Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.

The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:

They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon.

Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.

No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:

The story books say they were all cut low.
But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,
The spirits will live and their legends grow,
so long as we remember the Alamo.

The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”

Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):

It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized.

The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.

Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.

Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.

The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.

There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.

We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.

War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:

The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it.

Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.

But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.

Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.

We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?

If you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, you’re aware of massive forest fires raging in Western North America and Europe this summer. It appears as if the world is on fire.

In an important sense, the world is burning, in two related ways. In the United States, as of this writing, there are 661 active wildfires covering 4.7 million acres, largely concentrated in the western states. British Columbia is currently experiencing 180 active wildfires, nearly half of which are burning out of control. So far this summer, fires in the US and Canada have burned 25% more land than the 10-year average, according to national wildfire centers.

This summer, Europe experienced two unprecedented wildfires in France and Spain, and fires have also raged in Greece and other nations. Fires are also raging in Indonesia and Australia.

If you’ve managed to see video of wildfires, you know that the living things in these forests are being burned alive. Tens of thousands of people are evacuated from their homes, which are often totally destroyed. The courageous firefighters, too, can suffer from profound health issues, even death, for their efforts. Fires also spew carbon and toxic pollution into the atmosphere.

We happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options.

But the world is also burning up from unprecedented heatwaves over the past several years. You’ve probably heard of temperatures well over 100°F in the southeastern and southwestern United States. Northern parts of the country have also experienced unprecedented heatwaves, with a heat index over 100.

In a recently published New York Times article titled “Bigger and Hotter Fires are Erasing America’s Great Forests,” wildfires from Oregon to New Mexico “sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate.” Researchers contend that the shift to hotter fires reflects a permanent ecosystem shift with profound consequences for people, wildlife, and the planet.

The hotter fires leave a wasteland of spike shrubs rather than new tree seedlings. As trees disappear, spring snows melt faster leaving water shortages in their wake. The increasingly arid climate dries the soil and pulls moisture from the plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. Since forests absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as the Times put it, ‘The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.”

In sum, rising global temperatures and wildfires are interdependent. As hotter forest fires increase, greenhouse gases increase, heating the planet, producing extreme weather events like droughts, which themselves increase the spread of wildfires.

Several years of record heatwaves around the world are but one product of global climate change—along with melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, warming oceans, severe droughts, and more extreme storm weather: torrential rains and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like. People the world over are bearing the impact of global warming, albeit some far more than others.

However, we happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options. Climate change is a profound political issue that calls on us to act together to realign our politics and our economy.

How we do that is the challenge.

Despite President Donald Trump’s continual harangue that climate change is a hoax, only 15% of Americans believed climate change is not happening, according to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication poll. A full 69% believed it is happening, and 60% or more believed it is causing droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat. And that was before this summer.

Yet an article written by film director Adam McKay (Don't Look Up) in the August 6 edition of Current Affairs focuses on “The Gargantuan Lie that is Collapsing the World’s Climate.” In McKay’s words, the lie is “told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large nonprofits and eventually… by ourselves, to ourselves.”

He sums up that lie as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.” We don’t.

The climate has already temporarily passed the 1.5°C target of the Paris Accords. With the likelihood that this year’s El Niño will push next year’s average warming to 1.7°C, it will likely cause agricultural failure and food shortages, leaving us staring at the catastrophic 2°C increase we are currently hurtling toward.

As Robert Hunziker wrote of McKay’s article, climate change is an “existential threat to all forms of life sooner rather than later, meaning current lifetimes.”

We are clearly facing many crises—horrific wars, unaffordable healthcare, income and wealth inequality, inflation, fascist-like repression, and targeting of vulnerable peoples. How can we cope with the impending doom suggested by the well-established scientific data on climate change, especially when elected officials virtually ignore the climate crisis and mass media treat critical events as isolated crises?

We may feel tempted to block or ignore messages like these, and powerful corporate interests are perpetually encouraging us to do exactly that. We may despair and grieve for our planet, and we can try to “do what we can” as individuals. But we must act politically as well, or we—and especially our children and grandchildren—are doomed. We must demand action from public officials; we can oppose data centers and boycott corporations that profit from climate damaging activities; we can join with others around the world, but we must act. Individually and collectively. We need to talk to each other.

More than any other crisis, our shared global climate has the potential to unite us on the path toward political and economic transformation.

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s mysterious trip to Moscow this week was preceded by fresh U.S. intelligence indicating that the Kremlin sees the US as weakened by the Iran war, offering Russia an opportunity to escalate action against American interests and allies in Europe. The CIA chief warned Russia against ramping up its war against Ukraine, arguing that such a move would backfire.

• Parents say that because of the $17 billion Meta settlement, they have been robbed of seeing evidence of Meta’s awareness of harm due to its products.

• The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is blaming the location of a temporary Ellipse site for an incident in early August when President Trump’s Marine One helicopter came within a mile of a passenger jet. The agency flagged twice that the helicopter attempted to contact controllers to give the typical three-minute liftoff warning to clear the airspace at 2:31 p.m. Aug. 4. The first attempt was not received by National Airport’s air traffic control tower while the second was “broken and completely unreadable.” When this failed, the helicopter attempted to relay the three-minute warning “through the helicopter facility at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, which was also unsuccessful.”

LIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShow

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The post CIA: Putin Thinks USA Is Now Weak | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.

Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.

If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.

Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Is it socialist or capitalist?

All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity.

Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.

These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States—meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.

These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.

These criticisms conflate a set of policy proposals, most of them quite popular, with an economic system where the government owns the means of production. However, this well-trod attack doesn’t seem to be working anymore, especially for younger generations.

Younger voters see the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power that distort the economy and block opportunity for the non-rich. They witness how large corporations have captured Congress and blocked popular reforms to defend consumers and counter monopolies.

They watch with alarm as billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up healthcare facilities and squeeze consumers in every corner of the economy. They see how both major political parties have been captured by the billionaire donor class and failed to address stagnant wages and rising basic costs.

All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with 7 in 10 experiencing economic insecurity. These folks still hope hard work could lead to a decent life—to own a home, take a vacation, pass opportunities to their children, and retire before they die. They feel the constant stress of knowing they’re one job loss, illness, disability, or divorce away from living in their car.

Without a strong party representing working people’s concerns, political realignments are happening in both parties. A new generation of progressives and a handful of self-described democratic socialists argue the economy should work for everyone, not just the billionaire class.

They believe new technologies—such as AI—should serve everyone, not just billionaire tech bros and their global conglomerates. They believe the government has an important role in expanding healthcare, blocking oligarchy, and breaking up big corporations.

They advocate for expanding affordable housing to aid people struggling to find decent housing in a hyper-speculative market. Instead of subsidizing private developers, they advocate for housing owned by nonprofit organizations, resident cooperatives, and—egads!—government entities, like housing authorities.

These progressives believe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and end tax breaks to the Jeffrey Epstein class. They support investments to help us transition to sustainable energy, lower energy costs, and reduce climate disruption.

The right-wing pundits—and some so-called moderates, too—are hoping that when they trot out the “socialist” bugaboo, your mind will freeze and you’ll start frothing at the mouth. They’re afraid that you will ask why the current system isn’t working and wonder if there are alternatives. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

When someone brandishes the word “socialism” like it’s a stink bomb, take a courageous look at the actual ideas—higher taxes on the rich? Medicare for All? A raise for working people?—being proposed. There might be more common sense than you thought.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America share a problem. As organizations largely run by and involved with college-educated voters, they are physically and psychically removed from working people without four-year degrees. Both the Democrats and DSA claim they are speaking for the working class, but they are not, at present, political organizations of the working class.

The Democrats have tried to avoid their working-class problem by embracing suburban Republicans and independents who have been repulsed by the GOP’s extremism. The Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street and Hollywood big money—and NAFTA—has pushed working people out of the coalition.

