On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss a plethora of topics worldwide, including Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.    The show begins with journalist and YouTuber Peter Coffin joining the show to discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign in key battleground states.    Then, award-winning scientist, speaker, and leading expert on climate change Dr. Guy McPherson joins the show to discuss the environmental impacts of the California and Canadian wildfires.    Later, former Pentagon official Michael Maloof shares his expertise on the latest escalation out of the Middle East, amid the assassination of the Hamas leader in Iran.   The show closes with Venezuela-based independent journalist Paul Dobson to discuss the Venezuelan elections.     The post The Final Countdown – 7/31/24 – Kamala Harris Campaign Goes Full Charge in Strategic Battleground States first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Economic inequality is the scourge of the 21st century. The rich are getting richer and faster than any other time since the onset of neoliberalism, which calls for “free-market” capitalism, regressive taxation, fiscal austerity and the rejection of the social state. They get richer not only when the economy is on an upswing but even amid crises. Billionaires more than doubled their net worth during the pandemic, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The latest analysis shows that the richest 1 percent gained $42 trillion in new wealth over the past decade, which amounts to “nearly 34 times more than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.” In the meantime, the very poor and low-income people across the globe, including the U.S., are actually getting poorer. So much for trickle-down economics which was popularized during the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s vast capital gains and income tax cuts and continues to persist to this day in spite of its major flaws. Cutting taxes on the rich not only increases economic inequality but has no effect on economic growth and unemployment.

There must be something very rotten with an economic system that allows individuals to generate obscene amounts of wealth to the point they can hijack the political system and undermine democracy.

However, inequality should not be examined purely from an economic perspective. Over the years, numerous studies have shown that economic inequality influences public attitudes toward democracy by generating political disillusion and low trust in government and other institutions, like Congress. Inequality also undermines social mobility, contributes to political polarization and fuels authoritarianism.

Finally, inequality contributes to climate change. The richest 1 percent is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent, according to a 2023 report by Oxfam. Of course, while the world’s wealthiest people make a huge contribution to climate change, they are also able to insulate themselves from the worst impacts of global warming.

In sum, the super-rich can be blamed for many of the most serious ills confronting societies in the twentieth-first century. The only consequential question here is this: what can be done about it then?

One of the most frequent responses to the problem of rising inequality is a call for the implementation of a wealth tax. Wealth taxation may sound like a good idea, but can it really address, let alone solve, the problem of inequality? The answer is an unqualified “no.” At least for the world’s advanced economies. Indeed, even if it’s possible to discover all the wealth that the very rich people own (much of which is hidden in companies or put in trusts) and then proceed with an accurate asset valuation, this will have very little impact, if any, on the daily lives of people who try to survive on minimum wages. Wealth taxation alone will have no impact on workers without social protection and no bargaining power at companies. It won’t protect workers at the “gig economy” and part-time workers.

To effectively address economic inequality, we must identify the root cause of the problem, and one simple way to do this is by asking a rather simple question: How does one become superrich? Where does this immense wealth come from? Because as the renowned progressive economist James K. Boyce recently put it “nobody ‘earns’ a billion dollars.

There must be something very rotten with an economic system that allows individuals to generate obscene amounts of wealth to the point they can hijack the political system and undermine democracy. Democracy cannot exist when we have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. The idea that rich and poor are equal before government in democratic societies is ludicrous. As disparities in wealth and income grow, so do the disparities in political influence.

Take corporations, for example, which exert enormous influence, thanks primarily to campaign donations and lobbying Their actions, which range from opposing labor laws and policies that benefit workers to restricting unionization, exacerbate inequalities at all levels of society and across the globe. Moreover, the surge in billionaire wealth and the surge in “corporate power and monopoly power” form a powerful connection. The very rich are not simply beneficiaries of the existing economic order. They are in control of the working arrangements of the global economic system. Yet despite the enormous power that corporations have on people’s lives and the communities in which they operate, there are very few policies and mechanisms at national or international level to curtail that power.

Of course, we know that billionaires and big corporations pay very little in taxes, but we need much more than wealth and corporate taxation. We need ways to curb the power of big corporations and their drive to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else. We should also set a cap on extreme wealth. There is no social value for having billionaires. We should abolish the superrich, perhaps an easier task, politically speaking, than finding ways to tax them. Democratic societies could hold a referendum on whether we should abolish extreme wealth.

In addition, we could create economic arrangements that provide a minimum income to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. This can be done either through universal basic income or guaranteed income programs.

Last, but not least, we can challenge the rule of capital by advancing democratic forms of economic governance and economic planning. Participatory economics is one such alternative that would change the economy as we know it since it entails social ownership of production and self-managed workplaces. Worker cooperatives are established is various parts of Europe, particularly in Italy and Spain. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain is owned by its workers and represents the biggest and most successful case of worker cooperatives. Of course, for economic transformation to occur, breaking down hierarchical structures and putting workers in charge of business activities is not enough. What needs to happen is that the values of worker cooperatives spread across the economy and that power is wrested away from the capitalist class.

In today’s world, we can tackle economic inequality only by shifting the conversation to its root causes and then coming up with blends of policies that work together to put an end to the driving forces behind inequality. Spending all political capital on something like a wealth tax will only help to prolong the life of an immensely cruel and dangerous economic system. An easier and far more effective way to end plutocracy is through the power of democracy via a binding referendum that calls on citizens to decide whether or not we should abolish altogether extreme wealth.

In killing Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent the clearest message yet to Iran and the resistance movements that he wants a regional war.

In denying any involvement or foreknowledge of the drone strike that killed Haniyeh, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken further damaged Washington’s battered credibility.

US security officials were briefing journalists within an hour of the attack taking place that a senior member of the Axis of Resistance had been killed. They did not specify where or whom, and at first it was thought to be a second strike in Lebanon after the targeting of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military commander and right-hand man to leader Hassan Nasrallah.

But it is certain that US security officials knew about the drone strike on Haniyeh within minutes of it happening. To cast Netanyahu as a leader in the grip of Jewish messianic fascists in ordering this strike, is only half of the story.

When I met him two decades ago as a political outcast dubbed an extremist by my liberal Zionist hosts, Netanyahu had only one idea to impart: Iran was the mothership. Hamas and Hezbollah were only its aircraft carriers.

Netanyahu’s lifelong belief that he will lead his nation to victory by crushing the Palestinian national cause and preventing a state from ever seeing the light of day can never be discounted.

Today, he might think he is on the cusp of his ultimate political achievement as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, by dragging the U.S. and Britain into war with Iran.

Negotiations torn up

Netanyahu sent other messages, too, in killing Haniyeh, who had no involvement in the Hamas attack on 7 October, and whose bureau was in charge of negotiations with mediators Qatar and Egypt.

Netanyahu has torn up negotiations and any thought of getting the hostages back alive. This should already have been obvious from the latest round of talks in Rome, where the Israeli side multiplied its conditions around phase one of the deal.

It was evident, too, from Netanyahu’s last visit to Rafah, where he vowed Israel would retain indefinite control of the Philadelphi corridor.

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has asked how negotiations can proceed when Israel has killed its negotiating counterpart.

Even without a ceasefire, Haniyeh was worth more to Israel alive than dead

In fact, Haniyeh was one member of a negotiating committee, which will carry on without him.

Al Thani’s barbed reaction was aimed at Netanyahu, who has done everything in his power to escalate regional tensions and to undermine the US administration’s position on a permanent ceasefire, and its consistent opposition to opening a second front in Lebanon.

In killing a mild man like Haniyeh, who did not hide underground but lived out in the open, and who dedicated his career to negotiations and engagement with the Islamic world in Qatar, Turkey and Iran, Israel has killed a leader it could one day need to negotiate a hudna, or long-term ceasefire.

Out of the equation

In person, Haniyeh was amiable, mild-mannered, an attentive listener, modest—the complete diplomat. He was never one to speak ill of Fatah or Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

If, as now must be obvious even to the Israeli military, it will not be able to defeat or disable Hamas in Gaza, Israel will need people in Hamas to negotiate with. They have just killed one of them.

From a strategic point of view, Israel’s action is madness. This is not my word, but that used by former Israeli General Amiram Levin, who added, with some understatement, that the “security forces should’ve strongly opposed” the move.

Even without a ceasefire, Haniyeh was worth more to Israel alive than dead.

Israel could have plausibly argued to a western audience that it would not surrender Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to the International Criminal Court in The Hague while another of those named in the ICC’s application for arrest warrants, Haniyeh, was free to live in Qatar and roam around the region.

Pressure would have inevitably been applied on Qatar to surrender him and expel the political bureau of Hamas.

Now that he is out of the equation, Israel has lost that defence. All this, Israel has achieved in killing Haniyeh.

Hamas strengthened

What Netanyahu can be sure he has not done is weaken Hamas.

Quite the contrary. Haniyeh, a modest man who lost 60 members of his family, including sons and grandsons, to Israel in this war, will go down as one of Hamas’ greatest martyrs.

The moment Haniyeh learned that his sons and grandsons had been killed in cars struck by Israeli forces during Eid, he was visiting a hospital in Doha where injured Palestinians from Gaza were being treated.

He said only: “May God have mercy on them,” but he refused to interrupt his visit. The clip went viral, because it spoke more than words could have done about his ability to put the Palestinian cause above his personal grief as a father.

Israel has killed countless Hamas leaders and commanders, and the movement has only grown - in recruits, weaponry and political influence. Today, polls show that Hamas would win in the West Bank if free elections were allowed to take place there.

The Hamas that has resisted Israel’s attack on Gaza for 10 months is many times the size and capabilities of the Hamas in the days of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The quadriplegic founder of Hamas was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at him as he was being wheeled from Fajr prayers in Gaza. Haniyeh was his chief of staff. That assassination was internationally condemned.

The Israeli military knows the truth: that killing Haniyeh was last thing they should be doing if they want to see any of their hostages back alive

Hamas’ stock has risen, not fallen, in Palestine and the Arab and Muslim world since the 7 October attack. This is the only reason why the 88-year-old Abbas, who has continuously torn up reconciliation agreements, paid homage on Wednesday to his slain rival.

Abbas condemned the killing as “a cowardly act and a dangerous development”, and called on Palestinians to unite. Abbas spoke out of fear and political necessity, not out of any love for Hamas.

Within days of a reconciliation agreement among Palestinian factions negotiated in Beijing, Abbas’ security forces tried and failed to arrest an injured commander of the Tulkarm Battalion from a hospital in the occupied West Bank.

So you can be absolutely sure that Abbas has no intention of unifying Fatah with the other Palestinian factions. Fatah’s negotiator in Beijing might have been sincere, but for Abbas, Beijing was for show only. It made no difference on the ground in the occupied West Bank.

Fire in the region, fire at home

Nor is it a coincidence that Haniyeh’s assassination was ordered within a day of Israeli fascists and far-right members of the Knesset breaking into a detention facility in an attempt to prevent soldiers from being arrested for raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Setting fire to the region is Netanyahu’s only response to the bushfire that is breaking out at home and on his doorstep.

