The stürm und drang all over the media this week is about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, on Monday, doubling down on his tariffs saying that he’d impose across-the-board 25% tariffs on all goods from China, Mexico, and Canada until there’s no more fentanyl or undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming into the U.S.

That’s a substantial lift, and if he follows through with the threat (which seems likely, although I’d bet money that he’ll drill lots of holes in those tariffs to satisfy corporate donors) it’ll cause a considerable disruption in American commerce. Those three countries, after all, account for more than 40% of all American trade.

Weirdly, Trump may be doing the Democrats a favor by taking this position, and I don’t mean the possibility that he’ll wreck the economy and thus his party’s chances in 2026 and 2028 (although that’s real, too).

Tariffs can be a good thing for a country, if done right.

Tariff-free trade was a central cornerstone of former President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal agenda; he and George H.W. Bush wrote the NAFTA agreement that Bill Clinton later signed, for example. I lay this out in considerable detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America. Tragically, Bill Clinton and his Larry Sommers/Robert Rubin crew embraced neoliberalism with gusto, putting the final nail in the meaningful use of tariffs to protect American manufacturing and the jobs associated with it.

Democrats like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have been working for years to pull the Democratic Party back from the neoliberal free trade brink, and if Trump pushes through his tariffs in a big way it may help shatter what’s left of the neoliberal consensus (at least with regard to trade) in the Democratic Party. That would be a Very Good Thing, both for the Party and for the nation.

Tariffs can be a good thing for a country, if done right. People who grew up in the Midwest (like me) know all about tariffs; we learned about them as children (I remember 5th Grade civics!).

Trump, however, did them so badly last time that they backfired, cost us a fortune, and forced the federal government to subsidize Midwestern farmers. Odds are, if he keeps to his current rhetoric, he’ll do the same, and Democrats should be ready with reasonable talking points; this could end up working tremendously to their advantage if they’re willing to embrace reasonable tariffs and other trade protections to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

So, let’s reexamine how tariffs can work when done right, their role in American history, and why we should be discussing them now without hysterics.

Tariffs are taxes paid to the federal government on imported goods. And, like all taxes, they have two purposes: to raise revenue and to alter behavior. In the case of import tariffs, the second purpose (changing behavior, in this case encouraging entrepreneurs to start manufacturing companies aka factories here in America) is far more important than the first.

It all began here in America when General Henry Knox rode up to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1789 to tell George Washington that Congress had just elected him as the first president of the United States. Washington took the news, and had two requests for his old friend.

First, he asked Knox to let folks know he’d be delayed by a few days because he wanted to say goodbye to his mother, who was elderly and ailing (turned out, it was the last time he saw her alive).

Second, Washington asked General Knox to ride all the way up to Connecticut to visit Daniel Hinsdale, a man who’d been secretly manufacturing black-market American-made fine men’s clothing in defiance of British law for decades. Knox took Washington’s measurements and then, a month later, brought to New York (where the swearing-in took place on what is now Wall Street) a fine American-made suit, which Washington proudly wore. (The suit was brown; the black suit of his later, famous painting was British formal wear.)

This incident highlighted the manufacturing crisis facing our new nation, and Washington was acutely aware of it.

The British, for two centuries, had been extracting wealth from the American colonies by forbidding us from manufacturing everything from fine clothing (thus Hinsdale’s illegal business) to weaponry to sophisticated machinery: All such items had to be imported from British manufacturers. We sold England cheap raw cotton, for example, and they forced us to buy back expensive fine cotton clothing manufactured on the looms of British cities. (Homespun was still legal in the colonies.)

They also forced us to buy tea—then the primary American beverage—from the East India Company, an outrage that led directly to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which arguably kicked off the American Revolution. Thus, when Washington came into office, the first challenge he faced was how to build an American manufacturing base that wasn’t dependent on British imports.

Thirteen years before Washington’s inauguration, British economist Adam Smith had made worldwide headlines with his bestselling 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposing that the main thing that made a country rich was independence in manufacturing.

The process of converting raw materials of little value into finished products with a high value (manufacturing) was, to Smith’s mind, the best and only practical way a nation could grow wealthy without overseas conquest and plunder.

A tree limb laying on the forest floor, for example, had no monetary value, but when labor and the tool of a knife were applied to it and it was turned into an axe-handle—a process called manufacturing—it now had a value that could be passed down through generations.

Smith called that wealth. That axe-handle became part of the aggregate wealth of the entire nation, and even if it was sold overseas that wealth would still remain here because its value was simply converted into currency which stayed in America.

