The deadly fires that devastated Los Angeles and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in January have been finally contained, but they left another sort of firestorm in their wake—one raging around the insurance industry and its shrinking coverage of climate risks such as extreme wildfires. Climate change increased the likelihood and severity of the fires—by far some of the most destructive in the city’s history. The blazes killed at least 28 people and destroyed some 16,000 structures over nearly 50,000 acres—an area larger than the city limits of San Francisco. Insured property damage alone is expected to reach as much as $40 billion. The question of who pays looms large.

For at least 50 years, the insurance sector has been aware of the physical risks of climate change and that greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from fossil fuels, are overwhelmingly responsible for rising temperatures. Despite this, U.S. insurance companies have investments of more than $500 billion in fossil fuel-related assets. The underwriting business of major insurers remains heavily focused on the fossil fuel sector, with the top U.S. insurers of fossil fuel businesses earning $5.2 billion from underwriting in 2023.

After decades of pocketing premiums from homeowners and investing significant portions of that money in the fossil fuel industry that drives climate change, private insurers like State Farm and Berkshire Hathaway carved out fire coverage from their policies or pulled out of the California market altogether.

All of California’s home insurance policyholders are the victims of fossil-fueled climate change.

The result: The insurers that played a role in facilitating the very climate disasters now affecting their former customers have effectively cut and run, leaving the residents and the state holding the bag.

Private insurers will escape the full bill, largely because they have shifted their exposure to the most extreme climate risks to California’s insurer of last resort—the FAIR Plan. In abandoning the California home insurance market, or otherwise excluding fire coverage from their policies, private insurance companies effectively pushed the responsibilities of shouldering climate risk back onto the public and protected their own profits. Despite their claims to the contrary, insurance companies, as recently as 2023, generated significant profits on homeowner insurance policies and are still raking in record profits.

The FAIR Plan is now on the brink of insolvency. To fund the shortfall, the California Insurance Commissioner has levied an assessment totaling $1 billion on private insurance companies. However, private insurance companies will pass $500 million of the assessment on to all of California’s insured homeowners.

This $500 million bill is a direct consequence of climate change and the profit-driven insurers who—after pocketing ever-increasing premiums and investing in the fossil fuel sector—have shed policies for homes most vulnerable to climate risks. All of California’s home insurance policyholders are the victims of fossil-fueled climate change.

Insurers Abandon Californians

The destructive force of the LA wildfires is a result of climate change-induced drought, which led to the accumulation of dried-out vegetation and the perfect conditions for extreme wildfires. Unusually strong wind gusts of more than 100 miles per hour spread the fires across LA, scattering flames throughout many of the city’s communities. And it was not just the fires causing damage—climate change intensifies fire smoke, filling the air with hazardous pollutants that harm health.

In California, the frequency and severity of wildfires have increased the cost of disasters, prompting insurers to hike premiums or refuse to renew policies. California’s home insurance rates jumped 48.4% from 2019 to 2024. Twelve major insurers have also restricted homeowners insurance even after being allowed massive rate hikes.

Insurers have justified abandoning California homeowners by citing rising climate risk. Yet, insurance companies are complicit in facilitating climate change through their massive investments in fossil fuel-related assets—including coal, oil, and gas—the primary sources of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

State Farm and the Hypocrisy of the Insurance Sector

State Farm General (State Farm)—through its parent company, State Farm Mutual—is a major investor in fossil fuels. The company’s investments include more than $6 billion in upstream oil and gas producers ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coterra Energy, and Shell and mining company Rio Tinto. These five companies sit on the list of the top investor-owned entities with the highest historical carbon dioxide emissions. State Farm Mutual also has billions of dollars of investments in fossil-fuel-intensive or dependent industries such as utilities, oil and gas services, and pipeline companies, as well as chemical, steel, and fertilizer manufacturers.

(Graphic: CIEL)

Despite facilitating climate change through its fossil fuel investments, State Farm—the largest property and casualty insurer in California—stated in 2023 that it would not renew 30,000 home insurance policies in the state. The decision was primarily due to the increasing risk of wildfires in California. After an approved rate increase of 20% in December 2023, among other concessions from the California Department of Insurance, State Farm agreed to renew these 30,000 home insurance policies, but only on the condition that the renewed policies exclude fire coverage. State Farm clients had to specifically secure separate fire coverage from the FAIR Plan.

The Pacific Palisades, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the LA Fires, was one of the zip codes abandoned by State Farm. According to California Department of Insurance spokesperson Michael Soller, State Farm dropped about 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades in July. State Farm also dropped more than 2,000 policies in two other LA zip codes, which include neighborhoods also damaged by the wildfires, such as Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido. The FAIR Plan is now the principal recourse for wildfire coverage for former State Farm policyholders.

State Farm Demands Rate Hike Instead of Using Reinsurance Profits

Most private insurers are looking to their reinsurer to provide coverage for their losses from the LA Fires. Reinsurance, basically insurance for insurance companies, is a common part of an insurer’s business model as it allows them to shift some of their risk to protect themselves from the most catastrophic events. State Farm’s reinsurer is its parent company—State Farm Mutual. From 2014 to 2023, State Farm paid reinsurance premiums of nearly $2.2 billion but was only reimbursed $0.4 billion—less than 20%—suggesting that the company overpaid for reinsurance. These payments to its parent company, with little return, led to accusations that State Farm was artificially boosting its parent company’s profits.

State Farm Mutual has over $130 billion in surplus available to support its subsidiary. Despite the exorbitant profits of its parent company and well before the LA Fires, in June 2024, State Farm requested a 30% increase in its homeowners insurance rates (on top of the 20% increase it was granted in March of the same year) purportedly to improve its general financial condition. Within days of the LA fires being contained, State Farm again asked its California policyholders to step in and maintain the profits of its parent company. State Farm requested an annual $740 million bailout in the form of an “urgent” 22% increase in State Farm’s home insurance rates, as well as requesting rate hikes of 38% for rental dwellings and 15% for tenants.

Fortunately for California’s consumers, Commissioner Ricardo Lara rejected State Farm’s requested rate increase. And true to form, State Farm is now “considering its options” because the commissioner’s decision “sends a strong message to State Farm General about the support it will receive to collect sufficient premiums in the future”—a barely veiled threat to again abandon California policyholders.

State Farm had already limited its exposure to climate change-induced wildfires and then sought to reduce it further, asking policyholders to take on even more of the remaining risk. All the while, they continue to facilitate climate change and profit from their fossil fuel investments.

Climate Change Pushes FAIR Plan to the Brink

As insurance companies pull out of vulnerable areas or raise premiums, many California homeowners are left with no choice but to rely on the FAIR Plan—the state-supported insurer of last resort. The FAIR Plan offers limited coverage at higher rates, making it costly and an inadequate safety net for homeowners abandoned by private insurance companies.

The exit of insurers from the California residential property market has meant that the FAIR Plan’s exposure to wildfire risk has increased exponentially. The FAIR Plan now holds 13,752 policies with more than $23 billion in liability across the residential and commercial sectors in the zip codes affected by the fires.

Insurers should then seek to recoup the costs of covering the damage from climate change-induced severe weather events from fossil fuel companies—not from the individual policyholders or the public at large.

On February 11, 2025, Insurance Commissioner Lara found “that the FAIR Plan is faced with a substantial threat of insolvency due to unprecedented losses” and approved the FAIR Plan’s request to levy an assessment totaling $1 billion on private insurance companies. Before July 2024, insurers operating in California would have been solely required to fund any deficit, paying a fee based on their market share. But a July 2024 regulation allows insurers to shift 50% of the assessment onto the state’s existing policyholders. Homeowners from all over California are being asked to bail out the FAIR Plan, irrespective of the risk profile of their home and neighborhood and the climate risk mitigation or adaptation they have undertaken.

This change in regulation was part of a series of concessions Lara has given to the insurance industry in recent years, including provisions that make it easier for companies to raise premiums and a new rule that allows companies to use forward-looking catastrophe models when setting rates. These new regulations were aimed at convincing insurers to stay in California, but consumer advocates warn that they have the potential to further exacerbate homeowners’ climate-related costs.

Making Insurers Take on the Real Culprit of Climate Change

Insurance companies facilitate climate change by investing in fossil fuel assets and underwriting fossil fuel projects. However, the primary drivers of climate change are fossil fuels themselves, and it is the companies that produce and sell them that are principally responsible for the climate emergency. Instead of attempting to shift their exposure to California’s householders, insurers should divest from fossil fuel assets and cease underwriting fossil fuel projects. Insurers should then seek to recoup the costs of covering the damage from climate change-induced severe weather events from fossil fuel companies—not from the individual policyholders or the public at large.

A new bill, SB222, introduced into the California legislature, would make it easier to ensure that polluters pay for the climate-driven disasters befalling residents and upending the insurance industry. It specifically directs the FAIR Plan and incentivizes private insurers to pursue the parties responsible for climate change-induced weather events by standing in the shoes of policyholders to recoup the costs of losses, utilizing their right of subrogation. An insurer’s right of subrogation is the right to try to recover the amount of a claim or claims it paid out from another party that caused the insured loss(es).

The draft legislation directs the FAIR Plan to exercise its right of subrogation against “a responsible party for a climate disaster or extreme weather or other events attributable to climate change” if the benefits of subrogation outweigh the costs (as determined by an independent advisory body). If the FAIR Plan’s funds are exhausted and private insurance companies are being assessed, as is the case now, the bill also provides incentives to insurers to exercise the right of subrogation against a “responsible party” for a climate disaster. An insurer’s share of the assessment will be reduced by 10% if the insurer exercises its right of subrogation against a responsible party, but if it does not exercise its right of subrogation against a responsible party, it will be increased by 10%.

Finally, in addition to its right of subrogation, the bill provides that an insurer may seek damages against a responsible party for a climate disaster, extreme weather, or other events attributable to climate change.

Make no mistake: The responsible parties driving climate change are fossil fuel businesses.

Insurers Must Stop Fanning the Flames of Climate Risk

SB222 highlights that the real culprit of the climate emergency is the fossil fuel sector. But insurance companies are far from innocent bystanders. By supporting “business as usual” in the fossil fuel sector, insurance companies are facilitating the escalating climate crisis, causing climate change-induced events like the LA fires. When coupled with their representations around protecting policyholders from peril and their justifications for rate hikes and non-renewals, insurers’ conduct violates consumer protection laws and standards.

Insurers must no longer be permitted to invest large portions of premium income in fossil fuel companies and underwrite new oil and gas projects while charging some homeowners more for increased climate risk and simply turning others away. Before any further handouts are given to the insurance industry or any more concessions are made to preserve a profit-driven insurance model that may simply be untenable in the age of climate chaos, insurers must stop fanning the flames.

Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans so as to favor the insatiable greed and power of the Super-rich and giant corporations. The plutocrats are demanding more tax escapes, corporate welfare, and green lights for lawlessness.

No more excuses for the failing Democratic Party and its contracting out of electoral campaigns to profiteering corporate-conflicted political/media consulting firms

Progressive Congressional Democrats like Al Green, Elizabeth Warren, and Independent Bernie Sanders know exactly what needs to be done to Stop Dangerous Donald and Marauding Musk from their lawless, fascistic overthrow of our government and our Constitution.

Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans.

First and foremost, House and Senate Democrats can hold UNOFFICIAL public hearings on Capitol Hill, highlighting an all-time winning agenda supported by the citizenry and opposed by the Trumpsters. These are the long-overdue, immensely needed, and widely popular programs abandoned by the corporate Democrats who allowed the disastrous loss last November to the most corrupt, cruel, bigoted, and greedy GOP since its founding in 1854.

To see what I and Mark Green and two dozen civic leaders urged the Democrats to AUTHENTICALLY adopt in 2022 and 2024 (see winningamerica.net and my 2024 book titled Let’s Start the Revolution and The Inflection Election by Mark Green). The following are the election winners:

1. Raise the frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. (Twenty-five million workers would get a long-earned raise.)
2. Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for nearly 50 years for over 65 million retirees. Pay for this by lifting the income cap on the social security tax for the rich and super-rich (now at just $176,100).
3. Restore the child tax credit by sending $300 a month to over 60 million children, cutting child poverty nearly in half.
4. Pay for this and other necessities by raising taxes on the severely undertaxed rich, super-rich, and giant corporations (over half of which pay no federal income taxes). Eighty-five percent of Americans support this tax fairness reform.
5. Crack down on corporate crooks and swindlers eating away at the income of hard-pressed workers. We are talking big money stolen from consumers and workers. The polling support for this LAW AND ORDER reform is huge.

There are many more pro-people reforms shelved by the Democrats and their mendacious for-profit consultants. But these initiatives are the “Big Five” that draw overwhelming support from liberal and conservative voters, from Red and Blue States. An unstoppable coalition of political power over their legislators. (See my 2015 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.)

The second parallel wave of UNOFFICIAL hearings could strongly rebut and reject dictator Trump’s cruel and mostly illegal Executive Order Dictates. In her largely feeble and dull response to Trump’s lengthy lying, deceptive, and distracting propaganda show before the U.S. Congress, Senator Elissa Slotkin used the weak words “reckless” and “chaotic” to describe Trump’s lying boasts. She should have called Trump “criminally insane” and “knowingly homicidal.” Trump’s vicious actions are harming many Americans and desperately poor people abroad.

The Trump/Musk Axis of Evil is knowingly leaving Americans defenseless by strip-mining programs dealing with pandemics, climate violence, toxic pollutants, unsafe air and surface transportation, and contaminated food, water, and air here at home. Abroad, cutting the lifelines of AIDS medicines, food supplements to near-starving children, and other emergency American help, long supported by previous Republican and Democratic Presidents, brings arrogant glee to these GOP gangsters. One new, obsolete aircraft carrier costs taxpayers more than the vital work of dismantled federal agencies.

Senator Schumer’s choice of Senator Slotkin (D-MI) to present the Party’s response shows that he has not learned anything from his self-inflicted losses to the GOP. It would have been far more popular and persuasive to have Senator Sanders or Senator Warren make the specific, devastating case against the vengeful, scapegoating, egomaniacal, delusional Trump.

Slotkin, a former CIA employee, used her 10 minutes of fame to be self-promoting and repeated the vague affirmations behind “the middle class” (of course, no mention of the vast poor), “national security,” and “economic security.” Like so many of the Democratic politicians, she just couldn’t get herself to be specific, as with the aforementioned Big Five, which, after all, are just updates of the successful New Deal policies under Roosevelt and Truman.

Letters decrying another lost opportunity for the Democrats to unmask the Trump Dump rising in Washington, DC poured into the newspapers. The Washington Post published many of them. One writer wanted this to be said: “Resign, Mr. President, Resign and you’ll hear a thunderous ovation.” A long-time Republican, Grant Grissom, took this a broader step forward by paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times on March 2, 2025, titled “A PLEA FOR DONALD TRUMP TO RESIGN” and presented cogent reasons for not waiting for Impeachment. (Grant Grissom: trumptimetoresign@gmail.com).

To conclude where I began: Democrats hold regular UNOFFICIAL hearings, which will get good mass media coverage and reach millions of registered voters who are increasingly indignant over what is being taken from them. If the Democrats stand with the fast-growing resistance by the people, they can stop the Trump madness and save what is left of our democracy.

As I stand here at the precipice of a cliff that spells career suicide as an academic physician, I pause to wonder how I got here.

A professor of medicine at a university known for its excellence, with over two decades of service and awards for my work, some of which I accepted and others I rejected for their performativity, I never put “health equity” in my job title and never got paid to specifically work for it. I got the sense early on that any career branded with the label “health equity” would require an allegiance I would never be prepared to give. Health equity is a part of the landscape of being a physician committed to health for all, just like source control of an infection or pain management. These are expectations of our professional duty.

Used as a poster child for health and justice in the academy when it was politically convenient, I am now facing intense repression for speaking up for health justice. As institutions across the US pursue broad criminalization of dissent, the flow of weapons to Israel and the mass murder of Palestinians continue unimpeded. The point of this repression is to silence me, to make an example out of me and to cast me as out of favor, “unprofessional” and an outlier.

My work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity of medicine.

But my work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity of medicine. What I did not realize when I embarked on this path that would lead me here to this point of no return was that this moral center was the most dangerous thing you could assert in academic medicine. Because what logically flows from this center is the following: the right of all people to have the opportunity to be healthy and the responsibility physicians carry to create the conditions for health to be possible–for all.

Of course, many people like to speak about these things, but no one actually likes to do anything about them. To act in accordance would require a reallocation of power from those who hold too much of it to those who hold very little. And when it comes to disease, the abundance or lack of power dictates who lives, who dies and how. To disrupt dynamics of power–or to even name them–would damage one’s personal aspirations, one’s reputation and one’s career.

As I shift my weight and peer over the edge of the cliff, squinting my eyes to try in vain to make out the distance to the bottom, I can hear the thousand shards of my shattered heart move. They poke me from the inside. The welling salt water stings my eyes. The images of doctors a half a world away pleading for humanity to care as their hospitals were bombed into oblivion. The sound of their voices as they sang their commitment, refusing to leave the bedside of their bedridden patients. We will remain. Their handwriting scrawled on the mangled white board was all that was left after Israeli forces bombed, shelled and raided their way through the sacred space of healing: We did what we could. Remember us.

Standing at the edge, feeling the breeze move the curls of my graying hair over my cheeks, I look over at my colleagues who are standing at a safe distance a ways back, looking at me sideways with a mix of consternation and pity. How did she get herself into this predicament? She has always been so different from the rest of us.

And the truth of the matter is—I am different.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. Not because I wanted the prestige. I never wanted to lead a department or be an expert of some esoteric medical condition. I am a generalist in every sense of the world. I love people and want to see us all thrive. I feel a kinship with the entire web of life. I am a part of the growing chorus of humans calling us back into the crucial and sacred relationships that keep us all healthy. I am passionate about teaching and sharing my vision for a world of health with the upcoming generation, a vision where physicians are whole, integrated and beloved members of the communities they serve and love. I have a knack for seeing the gaps and enjoy pushing myself and the field to extend its vast healing potential, in this particular moment of human, more than human and planetary sickness. I value the colleagues I work with who strive for excellence in our healing work together.

To learn this kind of medicine, I tuned my ear to hear the teachers who would show me how people live and how they die. Not in the hospital but in the streets.

But my vision of excellence is apparently controversial. My vision is one where systems-level interactions bring health, not just of individuals but of the whole. And to achieve this, our activity as healers must operate at both the individual and systems levels. This approach requires a different kind of training than we receive in medical school.

So I sought that training out, and that training continues to this day. To learn this kind of medicine, I tuned my ear to hear the teachers who would show me how people live and how they die. Not in the hospital but in the streets, in the alleys, in the railroad cars, in the slums, in the refugee camps and in water stops along dangerous desert border-crossings, in the interstitium of lived experience at the heart of empire. I had to learn to hear the voiceless and see the invisible–the undocumented, the unhoused, the gender queer, the Indigenous, the chronically ill and disabled, the non-English speakers, the Muslim, the Roma, the Traveller, the Black and brown, the imprisoned, the immunes–those in Roman times who were subsumed by the empire, but did not have the same rights as the conquerors. The people who fall in the cracks that were designed especially for them to fall into.

Since I came into my awareness of the world as the daughter of Punjabi immigrants growing up in California, where the original people are still healing from genocide and ongoing erasure, I have been a student of and participant in principled struggle. In medical school while I was studying the microbiology of urinary tract infections, I was simultaneously learning the histories of oppressed people, from their mouths, from their tender stories, from the aching memories of their loved ones who died before they had to. These living narratives shaped who I became as a physician more than any test score or career opportunity. I wanted to serve the communities who entrusted me with their lived knowledge, so that I would carry it to serve the benefit of all. I wanted to help understand what led to disparities in health and to heal what was hurting.

My own journey to this particular moment–where I am now staring over this edge with nothing to break my fall–was not a rapid one. For the most part, it was slow and measured. These past seven years though, the journey has accelerated.

The acceleration started when I began noticing how many Black patients were admitted to the hospital with emphysema, their lungs destroyed by some inflammatory molecule that ripped through the delicate pulmonary tissues. Typically we see this in smokers. But these people in their 30s and 40s had no smoking history or exposure. They all lived next to the Hunters Point shipyard, where the atom bombs were loaded onto ships before they were blown up over the Midway islands and eventually over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Traces of radioactive material persist in the soil today. The dust settles onto the window sills and bookshelves of the houses nearby. The people who used to live there were predominantly Black before the latest wave of “development,” as the tech industry took over the Gold Rush city once again in the early aughts.

The acceleration increased when Oscar Grant was executed point blank by a cop on New Year's Day at the Fruitvale station, Oakland. The ripple effects were felt all over the community and the world. It became louder still when San Francisco Mission homeboy Alex Nieto was shot 59 times by cops as he was eating a burrito, taking in the sunset over his beloved cityscape from a bench on Bernal Hill, just before his work shift started. The techies were moving back into San Francisco, and they wanted our homes and our parks. Coming from the predominantly melanin-scarce suburbs from across the US, they showed up in our predominantly melanated neighborhoods and called us “foreign”, “suspicious” and “threatening.” These same people developed the technology of the dreaded quadcopter drones, which are currently executing Palestinians sheltering in tents based on AI algorithms, which some suspect try to determine who may one day grow up to be a militant. No wonder so many children are being killed.

The tempo quickened as I accompanied the Frisco 5 on hunger strike, protesting the police killings of Indigenous, Black, Latino and poor people in the neighborhoods where invading tech workers wanted our housing. Rents exploded, evictions left elders unhoused and the trauma of the killings reverberated in every family. When I saw the effects of trauma in our communities, I started voicing how racism and police violence were threats to public health. I started putting my medical work more directly into the streets and into the hands of the people who needed it to create the conditions where their health could be a possibility. Getting shot by the police is an impediment to health for the whole community. Getting swept up like trash as our unhoused and poor communities experience, can cause devastating health consequences for all of us.