Hundreds of detainees have emerged with harrowing accounts of the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre. Middle East Eye first reported on how iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns were used in torturing Palestinian detainees at Israeli detention centres.

Omar Mahmoud Abdel Qader Samoud, who was detained for more than 42 days, said one of the rooms in the facility was known as the “disco”.

“A soldier dragged me on the floor, naked and handcuffed, and placed me on a piece of rug,” Samoud told MEE. “The soldiers sprayed freezing cold water on me and placed a fan in front of me. They would leave me for a few days, without food or water or the possibility to get up and go to the bathroom. I urinated on myself and pleaded for mercy but they didn’t care.

“The soldiers would kick me on all parts of my body,” he added. “Imagine yourself naked, handcuffed on the floor with five or six soldiers kicking you with their boots, hitting you with weapons and bats. Then they asked me to sit up. How could I possibly sit up? When I couldn’t follow their orders they would beat me even harder. They completely smashed me. I thought this nightmare would never end.”

A month later, an anonymous doctor working at the same centre said limbs were amputated because of handcuff injuries, noting: “We are all complicit in breaking the law.”

No one was detained; nothing was investigated. But as pressure mounted from the ICC about war crimes in Gaza, alongside the ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israeli military prosecutors felt obliged to act.

Israel could not argue that a domestic judicial process existed to examine such allegations of torture during detention, if the state did not use it. So nine soldiers accused of sexual abuse against a detainee, which led to him being hospitalised with serious injuries to his rectum, were arrested.

Breakdown of the state

What happened next was a complete breakdown of the state, similar to the 2021 assault on Congress by Trump supporters.

The arrests were met by angry demonstrations at the gates of Sde Teiman, with several protesters temporarily breaching the gates. Among the protesters were reservist soldiers, as well as two far-right parliamentarians: Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Religious Zionist movement, and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the Jewish Power party.

Police took three hours to arrive. Herzi Halevi, the army’s chief of general staff, had to break off a defence meeting on Israel’s response to the recent attack on the Golan Heights to deal with the crisis. The army and police each blamed each other for the breakdown in law and order.

For a time, the accused soldiers barricaded themselves into Sde Teiman and used pepper spray to defend themselves against arrest, before eventually being taken into custody.

When Hezbollah threatens to close Ben Gurion Airport, or knock out the Israeli electrical grid, these are not empty threats

It is a mistake often made by those who style themselves as friends of Israel to cast such scenes as a fight between moderates and the extreme messianic right. This is wholly illusory, for the “moderates” are fully on board with continuing the murderous Gaza campaign. The “moderates” voted for the recent Knesset bill that rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Where they differ is means, rather than ends.

Israelis who cling to their western identity are past masters of seizing Palestinian land in salami slices - subtly, quietly, without great fuss; but patiently, one property, one street, one high court case at a time. They care about their image, about being called global pariahs, and about the label of apartheid or war crimes being pinned on them personally.

The religious Zionist right, on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s cuss about world opinion or international courts. They want annexation of the West Bank now. The sooner it happens, the better.

Call it two-speed Zionism, but the goal is the same: a one-state solution in which the modern state of Israel dominates, if not overlays, the biblical Land of Israel, the land from the river to the sea.

Deepening fractures

But it is a mistake, too, to underplay the ever-deepening fractures within Israel, which are occurring in the middle of a major war.

Israel portrays itself to the outside world as the one functioning state in a neighbourhood of failed ones. You don’t have to build a state in Israel, Netanyahu once bragged to US politicians in one of his many appearances before Congress: “We’re already built.”

But that state is showing distinct signs of failing, too.

Napoleon and Hitler were at the height of their powers, and their respective armies had tamed Europe under their jackboots, when each dictator thought it would be a good idea to attack Russia.

So, too, is Netanyahu endangering everything Israel has achieved in establishing a strong state by openly creating the conditions for a regional war.

The Israeli military knows the truth: that killing Haniyeh was the last thing they should be doing if they want to see any of their hostages back alive. They know they are not ready to attack southern Lebanon, because they don’t have enough tanks or ammunition.

They know how well-armed Hezbollah, the Houthis and other resistance groups are, and how effective their rockets are. They know about geography and distances, and the vulnerability of Israel’s population and economy to war on five fronts simultaneously. When Hezbollah threatens to close Ben Gurion Airport, or knock out the Israeli electrical grid, these are not empty threats.

Israeli security establishments also know they are in danger of losing command and control over their troops, and if they give the order to withdraw, many units may not obey.

Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is making the classic mistake of all colonial powers. It is overreaching in the messianic belief that the Jews really are God’s chosen people; that the Bible ordained all of what is happening now, and that Israel can achieve its goal of complete military victory.

It is precisely at this moment that it is at its most vulnerable, and that the project could collapse.

In the final years of apartheid, the South African regime went into hyperdrive. It decided to overthrow the government of Angola, install a puppet regime in Namibia, and attack Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia—all fruitless projects that could not stave off regime collapse. Netanyahu’s Israel is treading the same path.

For nothing other than self-preservation, those who understand this should act before Netanyahu involves them in a war they could not possibly stop, still less win.

Soon after the Gaza war began 10 months ago, a prominent newspaper columnist denounced Congresswoman Cori Bush under a headline declaring that “anti-Israel comments make her unfit for reelection.” The piece appeared in the newspaper with the second-largest readership in Missouri, the Kansas City Star. Multimillion-dollar attacks on Bush followed.

Bush’s opponent, county prosecutor Wesley Bell, “is now the number-one recipient of AIPAC cash this election cycle,” according to Justice Democrats. “Almost two-thirds of all his donations came from the anti-Palestinian, far-right megadonor-funded lobby group.” The Intercept reports that “AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush” in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary in her St. Louis area district.

“The $2.1 million in ads spent for her campaign is up against $12.2 million spent to attack her or support Bell,” The American Prospect points out. AIPAC “is trying to pull voters away from her without ever saying the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine.’ Instead, their advertising against Bush centers around her record on infrastructure legislation, in a manner that lacks context.”

Denial about Israel’s massive and ongoing crimes against Palestinian people is pervasive—and often used to attack principled progressives in election campaigns.

It's easy to see why AIPAC and allied forces are so eager to defeat Bush. She courageously introduced a ceasefire resolution in the House nine days after the bloodshed began on Oct. 7, calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”

The Kansas City Star article, published shortly after Bush introduced the resolution, was written by former New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger, now a member of the Star’s editorial board. “A military attack in response to the massacre of civilians by a group committed in writing to ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ for Jews is not my idea of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” she wrote in early November. “But it is Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s, which is why she deserves to lose her congressional race next year.”

Bush supposedly became unfit to keep her seat in Congress because, after three weeks of methodical killing in Gaza, she tweeted: “We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Babies, dead. Pregnant women, dead. Elderly, dead. Generations of families, dead. Millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go being slaughtered. The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians.”

Henneberger’s response was hit-and-run. She wrote a hit piece. And then she ran.

Ever since late April, I’ve been asking Henneberger just one question, over and over. Every few weeks, I have sent another email directly to her. I also wrote to her care of an editor at the newspaper. And I even mailed a certified letter, which the post office delivered to her office in June.

No reply.

Henneberger’s column had flatly declared that Bush’s tweet was a “projectile spewing of antisemitic comments and disinformation” because it said that Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing.

So, my question, which Henneberger has been refusing to answer for more than three months, is a logical one: “Do you contend that the Israeli government has not engaged in ethnic cleansing?”

If Henneberger were to answer no, the entire premise of her column smearing Bush would collapse.

If Henneberger were to answer yes, her reply would be untenable.

No wonder she has chosen not to answer at all.

My question, which Henneberger has been refusing to answer for more than three months, is a logical one: “Do you contend that the Israeli government has not engaged in ethnic cleansing?”

What Israel has been doing in Gaza clearly qualifies as “ethnic cleansing”—which a UN Commission of Experts defined as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”

But denial about Israel’s massive and ongoing crimes against Palestinian people is pervasive—and often used to attack principled progressives in election campaigns. And so, two months ago, in the St. Louis area, 35 rabbis supporting Bell against Bush issued a statement that alleged the congresswoman “continually fanned the flames with the most outrageous smears of Israel, accusing the Jewish state of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ as it has fought to defeat the terrorists.”

The electoral forces against human rights for Palestinians have been armed with huge amounts of cash. AIPAC dumped $15 million into successfully defeating progressive New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman early this summer. While the spending amount set a record, the approach was far from unprecedented.

In 2022, AIPAC beat Michigan Congressman Andy Levin, who had expressed support for Palestinian rights. “I’m really Jewish,” Levin said in an interview days before losing the Democratic primary, “but AIPAC can’t stand the idea that I am the clearest, strongest Jewish voice in Congress standing for a simple proposition: that there is no way to have a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people unless we achieve the political and human rights of the Palestinian people.”

AIPAC excels at strategic lobbying on Capitol Hill, relentlessly prodding or threatening lawmakers and their staffs to stay on the right side of a Zionist hardline, always brandishing the proven capacity to launch fierce attacks—while conflating even understated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The basic formulas are simple: Israel = Judaism. Opposition to Israel’s lethal violence = antisemitism.

Such formulaic manipulation has long been fundamental to claims that the Israeli government represents “the Jewish people” and criticisms of its actions are “antisemitic.”

That’s what the heroic Congresswoman Cori Bush is up against.

When it comes to politics, they are some of the loudest voices in Pennsylvania: left-leaning activist types who protest the fracking industry, rally for more public school funding, or join anti-war marches. When the Democrats put forward a 2022 gubernatorial candidate in then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro from the party’s center flank — with iconoclastic views on some issues important to progressives, like school vouchers — the noise coming from his left flank was truly remarkable.

Utter silence.

That’s because Shapiro, unchallenged in the 2022 primary, faced a GOP fall opponent in Doug Mastriano — a Christian nationalist state senator with ties on the extreme right, a record of 2020 election denial, and a fondness for the Confederacy — who was seen by many voters as a threat to democracy. Disagreements over issues like the future of fracking didn’t seem important compared to fears of what a Mastriano administration might do.

Two years later, Shapiro is considered one of the nation’s most popular governors — with an approval rating that’s gone as high as 61%. And with the surprise elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democrat ticket and the party scrambling to make up lost ground in Pennsylvania, the largest swing state, Shapiro is one of the top contenders to become Harris’ running mate.

But that means the 51-year-old Shapiro’s rivals for the job aren’t right-wing Republicans like Mastriano but other Democrats like popular Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, the former astronaut married to anti-gun activist Gabby Giffords. Pennsylvania’s progressives, who bit their tongues in 2022 and have seen their grievances largely ignored in Harrisburg, are reverting to form. Many are speaking out against their home-state governor as a Democratic veep — raising questions among the party’s base that could derail his bid.

Upper Darby’s Colleen Kennedy, who represents Delaware County on the Democratic state committee, echoed other critics in saying that they’ll work hard for Harris no matter whom is picked. However, they contend, while Shapiro has some strong achievements that are comparable to his VP rivals, parts of his record make him a weaker choice for the Democrats.