This understanding led President Washington to commission his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to propose to Congress in 1791 an 11-step Report on the Subject of Manufactures, also known as The American Plan.

At the core of Hamilton’s plan were protective tariffs on goods that were then being imported but could be easily made in the USA. The tariffs would increase the price of the imported goods so much that they’d encourage American entrepreneurs to start factories to make the same things here.

(Hamilton’s plan also included government subsidies for companies that wanted to move manufacturing to the U.S., federal subsidies for the development of new technologies, a massive investment in infrastructure [particularly roads and water-power systems] to support industry, and a requirement that the U.S. government purchase only American-made products whenever possible.)

Within two decades, Congress and the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations had put nearly all of Hamilton’s plan into effect, and major parts of it stood all the way up until Reagan’s neoliberal revolution kicked off in 1981.

Today, you’ll search for hours to find a single made-in-America product in most big-box stores.

Hamilton’s plan was such a successful and important part of how America became the wealthiest nation on Earth, and produced so much revenue, that virtually 100% of the cost of operating our federal government—from our founding until the Civil War—came from tariffs. The salary of every president from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln was paid by tariffs (some were domestic interstate tariffs, like on alcohol), as was the salary of every federal official and the cost of everything else the federal government did.

Fully two-thirds of federal government revenue came from tariffs from the end of the Civil War until the World War I era and the 1913 passage of the 16th Amendment (the income tax); a third of federal government revenue came from tariffs between WWI and WWII.

Today, however, it is under 2%.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing—kept on this continent by the force of tariffs—was at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: If a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with U.S. labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs.

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus).

And then came the neoliberal sales pitch of the 1980s, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

If only we could get rid of those nasty tariffs—we had over 20,000 categories of products with specified tariffs—by reducing them to zero or very, very low numbers, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton told us, then American consumers would benefit because big retailers like Walmart could buy products made with cheap labor from overseas instead of from higher-paid American workers. Prices, in other words, would be lower for consumers.

The result has been the shuttering of over 70,000 U.S. factories and the loss of around 8 million good often-unionized manufacturing jobs. It typically takes companies between one and two decades to shift manufacturing overseas, given how large a logistical operation it involves, and reversing the process will probably also take a decade or two.

Entire regions of America were wiped out, producing a swath of our country now referred to as the “rust belt.” The situation was compounded by the Bush administration’s and the Supreme Court’s hostility to union rights.

Since Reagan’s “free trade” we’ve had nothing but annual trade deficits, each representing trillions in American worker’s wealth that’s been shifted to overseas manufacturing countries.

Sam Walton’s autobiography, titled Made in America, epitomized the situation prior to Reaganism when Walmart stores had big “100% Made In America” banners hanging over their front doors. Today, you’ll search for hours to find a single made-in-America product in most big-box stores.

How do we bring back tariffs and how do we avoid a trade war disaster like Trump caused during his first presidency?

Around that same time, another rationale for corporations seeking cheap labor and easy pollution regulations overseas began to take hold in the minds of the neoliberal intelligentsia: “Free trade,” they said, was so magical it could even bring about world peace!

The argument was simple, the neoliberals told us: History showed, they said, that countries that traded heavily with each other rarely went to war with each other. The example most often cited was that no two countries with MacDonald’s burger outlets had ever, at that time, gone to war (although they have since: see Russia and Ukraine).

Thomas Friedman jumped into the act at the end of the 20th century, promoting the MacDonalds’ Peace Theory and the transfer of American manufacturing overseas with his now-discredited 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Its impact, along with major campaigns encouraging “free trade” funded by American industrial and retail giants and their billionaire owners, echoed across American manufacturing and foreign policy for the next 20 years, as America continued to hemorrhage jobs along with the middle class “American Dream” wealth that accompanied them.

As a vast proportion of American manufacturing shifted to China, that nation—just like Hamilton predicted and proved with the U.S.—underwent the most rapid transformation from Third World poverty to First World affluence in the history of the world.

All because the “wealth” of America was transferred to China every time a cash-register rang at Walmart, an Apple Store, or in pretty much any other American retail outlet. And continues to this day.

So, how do we bring back tariffs and how do we avoid a trade war disaster like Trump caused during his first presidency?

The main goal of an import tariff is to encourage Americans to buy the products of domestic—rather than foreign—manufacturing. For that to work, companies that may consider investing billions in factories here in the U.S. need to know that the tariffs aren’t just a whim or election stunt like they were with Trump, but will be around for the coming years or even decades necessary to recover their initial billion-dollar investments in new manufacturing facilities.