For DSA, on the other hand, the easiest way to address the problem is to define it away. DSA uses a broad definition of the working class that includes underpaid college-educated graduate students, unemployed and underemployed college graduates, and a host of other college-educated workers who suffer from insecure jobs and the high cost of living. While these educated workers are sometimes financially akin to the working class, the majority of working people—nearly 60 percent—do not have four-year college degrees.

And that’s the way the 2024 vote went. Trump had a 14-point advantage among voters without college degrees, while Harris carried college graduates, 56 percent to 43 percent. If DSA and the Democrats remain organizations largely of the highly educated, they will lose.

Racial Silos?

Looking at voters as racial groups is another way to avoid dealing with the working-class issues the Democrats and DSA face.

The Democrats have historically done well with Black and Hispanic voters, and the working class is increasingly multiracial. The idea is that if we stop viewing the working class as dominated by white workers, people of color will lead to stronger vote totals for the Democrats.

Alas, ethnicity is no longer a sure sign of voting Democratic because working-class Black and Hispanic voters have been leaving the party. Twenty percent of Black voters without four-year degrees and 48 percent of Hispanic voters without four-year degrees supported Trump in 2024.

White voters without four-year college degrees made up 42 percent of the 2024 electorate nationally. In seven states where Democrats have largely abandoned the political field—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—they constituted a majority of voters, ranging from 51 percent in Kansas to 58 percent in Montana and Idaho.

No significant progressive political movement can succeed without attracting large numbers of working-class voters of all colors. (Please see my latest book for the development of this argument.)

The Fox News Strategy?

Perhaps a good way to reach the working class is through conservative media. Some in DSA believe that their base can be extended by appearing on Fox News and making their case.

According to Pew Research, the median age of Fox viewers is 55, and most are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been making Fox News appearances lately that have drawn attention, but it’s not at all clear that Fox News reaches deeply into younger working-class communities, especially those independents who are open to progressive economic populism. A good case could be made that progressives are wasting their time on conservative media, though El-Sayed’s performance this November could change my mind.

Electoral Canvassing?

DSA has done a remarkable job of fielding large numbers of door knockers during its political campaigns. The one-on-one conversations that take place are key to getting out the vote and sharing information about progressive policies such as taxing billionaires and Medicare for All. When thousands of DSA activists hit the streets during an election, public education certainly takes place.

But where and with whom?

Most DSA canvassing to date takes place in blue districts. And within those districts, it’s not clear whether working-class areas have been targeted. Often in political campaigns, the goal of canvassing is to find those voters most likely to support your candidate and make sure they vote. Harvesting the most likely supporters usually means targeting the areas where they live. Since DSA candidates thrive among college-educated voters, there is likely to be a tendency to concentrate canvassing in gentrified and upper-middle-class areas. Working-class urban areas will also be reached, but the balance is likely to tilt toward where the most likely supporters live.

More importantly, to date, most of the canvassing has taken place in urban areas and in and around college towns. Maybe I’m missing something, but reaching deeply into red working-class communities has not yet become a significant part of DSA’s ground game.

Long-Term Engagement with Working-Class Union People?

Unless and until DSA—and the Democrats, for that matter—set up precinct-level organizations in working-class neighborhoods, electioneering will be episodic and superficial. Door-to-door conversations are worthwhile, but they are no substitute for continual engagement within local organizations.

In my opinion, the best way to reach the working class is to engage with people through their labor organizations. The labor movement is much smaller than it was a generation ago, but there are still thousands of union meetings taking place each month, ranging from small local union gatherings to larger regional and national conferences. Political activists need to show up and listen to what union members care about.

It takes work, often hard work, to get in the door. That’s something the Labor Institute, which I cofounded, had to do a half century ago when we started our work. To get educational opportunities, we reached out to countless labor leaders and activists, gradually gaining their trust and finding venues to show our wares.

It takes lots of time and lots of trust-building, but the conversations that emerge through ongoing educational engagement taught us as much as we taught others, greatly enriching what we were able to offer. DSA would broaden its support and deepen its connections with working people if it engaged with large numbers of blue-collar and service workers in trade unions.

If DSA wants to be of and not just for the working class, broadly defined, it will have to get in the labor door. It will need to learn how to have a dialogue with working-class groups who might be progressive populists but are also likely to have concerns about socialism and whether DSA really can advance the cause of non-college-educated working people.

DSA, more than the Democrats, has the troops and the energy to do that work. The jury is out, however, on whether it can deploy that passion, and commitment to engage with working people who don’t already agree with them.

If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.

The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.

While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.

Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.

The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities, and expelling their inhabitants.

The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.

Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and land confiscation.

The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence—a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.

While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.

The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.

Now, back to Qusra.

Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.

They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them, and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.

The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists, and journalists.

What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: Settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.

And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.

Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.

Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory, and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.

A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession—in both words and action.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversaw the mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities—one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.

And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.

The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts, and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm—and potentially a testing ground—for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.

Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a "strategy" is painfully redundant.

But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba—and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza—recognition is no longer enough.

The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.

It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.

Multibillionaire Mark Cuban is one of the many incredibly wealthy men who have warned that ideas like the wealth tax currently on the ballot in the state of California would be a disastrous idea. Talk about self-interested!

The post Objectively Speaking, the Wealth Tax Sucks appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Dolly Parton, actress, entrepreneur, and singer extraordinaire, passed away at the age of 80 on August 25, 2026. She rose from poverty in Appalachia to global fame and a loyal following.

Tributes have been pouring in and rightly so. I admired Parton not so much for singing, like millions did globally, but for something else: her literacy promotion. Let me explain.

Parton donated some 200 million books in her lifetime. Think about that. Reading is a key process to self-discovery in an increasingly confused and confusing world.

As a youth growing up in a vanilla neighborhood attending an integrated middle school, reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, was an eye-opener. Brown’s autobiography of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s was unlike anything else that I had read.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important.

My parents had union jobs, and the schools I attended had libraries. My fortune in life is increasingly rare in America now, where 1,000 billionaires rent politicians to get government contracts and favorable laws and policies to accumulate more wealth, as ordinary people struggle to pay for food, fuel, and rent—the affordability crisis.

Later as a young adult, I learned that my father was in Harlem during an uprising against police brutality and economic marginality, of March 19-20, 1935, a history that deepened my appreciation for Brown’s work. Harlem “was where the action was,” my father shared with me. I began to grasp a bigger picture of personal and national history, encompassing Brown's autobiography.

Parton actively facilitated reading and one of its outcomes. I mean critical thinking. That’s never been more important in the current post-truth moment of online disinformation about domestic and foreign affairs, of, by, and for the benefit of billionaires and corporations, a symptom of the overall rot in US economics and politics.

Further, in a nation built with the stolen labor of enslaved Africans that in part relied upon depriving them of learning to read, Parton’s gift of 200 million books to poor and working people is, I argue, a revolutionary act. That she hailed from a community of poor whites long susceptible to the ideology of anti-blackness, a centuries-long ruling class divide-and-conquer strategy, speaks volumes of her revolutionary devotion to humanity.

Parton appeared to be electorally independent of the two-party duopoly, a great thing. Meanwhile, she publicly endorsed the movements of African Americans (Black Lives Matter) and LGBT folks for full recognition of their human rights. In a racist and warrior nation such as the US, where buying a gun is easier than receiving healthcare, her support of the maligned and oppressed via the promotion of reading books should be emulated.

An extreme position does not become less extreme just because someone can put forward one that’s even more extreme. Massacring 100 children doesn’t become a moderate position just because someone is advocating killing 200 children.

This is how we should view the line being pushed by “moderate” voices that we have to deal with the $40 trillion debt with both spending cuts and tax hikes. The reality is that, apart from the military and Homeland Security, there is little fat in spending to be cut, as even Elon Musk inadvertently acknowledged. Insofar as we have a deficit problem, the issue is on the tax side, as can be easily shown. The rich have been taking an ever-larger share of national income over the last half-century, and they don’t feel like paying taxes on their winnings.