The pace of my steps picked up as I headed to Standing Rock, called by a California Native youth who asked me to support the medic response. He was concerned that the police were harming Lakota elders praying for their sacred water–Mnisose or the Missouri River. They were gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing their sovereign territory. The connections between extractive capitalism, the state violence required to uphold its agendas, the ongoing processes of colonialism, the impact of climate change—and ultimately our health—came into sharp focus. I watched lines of heavily armed police in military grade gear shooting rubber bullets into the faces and groins of unarmed, bare chested Native youth, praying at the water’s edge. I realized I could not call 911 for help, because these were the people firing the rounds.

It was around this time that two things happened simultaneously back at the university. Medical students from around the country were emailing me to work with me. They showed up at my university and said they came there explicitly because of my work. They wanted to be a physician who took on advancing health through challenging power. Simultaneously, the university administration started to call me in more regularly, first to try to offer “coaching” on my communication. But soon it was clear the goal was to silence me. This was six years ago.

When I spoke with my mentor, sociology professor Troy Duster, the grandson of Ida B Wells, he shared with me how many people disliked his grandmother speaking out about the lynchings in Jim Crow South–Black and white alike. We are living in similar times, except now, those of us decrying the bodies hanging in trees are cast as the racists. As we toasted Wells’ posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020 with lemonade outside in his front yard, Duster spoke to me about the critical importance of standing strong in our moral center to advance justice. When everyone tells you to shut up, that is exactly when you should speak up. Louder.

So I did.

In October 2023, I started communicating with Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian British war surgeon who was working in Al-Ahli hospital when Israel bombed it, killing dozens of sheltering refugees. Receiving his communications daily at 3 a.m. for a span of 5 weeks, I was a witness to a genocide unfolding, told from the perspective of a colleague in an operating room across the world. He spoke of doing surgery by candlelight, running out of drinking water, not having enough anesthesia and using vinegar to clean wounds infected with the deadly Pseudomonas infection because Israel had cut off Gaza’s access to food, water, electricity and medicine. He spoke of thousands of people seeking shelter in the hospital hallways, sleeping on mats strewn across the floors of the emergency room, because their homes had been destroyed. They had assumed the hospital was safe. It wasn’t. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

As I spoke up, my colleagues provided a list of excuses why they could not.

As I moved to share the urgency of his experiences with the medical community, with the institutions of medicine in the West, I was met with a stunning response. Everywhere around me were attempts to shut me up and to stop medical students, residents, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, lab technicians and other physicians from speaking about the avalanche of violence barreling down on Palestinians, landing squarely on the children.

As every hospital in Gaza was bombed, the acts of silencing intensified. As Israel kidnapped and tortured Palestinian healthcare workers, the repression grew. As multiple first-person accounts of doctors returning from Gaza reported sniper wounds to Palestinian toddlers’ heads, the criminal charges against protestors here racked up.

I spoke up and faced a torrent of racist repression in response. And as I spoke up, my colleagues provided a list of excuses why they could not.

It’s complicated.

I’m not knowledgeable and should not speak to things outside my area of expertise.

I don’t want to upset my supervisor–they’re my friend.

I have to get a letter from my boss for this grant next week and cannot risk it.

I have to apply for this fellowship and don’t want to ruin my chances.

I am afraid. I am not as courageous as you.

I have to protect my work in [insert whatever special program for marginalized population here] and if I speak up and I am punished, all those people will be left without the services I provide.

You have your strategy, and I don’t agree with it. I have mine.

The “You Do You” approach does not work for things that threaten our collective wellbeing. Genocide and the fascist logic that drives it—these are threats to all of humanity. For an excellent example of the stunning failure of the “You Do You” approach, look no further than the morbidity and mortality data for COVID-19. Physicians in academic medicine offered misdirected advice that led to the death and disabling of masses of Indigenous, Black, brown, chronically ill, elderly and poor people.

Individual calculated risk assessments sharpen the relief lines around power, as the powerful stay safe and the powerless die.

While community health workers were trying to shore up resources so that the people who are made most vulnerable by our society could be safe as each successive wave of virus hit, some healthcare experts offered a “calculated personal risk assessment” approach. As if a teenager spending a maskless night in a movie theater wouldn’t bring the virus home to their elder who would die. The elders who kept themselves sequestered safe at home eventually got sick and died—millions of them did.

With threats to our collective health, individual calculated risk assessments sharpen the relief lines around power, as the powerful stay safe and the powerless die. The only real move to address these threats with minimal harm is a collective approach where we insist upon the safety and health of all. Like COVID-19, the rise of fascism—where whole groups of people are oppressed, repressed or killed—is also a threat to collective health which requires this collective approach. Without it, we are overwhelmed, and many people will needlessly die. As they are right now, as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza.

When push comes to shove and the grotesque contours of power are exposed for all to see, doctors tend to side with the powerful. Not because they’re cold and unfeeling and not because they hold that much power themselves. While physicians are led to believe they are part of the elite as medicine’s hierarchies afford them some jurisdiction, they do not possess enough power to change the structures driving the disease patterns they spend their entire clinical lives trying to extinguish. Physicians have been educated in ways to maintain illiteracy around power. In academic medicine, doctors have tacitly and unknowingly pledged allegiance to power. We have been captured by a profession committed to power, not to life itself.

This list of my colleagues’ reasons to justify their silence as genocide rages in Gaza exposes something important. We cannot advance health equity if we are more concerned about our personal career or even the needs of one specific marginalized group than the collective wellbeing of all. To achieve health for all, physicians must be prepared to sacrifice the privilege we carry to confront the power that inexorably prevents that needle from moving forward. We must be prepared to commit career suicide. Without that commitment, we become performative cogs perpetuating the inequity of a system built on entrenched inequities.

No matter how one frames the silence of my colleagues—whether it is an act of self-preservation or a benevolent concern for a particular marginalized group they serve—all of it is under threat when we stay silent in the face of violent oppression. Because an injury to one group is an injury to all. As hard as some try to divide humanity, we are as connected by our threads of relations and duties to care as the mycelial web that extends its filamentous embrace around the entire globe, crossing every surface, even the seemingly barren ones.

This list of my colleagues' reasons to justify their silence as genocide rages in Gaza exposes something important.

So when Abu Sitta called me with the details unfolding in Gaza before he went to the International Court of Justice and offered the same testimony there, with my duty to collective care and my commitment to health for all, what else could I have done?

As I look over the edge of the cliff, dizzy with gravity’s coaxing of my semilunar canals, I take note of how much lighter I feel now knowing that this is the only path I knew how to take as an academic physician with a daily practice in the struggle for health and dignity. If this is its natural conclusion, so be it. Healing sometimes requires these transformative painful moments. We push through the skin to lance the abscess so the pus can escape. We call this source control. Without that action, the infection will fester, potentially grow and overwhelm the body’s ability to keep it walled off.

I take this all into account as I inch closer to the edge, with nothing to catch me now but faith. Faith that my commitment to humanity and serving health for all is more important than any career I could possibly pursue. Faith that there are times in history where it is more important to take a stand than to sit and be quiet. And understanding that in those moments, those who take a stand are often unpopular, hated and dragged. Faith that my ancestors have my back and that they knew this moment was coming. They prepared me, because they too had been dragged in their struggle against colonial oppression. Faith in knowing this: some things are worth losing for the greater things we gain.

I fix my gaze on the radical horizon where all may find the possibility of health.

I take the final step and catch my breath.

Earth gives way to air.

With water in my eyes and fire in my heart—I fall.

My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.

Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.

My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.

The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.

I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.

My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.

Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:

In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.

My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.

I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.

Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.

In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.

In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.

Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.

My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.

But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.

Lee Zeldin was full of pablum in his January Senate confirmation hearing to run the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. A former member of Congress from Long Island, New York, with scant regulatory experience, Zeldin promised to “defer to the research of the scientists” on whether climate change made oceans more acidic. In even more laudatory language, he said he would “defer to the talented scientists,” on whether Earth had hit thresholds for runaway climate change.

He said he “would welcome an opportunity to read through all the science and research” on pesticides and search for “common sense, pragmatic solutions” on environmental issues. Claiming there was “no dollar large or small that can influence the decisions that I make,” Zeldin went so far as to say, “It is my job to stay up at night, to lose sleep at night, to make sure that we are making our air and our water cleaner.”

It was all a lie. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said Zeldin was considering firing 65% of EPA’s staff, which would amount to nearly 10,000 of the agency’s 15,000 workers. The White House later issued a clarification—as if it made any difference—that Zeldin was “committed” to slashing 65% of the agency’s budget. The EPA issued a statement saying President Trump and Secretary Zeldin “are in lockstep.”

When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth had its hottest year yet in 2024.

Also last week, the news broke that Zeldin is urging the White House to strike down the 2009 EPA finding that global warming gases endanger public health and the environment. That finding, made under the Obama administration, girded federal efforts to reduce vehicle and industrial emissions. The finding, long a legal target for climate deniers, has so far held up, even in an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, but that has not stopped the administration from attacking it. Project 2025, the blueprint organized by the Heritage Foundation to guide this White House, calls for an “update” to the endangerment finding. Leading climate denier and former Trump transition adviser Steve Milloy told The Associated Press last week that without the finding, “everything EPA does on climate goes away.”

This is after Zeldin told senators in written answers for his confirmation that he planned to “learn from EPA career staff about the current state of the science on greenhouse gas emissions and follow all legal requirements.” Instead, Zeldin has scientists in a state of bewilderment. In one fell month, he has every employee looking over their shoulder, fearing the dismissal of their work or the tap of outright dismissal.

Zeldin’s latest “lockstep” actions cap an already-breathtaking first month in running the EPA.

He has launched an illegal effort to claw back $20 billion in EPA clean energy funding significantly targeted for disadvantaged communities. He placed nearly 170 workers in the office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave and oversaw the firing of about 400 probationary staff (although some have momentarily been brought back after public outcry).

Zeldin has begun a rollback of Biden administration energy efficiency and water conservation regulations for home appliances and fixtures, and is asking Congress to repeal waivers for California to phase out new, gasoline-only vehicle sales and stricter emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks. Many other states in recent years have decided they would follow California’s standards, as they are allowed to under the Clean Air Act. Combined, these states add up to 40% of the automobile market in the United States.

There are surely many more attempts to come that will turn back the clock on environmental protection.

An EPA Led by Industry Apologists

Zeldin’s EPA includes a rogue’s gallery from President Trump’s first term.

Returning to the EPA in top spots for chemical regulation are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva. Both formerly served on the American Chemistry Council, the top lobbying arm of chemical manufacturers, and Dekleva spent more than three decades at DuPont, one of the most notorious companies for burying the dangers of PFAS.

In the first Trump administration, Beck was at the center of the suppression on science to resist the most stringent regulation or bans on carcinogenic chemicals such as trichloroethylene, PFAS, methylene chloride, and asbestos. She was also reported to have helped in burying the strongest possible health and safety guidelines to help communities reopen during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dekleva was accused during her first stint in President Trump’s EPA of pressuring employees to approve new chemicals and colluding with industry to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act.

The nominee to be Zeldin’s assistant administrator, David Fotouhi, is another returnee who was at the center of the first Trump administration’s efforts to strip wetlands protections. When not inside the EPA, Fotouhi has a long record defending industries in legal battles over standards or contamination lawsuits about toxic chemicals, such as asbestos, PFAS, PCBs, and coal ash.