“Shapiro has repeatedly pursued education policies that would permit discrimination against queer and trans students, disabled students, working class students, and immigrant students,” said Kennedy, in a criticism of his support for a school voucher plan. “We must continue to attract the political support of young people, who want to see accountability of rogue police departments, not student arrests” such as the raid on a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Pennsylvania urged by the governor.

Karen Feridun, a leader of the anti-fracking Better Path Coalition, told me that for vice president the Democrats “need all hands on deck dealing with the climate crisis, not guys like Shapiro who openly support continued fossil fuel production.” She added that “I think he will drive away the youth vote she needs between his terrible positions on both Gaza (including his intolerance of dissent) and climate.”

The basic conundrum for Harris and national Democrats is this. Would her drive for 270-plus electoral votes against Donald Trump be best-served by a center-left Democrat with crossover appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, especially in a critical swing state? Or would a candidate who alienates the left depress some of the young-voter enthusiasm that’s been evident since Harris emerged as President Joe Biden’s replacement?

The progressive case against Shapiro falls largely in four areas:

— School choice. More than two dozen public-education advocacy groups signed a letter urging Harris to not pick Shapiro as vice president, citing his statements of support both as a 2022 candidate and as governor for school vouchers that would funnel taxpayer dollars to help families send their kids to private schools. Ironically, those proposals backed by state Republicans and megadonor Jeff Yass haven’t become a reality under Shapiro, and in 2023 he vetoed an $100 million voucher-style program after initially saying he’d sign it. And Shapiro advocates note the 2024 budget he did sign boosted funding for public schools by $1.1 billion. But the Pennsylvanian’s willingness to even entertain vouchers puts him at odds with other Democrats vying to be veep.

— Fracking and the environment. While environmentalists hoped Shapiro, who tangled with the oil and gas industry as AG, would crack down on fracking as governor, many leading groups say they’re deeply disappointed in his record. Physicians for Social Responsibility in Pennsylvania charged that Shapiro has “radically changed his environmental policy priorities and began to court fossil fuel companies.” Critics have blasted his support for projects like hydrogen hubs that use fracked gas and for the return of fracking to Dimock, the rural town whose pollution was featured in the documentary Gasland. The Shapiro administration insists it is aggressively going after polluters.

— Student protests and Gaza. No issue has divided the Democratic coalition like the war in the Middle East. Shapiro’s strong support for Israel is arguably in line with other top Dems, but critics cite his reluctance to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and in particular his strong stance against pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, using his platform to urge Penn to shut down its protest encampment and even seeming to compare pro-Palestinian activists to “white supremacists” in interviews. But Shapiro has also spoken out against Palestinian civilian casualties, and his supporters say activists’ focus on the one VP finalist who is Jewish smacks of antisemitism.

— Handling of sexual harassment. The Shapiro administration last year agreed to pay $295,000 to a former female aide who accused a long-time political associate of the governor — Mike Vereb, his legislative secretary, a cabinet post — of making unwanted sexual advances and frequent lewd talk. Female lawmakers in both parties have criticized the administration — which cites a non-disclosure agreement for not talking about the case — for an alleged lack of transparency. The Democratic candidate for state treasurer — political outsider Erin McClelland — sent shock waves through the veepstakes when she tweeted that she wanted a VP “who doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug.”

That is exactly the kind of allegation that can prove toxic in an intra-party squabble among Democrats. The Shapiro situation is vexing because — even as critics like Kennedy point out — his overall record of liberal gains in a politically divided state is pretty good. The governor is also a master at performative but effective politics, which looks brilliant when he pushes to get a collapsed bridge on I-95 reopened in days instead of months.

But other bipartisan gambits — especially his repeated endorsements of school voucher programs — look like a massive unforced error for a man with higher ambitions in the Democratic Party. I find his continued support for fracking after a state-backed report found an increased risk for some types of childhood cancer for kids growing up near active wells to be morally unconscionable.

It’s no wonder that progressives seem to be lining up in the VP contest behind Minnesota’s Walz, who like Shapiro has some policy wins on cherished liberal issues like expanding free school lunches but isn’t lugging around political baggage like the Pennsylvania governor. Whether Harris, said to have close ties to Shapiro, sees it the same way will tell us a lot about her White House bid.

But for local progressives, the emergence of Shapiro as top-tier veep contender is a double-edged sword. Feridun told me she would work like crazy to get a Harris-Shapiro ticket elected — “not just because of Trump” but also with the goal of “getting him (Shapiro) the hell out of the governor’s office.”

With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.

Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, U.S. Congress handed President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.

We have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully.

In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.

What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision—because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”

Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.

We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against pro-war Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide. Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including 33-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.

After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young anti-war activists and intensely studying the 7,000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.

At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite anti-war activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade anti-war senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.

Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”

You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.

And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber-stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make that policy more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more anti-war than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.

We have seen, in the last 10 months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Around 1.7% of the Gazan population (2.3 million) have been killed and at least 90% displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a cease-fire today.

For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 5.7 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children, and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying—buried, lost, sick, starving. More than 300 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.

That is the reality in Gaza.

In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism—the over 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.

Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.

The Senate just passed a bill that will let the federal and state governments investigate and sue websites that they claim cause kids mental distress. It’s a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online, but the Senate passed KOSA on a 91-3 vote.

Bill proponents have focused on some truly tragic stories of loss, and then tied these tragedies to the internet. But anxiety, eating disorders, drug abuse, gambling, tobacco and alcohol use by minors, and the host of other ills that KOSA purports to address all existed well before the internet.

The Senate vote means that the House could take up and vote on this bill at any time. The House could also choose to debate its own, similarly flawed, version of KOSA. Several members of the House have expressed concerns about the bill.

The vast majority of speech that KOSA affects is constitutionally protected in the U.S., which is why there is a long list of reasons that KOSA is unconstitutional.

The members of Congress who vote for this bill should remember—they do not, and will not, control who will be in charge of punishing bad internet speech. The Federal Trade Commission, majority-controlled by the president’s party, will be able to decide what kind of content “harms” minors, then investigate or file lawsuits against websites that host that content.

Politicians in both parties have sought to control various types of internet content. One bill sponsor has said that widely used educational materials that teach about the history of racism in the U.S. causes depression in kids. Kids speaking out about mental health challenges or trying to help friends with addiction are likely to be treated the same as those promoting addictive or self-harming behaviors, and will be kicked offline. Minors engaging in activism or even discussing the news could be shut down, since the grounds for suing websites expand to conditions like “anxiety.”

KOSA will lead to people who make online content about sex education, and LGBTQ+ identity and health, being persecuted and shut down as well. Views on how, or if, these subjects should be broached vary widely across U.S. communities. All it will take is one member of the Federal Trade Commission seeking to score political points, or a state attorney general seeking to ensure re-election, to start going after the online speech his or her constituents don’t like.

All of these speech burdens will affect adults, too. Adults simply won’t find the content that was mass-deleted in the name of avoiding KOSA-inspired lawsuits; and we’ll all be burdened by websites and apps that install ID checks, age gates, and invasive (and poorly functioning) software content filters.

The vast majority of speech that KOSA affects is constitutionally protected in the U.S., which is why there is a long list of reasons that KOSA is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the lawmakers voting for this bill have hand-waved away those concerns. They’ve also blown off the voices of millions of young people who will have their free expression constricted by this bill, including the thousands who spoke to EFF directly about their concerns and fears around KOSA.

We can’t rely solely on lawsuits and courts to protect us from the growing wave of anti-speech internet legislation, with KOSA at its forefront. We need to let the people making the laws know that the public is becoming aware of their censorship plans—and won’t stand for them.

A new assassination campaign aimed at Israel’s opponents has erupted across the Middle East, imperiling already shaky Gaza ceasefire talks and threatening an even greater regional expansion of war. While Israel continues its genocidal attack on desperate Gazans, killing scores, perhaps hundreds just in the last several days, the latest moves were clearly designed to escalate Israel’s war in Gaza and expand the military tensions already simmering on its border with Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere into a full-scale war, potentially drawing in both Iran and the United States even more directly.

The lethal attacks on top military and political officials of Hezbollah and Hamas, in Beirut and Tehran respectively within 24 hours, demonstrates the centrality of assassination—and the irrelevance of diplomacy—in Tel Aviv’s strategic calculus.

Tuesday evening in the Lebanese capital, an Israeli airstrike hit the neighborhood of Dahiyeh, destroying a residential building very close to a major hospital, killing and injuring still-unconfirmed numbers of people. Israel claimed it killed Fuad Shukr, a top military official of Hezbollah, and a close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political-military resistance organization in Lebanon. While Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr’s death, it is clear that his assassination was the Israeli intent.

All the talk about Washington and Tel Aviv supporting a ceasefire or wanting the hostages returned means little when a top negotiator on the other side can be assassinated with impunity.

Just hours before that Israeli strike, U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that U.S. officials “do not believe that all-out war is inevitable and we still believe that it can be avoided.” That followed his statement that “our commitment to Israel's security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah, and we are working on a diplomatic solution.”

But the U.S. has made clear by its actions—regardless of some politicians’ rhetorical support for ending the war—that it is not prepared to do the one thing that would result in a permanent ceasefire: stop sending Israel the weapons that enable the war in Gaza.

To the contrary, the possibility of a diplomatic solution was grievously undermined again just hours after the Beirut attack when another airstrike, widely assumed to be Israeli, assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guest house in Tehran. He was visiting the Iranian capital for the inauguration of just-elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh, who had briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections that were initially welcomed by the United States, lived in exile in Qatar. In recent months he played a key role in the Qatar-sponsored and U.S.-backed Israeli-Hamas negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s assault on Gaza, ensuring access to humanitarian aid, and releasing illegally held Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages.

All the talk about Washington and Tel Aviv supporting a ceasefire or wanting the hostages returned means little when a top negotiator on the other side can be assassinated with impunity. Haniyeh was widely recognized as pragmatic and supportive of negotiations; in 2006, just three months after Hamas won the Palestinian election in both Gaza and the West Bank, Haniyeh wrote to then-President George W. Bush urging negotiations between the U.S. and Hamas, and offering acceptance of a two-state solution and a long-term truce with Israel. The current situation, he wrote, “will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region.” Bush never responded.

The negotiations the Hamas leader was participating in will almost certainly be stalled, if not derailed entirely, as a result of Haniyeh’s killing. The resulting continuation of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza matches the goal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has resisted ceasefire efforts and pledged to keep fighting until Hamas is destroyed.

The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher—with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater direct U.S. involvement. The assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was a deliberate provocation, aimed at forcing an Iranian reaction. Any government whose intelligence assets were powerful enough to know exactly where the Hamas leader was staying during a temporary visit to the Iranian capital would have known where he lived in Qatar, where an assassination, while of course still illegal, would not have had the same consequences.

The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher—with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater direct U.S. involvement.