The major media outlets, which are all controlled by rich people, are pretending to be moderate by saying that we need to both raise taxes and cut spending. But there is nothing moderate about saying that we have to cut programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because Republicans have given big tax breaks to their campaign contributors.

Republicans pushed these tax cuts, knowing they would increase the deficit, but did not make any corresponding cuts in spending because the cuts would be incredibly unpopular. Now they are using their control over the media to insist that these cuts are now absolutely necessary to offset all the lost tax revenue from tax cuts put in place by Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave us a great example of this fake moderate position in its editorial, “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state.” The piece makes its case by taking the example of a two-earner couple, with average earnings of $100,000 a year. It shows that the couple, turning 65 in 2025, can expect lifetime Social Security benefits of $739k compared with tax contributions of just $597k. A couple with the same income retiring in 2045 can expect lifetime benefits of $987k compared to tax contributions of $735k.

After laying out this disparity for Social Security (it has a similar story for Medicare, which I’ll come to), it then makes an argument for reducing Social Security for high-income people. This is three-card Monte level deception.

If the idea is that we should reduce the benefits of high-income workers, honest people would look at the relative taxes and benefits for high-income workers. Social Security is explicitly designed to have a progressive payback structure, which means that relatively moderate-income workers, like the ones highlighted in the WaPo editorial, have higher paybacks relative to their taxes.

If the editors were interested in doing an apples- to-apples comparison, here’s what the picture would look like. (This is taken from the exact same source.)

As can be seen, high-income people pay considerably more in taxes than they get back in benefits. For a high-income woman retiring in 2025, the gap is $263k. For a high-income man, the gap is $336k. (The gap is larger for men than women because their life expectancy is shorter.) For a high-income woman retiring in 2045, the gap is $259k. For a high-income man, the gap is $346k.

If the point is to make an argument for reducing the benefits of high-income retirees, then show the taxes and benefits for high-income retirees. No one disputes that Social Security looks like a pretty good deal for more moderate-income retirees, but these people don’t typically have much income in retirement. I guess Jeff Bezos’ paper would have been too embarrassed to argue that we have to reduce the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071.

The Post’s editorial makes the push that while cutting Social Security, we should expect people to be more reliant on private 401(k)s. In addition to increasing risk, this is also enormously inefficient. Private 401(k)s cost more than 40 times as much to administer per dollar of benefits as Social Security. It is understandable that Mr. Bezos would be happy to see more money going to his rich friends in the financial industry, but most of us would rather see the money going to ordinary workers.

Medicare Benefits: Big Bucks to Hospitals and Drug Companies Are Not Benefits to Workers

The Post’s graphs do show a huge imbalance between the taxes paid out for Medicare and the cost of the benefits received. This is also deceptive.

In the United States, we pay almost twice as much per person for healthcare as the average for other wealthy countries. This is not because we get more or better healthcare. Our life expectancy ranks near the bottom for wealthy countries.

The big bucks for healthcare go to the income of drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and doctors. In each case, we pay two times as much, or more, than people in other wealthy countries. A paper that was not answerable to one of the richest people in the world would suggest bringing our payments in line with the rest of the world. But instead, the WaPo wants to beat up on the country’s retirees.

No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system. That is extreme, but the rich media owners pushing this position will do everything they can to convince us they are being fair and balanced.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Canadian trade officials acknowledge that their retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion in American goods are intended to exert pressure on key U.S. states. The tariffs could hit states in the Midwest and Northeast particularly hard.

• Meta reaches a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. Meta’s stock rose on the news, closing up just over 1 percent. The company is valued at $1.47 trillion and most recently generated $60.8 billion in quarterly revenue. The full value of Meta’s payout depends on whether other social media companies also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. It will pay an additional $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.

• The massive expenditure of U.S. munitions in the Middle East is worrying Asian allies and frustrating Pentagon officials overseeing the Indo-Pacific, who fear that the prolonged war with Iran could undermine U.S. readiness for a conflict with China. One Taiwanese official said they expect “significant delays” of Pac-3 Patriot missiles due to the drain on supplies as the Pentagon has depleted most of its interceptor stockpile in the Middle East. Japan has been warned by the Pentagon of possible delays in defense shipments, including Tomahawk cruise missiles.

LIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShow

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The post Canada Retaliates Against U.S. with 50% Tariffs | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, whose mission is to protect public health and safety regarding nuclear energy, has now transformed into an agency, as so many have under the current administration, to support the nuclear industry and its billionaire backers. Following other captured federal agencies like the Department of Energy, which is variably led by individuals from the very industries it is intended to regulate, the NRC is under pressure from the president to facilitate the quadrupling of nuclear energy production by 2050. This is to be accomplished by fast-tracking the licensure and building of reactors while discarding the nuclear radiation exposure safety measures in place for decades as these are seen to be onerous and financially burdensome to the industry.

The current safety standard for nuclear exposure comes from the BEIR VII (Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation) study. This was produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and concluded that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation exposure above background, noting that any excess exposure above background increases the risk to human health of cancer, and other diseases associated with nuclear exposure. This is the so-called Linear No Threshold, LNT, theory. This theory is the basis for the core precautionary safety principle and risk management approach used in the fields of ionizing radiation exposure from medicine and dentistry to nuclear energy referred to as “ALARA,” or "As Low As Reasonably Achievable.”

The problem that exists, even with current standards of radiation exposure allowance, is that they are based on the “Reference Man,” which is a 25-to-30-year-old 70 kilogram man. This androcentric standard totally disregards the fact that the majority of humanity is not represented by this standard, and that children, females, pregnant women, and the elderly are more sensitive to radioactivity exposure. In addition workers involved throughout the entire nuclear cycle are at increased risk from exposure. Furthermore, a recent Harvard study demonstrated increased cancer rates in the communities surrounding nuclear power plants within ~18.5 miles.

The current NRC proposal plans to do away with ALARA while purportedly supporting the LNT. This flies in the face of reason and is duplicitous as LNT is the basis of ALARA. Their plan is to substitute an unproven “graded approach” allowing workers to be exposed to near the regulatory limits and then taking added measures so as not to exceed it. They propose allowing the exceeding of exposure limits under “certain circumstances” setting up a banking system from subsequent year allowances amortizing over five years. They have even invoked the controversial unproven hypothesis of “Radiation Hormesis,” which proposes that a small amount of radiation causing cellular damage will stimulate cellular repair, as though to say what does not kill you, is good for you. Remember LNT.

The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31.

Furthermore, when implemented, these new regulations will most likely be used to reduce the already weak cleanup standards, further increasing the health risks to impacted communities contaminated from our nuclear legacy and history. These include communities such as the South Carolina Savannah River Site and New Mexico Los Alamos Nuclear Lab and Trinity Test Site to the Navajo Nation mining sites, Hanford Washington site, Nevada Test Site, St Louis Cold Water Creek, Parks Township (Pennsylvani), Rocky Flats Site near Denver, and the Santa Susana Field Lab near Los Angeles, among others.

The rationale for this current proposal is to facilitate the fast-tracking of nuclear power for the uncontrolled growth of data centers (with 1,500 new data centers currently in development), artificial intelligence, additional large commercial nuclear power plants, and new plutonium pits that are the nuclear trigger of nuclear weapons, reminding us that nuclear power remains the cover story for nuclear weapons.

The potential health risks of cancer, heart disease, birth defects, cognitive defects, thyroid and endocrine disorders, genetic mutations, and infertility are all related to ionizing radiation exposure. These are risks lasting for generations, passed on from one generation to the next. Yet, these health effects do not have to be and can be prevented if we demand the strengthening of current radiation exposure guidelines. The current proposal does just the opposite unless we stop it from moving forward. The NRC is providing a limited public comment period on this proposal which ends at midnight on August 31. Your comment is critical and can be submitted at federalregister.gov. More information can be found at www.protectbetter.org.