Just because Trump was conceptually right about tariffs (but terribly wrong in how he executed them) doesn’t mean Democrats should freak out at any mention of them.

Tariffs also need to be brought in on an item-by-item basis, organically, with each imported item that we want to put a tariff onto examined for the tariff’s impact, both on domestic inflation and international relations.

We really have no need to put a tariff on, for example, imported artwork from Mexico or moose-skin jackets from Canada; there’s no competing domestic industry here. It’s why Trump’s proposed “across-the-board” tariffs are so stupid.

But the manufacture of cars, steel, chips, computers, toys, clothes, pharmaceuticals, and hundreds of other products and categories of goods can be brought back to the U.S. by appropriate tariffs, introduced gradually and predictably, done in a way that allows both foreign companies and U.S. entrepreneurs to adjust without major disruptions.

There’s also a national security aspect to this. Right now, it’s nearly impossible for the U.S. to manufacture a battleship or advanced aircraft without parts from overseas. Because tariffs had kept virtually all manufacturing here in the U.S. prior to WWII, shifting to a war-based manufacturing economy in the 1940s, before Reagan’s neoliberal “reforms,” was easy. Today it would be extremely difficult.

On top of that, we no longer make most therapeutic drugs here in America. China makes many of the raw ingredients for the drugs we use here, and most pharmaceuticals used in America are manufactured there and in India.

One result is that often drugs we take are contaminated because they’re made in plants outside the U.S.; an old friend got cancer from taking a drug contaminated by a toxic chemical, and my father got bladder cancer from taking a drug contaminated in India with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).

Also alarming, if we got into a serious conflict with China (for example) and they cut us off from all their manufactured goods, our economy would collapse overnight and we’d find it very, very difficult to manufacture some of our most important weaponry and telecommunications equipment. Not to mention the crisis of a massive drug shortage.

Thus, tariffs have to be put into place intelligently; after all, we’re reversing a neoliberal free trade process that took 44 years to get as bad as it is today.

We don’t want to start trade wars—like Trump did the first time with his tariff stunt and is threatening to do again in January—or wipe out people in poor countries (like Bangladesh or Malaysia, where much of our clothing is made), but we do want the “wealth of [our] nation” to be built and kept here.

We do this by having Congress openly discuss and debate tariffs, apply them gradually, and accompany them with supports for the poorer parts of the world that may be harmed by them, assisting them in developing sustainable domestic industries to replace their export losses.

This is not a radical idea.

China uses tariffs (and dozens of other trade restrictions) to protect its domestic industries. The European Union imposes tariffs on agricultural products to protect its farmers (averaging around 11.4%) as well as industrial goods (averaging around 4.1%). Some industries, like dairy products (38.4% E.U. tariffs) and confectionery products (24.6%), have asked for and gotten even higher E.U. tariffs to keep them viable domestically.

And, of course, that’s how America became the richest country in the world, and the loss of tariffs is a major part of why our standard of living has slipped so badly over these past 44 years of our neoliberal Reaganism experiment. Our wealth, along with our manufacturing and jobs, was simply shipped overseas—and now we must begin the process of bringing it back home.

Democrats know this, even if they’re unwilling to talk about it. The Biden administration took some good steps in this direction by imposing or maintaining multiple tariffs, and they’re already increased American prosperity, particularly for working people.

President Joe Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% this year; tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by 2025; tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% this year; tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid-19 crisis, the Biden administration put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

This is not a black-and-white issue. Yes, tariffs are a tax and, until domestic manufacturing replaces foreign imports, they’re a tax that’s mostly passed along to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods.

But when done right and gradually, those higher prices open the door for American companies to again become competitive, to manufacture goods here—and thus keep our jobs and our “wealth” here—while raising the wages and standard of living of American workers and people around the world.

Just because Trump was conceptually right about tariffs (but terribly wrong in how he executed them) doesn’t mean Democrats should freak out at any mention of them. They’re an important part—as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington taught us—of creating and maintaining wealth and independence for our nation.

And voters in the Rust Belt states know all this already.

As Trump behaves like a bull in a china shop, ready to slap punitive and politically-motivated tariffs on our top trading partners, expect considerable market and overall economic dislocation; a recession is a probable outcome.

But as he shatters the neoliberal tariff consensus, Democrats should rise to the occasion and argue for rational, targeted, and gradual tariffs, taking the Party back to its pre-1980s positions on trade.