Forcing Iran’s hand, particularly at the highly symbolic moment of the inauguration, will severely limit the options for the new president, who has called for renewed negotiations with the United States on nuclear issues and signaled the possibility of reopening the Iran nuclear deal. Preventing that would match Netanyahu’s longstanding goal of undermining any hint of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and bringing the United States directly into a potential Israeli-Iranian war.

While details on the exact nature of the missiles or other kind of projectiles used in the two assassinations have not yet been made public, it is likely that one or both were U.S.-produced and/or U.S.-funded. In that circumstance, the U.S. complicity in genocide by providing the weapons Israel is using in Gaza, could expand to direct U.S. involvement in what could escalate into a major regional war—exactly the war that U.S. officials claim they are trying to prevent.

The work of the movement for a permanent ceasefire—a ceasefire that includes an end to the killing, the resumption of humanitarian assistance and funding of UNRWA, and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel—is about to get a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more urgent.

This piece was co-published with Foreign Policy in Focus.

With Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside as Democratic nominee for president and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, the 2024 presidential race has suddenly transformed from an uninspiring duel between two old white men to something altogether different. Powered by coconut memes and refreshing cognitive competence, Harris has surged in popularity. Young voters, in particular, have shown a burst of enthusiasm.

The Washington Post, however, is concerned. An energetic alliance between progressives and liberals behind a woman who ran to the left of Biden during the 2020 primary could signal a leftward shift of the Democratic Party, which has generally been dominated by centrists over the last several decades. That’s not something the Jeff Bezos–owned Post has much interest in.

Kamala Harris is gaining ground against Donald Trump with most sub-groups of voters (Financial Times, 7/26/24).

‘What Harris needs to do’

So the editorial board decided it was time to weigh in. A day after Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing, it published the editorial “What Harris Needs to Do, Now, to Win” (7/22/24).

In the piece, the board implores Harris to abandon progressive policy priorities such as “widespread student debt cancellation” and “nationwide rent stabilization” that Biden has backed during his term as president. Instead of promoting these policies, according to the board, Harris should mercilessly turn her back on the progressive wing of the party:

Ms. Harris should both resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow. Ms. Harris’s pick of running mate could be a revealing early indicator, too. Tapping a politician likely to appeal to the median voter would serve her—and the country—best.

This, we are to think, is not simply about the more conservative policy preferences of the members of the Post’s board. It is cold, calculated and smart electoral strategy. After all, everyone knows that America is a center-right country, and general election voters would never get behind a progressive platform. (Never mind that Biden adopted a slate of progressive policy positions in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his ailing campaign, precisely because these policies are so popular with the general electorate.)

Misty memories of 2020

Not only that, but remember what happened in 2020? In the Post’s telling, during that presidential primary, Harris

tried to play down her record as a tough-on-crime California prosecutor and embrace the progressive left of the Democratic Party, backing policies that lacked broad appeal, such as Medicare-for-all. She did not make it out of 2019 before folding her campaign.

The implication here seems to be that support for progressive policies hampered Harris’s campaign. A strange hypothesis, given that progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did exceptionally well in that primary, and only lost after moderates consolidated around Biden in a last-minute tactical alliance.

Medicare-for-all, meanwhile, posted majority support from the American public throughout the 2020 primary season, and had garnered majority support for years before that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. To be fair to the Post, the polling on this issue was incredibly sensitive to the framing of the question, so you could easily point to some poor results for the policy as well, often found in Fox’s (unsurprisingly biased) polling. But, unlike with many of the polls that returned unfavorable results, the wording used by Kaiser was eminently even-handed.

Polling by Kaiser (10/16/20) finds that Medicare for All has remained broadly popular for years.

In any case, what matters for the Post’s suggestion about Harris’s fate in the 2020 primary is not views among the general population, but views among Democrats. With that group, polls consistently found overwhelming support for Medicare-for-all. At best, then, we might call the Post’s claims here misleading, an attempt to pawn off opposition to a policy on the general public when, in fact, it’s really the paper that takes issue with it.

Ignoring full employment

The policies that the Post prefers Democrats to push are of a different sort, the Very Serious and bipartisan sort. Because only when Republicans also sign off on legislation is it any good. As the Post calls for a rightward turn from Harris, it celebrates the scarce moments of bipartisanship (sort of) over the last few years:

In the White House, Mr. Biden’s approach helped get substantial bipartisan bills over the finish line, investing in national infrastructure and critical semiconductor manufacturing. He also signed a bill that should have been bipartisan: the nation’s most ambitious climate change policy to date.

Conspicuously absent from the editorial is any mention of the American Rescue Plan, the stimulus bill passed in the spring of 2021 that spurred the most rapid and egalitarian economic recovery in recent American history. As the progressive journalist Zach Carter noted in a recent article titled “Full Employment Is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” (Slate, 7/24/24):

Across the 50 years preceding Biden’s tenure in office, the US economy enjoyed only 25 total months with an unemployment rate below 4%. Biden did it for 27 consecutive months—a streak broken only in May of this year, as an expanding labor force pushed the rate over 4% even as the economy actually added more jobs.

Given that the stimulus bill can claim much of the credit for this outcome, it stands as arguably the most significant legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration. For the Post, though, that’s apparently not worth highlighting.

Politically toxic

Also conspicuously missing from the Post editorial is any discussion of the potential electoral damage that could result from continuing Biden’s support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In May of this year, the American Arab Institute estimated, based on their polling, that Biden could lose as many as 177,000 Arab American votes compared to his performance in 2020 across four swing states. It would be worth discussing this policy failure, and the ways in which Harris should break from Biden on Gaza, if the Post were really interested in helping Harris win. But that would distract the paper from advocating incredibly unpopular centrist policies.

Take its editorial (7/23/24) published a day after it admonished Harris for supporting Medicare-for-all, due to that policy’s supposed unpopularity. This piece finds the editorial board once again calling for cuts to Social Security, specifically through raising the retirement age. Benefit cuts are opposed by 79% of Americans, and raising the retirement age polls almost equally badly, with 78% of Americans opposing an increase in the retirement age from 67 to 70. Yet the Post evidently finds it critical to advocate this politically toxic policy just as Harris gets her campaign off the ground and starts shaping her platform.

As of now, it looks like Harris could break either way in the coming months. Her choice to tap Eric Holder, a corporate Democrat hailing from the Obama administration, to vet candidates for vice president, suggests a possible rightward shift. As do her team’s overtures to the crypto world. On the other hand, her relatively cold reception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit could signal a leftward turn.

In short, Harris seems to remain persuadable on the direction of her campaign and the content of her platform. Unfortunately, while the Washington Post is doing its best to convince Harris to move right, there exists no comparable outlet representing the interests of the progressive wing of the party that can fight back.

For decades, U.S. trade policy across Latin America has prioritized the profit of U.S. mega-corporations over the well-being of communities, workers, democracy, and human rights. Now, as trade ministers from the U.S. and eleven countries in our hemisphere convene at the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) Ministerial in Quito this week, they have an opportunity to address one of the worst manifestations of this shameful legacy.

Embedded within trade and investment agreements between the U.S. and many countries in Latin America is a relic of colonialism that empowers multinational corporations to challenge any public interest law and policy that may interfere with their profits in extrajudicial, closed-door arbitration tribunals. This insidious system is called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), and it effectively erodes democracy while fleecing governments of taxpayer dollars and diverting public funds. Yet the secretive nature of the ISDS system ensures the public remains largely unaware.

As a former ISDS defense attorney, I represented Latin American governments against corporations and witnessed firsthand the devastating impacts of ISDS on local communities, economies, and environments.

Time and again, I saw how ISDS granted corporations unprecedented power beyond domestic laws to sue foreign governments for any action they argue violates their broad investor rights, even if governments attempt to protect human rights, workers, or the environment.

Only corporations can launch suits, meaning governments cannot hold corporations accountable. Therefore, if a corporation engages in harmful practices and a government tries to mitigate them, the company can launch an ISDS claim. This system has awarded corporations over $100 billion in taxpayer dollars in known cases, with fossil fuel companies being the primary beneficiaries. The actual sum is likely much higher since awards are often kept secret.

The impact of ISDS on Latin America and the Caribbean has been particularly severe. The region faces a disproportionate number of ISDS disputes (nearly a third of all cases) despite having less than 10% of the world’s population. Latin American governments have been forced to pay corporations $33.8 billion in known awards and settlements, diverting critical resources from social needs.

Following colonization, newly independent nations were pressured to adopt trade and investment deals with ISDS provisions supposedly to attract investment. Despite proponents’ claims, studies show no meaningful increase in foreign investment due to ISDS provisions. Brazil does not have any treaties with ISDS and yet receives the most foreign investment in the region. Instead, ISDS has entrenched an imbalanced system where multinational corporations wield disproportionate power and pillage resources unchecked, often at the expense of the environment and local communities, echoing the colonial paradigm.

I have also witnessed many times how ISDS undermines the will of the people and places Indigenous communities in danger, particularly when corporations want to extract resources from their lands.

The right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is a cornerstone of Indigenous rights, allowing them to agree to or reject proposals impacting their lands. However, governments may sideline these rights to avoid costly ISDS litigation, undermining Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. While Indigenous rights are enshrined in international law, they are often inadequately enforced, whereas ISDS obligations are both binding and highly enforceable. Furthermore, ISDS tribunals frequently restrict the participation of local communities before issuing their awards, effectively silencing the voices of the most impacted and vulnerable.

Notably, the APEP ministerial is taking place in Ecuador, a country that has endured egregious ISDS cases highlighting the erosion of sovereignty and environmental injustice perpetuated by the system. For example, after being found guilty of severe pollution and environmental damage to the Amazon and ordered to clean up by Ecuadorian courts, U.S. oil giant Chevron launched an ISDS suit against Ecuador for $9.5 billion instead of complying. Another case involved Occidental Petroleum, which was awarded $1.4 billion after Ecuador terminated a contract due to the company’s violation of domestic laws.

In 2009, after undertaking an extensive audit of its investment treaties, Ecuador denounced ISDS, withdrew its membership from the World Bank’s venue where most ISDS cases are heard, and terminated 16 bilateral investment treaties. Subsequent Ecuadorian governments have unsuccessfully tried to reinstate ISDS. In response to a referendum this past April, Ecuadorian voters rejected ISDS in a landslide. This is a powerful, democratic statement against a system that prioritizes corporations.

Ecuador’s struggle with ISDS is emblematic of the broader issues countries face, and the global opposition to ISDS is growing. The European Union recently exited the Energy Charter Treaty, which granted ISDS powers to fossil fuel companies, citing concerns that it undermined the fight against climate change. Bolivia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Venezuela have also taken steps to eliminate their ISDS liability. United Nations experts have called for the abolition of ISDS, citing its undermining of state sovereignty, democracy, and the rule of law.

Domestically, there is increasing bipartisan pressure to end ISDS. Both the previous and current administrations have taken steps away from ISDS. President Biden pledged to abstain from including ISDS provisions in new trade deals. Last year, over 200 U.S. labor unions, faith groups, and environmental organizations urged President Biden to eliminate ISDS from existing treaties, highlighting its detrimental impact on public health, climate protections, Indigenous land rights, and democratic sovereignty. Members of Congress have echoed these calls, emphasizing the need to address ISDS to tackle the root causes of migration, protect the environment, and uphold democratic values.