In our political life, reality hardly matters any more. On Tuesday the president of the United States, in a fit of pique, proposed renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He hides in a food cart and sends journalists out as decoys to be killed on his behalf. His winsome aide hands him an endless stream of flattering tweets. And yet the world stumbles on. People die, obviously, as a result of this folly—in the Middle East, and in middle America, where suddenly measles is a serious threat again. (Hell, the deaths attributable to Elon Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development put him in the Stalin and Mao category for negligent manslaughter.) But human societies are for a while resilient; we assume that there’s always a chance for a reset. After the next election normal service will resume. If you start with a rich country like the US, it can absorb a lot of decline.

But that’s not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change. If the temperature drops below 32°F water freezes, and if it rises above 212°F then it boils, more or less. This newsletter spends a lot of time in the world of politics, because that’s where we need to make changes. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves that ultimately that political world is a subset of the physical one, simply because that’s how things work.

And we’re now reaching, I think, the point where that physical system is running out of margin.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the temperature of the global sea surface, averaged on a daily basis. Since our planet is 70% ocean, it’s a pretty good gauge of how hot the planet is getting. And what it shows is that in all the decades we’ve been measuring, it’s never been hotter. Given what we know about climate history, it’s almost certainly never been hotter in the history of our species. (Handily, by the way, that 21.1°C line is just about exactly 70°F.) As a Canadian professor wrote, “August 21st likely marked the warmest Sea Surface Temperatures have been for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back as the last Interglacial 125,000 years ago.”

As Damian Carrington chronicled Monday:

The new ocean heat record being set in August is especially remarkable as global sea temperatures are typically highest in March and April, after the austral summer. The Southern Hemisphere has significantly more ocean area than the Northern.

“The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: The number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

That means many things. Among them, as Ben Noll laid out Monday:

The unusual ocean warmth has fueled powerful storms in the Pacific, such as Hurricane Lala near Hawaii, helped create a reservoir of extra moisture that has contributed to recent rainfall extremes across the United States, and boosted summer heat across Europe.

This is a system that’s being pushed much too hard and much too fast, and it’s breaking.

Forty two percent of the world’s ocean area is now experiencing a “marine heatwave.” This means that wide swaths of coral are already “bleaching,” turning a deadly shade of pale; we don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s entirely predictable. We learned earlier this summer that the last huge coral bleaching event, the fourth this century, ran from 2023 to 2025 and

impacted 84% of the world’s coral reef area in all three coral reef-containing ocean basins (Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans). Mass bleaching was documented in at least 83 countries and territories.

It’s not just that coral reefs are one of the wildest corners of God’s brain; it’s that they provide food for 500 million human beings and keep waves from destroying shorelines. But still—they’re underwater. We don’t actually see them on a daily basis. It’s hard for us to imagine the damage.

Trees are easier for us to see; think of them as coral reefs but on land. And here’s a completely remarkable account from Eric Niiler on how the hot new wildfires bred by our hot new atmosphere are degrading them in the most obvious possible ways:

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40% of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

These trees help define the American West. (Google the Oregon license plate). But they also function as part of an ecosystem. To wit:

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75% of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Oh, and:

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

But again, much of that is invisible—CO2, sadly, can’t be seen. (If it turned the sky smog-brown like carbon monoxide we’d have done something decades ago). And even forests are far away from where most people live as to seem almost unreal. (Once, a visitor looking at the Vermont foliage near my home asked me if we collected the colored leaves when they fell and put them back up next year, as if they were a kind of Christmas decoration).

So let’s think about that water for a moment, the snowmelt that’s disappearing ever faster. Here’s another remarkable account of the American West, this time from Reis Thebault. It begins in the control room of the Central Arizona Project, the vast canal project that supplies water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and its surrounds, which are some of the fastest growing communities in America. The Colorado, though, is drying up, and so big cutbacks are coming:

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

There’s a certain poetic justice here, perhaps—communities that have built their identity on the myth of the ruggedly independent Western man overcoming the hostile elements, only to find themselves entirely dependent on the socialized distribution of limited water.

Cave Creek, a picturesque burg steeped in cowboy kitsch in the foothills north of Phoenix, gets 95% of its water from the aqueduct system.

“Without Colorado River water, we would be a dusty little town with dirt roads,” Mayor Robert Morris said.

The town’s leaders have been scrambling to find backup plans. Cave Creek has hired a water consultant and struck deals with neighboring municipalities, cobbling together enough supply for the next five years, Mr. Morris said.

He has sought to prepare residents for higher bills and stricter conservation, working to undo a foundational part of the state’s philosophy in the process.

“The biggest thing for people to overcome is the idea of unlimited, cheap water,” Mr. Morris said.

But even that blow to identity is small compared to the blow that comes when you run out. And not just of affordable water, but of affordable food. And we seem to be nearing that point. We’ve long known, for instance, that yields of staple crops are rising more slowly than they would otherwise, because of higher temperatures. But a new study this week put some fairly remarkable numbers on the future: “Severe water scarcity” events due to global warming could easily triple the price of wheat:

Looking ahead, climate model projections suggest that water scarcity will expand under continued warming. Our results indicate that a temperature increase of about 3°C could triple average global wheat prices relative to 2010.

But we don’t have to wait. As Somini Sengupta pointed out this weekend, in four paragraphs that may set some kind of record for condensed reality, that future is more or less now:

Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

All of this is down to fossil fuels—the oil we’re fighting over in the Strait of Hormuz, the gas and coal whose methane and carbon emissions have sent temperatures soaring and river levels dropping. It’s reality.

Just to repeat the numbers, this time from Neal Burnette-Irwin and Marion Kilpatrick:

Mark Jankowski with USDA’s Outlook Board is still crunching the numbers for the year, but says the crop is set to break all the wrong records.

“On our balance sheet, we didn’t make any changes to our export or other use forecasts, so all that essentially did was tighten up ending stocks by six million bushels from where we were last month. Now we’re looking at US ending stocks of 717 million bushels, down 203 million bushels from last year, reflecting the fact that this wheat crop is a small crop. It’s historically small.”

US wheat growers can point to a number of challenges this year, but Jankowski says the issues aren’t limited to domestic wheat production. The crop is also suffering globally.

“A fairly sharp reduction in the European Union production estimate. We lowered it by 1.8 million tons this month, reflecting very hot, dry weather that spread across the entire EU region over the summer. Much of that extreme heat hit during the grain-filling stage for wheat, so it is showing up as reduced yield potential. With a 1.8-million-ton reduction in the forecast this month, that would bring the EU’s wheat production forecast down to 134.2 million tons, down just about 11 million tons from last year.”

It’s not just wheat. In Europe, knocked to its knees by an endless stream of heatwaves this summer, we have reports of vegetable harvests collapsing by double digits—60% of France’s broccoli crop, for instance, is gone. Britain could face food shortages within months, one excited newspaper report warns; in Ireland, they’re calling for an emergency food stockpile as harvests run low. The UK government has refused to release an unredacted copy of a report from the country’s intelligence agencies about ecosystem collapse amid rising temperatures, but we do know that it predicts the very real possibility of widespread food shortages by 2030, resulting in “price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war… fueled by the human-induced climate crisis.”

What I’m trying to say is, we are running up against limits. We have made it hot enough on this planet that things are going very wrong. This is not like politics, where you get to say something dumb and change the subject. As I’m writing this, for instance, word has emerged of a court filing where the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has threatened to tear the building down unless President Donald Trump’s name is carved on the wall. That’s not real; it’s a game, one designed to distract. But wheat is real.

Because we’ve pushed so hard into this new hot world, our margin has been substantially reduced, in some cases to nothing. As one scientist quoted in that excellent article on Western trees and fire said:

“Forests do have innate resilience and under normal circumstances, they can take a hit or two and bounce back,” Dr. Coop said. “But circumstances just aren’t normal anymore.”

Still, there are things we could do. When it comes to forests we could at least not knock more roads into the middle of them, as the Trump administration decided to do last week. (If you want to read a bang-up piece of writing about the Peavine Fire currently devastating Reno, I recommend this from my beloved Third Act colleague B Fulkerson).