Holding high-level positions in the Office of Air and Radiation are Abigale Tardif and Alex Dominguez. Tardif lobbied for the oil and petrochemical industry and was a policy analyst for the Koch-funded network Americans for Prosperity. Dominguez lobbied for the American Petroleum Institute, which opposed the vehicle pollution standards of the Biden administration.

Aaron Szabo has been nominated to be assistant secretary for Air and Radiation. Szabo was a contributing consultant to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA that recommends sharply curtailing the agency’s monitoring of global warming gases and other pollutants and eliminating the Office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.

Other recent EPA appointees who also contributed to Project 2025 (which President Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign) are Scott Mason and Justin Schwab. Steven Cook, a former lobbyist for plastics, chemicals, and oil refining, and another veteran of the first Trump administration, is also returning.

Zeldin may be inexperienced at regulation, but none of the above are. Kyle Danish, a partner at Van Ness Feldman, a consulting firm for energy clients, told The New York Times, “This group is arriving with more expertise in deploying the machinery of the agency, including to unravel regulations from the prior administration. They all look like they graduated one level from what they did in the first Trump administration.”

Same Playbook at Other Agencies

Other agencies responsible for addressing climate change pollution have also quickly deployed the machinery of environmental destruction.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memorandum ordering a review of the fuel economy standards of the Biden administration, claiming without evidence that the standards would destroy “thousands” of jobs and “force the electrification” of the nation’s auto fleets. This is despite the agency’s own analysis showing the rules would save consumers $23 billion in fuel costs and result in annual health costs benefits of $13 billion from reduced air pollution.

Secretary Duffy also issued a memorandum canceling the Department of Transportation’s plans to address environmental justice in low-income populations and communities of color, climate change, and resilience polices for department assets and the department’s Equity Council. Again, no facts were offered as to why communities disproportionately beset with pollution and pollution-related diseases should be excluded from protection. He was just following President Trump’s Orwellian executive order that aims to wipe any consideration of race, gender, climate, equity, and disproportionate impacts from federal programs.

Over in the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum issued a memorandum directing all his assistant secretaries to provide action plans that “suspend, revise, or rescind” more than two dozen regulations. The obvious goal is to plunder more public land and water for private profit for the fossil fuel and mining industries. Many of those regulations to be revised or killed involve endangered wildlife and plants; landscape and conservation health; the Migratory Bird Treaty; and accounting for the benefits to public health, property, and agriculture of reducing climate-related pollution.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Secretary Burgum said he was “completely embracing” the massive shrinking of the federal workforce by the Department of Government Efficiency, a cruel act that means he is just fine with DOGE’s 2,000 job cuts at Interior, including 1,000 in the chronically understaffed National Park Service, which has a $23.3 billion backlog for deferred maintenance.

Climate Mockery at Department of Energy

And then we have the reported layoff of between 1,200 and 2,000 workers at the Energy Department, now run by Chris Wright, a former CEO of one of the nation’s largest fracking companies. In President Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary Wright is the most blunt in dismissing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2023, he said the “the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify” climate policies. He said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition.”

He has doubled down on his rhetoric during his first month in office. Wright told a conservative policy conference in February—without evidence—that net zero goals for carbon emissions by 2050 were “sinister” and “lunacy.” Wright also went on Fox Business in February to say that climate change is “nowhere near the world’s biggest problem today, not even close.”

Despite all the evidence already unfolding that climate change is a factor in the increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S., and despite a major 2023 study projecting that 5 million lives a year could be saved around the world by phasing out fossil fuels and their pollution, Wright said a warmer planet with more carbon dioxide is “better for growing plants.” Never mind the communities living in the crosshairs of contamination and climate catastrophe or conservationists who are concerned anew about endangered species.

Wright spent his first month in office postponing Biden-era energy efficiency standards for home appliances, claiming without evidence that they have “diminished the quality” of them. His office announced the canceling of $124 million in contracts, many of them connected to diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives. He said those contracts were “adding nothing of value to the American people.” When asked if he wanted fossil fuels to “come back big time,” Wright responded, “Absolutely.”

Behind the Pablum of Confirmation Hearings Was an Iron Fist

And over in the Commerce Department, the 6,700 scientists and 12,000 staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are reeling from the recent first wave of hundreds of layoffs. Many more job losses are threatened, with sources telling major media outlets that the Trump administration and new Secretary Howard Lutnick are considering a 50% cut in staff and a 30% cut in the agency’s budget.

It is irrelevant to the Trump administration that NOAA is a bedrock agency that protects the public with its real-time tracking of dangerous storms. It is at the center of long-term federal analysis on climate, the toll in property and life of global warming, the health of our oceans, and the state of our fisheries. Instead of being placed on a pedestal for this central role, NOAA is as much a bullseye for polluters and plunderers as the EPA. Project 2025 calls for the breaking up of NOAA because it “has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street financier, told senators in his January confirmation hearing that he had “no interest” in dismantling NOAA. The firings suggest the dismantling has begun.

When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth had its hottest year yet in 2024. That was obviously lost on him. In just one month, the only demonstrated deference of Zeldin, Burgum, Wright, Duffy, and Lutnick is to President Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill” and the deregulation of toxic industries.

Left in the wake are demonized and demoralized federal scientists.

In his address to Congress this week, President Trump boasted about ending “environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.” Hopefully it will not be one hurricane, one contamination, or one disappearing species too many to realize we cannot afford to be without those scientists. We will be far less safe without them.

On February 22nd, the Michigan Republican Party met in Huntington Place in Detroit to elect a new chair. After the ballots were counted, State Senator Jim Runestand prevailed over President Donald Trump’s choice, “fake elector” Meshawn Maddock. Even though he had delivered Michigan to the GOP column, incumbent Peter Hoekstra didn’t run again. He couldn’t, because as of November he is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s ambassador to Canada.

During his three-decade plus career in government, Hoekstra has amassed quite the right-wing record. In the 90s, he was a fierce foe of workplace safety and union reformers. Teamster warehouse director Tom Leedham called Hoekstra “a congressman who tried to eliminate the forty-hour workweek, and gut overtime and job safety laws.” As chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Hoekstra led a witch hunt into the Teamsters that ended up removing Ron Carey, the only reform president ever elected in Teamsters history, from office shortly after the union won a hard fought battle against UPS. Hoekstra proclaimed in 2000 that if he and his allies “had not acted, Ron Carey would still be president of the Teamsters.”

On foreign policy, Hoekstra’s tenure was similarly malicious. After voting for the Iraq War, Heokstra remained convinced well into 2006 that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction. To that effect, he announced that U.S. troops had actually found WMDs that year. Too bad for Hoekstra they turned out to be defunct weapons that predated the Persian Gulf War. The WMD lie remained just that, a lie. He also palled around with David Yarushalmi, an anti-Muslim bigot who once called Blacks “the most murderous of peoples.”

Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well.

In 2012, Hoekstra attempted to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenhow. His campaign’s Super Bowl ad featured an Asian woman, bicycling through a rice paddy, who castigated “Debbie Spend It Now” in broken English. A clear attempt to resuscitate the “Yellow Peril,” a journalist called it “the most racist political ad of the year.” Heokstra’s campaign floundered and he lost in a landslide.

Hoekstra’s post-Congress years saw him argue that the CIA’s torture program, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” produced “actionable intelligence.” He took time in 2016 to defame Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin over her “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After co-chairing Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign in 2016, Hoekstra was back in government. For his services, he was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the Netherlands, his birthplace.

As Trump’s ambassador, Hoekstra was dogged by reporters over his false 2015 claims that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, in which cars and politicians were “being burned.” In 2020, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands posted a bizarre image of a graveyard containing German soldiers from World War II. The account said the graves were a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace,” seemingly forgetting what side the U.S. was on during the war. The whole thing was reminiscent of when President Reagan went to a graveyard containing bodies of Hitler’s SS to declare the dead Nazis were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

Hoekstra’s tenure was marked by accusations that he openly interfered in Dutch politics. In 2019 he hosted a party for the far-right Forum for Democracy whose anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views nicely dovetailed with his own. Diplomats are prohibited from interfering in their host countries politics by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Although other political parties in the Netherlands complained, Trump lost the following year’s presidential election and Hoekstra was out. Or was he? Hoekstra’s reward for helping Trump win the Mitten State, is once again, an ambassadorship, but this time to Canada.

Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well. Given that he has already violated diplomatic protocol via his involvement in the domestic politics of the host country, and that a stated goal of the Trump administration is the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, it stands to reason that Hoekstra will use any available means to further that project as ambassador. In short, he will attempt to undermine Canadian sovereignty under the guise of diplomacy.

Although Peter Hoekstra will almost certainly be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that’s no reason for him to be treated as just another ambassador in Canada. As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as someone who will undermine Canadian independence in the service of American empire.

Land is not just a means of survival; it is one of our most powerful tools to combat climate change and nature loss. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, retains water, supports biodiversity, and—crucially—underpins food production. When land is degraded—through deforestation, overexploitation, or poor management—it shifts from being a carbon sink to a source of emissions, disrupting local water cycles, accelerating desertification, and sparking food insecurity. This degradation has direct consequences, such as the catastrophic flooding that hit Valencia last year, where altered landscapes and poor land stewardship exacerbated extreme weather impacts.

Without land security, women farmers remain locked out of decision-making, deprived of resources, and forced to fight climate change and nature loss with one hand tied behind their backs.

The link between land health, food security, and climate resilience is clear. But the role of women—who form the backbone of food production globally—is often overlooked. Women have extensive ecological knowledge and are key stewards of land, particularly those in rural and Indigenous communities. Women produce up to 80% of the world’s food, consumed by families and communities worldwide, and account for between 30-40% of the agricultural workforce. Yet, fewer than 20% of landowners are women—and, in half of the world’s countries, they have little to no rights or decision-making power over the land they work. This systemic land insecurity undermines their ability to implement long-term soil and land restoration practices crucial for climate adaptation.

The Three Systemic Barriers to Women’s Leadership in Land Restoration

To truly #AccelerateAction, as this year’s International Women’s Day theme calls for, we must address the root of the problem: land access. Without secure land tenure, women farmers face three systemic challenges.

Limited decision-making power results in less resilient agriculture: Studies from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) indicate that women farmers with land rights are more likely to invest in soil conservation and water retention techniques, which are crucial for adapting to climate change. Without control over their land, women are often forced to comply with farming methods that may coincidentally be more planet-friendly (due to women lacking access to resources like chemical inputs) but are often less efficient and reduce resilience to yield variation. Women’s land insecurity translates into a lack of autonomy in adopting and scaling climate-smart farming methods that can both render their community more climate resilient and reduce hunger.

Restricted access to funding and training: Despite their deep knowledge of sustainable farming, women are often systematically denied access to credit, training, and agricultural extension services. A report by the World Bank found that if women had the same access to resources as men, agricultural yields could increase by up to 30%, reducing global hunger. Yet, because they often lack legal land ownership, they are sometimes ineligible for loans and grants that could help them transition to nature-positive forms of agriculture. Bridging this gap would not only benefit women but also strengthen global food security and climate resilience.