Achieving APEP’s stated goals of fostering inclusivity and sustainable economic development hinges on reconciling past policy mistakes. Members of Congress recently urged USTR to establish a working group within APEP to explore options for eliminating ISDS provisions in existing trade deals. Not only is this possible, but it is also essential to align trade policy with the values of democracy, human rights, and environmental protection.

APEP ministers should seize this opportunity and eliminate ISDS once and for all to give a sustainable future for people and the environment a fighting chance. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, widely believed by Israel. He was in Tehran to attend the ceremonies marking inauguration of Iran’s new President, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian. The two men met before Haniyeh was killed.

As of this writing, Israel has not commented on the killing or the allegations that it was behind it.

In assassinating Haniyeh, Israel would have struck at two targets, not one. The second one is the new Pezeshkian administration. On the day the reformist President was taking office, a foreign leader and an ally of Iran is assassinated, and as the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, he must address a security crisis with international dimensions and implications.

If Saeed Jalili, Pezeshkian’s opponent in the second round of Iran’s presidential elections, had won, given his radical and extremist positions, and his bombastic style, it would have helped Israel in its attempts to convince the international community that engaging Iran diplomatically will not be fruitful, and the country must be put under maximum pressure.

But Pezeshkian is a moderate, and although he has repeatedly condemned the United States for its support of Israel in its war in Gaza, for imposing harsh economic sanctions on Iran, and exiting the nuclear treaty with Iran known officially as JCPOA, he is also pragmatic in seeking a dialogue with the U.S. During his campaign, Pezeshkian stated repeatedly that he would pursue negotiations with the United States, a position apparently supported by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in order to get the economic sanctions lifted.

Dialogue between Iran and the United States is, however, the last thing that Israel, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, wants at this stage. If anything, Netanyahu would expand the war to Lebanon in hopes that Iran will react strongly and enter the war directly. Neither Hezbollah nor Iran wants a war with Israel at this stage, but no one should be under the illusion that if Israel begins a full-scale war with Lebanon and Hezbollah, Iran will sit it out.

Unlike Hamas, a Sunni group that has had differences with Iran over the past twenty years, particularly when it refused to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria during the war there that angered Tehran, Hezbollah is a Shiite organization and Iran’s most important asset in the Middle East. If Israel starts waging a full-scale war against Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic does not intervene to defend Hezbollah, it will lose all credibility with its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran has already been criticized by the Houthis in Yemen for not defending Hamas in Gaza.

Since Iran has not shown any inclination towards starting a direct war with Israel, the next best scenario for Israel is to trap it in an untenable position. Assassinating the leader of an ally, particularly in Tehran in the evening of the day in which a new administration took the oath of office, is that trap. It has put President Pezeshkian and his allies in an extremely difficult situation.

Amidst a perpetually churning news cycle, you may have seen a chilling phrase break through the din: “Project 2025.”

It looms like a bogeyman in everything from TikTok comments to headlines in major news outlets. And it refers to a 900-page wishlist and roadmap for a potential conservative president’s first months in office. The document was crafted by former Trump administration officials working with the Heritage Foundation (a think tank with a history of climate denial and funded by right-wing billionaires).

So what exactly is in Project 2025 that makes it so startling?

“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Project 2025’s director. Paul Dans, who on Tuesday announced he would be stepping down in August from the project. But Dans' comment alone clues you in on the gravity of its contents and its intentions. It is nothing less than a plan to completely overhaul the federal government, stripping away its ability to defend families from threats to public health and the environment.

Its deregulatory agenda will put our water at risk of pollution and contamination for the sake of corporate profits, and its agricultural policies will pull a resilient, affordable food system further from reach. Its plan for our energy system would push our planet even more toward climate chaos.

Moreover, Project 2025 is as meticulous as it is dangerous, detailing exactly how a right-wing president could carry out its plans. And while it details a heinous agenda on a wide range of issues, we’re going to focus on food, water, and climate.

Here’s what you need to know about Project 2025’s threat to our livable future.

Project 2025 Would Pave the Way for More Corporate Pollution

One key tenet of Project 2025 is dismantling and disempowering federal agencies. Its goal is to shift agencies’ focus from protecting our health and environment to paving more pathways for unchecked corporate abuse.

Notably, the plan recommends gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On day one, it would downsize staff at a time when the agency is already severely understaffed and under-resourced. This has led to, for example, absurdly long reviews of chemicals that threaten our water, air, and health.

In other cases, the EPA has rubber-stamped potentially dangerous chemicals to speed up corporations’ path to profits. Project 2025 wants this trend to continue, as it advocates for speeding up reviews “to ensure the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers” — putting companies before public health.

It also aims to strip our waters of protections from polluters. Project 2025 would exclude much of our country’s wetlands and temporary waters from protection and narrow the kinds of water pollution regulated under the Clean Water Act. As communities across the country suffer pollution from factory farms and industrial plants, we need more water protections, not fewer.

Moreover, Project 2025 would have a new administration pause and revisit Biden’s recent Lead and Copper Rule Improvement and PFAS regulations, which are vital first steps in responding to our country’s lead-in-water and PFAS contamination crises. This would put the health of millions of people at continued risk.

It specifically targets a recent Biden rule that designates two PFAS as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, jeopardizing efforts to force polluters to clean up their toxic mess. Project 2025 could allow corporations to get away with poisoning our water, and leave taxpayers to foot the bill.

Safe, Affordable, and Sustainable Food Is Under Attack

Project 2025 is expressly focused on deregulation and downsizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It views regulations as “a threat to farmers’ independence and food affordability” and advocates for removing “obstacles imposed on American farmers and individuals across the food supply chain.”

This completely ignores the essential role that regulations play in keeping our food safe and combating Big Ag’s takeover of our food system. Government programs are integral to supporting small and medium-sized farmers and building a food system that will be sustainable for generations of farmers to come.

But Project 2025 wants to cut these — from regulations on pesticide use and genetically modified food to conservation programs that help farmers manage their land sustainably.

It also brushes aside the role that our food system has in fostering a healthy environment, saying “environmental issues” are “ancillary” to agriculture. It would hamstring efforts to transform our food system to save our climate and environment while ensuring affordable, sustainable food for all.

Additionally, Project 2025 cruelly threatens to yank food access from poor and low-income families across the country. Notably, it calls for limiting access to SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — which help feed more than 40 million people in the U.S. It also calls for restricting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which specifically helps children and families. Cutting these programs will allow more people to go hungry.

Our food system is already in crisis, driven by agricultural corporations cutting corners, playing dirty, raising prices, and crowding out small farmers. The answer is not deregulation that invites Big Ag to get bigger at the expense of the rest of us. Yet that’s exactly what Project 2025 advocates for.

Project 2025 Puts a Livable Climate in Jeopardy

Finally, some of the most disturbing parts of Project 2025 are its fervent promises to let the fossil fuel industry run rampant on our health, climate, and environment.

We know that ending fossil fuel use and production is key to securing a livable climate and defending our health against pollution. Yet Project 2025 calls for a rapid expansion of drilling, fracking, and gas exports.

Its authors propose restoring coal mining on public lands and opening more of them to oil and gas leasing. They also recommend speeding up drilling permits, allowing fossil fuel corporations to more easily ravage our shared public lands for profit.

Notably, Project 2025 recommends clearing the way for the planet-wrecking liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry to balloon. Exporting even more LNG could lock in not only the U.S. into decades of more fossil fuels, but also the entire world.

At the same time, the authors of Project 2025 suggest dismantling several offices at the Department of Energy that are key to federal research, development, and deployment of renewable energy. They also push for stopping efforts to grow the country’s power grid to accommodate new solar and wind energy. Instead, they call for focusing on improving grid “reliability” by expanding fossil fuels and slowing clean energy.

This is a laughable idea. Research shows our grid does not need fossil fuels to be reliable; in fact, in disasters, fossil-fueled energy is more vulnerable to outages.

We know that renewables make our energy more affordable, more resilient, and less dangerous to our health, safety, and climate. Yet Project 2025 has no interest in ensuring these benefits. Instead, it’s fighting for the status quo of dirty energy and corporate power.

Project 2025 Proposes a Dark Future — But We Can Fight It Together

We all want clean water, safe, affordable food, a healthy environment, and a bright future we can share with future generations. But Project 2025 threatens all of these. At a time of so many intertwining crises, it promises to hamstring the federal government’s ability to protect people, sacrificing us for the sake of corporate profits.

But while Project 2025 represents some of the most poisonous paths our government could go down, we have the antidote. Food & Water Watch has shown again and again that when it comes to making meaningful change and fighting corporate power, the key to winning is two-fold: calling for bold action and organizing people power to fight for it.

By coming together, we can fight for the future we need and deserve. We can protect our food and our water, end fossil fuels, and win a livable future for everyone.

In June, Reuters reported on a hitherto secret U.S. program connected with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus rapidly spread throughout the world, our government sought to respond to Chinese disinformation which attempted to deflect responsibility for the virus’s origin by claiming that it had originated in a biological research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. What was our government’s plan? To fight fire with fire.

This was at the same time that the then-president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, was making noises about a closer relationship to China, even hinting that if China prioritized sending vaccine to his country, he would cede territory in the South China Sea to Beijing. Simultaneously, an element within the U.S. military in the Pacific was agitating Washington about keeping the Philippines on side and fighting the deluge of Chinese propaganda.

As a result, the Pentagon authorized a covert disinformation campaign against China, focusing on discrediting Chinese vaccine and protective medical equipment like masks. The channels of propaganda would be Twitter (now X), Facebook, and other social media. The campaign appears to have worked: the Philippines ended up with a very low vaccination rate in international comparison (in spite of Duterte’s efforts), and a high death rate.

While it is generally acknowledged that the Chinese vaccine (known as CoronaVac or Sinovac) is less effective, it is hardly useless: typically a 60-70-percent effectiveness versus the roughly 90-percent effectiveness of Western vaccines. Thus, it could have saved lives in the Philippines but for the U.S. disinformation campaign.

It is one more reason why Trump and his appointees should never be entrusted with public office. Will Congress ever investigate this misbegotten operation and finally nail down the chain of events?

It’s all there in the Reuters article, and there is no need to expatiate on the obvious immorality of the operation, quite apart from its colossal stupidity—at the same time U.S. public health officials were tearing out their hair trying to combat domestic Covid-19 disinformation, and doctors and nurses were risking their lives caring for terminally ill vaccine refusers, their government was pumping the same ideological poison into the minds of innocent people abroad. The nonchalant statement of an unnamed Pentagon official says it all: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

The report left a few dangling lose ends, however, that deserve further investigation by Congress and the Pentagon inspector general.