When it comes to the Colorado River, we could—as conservationists have suggested for decades—demolish Glen Canyon Dam and let Lake Powell drain downstream to Lake Mead. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it would give us a little more margin.

And we could deploy lots and lots of solar panels to desalinate enough water to supply some of the needs of places like Phoenix (solar panels that, by the way, shade the desert and conserve some moisture). And we could, you know, stop building water-intensive data centers. (Big victory in New Mexico yesterday, where activists included my Third Act colleagues managed to win a temporary halt to the giant Jupiter project, “in part due to recent revelations about the use of millions of gallons of fresh water for the data center’s construction in recent months.”)

When it comes to food, we may have more margin yet. America’s fertile cropland is filled to an astonishing extent growing corn syrup, feed for cattle, and gasoline—an area the size of Indiana is devoted solely to producing ethanol, an absurd boondoggle. So we’re not without options. Using it to produce solar power and, you know, food people eat would take off some of the pressure.

Above all, of course, we can rapidly deploy renewable energy. At this point it won’t lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly. And it’s within our technical capacity—the planet possesses the factories capable of turning out solar panels three times as fast as we’re currently going.

I will return next time to politics, because politics is unavoidable. It’s how we will or won’t rise to these challenges. But for now I just want to drive home the reality, the sheer inescapable reality of life on our rapidly overheating planet.

Because we’re pushing the margins, and we’re doing it right now. One of the more remarkable essays I’ve read in recent months comes from Aruna Chandrasekhar, describing modern-day Mumbai as a “city of sweat.” This relates directly to the elevated sea temperatures with which I began this account—Mumbai, as anyone who has had the privilege of visiting the Gateway of India will recall, sits on the edge of the Arabian Sea. The city’s seawalls are already overtopped in storms, but the constant danger is the humidity. Here’s Chandrasekhar (and the whole article is very much worth reading):

In summer, Mumbai’s air holds up to 90% of all the water it can possibly contain, leaving almost no room for sweat to evaporate—which in turn leads to rapid dehydration, exhaustion, and fatal heatstrokes. On a 38°C day in April 2023, 14 people died in an outdoor rally attended by India’s home minister. What has come to be expected of millions upon millions of Mumbaikars, no matter how bad it gets, is resilience. But that resilience is coming up against hard limits of survivability.

Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: Everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning.

In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49°C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7°C.

58.7°C is 137.66°F. No more need be said.

Which is the "All War, All the Time" party that impoverishes your family and makes us less safe? Which party lies to get us into wars, lies after they get caught, and then just issues additional lies as they are now doing in Iran and as they once did in Iraq?

This question is now playing out in Michigan in the Senate race. However, there is an out-of-state person who could definitively answer that question.

While the epic battle between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers wages in Michigan, the most dangerous man to one of the candidates resides in Cleveland, Ohio. His name is Dennis Kucinich. He was a 16-year member of the House of Representatives overlapping with Mike Rogers for a number of those years, especially when the Authorization for Military Force in the Iraq War was being debated in late 2002.

Kucinich is dangerous because no one interested in the welfare of American families, its soldiers, our national security, and personal liberties could vote for Rogers if they knew the evidence Kucinich produced before the War.

Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands?

Evidence that Mike Rogers and 214 other Republicans ignored. In fact, the All War, All the Time party only had six GOP members vote against the war. Unfortunately, Democrats have an All War, All the Time faction as well. These AIPAC-bred and -fed types are now mumbling how they can’t in good conscience support El-Sayed.

The Greedy Oil Party {GOP), of course, continues to vote the same war-mongering way as shown with their support of the Gaza genocide and the Israel-First War on Iran.

In 2002 Kucinich masterfully destroyed the Bush-Cheney web of lies justifying the illegal and immoral war. His evidence-packed memo pointed out that we were going to war against a country that did not attack us, had no means to do so, and had never expressed a desire to do so.

The fact that Iraq was not an imminent threat is not just my jaundiced opinion as a 40-year adviser to Dennis. Six artificial intelligence (AI) platforms—ChatGPT. Claude, Saner, Gemini, Deep Seek and Grok—were presented with a simple question:

Do you agree or disagree with the following conclusion: On Oct. 2, 2002 when Dennis Kucinich presented his eight-page memo against the Authorization for Use of Military Force there was already enough contradictory and qualifying intelligence available to Congress that the Bush administration's presentation of Iraq as an established, urgent WMD threat was not justified by the underlying evidence?

They all agreed that Dennis and other sources had already raised enough questions to halt the rush to folly. Certainly, no prudent, patriotic official would send 4,418 of our brave men and women to die violently in a foreign land.

But Mike Rogers did.

Over a million Iraqis likely died as a result. We wasted trillions of precious dollars as the Greed Only Party filled the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex and their donor-owners.

But Mike Rogers’ culpability gets worse. When Hussein Kamel—Saddam’s son-in-law in charge of WMD concealment—was interviewed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in 1995 after defecting, he disclosed that all the WMDs had been destroyed.

This devastating disclosure came out in late February 2003. The Newsweek article continued the shredding of the Greedy Oil Party web of lies which forced the Bush-Cheney administration to accelerate their war plans. While they had stenographers at The New York Times and other major media, Americans were getting queasy.

But the mainstream corporate media continued the pro-war propaganda. In one two-week period the media accuracy group FAIR noted that of 393 guests discussing the war, only 1 was from an anti-war group. A stunning 75% were current or former government or military officials.

Meanwhile Kucinich was making hundreds of speeches on the House floor and giving as many media interviews as possible in an effort to stop the war.

Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands? He didn’t speak out then, and he hasn’t spoken out now about the Gaza genocide or the wild WMD lies being used again by the All War, All the Time party.

Kucinich could clarify that Michiganders can elect Mike Rogers who will remain silent as our soldiers die, as family finances deteriorate, and we become more hated around the world. You can’t kill all the girls and teachers in a school and expect the world to like or respect us. In one recent United Nations General Assembly only 1% of the rest of the world’s population outside the Unites States and Israel voted with us.

Or they can elect Dr. Sayed who recognizes that the proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act budget for the war and surveillance is bloated with waste, fraud, and abuse. The average family of four in our society will see over $30,000 expended annually in our national budget going forward. This figure comes from the Chalmers Johnson logic that the official Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion may be as much as double that figure.

If one conservatively uses $2.5 trillion as the accurate budget, one arrives at the $30,000 yearly figure for American families of four. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that the $488.2 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs is not included nor the hundreds of billions we will spend to pay the interest on previous war borrowings.

My modest proposal is for Mike Rogers to send Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich halfway around the world on a two-month all-expenses paid vacation to the Maldives. Considering the damage Dennis could do to his campaign, it would be money well spent.

Dollar for dollar it would be far more effective than the Islamophobia and fear-of-immigrants ads that the GOP is currently peddling across the country.

This week, the argument over Lebanese sovereignty became concrete on a ridge overlooking Nabatieh. The New Arab reported on August 24 that Washington is pressing for the strategic Ali al-Taher ridge, where Hezbollah fighters are present, to be transferred to the Lebanese Army in exchange for Israeli withdrawal. The same area has been subjected to repeated Israeli shelling. In one small patch of southern Lebanon, the larger problem is suddenly hard to hide: Beirut is being asked to move first, while the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanese territory remains the inducement offered in return.

That pressure did not begin this week. Reuters reported in July 2025 that Washington was pressing Lebanon to make a formal cabinet commitment to disarm Hezbollah before talks could continue on halting Israeli military operations. Lebanese officials were told that without such a commitment, the United States would stop sending its envoy and would no longer press Israel to halt airstrikes or withdraw troops. Even the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which strongly favors disarmament, later described Lebanon's policy shift as having been adopted “under duress.”

Call it diplomacy if you like. It is still leverage. And it is being applied unevenly. Lebanon is expected to reduce its own side's military leverage first, while Israeli withdrawal is treated as something Lebanon must earn through compliance. If sovereignty means anything, it should not mean that a weaker country first dismantles its deterrent while a stronger military power keeps troops on its land.