The disproportionate impact of climate change on women: Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities, and land degradation disproportionately affects women. Roughly 80% of the people displaced by climate disasters are women. In communities where women lack land rights, they have fewer options for adaptation and recovery. Secure land tenure empowers women to implement long-term solutions that enhance climate resilience, from agroecological practices to community-led reforestation projects.

The Path Forward: Solutions for Gender-Inclusive Land Restoration

Landscape restoration is only possible when everyone in the community—including women—has the rights, resources, and recognition they deserve. Ensuring land tenure for women is not just about equity—it’s about survival. Women are already leading land restoration efforts across the globe. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement, founded by Wangari Maathai, has empowered thousands of women to restore degraded forests, leading to the planting of over 50 million trees. In India, women-led self-help groups have restored thousands of hectares of farmland through water conservation and agroecology. These initiatives prove that when women have control over land, they invest in solutions that benefit both people and the planet. And it’s not rocket science—there are concrete policy solutions that can ensure women can lead the charge in restoring land and combating climate change.

In order to increase and enforce land rights for women, countries must reform laws that restrict women’s access to land. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, customary laws often prevent women from inheriting land, even when statutory laws permit it. Enforcing legal protections is critical. In addition, more funding opportunities must be available to women in agriculture: Only 6% of agricultural aid funding worldwide treats gender as a fundamental issue. Governments and financial institutions must close the agriculture funding gap for women through targeted grants, subsidies, and loan programs. In tandem, women’s traditional knowledge of farming and conservation must be supported with expanded access to climate-smart agricultural training. Finally, climate-smart agricultural training must consider gender dynamics, as poorly designed programmes can unintentionally empower men while sidelining women. Research shows that when gender is overlooked, existing inequalities can be reinforced. Organizations should recognize that technologies and policies often carry biases that can entrench power imbalances, restrict food security, and further marginalize women.

This year’s International Women’s Day theme, #AccelerateAction, calls on the world to address the structural barriers slowing progress. If we are serious about climate action, we must start at the root of the problem: land access. Without land security, women farmers remain locked out of decision-making, deprived of resources, and forced to fight climate change and nature loss with one hand tied behind their backs.

A just, climate-resilient future is not possible without women at the forefront of land restoration. By securing their rights to land, we not only restore degraded ecosystems but also unlock the full potential of those who have been caretakers of the Earth for generations. If we want to accelerate action, we must start by giving women the tools they need: land, security, and the power to lead.

The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read—no, this is not hyperbole!—like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a 21st-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

High Technology and Squalor

Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of—yes!—Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.

Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.

Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health.

The racist tinge to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of white nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.

On January 31s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).

By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS—power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project—in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.

Overwrite Privileges

Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.

Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.

As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.

And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.

Cyber Capital

The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9%, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3% driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”

This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by white corporate digital power.)

The Ultimate in White Privilege

It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.

Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a white settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).

Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination.

Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in white privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories;” held political office in South Africa while it was still an apartheid state; and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in white establishments, and had no right to vote.

In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average white worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its apartheid racial segregation and ruling white nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.

Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population—many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.

District 9

What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy white Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.

The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.

It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.

By Ralph Nader March 7, 2025 Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans so as to favor the insatiable greed and power of the Super-rich and giant corporations. The plutocrats are demanding more tax escapes, corporate welfare, and green lights…

Streaming LIVE at 12 noon Eastern time/24-7 Streaming Afterward

In this episode of the DMZ America Podcast, hosts Ted Rall and Scott Stantis dive into the Democrats’ alarming ineffectiveness and inability to push back against President Trump, a weakness laid bare by Congressional Democrats’ limp reaction to his commanding speech before a joint session of Congress.

Rall, a passionate progressive cartoonist, and Stantis, a razor-sharp conservative illustrator, bring their ideological clash to the table, dissecting the party’s half-hearted gestures—symbolic votes, vague statements, and little else—that crumble under Trump’s relentless drive.

The duo debates whether Democrats need to escalate their efforts to reclaim relevance. Rall demands a fiercer approach: nationwide protests, targeted filibusters, and a cohesive message to rally their base. Stantis, skeptical of their spine, questions if they’ve got the stomach for such a fight or if they’re too fractured to unite. Is this just a fleeting stumble after a bruising election, or a chilling omen of the party’s decline into irrelevance? With wit and grit, Rall and Stantis explore whether the Democrats can adapt and rise—or if this signals a deeper, existential crisis foreshadowing political doom in an era dominated by Trump’s unyielding force.

 

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 196: Dem Dum Dems appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 10 am Eastern/9 am Central time, and Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

In this engaging episode of The TMI Show, host Ted Rall teams up with guest cohost Robby West, filling in for Manila Chan, who’s off enjoying a sun-soaked vacation.

Steering clear of today’s divisive political minefield, the pair invites Ted’s DMZ America cohost, Scott Stantis of The Chicago Tribune, for a spirited romp through history’s most unforgettable moments. The trio swaps tales with gusto: Ted dives into the chaotic brilliance of the French Revolution, painting vivid scenes of guillotines and rebellion, while Scott counters with the gritty, transformative power of the Industrial Age, marveling at steam engines and steel. Robby shakes things up with a ode to the Roaring Twenties—flappers, jazz, and Prohibition-fueled revelry—sparking laughter and debate.

Or maybe not.

Let’s talk about what history reveal about humanity’s quirks, resilience, and penchant for drama. Free of partisan sniping, the episode blends sharp insights, wry humor, and a touch of nostalgia, proving The TMI Show thrives on bold ideas, not just politics.

The post TMI Show Ep 93: “”That’s History!” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The cease-fire agreement on the Gaza Strip is on the verge of dissolving, for reasons that were predictable when the agreement was reached in January.

To follow an initial six-week phase, which has just concluded, the agreement envisioned second and third phases that would see the additional release of hostages by both sides, Israeli military withdrawals from the Strip, and a reconstruction plan. But those parts of the agreement were mere outlines or statements of objectives, with further negotiations needed to resolve all the details.

As addressed in Responsible Statecraft when the agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strong personal and political reasons to keep Israel at war, including his need to maintain a coalition with extreme right-wingers in his government whose policy on Gaza is to eliminate all Palestinians from the Strip.

Netanyahu thus has had incentives to sabotage the cease-fire agreement before its implementation could proceed to a permanent cessation of hostilities.

Such sabotage is well under way. Israel has frequently violated the cease-fire throughout phase one with air and ground attacks that have inflicted casualties. With Hamas not taking the bait of responding with full-scale hostilities, Netanyahu is now trying to junk the entire second and third phases of the agreement and replace it with something more to Israel’s liking. Instead of negotiating the details of phase two, as required by the agreement, Netanyahu is pushing a formula that includes a 50-day cease-fire, by the end of which all the Israeli hostages would be released.

With no provision in Netanyahu’s proposal for either an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza or a permanent cessation of hostilities, the formula is an obvious non-starter for Hamas. It would be giving up its remaining bargaining chips for nothing in return. Hamas described Netanyahu’s proposal as “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement and evade negotiations for its second phase.”

Meanwhile, other Israeli violations of the January agreement continue. Last week Israel indicated that it will not withdraw its forces, as stipulated in the agreement, from the Philadelphi corridor, an area along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. This week Israel began blocking all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip.

The incentives for Netanyahu to resume Israel’s assault on Gaza rather than see an agreement through to lasting peace are at least as strong now as they were in mid-January. The biggest factor in this equation is the Trump administration’s deference to Israeli preferences, as reflected in Netanyahu’s smiling face after hearing that President Trump is just as much in favor of complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip as the extremists in Netanyahu’s government are.

And those extremists are as gung-ho as ever about resuming the devastating assault on the residents of the Gaza Strip after first starving them and cutting off their supplies of water and electricity.

The most likely near-term scenario for the Gaza Strip is thus a resumption of the Israeli military assault. Such a resumption will have no more chance of achieving the declared Israeli objective of “destroying Hamas” than the earlier 15 months of devastation did.

As for the suffering civilian population of Gaza, notwithstanding any resentment against Hamas for its decision to launch the October 2023 attack on Israel, those civilians have been given no attractive alternative to continued resistance. Whoever might someday enjoy Trump’s vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, it will not be the Palestinians who currently live there. They would instead face squalor in exile, and even then would not be safe from more Israeli attacks.

The original January agreement, notwithstanding all its weaknesses, represented the best that international diplomacy could produce at the time for immediate management of the Gaza tragedy. The fact that the accord was reached only after many weeks of mediation and negotiation shows that it was the most that could be squeezed from the parties — including from Hamas, despite the battering it had taken during more than a year of war.

The United States has the leverage, especially given its voluminous military aid to Israel, to create incentives for the agreement to remain in force and for serious negotiations on phases two and three to occur. Clearly the Trump administration is not using that leverage. In fact, Netanyahu says that his alternative formula for a temporary cease-fire with no permanent end of hostilities and no Israeli withdrawal was a framework proposed by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witcoff — the same Steve Witcoff who had been given credit for brokering the original January agreement.

In addition to implications for the suffering people of Gaza, this turn by the administration has implications for U.S. credibility. For the United States to help destroy an agreement that the same U.S. administration — and even the same U.S. envoy — had helped to negotiate will amplify foreign doubts, already present because of the administration’s similar reversals regarding international trade, about the ability and willingness of the United States to abide by its commitments.

If alternatives to the January agreement on Gaza are to be considered, certainly one should look at what the Arab states are doing. The Arabs have had some challenges getting their collective act together, mainly because of different attitudes toward Hamas and political Islamism generally, but at a just-concluded summit meeting in Cairo they endorsed an Egyptian plan that addresses reconstruction and temporary administration of the Gaza Strip.

Egypt’s proposal calls for a technocratic, nonpartisan Palestinian committee to administer the Strip during a six-month transition. Hamas welcomed the proposal, a posture consistent with earlier indications that the group is not anxious to keep administering Gaza itself, even if it will continue to resist unilateral disarmament of its military capability. Israel rejected the proposal, consistent with its opposition to anything that hints at a path toward Palestinian self-governance.

The Trump administration brushed aside the Egyptian proposal and reiterated its support for Trump’s Riviera-in-Gaza idea. The White House spokesman also repeated the administration’s bizarre line that because “Gaza is currently uninhabitable,” this somehow is a reason to support the policies of the state that made Gaza uninhabitable.

The White House confirmed this week that the administration has held secret talks with Hamas, in a contact that evidently focused on release of hostages and especially American hostages. The fact that the U.S. official involved was the special representative for hostage affairs rather than Witcoff implies such an agenda. There is no indication that the broader administration position changed, with President Trump issuing a bellicose statement threatening Hamas and saying that he is “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza.

Although the Egyptian proposal deserves attention for dealing with the immediate situation, calls for the Arabs to come up with their own ideas are somewhat strange given that the Arab League produced more than two decades ago a peace proposal that offers peace and full recognition of Israel by all Arab states if Israel ends its occupation of Palestinian territories and accepts a Palestinian state.

That proposal is still on the table.

Imagine a high-stakes football game where one team is notorious for playing dirty, skirting the rules, and making the game about brute force, not fair play. Thank goodness for the referee, right?