Are U.S. special forces out of control? The report says that the program was initiated after persistent lobbying by the then-commander of Special Operations Command Pacific, General Jonathan Braga. The article implies that he pleaded directly to Washington. Did his superiors at U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii know what he was doing? Did they approve? We know from Reuters that various U.S. ambassadors in Southeast Asia did not approve, and they would ordinarily have overruled the general because it was a stupid idea that could harm diplomatic relations. But because the then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper designated the propaganda campaign as a de facto wartime action, the diplomats’ objections could be disregarded.

U.S. special forces were vastly expanded during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were given greater operational flexibility. They have also tended to produce loose cannons throughout the ranks. General Stanley McChrystal was special forces commander at the height of the Iraq war and later became commander of all coalition forces in Afghanistan. His career came to grief when he had the bad judgment to insult President Obama and other civilian leaders in front of a Rolling Stone reporter. Apparently, the civilian pukes in Washington lacked the general’s gung-ho attitude that with just a little more door-kicking and pyrotechnics, Afghanistan would be pacified—something that hadn’t happened since the Mongol invasions.

This kinetic mentality can get out of hand, as it did in 2017. Four Navy SEALs who were posted to the U.S. embassy in Mali, in a “juvenile” attempt to haze an Army special forces soldier, killed him. Their court martial, in a strange display of leniency, sentenced the most culpable perpetrator to only 10 years in prison, while one of the four defendants did not even receive a punitive discharge. The 10-year sentence was later vacated, with the defendant hiring a Trump lawyer to try to get him off the hook.

Ironically, vaccine refusal was the cause of another special forces stunt. Personnel from the Navy Special Warfare Command, including SEALs, not only declined to be vaccinated, but sued the Department of Defense. Their venue-shopping landed them in the Fort Worth court room of U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a favorite destination for nutty conservative causes, and shockingly but not surprisingly, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Ultimately, the Supreme Court blocked the judge’s ruling, but only insofar as it allowed the Navy to reassign, as opposed to discipline or discharge, the plaintiffs, while litigation continued.

What the personnel had done merited not merely reassignment or discharge, but potentially a court martial for the following: deliberately rendering themselves undeployable; endangering other service members; gross insubordination; and possibly even mutiny, as it was an organized action against their unit.

I have written before how religion is bandied about for political advantage by people whose own religious faith is ludicrously insincere. The justification of the SEALs—whose profession is to kill people—was a risible claim that deep Christian devotion prompted their refusal, advancing the heretofore undiscovered theological tenet that modification of their bodies by vaccine is an “affront to their Creator.” Apparently that doctrine exempts steroid abuse, which is common in the Navy’s special warfare community.

Even the military has begun to recognize that special forces may have become the tail that wags the dog—too big (bigger than the entire German army), diluted in quality, often operating outside the regular chain of command, and infected with a cowboy mentality. The mindless popular adulation, particularly of SEALs, has according to some observers had an adverse impact on civil-military relations. Perhaps we will always need door-kickers, but should they be overruling ambassadors in order to execute a cruel and asinine operation in a friendly country?

Who ultimately ordered the covert operation? The Reuters piece noted that Esper signed the directive to conduct the operation. The legality of his action rested on a provision in the 2019 defense authorization act permitting the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, including “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

This only raises more questions. Were the defense and intelligence committees of Congress, then controlled by the Democrats, duly notified of the disinformation campaign? If so, did the notification simply state that a covert psychological operation was underway, or did it provide enough details to make it clear that it was based on lies that could endanger the population of a friendly country? What was the reaction of Congress?

Perhaps we will always need door-kickers, but should they be overruling ambassadors in order to execute a cruel and asinine operation in a friendly country?

It seems unlikely that even as powerful a bureaucratic actor as the secretary of defense would order such a sensitive operation in defiance of the State Department without the guidance of those above him, or at least as a result of their signing off on his plan. The rules of Washington normally impel a person like Esper to seek cover for his actions. Accordingly, it is probable that he either notified the president directly or through the national security council of his order.

Then-President Trump had already directed the CIA in 2019 to conduct covert psychological operations inside China, so it is hardly a stretch to speculate that he would have had no problem approving DoD’s covert operation in the Philippines. It is one more reason why Trump and his appointees should never be entrusted with public office. Will Congress ever investigate this misbegotten operation and finally nail down the chain of events?

How do we know the operation did not blow back on the United States? The military is prohibited by law from conducting propaganda campaigns in the United States. But given the instant global connectedness of the internet, how could the Pentagon be so sure that its black propaganda campaigns in other countries wouldn’t leak back to the American population? They were, after all, using Twitter and Facebook accounts.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Filipino population in the United States was 4.4 million in 2020, the third-largest Asian-American group. It is inconceivable that none of them would have had contact with friends and relatives in the Philippines who might have been gulled by the American disinformation. Had their contacts made them vaccine-hesitant, it would have exacerbated the already epidemic anti-vaccine movement here.

Why did it take so long to shut down the program? Shortly after the inauguration, representatives from Facebook arranged a meeting with incoming Biden administration officials to complain about the covert program, which contradicted the company’s policy against spreading vaccine disinformation. The officials were properly horrified, but again, there are loose ends to the Reuters story.

Why hadn’t the new administration learned about the program through Pentagon channels already during the transition? Why did it take until the spring of 2021 to order DoD to shut it down? And in spite of the order, why did the program linger through the summer? Was the Biden administration lax in its follow-up, or was the Pentagon out of control?

Over the decades, the U.S. military has conducted numerous programs of breathtaking stupidity: the above-ground nuclear tests of the 1950s that exposed draftees to atomic radiation, dumping thousands of tons of Agent Orange defoliant over Indochina during the 1960s, the toxic burn pits of the Iraq war. Civilian leadership in this country needs to shed its adolescent awe of martial exploits and gain firm control over a very dangerous weapon.

Now that Joe Biden has withdrawn from the presidential campaign, Donald Trump, 78, himself becomes vulnerable on the issues of age and mental acuity, especially considering his own penchant for speaking in word salad. Like Biden, Trump is nowhere as sharp as he used to be.

The post One Senile Old Maniac Down, One To Go first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest developments from around the globe, including Biden’s plans to reform SCOTUS.    The show begins with attorney, broadcaster, and former Congressional staffer Rory Riley Topping sharing her perspective on Biden’s plans to reform SCOTUS.    Then, retired Navy captain and former city council candidate Armen Kurdian shares his perspective on Kamala Harris’s newly launched campaign.    The second hour starts with journalist, Youtuber, and author Peter Coffin joining to discuss Google search censoring Trump’s assassination attempt, and big tech’s role in U.S. elections.    The show closes with political analyst, host of ‘Pasta 2 Go’, and co-host of ‘The Convo Couch,’ Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula weighing in on the latest developments out of the Venezuelan elections.    The post The Final Countdown – 7/30/24 – Biden Makes Last Ditch Effort to Overhaul SCOTUS first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

It was a scene to behold: a union president delivering a booming, barn-burner speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee—“the first Teamster in our 121-year history” to address the Republican Party, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien told the cheering crowd. While the union hasn’t endorsed former President Donald Trump (yet), O’Brien’s appearance—and Trump’s pick of Ohio Senator and “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance as his running mate—aimed to solidify the bizarre notion that the Republican ticket is pro-labor and “economic populist.”

O’Brien’s speech was rousing and provocative, a stinging rebuke of corporate power and economic elitism, as the union leader railed against “an American worker being taken for granted. Workers being sold out to big banks, Big Tech corporates, and the elite.” It was a fiery populist speech you’d expect at a union convention, not promoting a Republican Party whose policies enable these conditions and oppose pro-worker solutions.

The convention didn’t cheer quite as loudly when O’Brien urged “legal protections that make it safer for workers to get a contract … Americans vote for unions but can never get a union contract.” As he rightly noted, “It’s only when Americans band together in democratic unions that we win real improvements on wages, benefits, and working conditions.”

One big problem: Trump, Vance, and the Republican Party have opposed every effort to support workers and unions. The facts show they have no record of supporting policies to improve workers’ lives.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler immediately countered the idea that Vance is pro-labor: “Working people know talk is cheap. JD Vance opposed the PRO Act [Protecting the Right to Organize], has a bill to let bosses bypass their workers with phony company unions, and voted against pro-worker NLRB and DOL appointments. No matter what he says, he’s refused to show up for working people where it counts.”

An AFL-CIO statement added that Vance “likes to play union supporter on the picket line, but his record proves that to be a sham,” noting that the senator “disparaged striking UAW members while collecting hefty donations from one of the major auto companies.”

Vance also cosponsored the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act, along with Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, which would effectively undermine labor unions by allowing voluntary “employee involvement organizations,” which would not be covered by collective-bargaining agreements and could be dissolved by an employer.

Trump, despite all his allegedly populist rhetoric, has a deeply anti-worker record from his first term.

In outlining “fifty reasons the Trump Administration is bad for workers,” the Economic Policy Institute wrote in 2020 that President Trump “systematically promoted the interests of corporate executives and shareholders over those of working people and failed to protect workers’ safety, wages, and rights.”

The previous Trump Administration failed to protect essential workers during the deadliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic; pushed to cut wages for migrant farmworkers, who already toil for poverty wages; undermined workers’ right to organize into unions; and betrayed all his promises to Rust Belt manufacturing workers by promoting the offshoring of manufacturing jobs through policies that “resulted in continued offshoring, including the net loss of nearly 1,800 factories between 2016 and 2018 and 740,000 manufacturing jobs since February 2020.”

Terri Gerstein, director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative, may have said it best: “Pro-worker is raising the minimum wage, ensuring people get overtime, supporting paid sick and family leave. Play-acting as working class by dressing up in jeans and acting aggrieved doesn’t do anything for real working people who are struggling.”

Shortly before midnight on 28 July, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that — with 80 percent of the over 20 million votes counted — the trend was irreversible: Nicolás Maduro had been re-elected president of Venezuela.

According to the CNE, Maduro received 51.2 percent of the vote, while his primary opponent, the little-known Edmundo Gonzales, received 44.02 percent. With that result, it was clear that the Venezuelan majority chose to continue the project of Bolivarian socialism introduced by Hugo Chavez at the end of the nineties. Recognizing the economic turn-around of the last two years and proud of their achievements in building 5.1 million housing units, securing food sovereignty, and deepening communal democracy, Venezuelans re-elected Maduro for a third six-year term.

A former ambassador to Argentina, the opposition candidate Gonzales replaced far-right leader Maria Corina Machado as the candidate of the Unity Platform after Machado was disqualified from running. Machado has long been an outspoken critic of Chavismo, supporting US sanctions and advocating foreign intervention in the country. In 2018, she asked Benjamin Netanyahu for military assistance in dismantling the Maduro government. Machado has close ties in the United States. In 2009, she was a Yale World Fellow. On June 23, 2024 she spoke at a National Endowment for Democracy awards ceremony in Washington, DC. She has been nicknamed the new “iron lady” after her idol Margaret Thatcher. In contrast, Maduro supports the Palestinian liberation struggle, linking it to the struggle of the indigenous peoples of Venezuela against colonial genocide.