None of this requires pretending Hezbollah has made no miscalculations. In March, after Hezbollah fired on Israel during the US-Israeli war with Iran, Lebanon's cabinet prohibited Hezbollah's military and security activities and ordered it to surrender its weapons to the state. The principle behind that decision is legitimate. A political movement, however rooted or powerful, should not be able to decide by itself when an entire country goes to war.

That is what real sovereignty would look like: not simply fewer Hezbollah weapons, but a Lebanese state strong enough that people no longer feel they need Hezbollah for protection, reconstruction, or basic support.

But sovereignty cannot stop at Hezbollah's weapons. It also has to mean that Israeli troops leave Lebanese territory and that Israeli strikes do not become a permanent feature of Lebanese life. Washington itself warned Israel this month that a permanent military presence in southern Lebanon would conflict with the US-backed framework. Yet the practical sequence still asks Beirut to show progress first. For many Lebanese in the south, that does not feel like state building. It feels like being told to surrender under fire.

There is another reality that is often flattened out of the American debate: Hezbollah is more than an arsenal. Its institutions became deeply rooted because they stepped into places where the Lebanese state was weak, slow, or absent. CNN reported as far back as 2006 that Hezbollah was providing water, helping pay medical costs, running schools, and collecting garbage in communities where government capacity was thin. The Council on Foreign Relations still describes a broad network of Hezbollah-linked healthcare, schools, infrastructure, and youth programs.

Calling that a “state within a state” is not far-fetched. But the phrase contains an uncomfortable admission: There was space for a parallel state because the official one repeatedly left a vacuum.

After the 2006 war, NPR found Hezbollah moving into reconstruction within hours of the ceasefire, assessing damage and distributing assistance while the government struggled to respond. For families standing in front of rubble, that was not an abstract debate about militias. It was help arriving when they needed it. People remember that.

The pattern returned after the 2024 war. The World Bank estimated Lebanon's reconstruction and recovery needs at $11 billion. While Lebanon searched for financing, Hezbollah's Jihad al-Bina network was already surveying damaged communities and paying compensation. Le Monde reported in early 2025 that Hezbollah had paid about $400 million to roughly 140,000 people. The effort was imperfect, and residents complained about delays. But it was there, visible on the ground, while the state had nothing comparable at that scale.

The same failure of formal institutions helped the Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard al-Hassan network grow during Lebanon's banking collapse. Families turned to it because ordinary depositors had been locked out of their savings. The United States has sanctioned Al-Qard al-Hassan officials and says the institution helps Hezbollah evade sanctions and move money. That allegation belongs in the picture. So does the reason such an institution became useful to ordinary people: The formal banking system had failed them.

This is the part a disarmament order cannot solve. Remove the weapons, and then what? Who fills the security gap along the border? Who rebuilds the next damaged neighborhood? Who replaces the clinics, schools, relief networks, and financial lifelines people have relied on for years? Lebanon's army can and should become the country's sole military authority. But it cannot also become a nationwide welfare system and reconstruction agency overnight.

There is a path out, but the order matters. Hezbollah should ultimately give up its military role and function as a political and social organization. Israel should withdraw fully from Lebanese territory, with an enforceable mechanism to stop renewed attacks and violations. At the same time, Lebanon and its international partners need to build institutions strong enough to replace the civilian functions that helped Hezbollah become indispensable to many communities.

That is what real sovereignty would look like: not simply fewer Hezbollah weapons, but a Lebanese state strong enough that people no longer feel they need Hezbollah for protection, reconstruction, or basic support.

The Ali al-Taher dispute shows why sequencing is not an academic concern. When Washington asks Beirut to take control of a strategic position in exchange for Israeli withdrawal, it reinforces the very perception that has sustained Hezbollah's argument for decades: that Lebanon is expected to prove its sovereignty by satisfying conditions imposed from outside. You cannot build a sovereign state by removing structures people rely on and promising that the state will catch up later. Build the security, capacity, and trust first. Then disarmament becomes a transfer of responsibility to a functioning state rather than an act of surrender to someone else's timetable.

Amidst the tragifarce of President Donald Trump’s apparently off-the-top-of-his-head war on Iran may lie a silver lining for the 2028 presidential election—a silver lining that comes with two big ifs. One, of course, is the if that goes with everything involved with the race: If there is a fair election. The if specific to the hoped-for silver lining is if there is a candidate willing and able to make use of it.

Ever since Gallup started public opinion polls, when it has come to questions of war, they’ve shown the American public favoring every one at the start—until now, with Donald Trump launching the first war to encounter immediate objection from a majority of the American public. A man who exults in doing things that no president has ever done before has certainly done it up proud with this one—ending a more than 85-year stretch when the American people gave the government the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of every military action, no matter how much they may have come to regret it later.

War. What Is It Good For?

Not surprisingly, the Second World War—the first one ever polled—enjoyed the broadest support, with 97% backing the declaration of war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And all these years later, World War II is still widely thought of as the “good war.” Not so much with the war that was the next most broadly supported at the outset—the Afghanistan War then enjoyed 92% support from a population that could never have imagined it dragging on for two decades. Eighty-two percent supported the first George Bush’s Iraq War, now remembered as the Gulf War. And even though Americans would eventually turn against all three of them, the (Second) Iraq War, Korean War, and Vietnam War started out with76%, 75%, and 65% support respectively. (Public polling only on the Vietnam War began in 1965, as America started coming to grips with the fact that we were actually in a war there.)

Much less remembered conflicts that also found initial approval included Bush's 1989 Panama invasion, with 82%favorable; Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War bombing of Yugoslavia, at 58 percent; and 53 percent for Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. In fact, the only American military operation not enjoying majority support from the start was Obama’s 2011 bombing of Libya, favored by only 47 percent. But even then, only 37 percent outright opposed it—You others perhaps not even considering us to be at war (a stance that the Administration would subsequently adopt in arguing that it did not qualify as war under the War Powers Act.)

So far as Trump’s current Iran War, Gallup encountered only 34 percent immediate support. This then, would seem to qualify as what political scientists might call, “a really big deal.” Despite a solid history of uniting behind the flag first and asking questions later, the American people have decided to believe their own eyes, seeing a president aid and abet the Israeli assassination a foreign head of state; bomb a population half a world away, threatening that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again;" and deploy the American military seemingly at whim, with little apparent concern as to cause or effect—all this in a war that he has several times claimed to have already won. In short, for the first time in living memory, the American people have concluded that a Commander-in-Chief—and his Department of War—has betrayed their trust. If there’s been a better opportunity in the entire post-World War II era to chart a course away from our permanent war footing, I can’t think of it. That is, if we can find the right candidate.

The Right Candidate?

We can probably safely assume that all 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will have opposed the Iran War and will in some sense claim title to any “silver lining” that may come with public rejection of that war. Not all, however, will be able to credibly argue that they offer the prospect of any real change in this arena, should they become president. After all, opposing a war entered into by “the other party’s” president may not be the norm, but it is common enough; opposing “your own party’s” president’s war is, however, quite another thing. That type of opposition, which would seem reasonable evidence of intent to buck the everlasting-war trend, is virtually non-existent among Republicans and rare among Democrats. For the latter, their foreign policy stances during the Biden Administration would logically seem more telling as to how they might operate in the White House.

The obvious touchstone in this realm is Israel’s Gaza War, continuous through both Biden and Trump Administrations. The questions for many Democratic primary voters will probably run along the lines of: “When did you recognize that the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attrocity—1,200 Israelis killed, 250 hostages—had become a campaign of destruction of just the sort that Trump threatened Iran with? And what did you do when you came to that realization—assuming you ever did?”

From that vantage point, the field currently in the 2028 presidential discussion mix seems to run the full gamut of plausibly in regard to taking advantage of any Iran War “silver lining.” On the less plausible end, we have Kamala Harris. The most recent Democratic nominee, now said to be considering another run, comes with a Biden Administration record that seems to offer scant ground to argue that a vote for her would be a vote for a significant foreign policy shift: As Vice President she supported arming the Israeli military through the end of her term, as the estimated Palestinian death toll reached 48,000 (out of a current total of 74,000), with the overwhelming majority being civilian, and a substantial portion children.