Well, now imagine that right in the middle of the game, the ref gets yanked off the field. Unfortunately, that’s the situation American consumers are facing now—and the other team is free to play as dirty as they please.

Since its inception in 2010, the CFPB—the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau—has been America’s indispensable referee. It’s the fast-moving, watchful eye ensuring that big banks, online lenders, and credit agencies play fair with their customers.

Musk is trying to destroy the CFPB to enrich himself—and prevent the agency from holding him accountable for how he treats X-Money users.

But the Trump administration is now trying to kick that referee off the field—permanently.

Without the CFPB, megabanks, Big Tech, and small-time fraudsters will be free to break the rules unchecked, leaving everyday consumers defenseless in the face of the fraud, abuses, and junk fees that are so prevalent in consumer finance.

With Elon Musk’s minions in the vanguard, the Trump administration has taken its slash-and-burn approach to the CFPB, determined to dismantle any government institution that stands in the way of corporate greed. Musk and Trump are defending predators, scammers, and crooks because a strong CFPB means less profit for financial companies.

The public knows the true value of the CFPB. According to a poll from Democratic and Republican pollsters, the CFPB is popular across the country—and even across party lines. Nearly 4 in 5 people say they support the agency, including 75% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats.

The agency’s popularity is no coincidence. It’s been earned through relentless dedication to standing up for people.

Since 2010, the CFPB has won more than $21 billion in restitution and cancelled debts to consumers who were scammed by financial institutions. The CFPB has also created safeguards against future financial crises, especially in housing, and cracked down on all manner of junk fees.

Congress established the CFPB as an independent agency to protect consumers from predatory financial practices. Now we have to defend the CFPB from political sabotage. In addition to Trump’s attacks, industry-friendly lawmakers are working to weaken the CFPB, threatening its ability to keep an eye on powerful financial actors.

Congress must reject these attacks and ensure the CFPB remains ready to do the job it has done so well. That includes defending the CFPB’s independence, funding, and integrity—as well as resisting attempts to roll back existing safeguards.

A CFPB measure to limit bank overdraft fees to $5, down from the typical $35 per transaction, would save 23 million households $5 billion annually. But that rule is now on the congressional chopping block. Additionally, Congress must protect CFPB’s measure to keep medical debt off the credit reports of the 15 million Americans burdened by unexpected medical expenses.

Before the Trump administration arrived, the CFPB also created protections for the millions of users of digital payment apps and wallets to prevent fraud, safeguard people’s sensitive personal information, and prevent Big Tech and other firms from freezing or deactivating accounts without notice or explanation.

Notably, this rule would apply to the partnership between Visa and X, Elon Musk’s social network formerly known as Twitter. Now, Musk is trying to destroy the CFPB to enrich himself—and prevent the agency from holding him accountable for how he treats X-Money users.

As we enter a period of our history defined by billionaire oligarchs and the rule of the richest, it’s more important than ever to have agencies that stand up for everyday people, not only the ultra rich class. People deserve a tough, honest referee in Washington that can stand up to Wall Street and other financial predators.

If the CFPB can’t blow the whistle, there’s no doubt they will play dirty.

Warning: This commentary includes Trump-style rhetoric.

I have never been a flag-waver. But after watching U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance crudely attack President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, I decided to buy Ukrainian flags. You can buy flags from most countries that are made in America and are “super tough.” Zelenskyy and his fellow Ukrainians have proven they are super tough even in the face of the devastating consequences of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Despite their posturing the same can’t be said about the miscreants in the president’s inner circle. Elon Musk, rather than growing up with American democratic values, was nurtured and schooled by racist apartheid South Africa. He, along with Vance, shamelessly supported a far-right neo-Nazi party in the recent German elections. That’s Hitler-made, not American-made.

The recurring Mar-a-Lago Dog-Cat banquets are no less bizarre than Trump’s assertion that USAID was full of people who do not hold American values.

Trump, who clearly admires dictators, relies on political tools used successfully by Hitler and other tyrants to gain and consolidate power. He employs hateful rhetoric, threats of violence, and physical violence along with state-sanctioned discrimination. The latter includes ethnic cleansing under the guise of mass deportations.

A case in point was Trump’s big lie during the election claiming that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were stealing pets and eating them. Vance and Musk jacked up the story which Trump used to harass Haitians, saying Springfield will be one of the first targets for mass deportations. Trump, lamenting that Norwegians were not applying to come to the United States, removed the temporary protected status of Haitians after he was elected.

Perhaps this was just a smokescreen to squelch speculations about something diabolical occurring at Mar-a-Lago. The sources used are no less creditable than Trump and Vance’s and consequently should be covered as extensively:

Why are dogs and cats vanishing in an expanding circle centered at Mar-a-Lago? Could this be tied to rumors that Trump requires people to eat dog meat and drink cat piss as proof of fidelity? If so, it is likely these events would have been recorded to ensure future loyalty.

Surely, this is no more fantastical than Trump’s blatant lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio and his disingenuous attempts to shift the blame for the war in Ukraine. Trump, who called Putin a genius when his tanks were lining up to invade a neighboring nation, now blames Zelenskyy for starting the war.

Using hate speech, Trump denigrates families fleeing violence, calling them murderers and rapists released from prisons and mental hospitals. This provides rhetorical cover to justify mass deportations aimed at ethnically cleansing our communities and blocking approved asylum-seekers from entering the country.

The recurring Mar-a-Lago Dog-Cat banquets are no less bizarre than Trump’s assertion that USAID was full of people who do not hold American values. Or that “burn, baby, burn” will not lead to global disasters. Or that unqualified Trump loyalists are better suited to running things than the people being fired. Or that cutting governmental services, while at the same time swelling the national debt to increase the wealth of billionaires, will make America great. Or that tariffs and trade wars make economic sense and that the prices of eggs will go down once Trump is elected.

Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations are coming to an end, and communities are moving towards a time of reflection with the observance of Lent. These communities, and people of any faith looking to make practical changes to protect our planet, should consider embracing “Plastic-Free Fridays” during this time. This simple weekly commitment is a powerful way to make planet-friendly choices that also nurture your well-being. It’s a small step that can lead to a significant change in how we consume products, giving us hope for a more sustainable future.

Plastic production and consumption play a significant role in our present environmental crisis. Production relies heavily on fossil fuels, contributing substantially to greenhouse gas emissions and harming local ecosystems and frontline communities through resource extraction. On the consumption side, single use of plastics generates excessive waste that clogs landfills, litters natural habitats, threatens wildlife, and raises potential health concerns due to chemical leaching and microplastic contamination.

These health concerns are already evident in our bodies and the bodies of those we love. People living near petrochemical plants bear the brunt of pollution, but their often single-use plastic products are everywhere. Plastic is in our food and water—even our breast milk and placentas are polluted with plastic, and the myriad of chemicals in plastics are linked to numerous health problems from cancer to infertility. Furthermore, 36% of plastic produced is for packaging—including single-use items like beverage containers that are discarded after the contents are consumed. We are poisoning communities and trashing our oceans to produce stuff we don’t even need.

It is daunting to turn the tide against plastic pollution, but we can achieve it through collective action.

With a reuse and refill system, we could eliminate over a third of the existing plastic production. It’s imperative that, on an individual and community level, we’re taking steps to reduce the consumption of materials that are so harmful, wasteful, and damaging to our environment.

In 2023, RISE St. James Louisiana was among the first to take steps toward a plastics-free Mardi Gras. We distributed glass beads to Mardi Gras riders—an innovative, vintage-inspired alternative to nonbiodegradable plastic throws. More than ever, there is a growing collaboration among local krewes, more than 25 community organizations, and the City of New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability. We are all working together to reduce plastic waste, champion eco-friendly alternatives, and shield vulnerable areas from unchecked petrochemical expansion.

This year, the Krewe of Freret hosted the first major parade free from plastic beads, setting a strong precedent for more sustainable Mardi Gras celebrations. At RISE St. James Louisiana, we believe these partnerships are essential to safeguarding our environment and preserving our unique cultural traditions for future generations.

As we enter a Lenten season of renewal, join Sharon C. Lavigne, members of RISE St. James, and various civic and cultural leaders in making a difference by embracing “Plastic-Free Fridays” every week through Easter. With simple, practical steps, you can participate in this movement and reduce single-use waste by using reusable bags, containers, water bottles, coffee cups, and utensils. You can further minimize our plastic impact by buying bulk whenever possible and following local recycling rules. Together, we can protect our planet and ensure healthier communities.

Whether you’re driven by a desire to protect the environment or the need to reduce waste mindfully, dedicating one day each week to a plastic-free lifestyle can have a meaningful impact. It is daunting to turn the tide against plastic pollution, but we can achieve it through collective action. Together, we can preserve our region’s vibrant spirit and build a healthier future for all through simple, sustainable actions and a shared commitment to eco-friendly celebrations.

The dramatic clash between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dominated headlines, turning what was supposed to be a diplomatic engagement into a public spectacle. Viewers watched in real time as shouting, accusations, and later reports of the abrupt departure by the Ukrainian delegation fueled outrage and speculation. Critics accused Trump of abandoning Ukraine, undermining the U.S. commitment to global democracy, and treating foreign policy negotiations as if he were a mafia boss issuing ultimatums. Yet while Trump’s behavior was undeniably confrontational, the real issue runs deeper than his personal style of diplomacy.

Trump’s approach may lack the diplomatic polish of previous administrations, but the difference is stylistic rather than substantive.

Beneath the theatrics, Trump is not fundamentally breaking from U.S. foreign policy traditions; he is reshaping them. His rhetoric of ending “forever wars” masks a calculated strategy—one that replaces direct military intervention with economic control, resource extraction, and corporate influence. What Trump offers is not an alternative to U.S. imperialism but a rebranded version: a “profitable imperial peace” where stability itself becomes a commodity for American oligarchs. Meanwhile, centrist politicians—his supposed opposition—continue to promote a perpetual war that serves the interests of the military-industrial complex, ensuring that conflict remains a permanent feature of global geopolitics.

The Outrage Over Trump Misses the Bigger Picture

Following the disastrous meeting, widespread condemnation of Trump emerged from political analysts and mainstream media. Critics accused him of selling out Ukraine, bowing to Russian interests, and violating the norms of diplomatic engagement. These critiques, while valid in their own right, fail to address the fundamental reality: U.S. foreign policy has always been about maintaining imperial power, whether through military occupation, economic coercion, or geopolitical alliances that serve corporate interests.

Trump’s approach may lack the diplomatic polish of previous administrations, but the difference is stylistic rather than substantive. His overt transactionalism merely exposes what has always been true: The U.S. does not support Ukraine out of a commitment to democracy but because it serves American geopolitical and economic interests. Beneath the veneer of respectability, the Biden administration, along with centrist politicians in the U.S. and Europe, has funneled billions into a war effort that increasingly appears to be less about securing Ukrainian sovereignty and more about sustaining a profitable cycle of militarization and strengthening U.S. global power.