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) organized over 200,000 neighborhood units across the country as part of its electoral strategy. Most of the units were led by women, who woke up their communities early on election day to encourage them to get to the polls. A key message was “1 + 10” – each voter should bring along ten friends. Maduro was also the presidential candidate for twelve additional parties. One of his campaign symbols was the rooster, popular in a working-class culture of cock-fighting as a fierce and fearless fighter. Throughout the campaign, Maduro sought to build a popular humanist and Christian socialism with a legacy stretching from indigenous, slave, peasant, and anti-colonial struggles into Venezuela’s present struggles against oligarchy and imperialism.

Maduro’s victory was hailed by leaders across Latin America and the Caribbean, with calls and tweets of congratulation from Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, and Honduras, and scores of others across Africa and Asia. Less than an hour before the official results were announced, far-right Argentinian President Javier Milei tweeted that the opposition had won an overwhelming victory, defeating the communist dictatorship in Venezuela. Argentina was one of a group of countries issuing a statement of concern about the election earlier in the evening – part of an expected attempt to discredit the results in advance. Other signatories included Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.

In a familiar pattern of undermining democracy in Venezuela and the wider region, the United States cast doubt on the results of the election. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the “US has serious concerns” about the announced results — a predictable sentiment given the Biden administration’s long-running opposition to the Maduro government, and its recent reinstatement of sanctions against it.

From here in Caracas, I can attest that U.S. doubts are unwarranted. In previous elections in Venezuela, election observers have sided with the Venezuelan electoral authorities' ability to run clean elections over US-organized skepticism — and opposition candidates have frequently won in those elections. Venezuela has one of the most advanced voting systems in the world. It includes multiple steps to verify the identity of voters, the accuracy of tabulations, and the reliability of results. While some international observers, such as Brazil and Mexico, have requested a full account of the “actas” tabulated by the CNE, the Venezuelan system has generally inspired confidence for its accessibility and security in previous elections.

Indeed, US doubts about Venezuela’s elections appear less as concerns that the people’s voice will not be heard, than that it will. The Bolivarian revolution rejects US imperialism. It demonstrates that even cruel sanctions and armies of social media bots engaging in ceaseless psychological warfare cannot defeat a people determined to be free. In his speech to the Chavistas gathered at the presidential palace in Miraflores following the announcement of his victory, Maduro described a massive early morning hacking attack that was foiled in its attempt to disrupt the electoral transmission system.

The last decade of sanctions and hyper-inflation has been tremendously hard for Venezuela. GDP plummeted 80 percent in under a decade. Over 7 million people left the country. The burning alive of Orlando Jose Figuera by far-right oppositionists in 2017, attempted assassination of Maduro in 2018, US-supported coup from Juan Guaido in 2019, and keystone cop-style invasion featuring mercenary former US Green Berets in 2020 demonstrated the violence of the revolution’s opponents and their imperialist backers.

Nevertheless, the Venezuelan people remain undaunted in their commitment to peace, dignity, dialogue, and the rule of law, as Maduro emphasized in multiple speeches in the last week of the campaign. Their faith in the Bolivarian project is a testament to the real achievements of the socialist government in weathering the 936 sanctions placed on the country by western governments and turning adversity into opportunity. For example, in response to crippling US sanctions on the CLAP program responsible for distributing food to millions of Venezuelan households, the Maduro government financed national production, empowering over 45,000 local supply committees, the majority women-led.

The Chavistas’ victory adds to the momentum following left victories in Mexico and France. The triumph against imperialism inspires popular movements across the globe, contributing to the sense that we are in the period of a new internationalism. Neoliberalism is crumbling and a battle is underway for what will replace it: war and oppression or peace and solidarity? The refusal of the opposition to accept the results of the election, and, indeed, their willingness to double down by claiming to have won over 70 percent of the vote and incite violence across the country demonstrates that the battle won’t be an easy one. But the courage of the Venezuelans in continuing to build a democratic Bolivarian socialism proves that a future of thriving communities is possible – when people have the will to defend them.

When the Biden Administration “ended” the Covid-19 public health emergency in March 2023 for over 20 million poor children and adults on Medicaid through “Medicaid Unwinding,” it had just extended Exchange health insurance subsidies which provided billions of taxpayer dollars to health insurance corporations, for that same pandemic.

Nowhere is the dictum “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” more apparent than in the decision to end continuous enrollment in Medicaid, which protected millions of poor children and adults during the pandemic from being kicked off Medicaid, and to enhance, and then continue, the Exchange health insurance subsidies through the Inflation Reduction Act.

But KFF.org, a nonprofit health policy research, polling, and news organization, is sounding the alarm: “The results of the 2024 elections will likely play a major role in whether the enhanced subsidies are extended beyond 2025.” Meaning, vote for the Democratic candidate, or these subsidies will be cut off.

If the Democrats want our votes, we must stop being satisfied with crumbs and raise our demands for a national, single payer, publicly financed, publicly owned health care system for all.

Who benefits from the subsidies on the Exchanges, also aptly called “The Marketplace”? Yes, people who earn “too much” to qualify for Medicaid (or who live in states which have not expanded Medicaid) but not enough to pay for private health insurance, benefit to some extent—but only in a warped kind of way. Depending on their level of poverty, these individuals and their families might qualify for zero-premium monthly payments with hefty deductibles.

KFF.org has a nifty calculator where you plug in your state, income, and size of family and figure out how much a “silver plan” will cost you. Keep reading the fine print, because even if you have $0 monthly premiums, your out-of-pocket annual costs could be as high as $6,300. This means that you pay $6,300 per year, or 6.3% of your annual income, before the insurance company starts to pay a penny for your care. Clearly, poor people benefit if they don’t get sick.

How much would a family of four, earning about $40,000 per year, pay for this “silver plan” without subsidies from the Exchanges? Over $1,400 per month! Wait! Is the insurance company giving poor people premiums for free?

No, not really. The government, using tax dollars, pays the insurance company $1,400 for the monthly premium (the calculations are a bit more complicated, but this is the general gist of the scam). The government pays the insurance company $17,796 annually to provide the family with a silver plan, plus the family pays the plan $6,300 out-of-pocket, if they need health care that year. The health insurance plan pockets over $24,000 every year before it spends a penny on care. And that’s if the plan doesn’t deny the family care, or make their doctor go through enough prior authorizations to discourage seeking care they’ve paid for.

In 2022, health insurance companies offering plans through the Exchanges made $20 billion. If the subsidies are extended permanently, as KFF suggests, the price tag, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be closer to $28 billion per year.

So, this election cycle, who is going to be voting for the Democrats? All the insurance company CEOs! They know who signs their checks.

There is an easier, more equitable, much less expensive way to fix this. Eliminate insurance companies and profits from health care altogether. If the Democrats want our votes, we must stop being satisfied with crumbs and raise our demands for a national, single payer, publicly financed, publicly-owned health care system for all. The health of our nation depends on it.

Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” nearly 2,000 years ago for the extravagant entertainment the Roman Empire used to distract attention from imperial policies that caused widespread discontent. Imagine the lavish banquets, gladiatorial bouts, use and abuse of young men and women for the pleasure of the rich, and so much more that characterized the later years of that empire. And none of it seems that far off from the situation we, in these increasingly dis-United States, find ourselves in today.

Although the Roman Empire described itself as being in favor of life and peace, the various Caesars and their enablers regularly dealt death and destruction in their wake. They spread the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), including a taxation system that left the poor in debt servitude, a military that caused terror and violence across the then-known world, and a ruling authority that pitted whole communities against each other, while legislating who could associate with whom (passing marriage laws, for instance, that banned gay, inter-racial, or even cross-class marriages). The emperor in power in Jesus’s time, Caesar Augustus, was known for ushering in a Golden Age of Moral Values that went hand in hand with that Pax Romana, and it meant war and death, especially for the poor.

Perhaps scarier than either Trump’s or Vance’s connection to this regressive plan, however, is the fact that, despite popular distaste for such policies, it may not take a second Trump presidency to implement significant parts of Project 2025.

Fast forward millennia and that world bears a strange resemblance to the media distractions, violence, and regressive policies that MAGA and other extremists are pushing forward in our times. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s assertion that “I alone can fix your problems”; Supreme Court and state legislative attacks on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and trans youth in the name of family values; cuts to welfare, healthcare, worker’s rights and other life-sustaining programs to protect corporate interests; the militarizing of endless communities by allowing guns (especially AR-15 rifles) to proliferate, while offering only thoughts and prayers to the victims of violence, the MAGA movement is promoting culture wars and extremist policies under the banner of Christian nationalism. In doing so, its leaders are perfecting a disdain for the excluded, exploited, and rejected that hurts the poor first and worst, but impacts all of society.

And now, after decades of neoliberal plunder and the coronation of an avowed Christian nationalist — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — to the third most powerful position in the government, the Christian Right and its wealthy patrons have their eyes set on an even more ambitious power-grab: Project 2025. Articulated through the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, it’s a sprawling plan to maximize presidential power with hundreds of newly trained and deployed political operatives during Donald Trump’s next presidency. It was seen in full display recently at the Republican National Convention and made all the more likely by the recent assassination attempt against him with (yes!) an AR-15! The nearly 900-page document outlines a plan to ramp up U.S. military might, slash social welfare programs, and prioritize “traditional marriage.” A reflection of the Republican Party today, including several Christian nationalist organizations and billionaire funders listed among its 100 institutional sponsors, Project 2025 is a roadmap for what could be thought of as a new Pax Romana.

The Formal Project 2025 Takeover

As Project 2025’s official website explains (and doesn’t this sound like it could come directly from the mouth of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance?): “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Although its authors unabashedly deploy the language of conservative populism — decrying wokeness and “cultural Marxists” — the plan is chiefly concerned with how to put ever greater control of both people and resources in the hands of a small minority of mostly white, mostly male, wealthy Christians.

The wholesale capture of the state is the ultimate goal of its Christian nationalist architects. Project 2025 simply clarifies just how they plan to implement their drive for power. Each of its sections — from “taking the reins of government” by centralizing executive authority in the office of the President to securing “the common defense” by expanding every branch of the military — is worth reviewing.

The longest section focuses on “general welfare” and it should be no surprise that the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development are subject to significant cutbacks, including:

• Imposing yet stricter eligibility standards, work requirements, and asset tests to constrain access to Medicaid, even though more than 23 million Americans have been unenrolled from that program since 2023;
• Revisiting how the “Thrifty Food Plan” is formulated to minimize food-stamp allocations, while imposing onerous work requirements on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), even though most of its recipients work and/or are in households with children, elderly people, or people with disabilities;
• Ending universal free school meals by removing the “community eligibility provision,” which allows school districts with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch programs to all children in need;
• Eliminating Head Start, which has served 39 million children and families since 1965 and currently serves more than 800,000 poor families with young children, while shuttering the Department of Education;
• Ending “Housing First” programs and prohibiting non-citizens, including mixed-status families, from living in low-income public housing; and
• Imposing a “life agenda” and a “family agenda” that will restrict access to abortion and reproductive rights, and otherwise curtail LGBTQ+ rights.