At the other end, we have Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who says she hasn’t ruled out a presidential run. By late October, 2023, with the Palestinian death toll already at 7,000, Ocasio-Cortez was one of only nine House Democrats both sponsoring an immediate cease fire resolution and voting against support of continued Israeli military action. At the moment, the only other currently chatted-about potential candidate to stake out a firm anti-Gaza War position that dates back to the Democratic Biden administration is Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

While these wars, and foreign policy in general, may not command center stage in the next presidential election, it’s been generally recognized that—Pete Hegseth notwithstanding—one facet of Trump’s appeal to some has been the belief that he was less committed to continual overseas wars than his recent predecessors—of both parties. While he arguably was no worse than they during his first term, his Iran War has shattered any illusion of that—both for him and the Republican Party that has backed him all the way. The challenge will be to produce a Democratic nominee who can credibly appeal to the antiwar sentiment within the Trump electorate. Although we are in no position to say exactly how the presidential primary field will ultimately shake out, the current snapshot does give us a sense of the hard reckoning we will have make as to which candidate would actually pursue altering our course of continuous conflict and spiraling military expenditure.

Just a Small Part

Foreign wars are, of course, neither the only, nor even the principal cause of Donald Trump’s disapproval ratings now running over 60 percent. So, given that no prominent Republican has bucked Trump in any significant way during his second Administration – and politically survived to talk about it—any imaginable 2028 Republican presidential candidate will likely have plenty of unpopular positions to talk their way around. All of which may eventually make it conventional wisdom that the race for the White House is the Democrats’ to lose—again if we assume a fair election.

But these foreign policy questions do provide an early, clear example of the type of choices that lie in front of us. More broadly, will the next Democratic presidential campaign be largely confined to—rightly—attacking the Republican Party for its support of a corrupt and stupid administration, on the assumption that simply being not-Trump will be good enough? Or will it attempt to deliver a candidate capable of credibly addressing the growing economic inequality, the unaffordabilty of healthcare, the concentration of corporate power, and the host of other issues closer to home that have sent a significant part of the American working class looking for love in all the wrong places?

The biggest Medicaid fight today isn't happening in Congress—it's happening inside the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Now, a year after H.R. 1’s passage (the 2025 federal reconciliation bill enacting significant cuts and changes to Medicaid), CMS’ recently issued interim final rule (IFR) implementing the law’s work-reporting requirements in the program narrows the very protections Congress included to prevent vulnerable people nationwide from losing the health coverage they need.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that more than 5 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because of these requirements. Already a conservative estimate as other organizations estimated over 10 million people are at risk of losing coverage, the number will surely be higher given CMS' IFR goes beyond the statutory language of the law.

The clearest example of this is the IFR's treatment of the medically frail exemption.

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Congress recognized that people living with complex medical conditions, disabilities, and chronic illnesses, including substance use disorder (SUD), should be protected from burdensome work-reporting requirements. As such, H.R. 1 specifically includes “medically frail” individuals among those exempt from the new requirements.

Yet CMS has added a new hurdle, putting millions of eligible Americans at dire risk of losing access to essential healthcare.

Under the IFR, people with SUD and other qualifying health conditions must also demonstrate that their condition "significantly impairs" their ability to satisfy the requirement before they can qualify for the exemption. This additional standard does not appear in the statute and will inevitably reduce the number of people who can secure the exemption.

For people living with SUD, the consequences could be profound.

While SUD is a chronic but treatable medical condition, pervasive stigma and discriminatory barriers have led to fewer than 1 in 5 people who need treatment actually receiving it. Amid persistent addiction and overdose crises, we should be making it easier for people to access the services and supports they need to become and stay well, not erecting additional barriers to lifesaving care.

Moreover, while CMS' rule relies heavily on Medicaid claims data and provider documentation to identify individuals who qualify as medically frail, the administration’s approach overlooks the reality that many people with SUD have never entered treatment due to the above-mentioned stigma and discrimination. Requiring additional documentation will not "motivate" people to seek care, as CMS suggests. Instead, it creates yet another barrier for people who are already among the hardest to reach.

When people are deprived of Medicaid access, their ability to engage in preventive care, behavioral health services, medications, and treatment that keep chronic conditions under control is also lost. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how untreated health conditions can not just impede a person’s capacity to work but quickly lead to costly emergency services.

These are not only personal tragedies—they are costly public policy failures.

Taking away health coverage does not eliminate health needs. It just shifts and raises costs while undermining public health and safety. Access to healthcare is precisely what enables many people to work, care for their families, and be productive community members, so why are we erecting so many barriers?

If the goal is really healthier communities and greater workforce participation, making it harder for medically vulnerable people to keep their health insurance is exactly the wrong approach.

Last month, both our organizations, along with many other leading advocates nationwide, explicitly articulated these concerns and submitted comments urging the agency to reverse course and faithfully reinforce the protections Congress included in the law. While CMS' public comment period on the IFR is now closed, all those who share the same perspective can still take action by calling their members of Congress to share their concerns about the impact of H.R. 1 and specifically, how the administration is planning to implement the law.

A year after H.R. 1’s passage, the question is no longer simply about what Congress enacted—it is whether the regulations that make the law real will preserve purposeful protections or quietly erode them through administrative action.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

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

Today we discuss:

• At least one in four NFL players will probably get chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Should football be banned? At least 215 of 878 players who died from 2016 to 2021 — 24.5% — had CTE. The actual prevalence could be far higher. This does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Studies have shown that the rate of CTE in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero. Professional football’s rate of brain disease is an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace: asbestos workers and coal miners. Symptoms include memory loss, confusion and uncharacteristic mood swings, decreases in executive function and increases in erratic and impulsive behavior, including addiction.

Should we ban other sports with high rates of CTE, like boxing, ice hockey, rugby, soccer and wrestling?

• Huge mudslides sweep through villages in Nepal and Tibet, and China’s Gyirong port. Hundreds are missing and feared dead. Nepal’s foreign minister said an earthquake triggered a large landslide, which in turn blocked a river, sending a torrent of water downstream. Could Central Asia’s “Sword of Damocles”—Lake Sarez—be next?

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly flew to Russia, where he met with his FSB intelligence counterparts. The topic of discussion, however, was probably not the Russo-Ukrainian War.

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The post Should Football Be Banned? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A year ago we warned that President Donald Trump had a concerted strategy to undermine the midterm elections.

Here’s news you can use: That effort is failing so far. For every move, there’s a countermove from voting rights groups, local and state governments, and more. In November, we should be able to have elections that are free, fair, and secure. But it will take a lot of work between now and then.

We saw that for sure this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to upend mail voting. That is the way 1 in 3 Americans vote. Trump purported to order the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver lawfully cast ballots unless the voter is on a list—which doesn’t exist yet—created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots. It’s absurd. And, no surprise, it’s illegal.

Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

Earlier this summer, in a lawsuit brought by 23 states, a federal court blocked the executive order in part of the country. The judge also blocked the order nationwide in a lawsuit the Brennan Center and others brought on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.

On August 24, the US Supreme Court jumped into the states’ case. It issued an unsigned order holding that the states did not yet have legal standing to sue. In particular, it concluded the states had not suffered an injury, because the Postal Service had not implemented the policy. In other words, the trial court had ruled too early.

This made big news, understandably, but those headlines confused matters a bit.

This was a procedural vote that let the Trump administration continue working on its plan to have the Postal Service decide who receives a ballot.

As the court itself explained, “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”

And in fact, late last Friday, under pressure from the administration, the Postal Service published a “Final Rule” to implement Trump’s scheme. The agency explained that it had the power to set rules for mail ballot delivery because ballots are like “animal remains” or “replica explosives” and deserve special treatment.