The left must support Ukraine’s fight for self-determination, but its critique of Trump cannot be reduced to liberal outrage over his rhetoric or authoritarian posturing. What is needed is a materialist analysis of the capitalist forces shaping U.S. foreign policy—one that moves beyond the spectacle of Trump’s behavior to examine the deeper economic interests at play. Trump is not simply an outlier; he is both a continuation of and a divergence from the military-industrial complex mindset embraced by the Democratic establishment and centrist foreign policy elites. While figures like former President Joe Biden and European leaders justify endless military aid as part of a moral defense of democracy, they are simultaneously ensuring that the war remains a lucrative investment for arms manufacturers and defense contractors.

Trump, by contrast, has framed his approach as one of “peace,” but this too is a project driven by oligarchic interests, not diplomacy or anti-imperialism. His vision of peace is not about Ukrainian sovereignty but about restructuring U.S. hegemony in a way that shifts power from defense corporations to the energy sector, real estate developers, and financial elites. The far-right’s “imperialist peace” seeks to replace direct military engagement with economic subjugation, where stability becomes a tool for privatization, resource extraction, and the expansion of corporate control over Ukraine’s post-war future. This is not an abandonment of empire but a strategic reconfiguration of its mechanisms. A critical left analysis must dissect why Trump and his allies are so committed to peace—not as a humanitarian cause, but as a means to consolidate power for a different faction of oligarchs, all while leaving Ukraine trapped between Russian colonization and Western economic domination.

Imperialist Peace: A New Model of Capitalist Control

The real divide in U.S. foreign policy is not between interventionism and isolationism but between two competing models of imperialism: perpetual war and profitable peace. Centrist politicians and military contractors benefit from an unending war economy, where conflicts like Ukraine serve as permanent revenue streams for arms manufacturers and defense lobbyists. The longer the war drags on, the more profitable it becomes, allowing the U.S. and Europe to solidify and grow their military industries.

Trump’s vision for Ukraine presents itself as a departure from military interventionism, yet it reshapes imperial influence into a model of economic control. This “imperialist peace” positions stability as a resource for capitalist elites, ensuring corporate access to energy, land, and financial markets. Instead of a commitment to democracy or self-determination, this approach prioritizes wealth extraction through industries aligned with Trump’s strongest backers—fossil fuel conglomerates and real estate developers.

As long as U.S. foreign policy remains structured around corporate interests, the world will continue to be trapped in a cycle where war is either endlessly prolonged or peace is crafted to serve the needs of capital.

While Democrats and Republicans both maintain deep ties to the weapons industry, Trump’s policies reflect a strong alignment with fossil fuel executives and luxury property developers. Energy firms invested an estimated $219 million to shape the current U.S. government, signaling their expectation of policies favoring resource extraction and deregulation. Real estate investors, long intertwined with Trump’s personal business empire, have also fueled his political rise through massive financial contributions.

The purpose of Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington underscored this economic agenda. While media attention focused on the fiery exchange between leaders, the trip’s primary objective involved securing a deal granting U.S. companies control over Ukraine’s mineral wealth. This agreement cements Trump’s vision where capitalist elites extract profits from conflict not only through weapons sales but also through post-war reconstruction, energy production, and privatized infrastructure.

Luxury real estate speculators view regions impacted by war as investment opportunities. Waterfront redevelopment in areas previously devastated by conflict has emerged as a lucrative ventures. Stability functions as an asset for those seeking to transform destroyed neighborhoods into high-end residential and commercial spaces, ensuring an influx of capital through privatization. Trump’s strategy for Ukraine mirrors this approach, positioning peace as a mechanism for capital accumulation rather than a humanitarian goal.

Expanding the Imperialist Peace Model: Gaza and the Digital Economy

Trump’s “imperial peace” extends beyond Ukraine. His proposals for Gaza suggest similar priorities—displacing residents while repurposing land for high-end redevelopment. Recent reports detail his team’s discussions on transforming Gaza into an exclusive investment hub, removing existing communities under the pretext of regional stabilization. This mirrors his broader approach to foreign policy, where war-torn regions become assets for financial elites seeking prime real estate acquisitions.

This version of peace appeals to billionaire investors shaping the digital economy. High-profile figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg support Trump not only due to ideological alignment but also because their industries depend on access to land and minerals critical for data infrastructure. Lithium and rare earth elements, essential for artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and cloud computing, remain central to their business models. Securing these materials through agreements structured under Trump’s version of stability allows these tech leaders to expand digital empires without disruption.

Developers pursuing large-scale urban expansion depend on geopolitical conditions that guarantee unrestricted access to construction zones, lucrative tax incentives, and flexible labor markets. This extractivist economic model strengthens corporate dominance by securing control over resources, expanding real estate ventures, and integrating digital infrastructure into newly developed regions. Trump’s approach reconfigures imperial influence into an economic framework where energy executives, land developers, and tech giants dictate the terms of global stability. War fuels one sector of capital, and peace opens new pathways for financial expansion, ensuring that every phase of instability generates wealth for those positioned to exploit it.

Perpetual War vs. Profitable Peace–A Capitalist Trap

Framing the future in terms of perpetual war or imperialist peace obscures how both serve capitalist consolidation. Centrist politicians sustain conflict through arms production and military spending, maintaining profits for defense contractors. Trump offers an alternative where corporate executives expand power through resource extraction, real estate ventures, and digital infrastructure. Both systems reinforce a global structure that keeps economic elites in control, ensuring that whether through war or peace, capital remains the primary beneficiary.

The shock over Trump’s behavior during his meeting with Zelenskyy reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. foreign policy. While his tactics may be more blatant, his actions expose what has always been true—war and peace are both industries, and U.S. engagement in global conflicts is driven not by moral concerns but by economic interests. Whether through perpetual war or a profitable imperial peace, the capitalist class benefits, while the people on the ground—whether in Ukraine, Palestine, or elsewhere—suffer the consequences.

Trump’s brash, domineering style serves as a distraction from the deeper capitalist dynamics at play. He performs the role of the “strong” business leader, evoking the image of a mafia boss who negotiates through intimidation and self-interest, much as Biden projected the aura of a “respectable” diplomat who upholds international order. Each persona functions as a veneer, concealing the same fundamental commitment to capitalist imperialism. While one brandishes threats and transactional deals, the other couches economic coercion in diplomatic formalities. Both preserve a system where economic elites dictate global affairs, ensuring that policy decisions—whether framed as aggressive or pragmatic—ultimately protect the interests of corporate power.

As long as U.S. foreign policy remains structured around corporate interests, the world will continue to be trapped in a cycle where war is either endlessly prolonged or peace is crafted to serve the needs of capital. The real challenge is not choosing between these two models of imperialism but dismantling the system that allows war and peace alike to be dictated by profit.

During his first term as president, Donald Trump criticized NATO, demanding that European allies increase their defense spending. This friction created uncertainty about NATO's reliability, a key aspect of its role in global security. Concern exists into his second term as countries like Ukraine brace for changing foreign policy.

This was heightened after a White House meeting in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was reportedly asked to leave, contacting French President Macron and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte afterward. Since their meeting, events have escalated, including the European Commission's proposal to borrow 150 billion euros for E.U. governments to invest in rearmament amid growing doubts about U.S. protection.

These concerns have also led some European leaders to explore alternative security arrangements beyond NATO. If Trump moves forward with reducing U.S. involvement in NATO, European countries may be forced to explore alternative security frameworks.

NATO's perceived instability could create opportunities for non-state actors and radical movements to challenge traditional security models.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there was no immediate answer as to what should become of NATO or future security structures. Mikhail Gorbachev's concept of a "Common European Home," proposed in the late 1980s, aimed to establish a unified and cooperative security framework that would encompass both Eastern and Western Europe. This vision sought to move beyond the division of military blocs like NATO and the Warsaw Pact, instead fostering a collective security system based on dialogue and cooperation. Institutions such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which later evolved into the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), were envisioned as key platforms for conflict resolution and diplomatic engagement.

A central element of Gorbachev's proposal was demilitarization and arms reduction, which he linked to broader Soviet arms control efforts, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty of 1990. Gorbachev also signaled an end to the Brezhnev Doctrine, Glasnost, and Perestroika, which sought to reform the Soviet system while reducing tensions with the West.

The United States put forward a contrasting vision. In his speech "A Whole Europe, A Free Europe," President George H.W. Bush emphasized the spread of free markets and the expansion of NATO's mission to support Eastern European democratization and strengthen transatlantic ties. He positioned NATO as the central stabilizing force in post-Cold War Europe.

While there are reasons why NATO's expansion filled the post-Cold War security vacuum, it remains highly controversial. Gorbachev's remarks and declassified documents provide a nuanced view of the debate, particularly regarding the infamous "not an inch" exchange between Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev. Baker's assurance that "not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction" has remained a point of ongoing contention, frequently cited in debates over NATO expansion and the commitments made during post-Cold War negotiations.

Baker's assurances were nonbinding and focused solely on NATO's presence in Germany, rather than a broader commitment against expansion. While these discussions did not explicitly address countries like Ukraine, any movement beyond Germany could be interpreted as conflicting with the spirit of those assurances. However, Gorbachev later emphasized that neither he nor Soviet authorities were "naïve people who were wrapped around the West's finger," asserting, "If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object."

Robert Zoellick, who participated in the negotiations as a U.S. State Department official, recalled that President George H.W. Bush explicitly asked Gorbachev whether he agreed that sovereign nations had the right to choose their alliances. Gorbachev affirmed this principle, effectively acknowledging that former Warsaw Pact countries could independently determine their security alignments. However, Gorbachev later expressed regret over NATO's expansion, stating, "I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990."

The debate over NATO's expansion did not end with Gorbachev. Russian President Boris Yeltsin also expressed mixed feelings, notably in a letter to President Bill Clinton. While he opposed NATO's rapid enlargement, citing what Russia believed were assurances made during German reunification negotiations, his position was inconsistent. During a visit to Poland, he reluctantly acknowledged Poland's right to join NATO, characterizing this statement as merely an "understanding."

Despite tensions, NATO and Russia initially pursued cooperation through the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, in which NATO pledged not to station permanent forces in new member states. However, Yeltsin later described this agreement as a "forced step," reflecting Russia's growing unease with NATO's expansion.

Other efforts to define NATO-Russia relations took shape through the 2002 NATO-Russia Council, which sought to establish equal dialogue. However, relations steadily deteriorated, first with Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, then with the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and finally collapsing entirely in 2021 when Russia ended its NATO diplomatic mission.

George Robertson, former U.K. Labour defense secretary and NATO chief, claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin once expressed interest in Russia joining NATO, a notion Putin himself had also suggested. Putin transitioned away from these efforts, culminating in the 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, where he condemned the U.S. for seeking a "unipolar world," a vision he saw as destabilizing and unacceptable. He portrayed NATO's eastward expansion as a direct threat to Russian security and strongly criticized U.S. military interventions conducted without United Nations approval.

While there is far more history behind this issue, these fundamentals are key to understanding the barriers and complexities in discussing alternatives to NATO. The debate highlights core issues, including the West's interest in maintaining power, Russia's attempts to either integrate into or counter that structure, and the often-overlooked agency of smaller nations. These discussions tend to center on justifiable criticism of Western dominance, partly fueled by financial interests tied to weapons production, and Russian security concerns, while overlooking the actual security needs and self-determination of the nations most directly affected.