Such proposals would undoubtedly be deeply unpopular. In fact, as people learn more about Project 2025, opposition is growing, even across party lines. Most Americans want a government that would provide for the down-and-out, who are a growing segment of the population and the electorate, as well as one that supports abortion rights, voting rights, and the freedom of expression. At least 40% of us — 135-140 million people — are either poor or one emergency away from economic ruin, including 80 million eligible voters. Project 2025’s social welfare cuts would, in fact, push significant numbers of people across the poverty line into financial ruin.

Even Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as attention has moved toward its distinctly (di)visionary agenda. However, more than half of the project’s listed authors, editors, or contributors were once part of his administration — and no one doubts that his vice-presidential nominee is 100% pro-Project 2025!

The Informal Takeover Already Underway

Perhaps scarier than either Trump’s or Vance’s connection to this regressive plan, however, is the fact that, despite popular distaste for such policies, it may not take a second Trump presidency to implement significant parts of Project 2025. In this sense, it reflects the ancient world of the Pax Romana. Rather than being dependent on particular emperors, its “peace” was a political and ideological program that punished the poor and marginalized so many, while keeping all its subjects in line.

From its recent rulings, it’s clear that the Supreme Court is hastening Project 2025’s agenda judicially, both in terms of specific future policies and the executive power grab at the heart of that mandate (and now of that court’s rulings). In June, for instance, it ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which enacted a law to fine, jail, and ultimately expel its unhoused residents. That precedent will only exacerbate the already hostile terrain confronting unhoused people, seeding firm ground to 2025’s plan to eliminate even more housing projects.

Worse yet, as the Nation’s Elie Mystal recently made clear, in just a few weeks of rulings, the court “legalized bribery of public officials, declared the president of the United States absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for ‘official acts,’ and made the power to issue regulations subject to the court’s unelected approval.” As he warns, “There’s no legislative fix for the problems the court has created… [and] they will continue to do all the things Republicans want that nobody elected them to do.”

In addition, in the legislative arena, Congressional debates around the Farm Bill echo Project 2025’s plan to cut food assistance by limiting updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, the current formula that determines SNAP allocations. For example, at the state level, a Republican supermajority in Kansas voted last year to override the governor’s veto and enact work requirements for older recipients of SNAP benefits.

Overall, various Project 2025 priorities are already being implemented at the state and local level, with reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, social welfare programs, and unhoused people under serious threat in Republican-run states across the country. Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, 21 states have enacted full or partial bans on abortion. Meanwhile, far-right groups like Moms of Liberty are seeking to capture local school boards as part of a “war on wokeness.”

There is also a multi-state strategy underway to preempt community-led efforts to implement guaranteed income programs. At least 10 states have challenged basic income programs with legislative bans, funding restrictions, constitutional challenges, and court injunctions, while four Republican-led states — Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and South Dakota — have already completely prohibited such programs.

And in lockstep with Project 2025’s call for military expansion, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker recently released a report proposing that $55 billion be added to the Pentagon’s already humongous budget in fiscal year 2025 while raising military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in the next five to seven years. The report, “Peace Through Strength,” revives the false idea that spending ever more on war preparations makes us safer. Not only is Wicker distorting Cold War history, but his prescriptions ignore our experience of the past 20 years of military buildup and the disastrous Global War on Terror. According to the Costs of War Project and the National Priorities Project, this country’s post-9/11 wars have cost at least $8 trillion, taken millions of lives, and displaced tens of millions of people globally, while precipitating climate chaos through their polluting emissions. If implemented, Wicker’s plan would only increase the risk of yet more destabilizing conflicts, offering a modern Pax Romana promise for yet more war and death.

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

While extremist Republican politicians and appointees are leading the way on Project 2025, both major parties align around building up the war economy. Indeed, bipartisan support for military aid to Israel is contributing to what the United Nations has labeled a genocide in Gaza.

Nor is this new. Every year, the Pentagon budget invariably passes with widespread bipartisan support, even if a few representatives vote otherwise. Since the 9/11 attacks, in fact, $21 trillion has been funneled into war, surveillance, policing, border control, and incarceration. In Fiscal Year 2023, nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget funded the military-industrial complex and militarized spending. This year, a Democratic amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act will automatically register every male citizen and resident aged 18-26 in the selective service database. This measure has only passed in the House of Representatives, but it suggests interest across party lines in increasing the number of individuals who could someday be called up for military service. While this is not (yet) a draft, it hints at one — and it was introduced by Pennsylvania’s Democratic Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan.

The state and local counterpart to militarism is support for the police. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers seem intent on adopting “tough on crime” legislation, including hiring more police officers, deploying the National Guard more widely, expanding surveillance measures, and recriminalizing drug possession. Of course, the 1033 program allows local police forces to be armed and trained by the U.S. military.

This remarkably bipartisan consensus for a war economy shouldn’t just be considered another “issue,” but an approach to governance that relies on force and violence, rather than consent, to establish social control. And as noted above, the nation may have automatic registration for the selective service system before we have automatic registration to vote. After all, the same Congress that supports ever more resources for war has failed to stop voter suppression, expand voting rights, or adequately protect our democracy.

Jobs and Homes, Not Death in the Streets

The greatest violence of the Pax Romana was always borne by the poor, who were often ripped from their families, enslaved in back-breaking labor, and dispossessed of their land and resources. To maintain its authoritarian rule over millions of people, the Roman Empire relied on its military might and the fear inspired by its brutal army. And yet it was from the ranks of the poor that Jesus and his disciples led a non-violent revolution for peace.

As in other moments of history, the struggle of the poor for life and dignity in a world that denies them both is a struggle for the best that we can be as a society.

Today, tens of millions of poor people in this country are on the front lines of our failing democracy and increasingly militarized society. They are the true canaries in the coal mine, already living through the violence of a society that has prioritized war and profits over addressing the pain and toll of low-wage jobs, crushing debt burdens, polluted water and land, and lives cut short by poverty, the police, and the denial of basic human rights. They can undoubtedly also foresee the drive toward an ever-deeper warfare state and the possible fallout from Project 2025 if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance win this year.

Forged in the crucible of violence, the criminalized and impoverished still call out for a true peace.

On June 29th, Reverend Savina Martin, a military veteran and formerly homeless mother, took to the stage of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Assembly in Washington, D.C., and shared these thoughts:

“I am a US Army veteran and I was impacted by homelessness many years ago. Today, thousands of homeless veterans are fighting for [their] benefits, housing… navigating a complex system while sick and suffering, trying to survive the war waged against the poor. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson permits cities to criminalize homelessness by enforcing bans on sleeping outside when no shelter is available. How can sleeping while homeless be against the law? If you sleep, you get arrested?
“This system depends on us to fight their wars, but we can’t depend on [our government] to guarantee housing or healthcare? Instead, [our government] allocates $1.1 trillion to war, weapons, and a system that criminalizes the poor, leading to mass incarceration, deportations, and detentions. We want jobs and homes, not death in the streets.”

Savina was speaking of the war on the poor, the power of the military-industrial complex, and an extremist agenda that will connect her in unsettling ways with 140 million poor and low-income people in this country — and billions more around the world. As in other moments of history, the struggle of the poor for life and dignity in a world that denies them both is a struggle for the best that we can be as a society. In their leadership lies the hope for us all — not in Project 2025, a future Trump administration, or the all-too-devastating version of a Pax Americana that would go with it, but in the peace (and justice) that Savina and so many others are demanding, and will continue to push for, until it is ours.

Before Medicare was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson 59 years ago today, nearly half of American seniors had no hospital insurance. Private insurance companies were reluctant to cover anyone over 65. Even fewer seniors had coverage for non-hospital services like doctor’s visits. Many of the elderly were forced to exhaust their retirement savings to pay for medical care; some fell into poverty because of it. All of that changed with Medicare.

In Medicare’s first year of coverage, poverty decreased by 66% among the senior population. From 1965, when Medicare was enacted, to 1994, life expectancy at age 65 increased nearly three full years. This was no coincidence. Access to Medicare coverage for those who were previously uninsured helped lift seniors out of poverty and extend their lives.

As with Social Security, workers would contribute with each paycheck toward their future Medicare benefits. Upon putting his signature on this new program, a keystone of the Great Society, President Johnson declared, “Every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in old age.”

Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump presidency, would gut traditional Medicare by accelerating privatization and repealing drug price negotiation.

Medicare has been improved several times over the decades. In 1972, Americans with disabilities (under 65 years of age) became eligible for Medicare coverage—along with people suffering from chronic kidney disease needing dialysis or transplants. In 2003, prescription drug coverage was added to Medicare (though the program was prohibited from negotiating prices with drugmakers). The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 finally empowered Medicare to negotiate prices with Big Pharma—and lowered seniors’ costs by capping their out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs and insulin.

Nearly 60 years after it was enacted, Medicare is one of the most popular and efficient federal programs. Ninety-four percent of beneficiaries say they are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their quality of care. Unlike many other federal programs, Medicare spends less than 2% of its budget on administrative costs.

Medicare isn’t perfect. It should be expanded to cover dental, hearing, and vision care. More urgently, though, the privatized version of the program, Medicare Advantage (MA), is gobbling up a larger share of the program despite myriad problems, including MA insurers overbilling the government and denying care that’s always offered by traditional Medicare. The Biden-Harris administration has been working to hold those private plans more accountable, but much remains to be done to protect traditional Medicare from efforts toward privatization.

Even after 59 years of Medicare’s overall success, we must continually defend Medicare against conservatives’ attempts to cut and privatize the program. Our founder, Rep. James Roosevelt, Sr. (D-Calif.), son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, knew that Medicare (along with Social Security) would need continuous advocacy to withstand assaults from antagonistic political forces. That’s why the word “preserve” is in our organization’s name.

Many conservatives opposed Medicare from the start, labeling it “socialism” and “socialized medicine.” In 1962, Ronald Reagan warned that if Medicare were to be enacted, “One of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Today, the onslaught continues. The House Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) 2025 budget proposes to cut Medicare by an estimated $1 trillion over the next decade. The RSC would replace Medicare’s current system with vouchers, and push seniors into private plans that can and do deny coverage. Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump presidency, would gut traditional Medicare by accelerating privatization and repealing drug price negotiation.

Democrats by and large support protecting and even expanding Medicare. President Joe Biden tried to add dental, vision, and hearing coverage in his Build Back Better Act, but encountered resistance from Republicans and centrist Democrats. It’s still a laudable goal.

Republicans, for the most part, advocate cutting Medicare benefits and privatization. We endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, because she knows the importance of Medicare to America’s seniors and people with disabilities—and has vowed to protect them. Former President Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been rhetorically all over the map on this topic, telling CNBC he is “open” to “cutting entitlements” but claiming to support Medicare. (His budgets as president called for billions of dollars in Medicare cuts.)

The 59th anniversary of Medicare is both an occasion for celebrating the program’s enormous successes over the past six decades—and a time to defend Medicare in the marbled halls of Washington, D.C., and at the ballot box this November.