Both the states’ case and the case brought by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups remain ongoing. The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling is not the final word. Our attorneys are assessing next steps, and things will no doubt move quickly in this complex legal back-and-forth.

But a few things are as true today as they were before the court’s order.

This executive order is still illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution’s Elections Clause is clear, as courts have ruled over and over: States run elections. Congress has a legitimate role in passing national legislation and can override states. You know who has no role in elections, under the Constitution? The president.

And the Supreme Court? This is the “shadow docket” at work. Rather than letting the legal process unfold, the justices jumped into the litigation to help Trump. Justices like Samuel Alito bristle at the ominous phrase “shadow docket” and complain it should be called an “emergency” order instead. Here, the only “emergency” would be that Trump could not move forward with his push to restrict voting, just weeks before an election.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that, while the order is unsigned, it was backed by the Republican-appointed justices. Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote dissents. Trump has repeatedly said, as he wrote in June about the SAVE Act, that without voting restrictions, “The Republican Party will never win another Election.” The Supreme Court, already at record lows in public trust, will further bleed credibility if it is seen as a partisan electoral actor.

And as for voters—what should we know?

This legal fracas is happening so close to the election that, however it turns out, it is highly unlikely that changes will affect voting this year. Federal law requires that the first mail ballots be sent to military voters starting September 4. We cannot let chaos engulf our elections.

All of which means that, in one sense, this is a lot of noise and manufactured chaos. Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.

You know who knows that? Someone who voted by mail this month from his house in Mar-a-Lago: Donald Trump.

His campaign to undermine the midterm elections is losing. The only way it wins is if people stay home.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home. This is welcome news after hearing of its abhorrent conditions. Yet, the situation lived by sailors and Marines aboard the carrier over the last nine months, the continued threats that troops still deployed in this unpopular war face, and the unpatriotic negligence both the president and members of his own party have demonstrated paint a grim, but unsurprising picture of how servicemembers are treated under this administration.

Donald Trump is the most hostile president to troops and veterans in modern American history. Look no further than his comments about the service members who have been at sea for more than 250 days—that they have not been deployed “nearly long enough”—or House Republicans parroting that line back to reporters. That’s how this administration treats its military members, and it should be a wake-up call for every American.

Yes, the USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home, but with the USS George Washington replacing it, how many more troops must suffer until we end this forever war? That is why veterans of Common Defense, like myself, are demanding a full-scale congressional investigation into this case. More than 4,000 of our members and their families agree: This can never happen again, and the war against Iran needs to end.

The war these carriers are supporting has already killed at least 18 US service members and wounded roughly 500 more, alongside thousands of Iranian civilians killed. As an Iraq veteran, I’ve come to understand the costs of war begin long before the first shot is fired. Diplomacy is what keeps the world safe, and certainly not bombs that pad shareholder value at the expense of service members, and military families, who have everything to lose.

If a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react?

The USS Lincoln is carrying 5,000 sailors and Marines, 5,000 souls who have touched communities far and wide throughout our nation. They’ve played in our little leagues, attended school dances, walked college campuses, and have full lives waiting for them at home. Whatever reason each of them had for raising their right hand, that oath reflects a rare kind of commitment—to a mission, and to a country they intend to keep giving back to. War is the price many military families pay, and veterans carry its scars, visible and invisible, long after they take off the uniform. It is time for this administration to uphold its end of that bargain.

Instead, this White House has gutted the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); sent troops to a highly unpopular, illegal, unjust war; and used the military as a political prop. None of that improves troops’ or veterans’ lives. What would actually improve their lives? Ending the war, investigating what happened on the USS Lincoln, expanding the VA instead of hollowing it out, and making sure military and working families can actually thrive.

As the USS Lincoln returns home, it’s worth remembering what most Americans already sense: War doesn’t accomplish what makes a life worth living. It doesn’t keep your family safe, cover your healthcare, give you a good-paying job, or protect the freedoms our Constitution promises. That’s why most Americans oppose the war with Iran. Yet, we’re all paying for it—in a cost of living already at historic highs, in gas prices, and in the roughly $1,000 per household experts say Trump’s decision to go to war has cost every one of us. The more hawkish members of his party will argue that this is part of the mission: to spread freedom and to contain Iran’s power. So ask them if a foreign adversary starved its own troops, kept them at sea for nearly a year, and left them in cramped showers and broken toilets, how would Washington react? We already know the answer. These very politicians would be first in line, demanding that America intervene. What our service members experienced on the USS Lincoln is abysmal and should infuriate every single American whose tax dollars are funding Donald Trump’s war.

Let’s not forget this was a choice made by Donald Trump’s hostile administration and enabled by its congressional allies. Lawmakers must demand a full-scale investigation into what happened aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln so it never happens again. Veterans and military families see clearly how failed leaders and politicians who carry every whim of the president’s disastrous war put our troops in danger. We must demand an investigation now—and we won’t stop until this country ends its forever wars.

Most people probably think that global warming will cause problems for their children and grandchildren, but not for themselves. I used to assume that those of us who are older need not worry.

But recent personal experience suggests that global warming can lead to financial disaster in the very short run. Even those of us in our mid 80s are not immune.

Several months ago, our house caught fire, forcing us into temporary accommodations. Only one room suffered major damage, but smoke permeated the whole house, requiring extensive remediation and destroying lots of furniture and clothing.

Fortunately, we had good insurance, which included coverage for contents and temporary housing as well as the cost of the repairs themselves.

If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Temporary housing is not cheap. We probably ran up $20,000 in hotel bills during the nearly two months before we could find more adequate housing. And temporary furnished housing itself is not cheap, easily amounting to thousands of dollars a month.

To state the obvious, owning a house without insuring it is highly risky. But what does this fact have to do with global warming?

Global warming has been setting off an increasing number of floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes, damaging or destroying more and more homes. Up until now typical homes have been insured, which—as in our own case—has protected their owners from financial ruin.

But the money insurance companies pay for repairs or replacements has to be obtained through the premiums charged to homeowners. When the percentage of homes damaged by extreme weather increases, the insurance companies must increase what they charge for their coverage. If they do not do this, they will not be able to stay in business.

As a result, it is getting much more expensive to insure houses in many states, especially in California and some southeastern states. But the higher insurance premiums are making it more and more difficult for people to afford property insurance in the first place.

Some people may be forced to get no insurance, in effect self-insuring themselves. Since houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are often the principal assets of families, those without insurance risk being wiped out financially.

And people cannot escape from this problem by renting a place to live instead of buying one. Landlords from whom people rent apartments and houses must increase rents in order to pay for the insurance they need.

Anybody following the news cannot help but be aware that floods, heat domes, hurricanes, and tornadoes are becoming more frequent and more devastating. And although climate has been always changing, the size and speed of the current changes cannot be explained away as just more of the same historical pattern.

A lot of future global heating is already “baked into” the world by carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil, and gas during the last 200 years. But there is no reason why the human race should continue fouling its own nest now that we understand why climate change is accelerating.

At some point, people are going to stop falling for the propaganda emitted by coal, oil, and gas corporations; by political leaders these companies have bought; and by media organizations like Fox News catering to these wealthy and powerful interests.

Fortunately, new solar energy facilities are now cheaper than new atomic, coal, oil, or gas generators. And solar’s local intermittency, the principal weakness cited by anti-green spin doctors, will disappear when the already expanding distribution systems are united into a single worldwide high voltage direct current (HVDC) grid.

In recent decades we have seen similar movements to worldwide systems with telephones and computer networks. The technical and economic advantages of a worldwide electrical grid are so huge that it will be built.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote about nine different “levels” of hell in "Inferno," the first part of his long narrative poem, The Divine Comedy. If Dante were writing today, he could appropriately reserve a specially unpleasant level of his hell for the energy managers and politicians who are trying to stop the development of green energy.

Hell has generally been considered a hot place. The longer these folks are allowed to continue putting their own interests over the general welfare, the more Earth itself may become like hell for its inhabitants.