Although Russia perceived NATO enlargement as a threat, the newly independent states of Eastern and Central Europe had their own security priorities, shaped by decades of Soviet dominance. Many actively sought NATO membership, not to provoke Russia, but to secure their sovereignty in a post-Soviet landscape where Moscow's future actions remained uncertain. Dismissing or misrepresenting these concerns overlooks the agency of these nations. This was most recently evident in Sweden and Finland's decision to join NATO, which was driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine rather than Western pressure.

Discussions about the influence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the E.U. are important, but they must also acknowledge the genuine security concerns of these countries, which extend beyond external pressures or manipulation. For example, after gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine quickly recognized that securing its sovereignty depended on international alliances. In 1994, Ukraine joined NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP). This decision was made independently of later political narratives and took place years before the Orange Revolution.

Ukraine also entered into the Budapest Memorandum (1994), an agreement in which it relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the U.S., and the U.K., but this ultimately failed to prevent later invasion. It exemplifies how nonbinding agreements, lacking the enforcement mechanisms of military alliances, can create vulnerabilities and uncertainty in international security commitments. It also highlights the tensions Eastern European countries face when entering such agreements with Russia, particularly when they lack assured, legally binding military defense.

During and after this time, NATO's interventions led to allegations of war crimes, civilian casualties, and legal violations. These allegations span interventions from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Libya. The International Criminal Court attempted to investigate war crimes, including allegations of rape and torture by the U.S. military and CIA, but U.S. pressure shut down the inquiry. In 2019, the U.S. revoked the visa of ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and later imposed sanctions on her and other ICC officials involved in the investigation. Facing these challenges, the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor, under new leadership in 2021, decided to "deprioritize" investigations into U.S. and NATO personnel, focusing instead on alleged crimes by the Taliban and ISIS. This further undermined NATO's portrayal of itself as a purely defensive alliance.

Over the years, various alternatives to NATO have been proposed, shaped by different geopolitical, ideological, and strategic considerations. These proposals generally fall into three broad categories: European-led defense initiatives, U.N.-based security strategies, and non-state or decentralized models.

Some European leaders advocate for reducing reliance on NATO, particularly on U.S. military commitments, by strengthening the European Union's Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). This vision promotes an E.U.-led military force capable of acting autonomously when European interests diverge from those of the U.S. French President Emmanuel Macron has been a strong proponent of this approach, arguing that Europe's dependence on the U.S. leaves it vulnerable to shifts in American foreign policy, such as those seen during Trump's presidency. His vision includes a joint European military force that could operate alongside NATO when necessary but remain independent when transatlantic priorities differ.

Another approach emphasizes strengthening the U.N.'s role in global security as an alternative to NATO. One example is the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative, which aims to enhance U.N. peacekeeping operations by prioritizing multilateral cooperation over military alliances. However, the Security Council's structure remains a significant barrier to any U.N.-led initiatives, as the veto power held by the U.S., Russia, and China frequently obstructs meaningful reforms and hinders the organization's ability to respond effectively to global security challenges. While calls for Security Council restructuring have gained momentum, particularly in response to conflicts like the Gaza crisis, the likelihood of the U.N. fully replacing NATO remains low without substantial institutional changes.

Nonaligned or regional security frameworks have also been proposed. This includes a return to Cold War-era nonalignment, where countries avoid military blocs, and the formation of regional security pacts. Organizations like the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could potentially assume roles similar to NATO within their respective regions.

Beyond state-centered models, some anarchist and labor movements propose radical alternatives that challenge the idea that security must be provided by nation-states or military alliances. These models emphasize mutual aid, worker solidarity, and decentralized defense structures rather than state-controlled militaries. The Zapatistas in Mexico, for example, have established autonomous self-defense forces to protect Indigenous communities, while Kurdish-led autonomous administrations in Syria organize security through federated agreements rather than centralized military command. In Ukraine, networks such as Solidarity Collectives play an important role in providing mutual aid and logistical support in conflict zones, working alongside unions to coordinate efforts.

Although these decentralized approaches offer an alternative vision, they face significant challenges, particularly the lack of strong military deterrence. In regions dominated by state-backed militaries, their ability to resist aggression remains limited. However, as NATO's legitimacy continues to be questioned, these models could gain traction, expanding the debate on security beyond traditional military alliances.

Trump is unlikely to formally withdraw the U.S. from NATO, but his past confrontations with the alliance and his current treatment of Zelenskyy signal to European leaders that NATO's reliability is no longer guaranteed. This uncertainty has already sparked discussions on alternative security frameworks, ranging from a stronger European defense initiative to broader multilateral arrangements. If European nations increasingly view NATO as unstable or subject to U.S. political shifts, they may seek greater autonomy, altering the global security landscape.

At the same time, NATO's perceived instability could create opportunities for non-state actors and radical movements to challenge traditional security models. As states reassess their dependence on military alliances, decentralized defense structures whether rooted in anarchist mutual aid networks, worker-based militias, or regional federations may gain traction. While such alternatives face considerable obstacles, NATO's crisis of legitimacy could open space for non-state approaches to security, expanding the debate beyond state power and military blocs.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says that the courts are the first line of resistance against Trump. By the time the slow-as-molasses courts take action in this country, anyone who is still seeking justice is already screwed.

The post How the “Democratic Resistance” Would Have Fought the Nazis appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Tuesday night, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history—the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.”

We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off—with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people)—soon to be on the chopping block.

Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme.

It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare. Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.

In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world.

But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons.

The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society: That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers.

Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil.

Former President Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the cause of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times.

Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s.

Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100.

The entire solvency and health of Social Security could be cured permanently, in other words, if we simply did away with the “billionaire loophole” in the Social Security tax.

But the idea of having to pay a tax on all their income so that middle class and low income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea.

How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets!

Which is why Elon Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security Administration and its employees with such gusto.

By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system.

(This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.)

The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare that former President George W. Bush created in 2003. That scam makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for giant insurance companies, who then kick some of that profit back to Republican politicians as campaign donations and luxury trips to international resorts.

Advantage programs are notorious for screwing people when they get sick, and for ripping off our government to the tune of billions every year. But every effort at reforming Medicare or stopping the Medicare Advantage providers from denying us care and stealing from our government has been successfully blocked by bought-off Republicans in Congress.

Once Republicans have damaged the staffing of the Social Security Administration so badly that people are screaming about the difficult time they’re having signing up, solving problems or errors, or even getting their checks, right-wing media will begin to promote—with help from GOP politicians and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News”—people opting out of Social Security and going with a private option that resembles private 401(k)s.

Rumor has it they’ll call it “Social Security Advantage” and, like Medicare Advantage, which is administered for massive profits by the insurance giants, it will be run by giant, trillion-dollar banks out of New York.

While big insurance companies have probably made something close to a trillion dollars in profits out of our tax dollars from Medicare Advantage since George W. Bush rolled out the program, Social Security Advantage could make that profit level look like chump change for the big banks.

And, as an added bonus, billionaires and right-wing media will get to point out how hard it is to deal with the now-crippled Social Security administration and argue that it’s time to relieve them, too, of the regulatory burdens of “big government”: Gut or even kill off the regulatory agencies and make their yachts and private jets even more tax deductible than they already are.

This is why Donald Trump repeated Elon Musk’s lies about 200 year-old people getting Social Security checks and the system being riddled with fraud and waste. In fact, Social Security is one of the most secure and fraud-free programs in American history.

But Tuesday night was just the opening salvo. It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare.

Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.

And he may well get away with it, unless we can wake up enough people to this coming scam and put enough political pressure—particularly on Republicans—to prevent it from happening.

Tag, you’re it.

In her towering 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics,” Jewish philosopher and refugee immigrant to the United States Hannah Arendt wrote, “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.” Nearly 60 years later, President Donald Trump is ensuring this observation becomes a reality — and in the process is putting our immigrant children and economic future at risk.

Our current political crisis is, at base, rooted in an informational crisis, where the facts of any particular matter — public health, climate change, gun violence, et al — only pertain insofar as they are politically useful for the Trump administration.

Above all, we are being forced to live with falsehoods about immigrant families living in the United States. This administration has blamed immigrants for harming the economy, spiking the housing market, and “poisoning” the country.

Say it plain: Not one of these claims is true — not vaguely, not a little, not in part, not kind of, not at all. But, as we are in a moment where political convenience constantly pressures the truth, the Trump administration published an executive order on Saturday, “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States.” This new policy is bad for kids, bad for the U.S.’s immigrant integration system, and bad for our economic present and future.

As its title notes, the order sets English as the country’s official language. But that is largely symbolic, completing a conservative culture war crusade — backed for years by radical groups like ProEnglish and U.S. English and California Republican gubernatorial and senatorial candidate Ron Unz. The U.S. government already conducts essentially all of its business in English.

More consequentially, it rescinds a quarter-century of federal guidance instructing public agencies to take steps to make their programs and services accessible to linguistically diverse communities. Until last weekend, that guidance instructed leaders of public systems to translate written materials and online information — and to interpret audio information and public meetings for non-native English speakers.

This longstanding policy was grounded in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination based on people’s national origins, and was a lynchpin of the country’s approach to integrating immigrant families into U.S. society, culture, communities and the economy. The success of the rescinded guidance wasn’t simply about doing the right thing — ensuring that multilingual communities can fairly access public services — it was also about supporting these communities because their success benefits everyone who lives in this country. Indeed, studies of immigrant families indicate that their children bring valuable languages and cultures to their schools — and benefit when educators engage them (across language differences) as partners.

This is immensely important now, as the country’s immigrants and their children make up the bulk of the growth in the U.S labor force in recent years. Their success in schools today and in the workforce tomorrow is essential to sustaining the country’s economic growth.

Look at what the Trump administration’s new guidance is throwing away. While far from perfect, the United States’ immigrant integration systems perform relatively well compared to similar systems in other countries.

Here’s how that looks in schools: Linguistically diverse children of immigrants are often designated as English learners (ELs), and receive targeted language instruction to help them learn the language while also advancing their academic development. Critically, research shows that the best way to do this is to provide them with bilingual learning opportunities so they are exposed to English while continuing to develop in their home languages.

Over time, as these students learn English, their academic outcomes significantly improve — these “former ELs” reliably become one of the highest-performing student groups in U.S. schools. What’s more, recent research has linked schools’ increased immigrant student enrollment with better academic outcomes for U.S.-born students.

Yet now, the Trump administration has chosen to dismantle public protections ensuring that these students’ families get translated enrollment forms and information about their available school choices. It has chosen to reduce their opportunities to learn about housing, health care, nutrition, and enrichment programs available to their children.

Or maybe it hasn’t? At the end of the order, the White House insists that it requires no “change in the services provided by any agency.” In a political moment where the facts are decreasingly important, perhaps it’s no surprise that the text of this executive order is confusingly at odds with itself.

But, given conservatives’ consistent support for reforms to make children of immigrants’ lives less stable and safe — see, for instance, the administration’s enthusiasm for conducting armed immigration enforcement raids on K–12 campuses — it’s hard to imagine a future where these language access supports persist. In this moment, the maximally cruel outcomes feel like the safest bet.