And then they’ll be well positioned to both exploit the issue and rescue the American economy in 2026 and 2028 after Trump’s done his worst.

Black Friday, once just a day to kick off holiday shopping, has evolved into a global phenomenon of massive sales, frenzied spending, and record-breaking profits for corporations. But beneath the allure of door-buster deals lies a complex web of wealth inequality, labor exploitation, and environmental damage. This annual shopping spree is more than a rush for discounts—it reflects systemic issues in our economy and society.

The Pressure to Buy More

Retailers carefully orchestrate Black Friday sales to create a sense of urgency. Promotions like “limited-time offers” or “flash sales” are designed to trigger FOMO (fear of missing out), leading consumers to purchase items they often don’t need. According to a 2022 survey by the National Retail Federation, Americans spent over $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, a 2.3% increase from the previous year. Despite rising living costs, this cycle of compulsive consumption continues, fueled by psychological manipulation and relentless marketing.

This system benefits large corporations disproportionately. For instance, Amazon’s Black Friday sales accounted for 17% of total U.S. online shopping in 2022, reinforcing its dominance in retail. However, while corporations and shareholders celebrate record profits, consumers often feel trapped in debt. Total U.S. consumer credit card debt exceeded $1 trillion in 2023, a stark reminder of the financial strain induced by events like Black Friday.

The Hidden Cost of Low-Wage Workers

The people enabling these shopping extravaganzas—warehouse employees, retail workers, and delivery drivers—often face the most significant exploitation. Many of these jobs are low-wage, part-time, and seasonal, offering little stability.

• Retail workers earn a median hourly wage of just $16.19, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023).

• In Amazon warehouses, workers are pushed to their limits, with fulfillment centers reporting injury rates nearly twice the industry average.

On Black Friday, the situation worsens. Retail employees are forced to work long hours, often on Thanksgiving, sacrificing time with family. Meanwhile, the CEOs of major retailers see their earnings skyrocket.

For example, in 2022, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon earned $25.7 million, while the company’s median worker pay was just $27,136—a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 933:1.

This stark disparity highlights a broader trend: while worker productivity has increased by 61.8% since 1979, wages have grown by only 17.5%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Black Friday encapsulates this imbalance, as the wealthiest continue profiting from the labor and spending of those struggling to make ends meet.

The Big Winners: Corporations and Shareholders

Major corporations like Walmart, Amazon, and Target dominate Black Friday, consolidating their power over the retail market. In 2023 alone, Amazon’s global Black Friday sales surpassed $10 billion, bolstering the wealth of its largest shareholders, including founder Jeff Bezos.

• Bezos’s net worth grew by $14 billion during the 2023 holiday season, underscoring the widening wealth gap.

• Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of U.S. households control just 1% of the nation’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 data.

Black Friday serves as a microcosm of this inequality. Consumers spend billions to fuel corporate profits, while low-wage workers and underpaid suppliers see little to no benefit.

Environmental Impact: The Cost of Overproduction

Black Friday’s environmental consequences are staggering. The demand for fast, cheap goods drives overproduction, resulting in waste, pollution, and resource depletion. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 12 million tons of furniture and clothing are discarded annually in the U.S., much purchased during sales events like Black Friday.

The transportation of goods contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, in 2022, global shipping for Black Friday orders generated an estimated 6 million tons of CO₂, equivalent to the annual emissions of 1.2 million cars.

The problem is compounded by the “planned obsolescence” of many products, particularly electronics. Items like smartphones and TVs are replaced frequently due to new models and sales, leading to an e-waste crisis. The Global E-Waste Monitor reported that 57.4 million metric tons of electronic waste were discarded worldwide in 2021, with less than 20% adequately recycled.

Rethinking Black Friday

Black Friday exposes the cracks in our economic system: unchecked consumerism, wealth concentration, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. Addressing these issues requires systemic change and individual action.

1. Buy Less, Buy Better: Support local businesses, invest in quality over quantity, and resist the pressure to buy unnecessary items. Adopting sustainable shopping habits can reduce waste and promote ethical consumption.

2. Advocate for Workers: Push for higher wages and better working conditions. Organizations like the Fight for $15 campaign continue to call for a living wage for retail and service workers.

3. Support Environmental Initiatives: Consider the environmental impact of your purchases. Look for brands prioritizing sustainable materials and ethical labor practices.

Black Friday should no longer be a day of exploitation and excess. Instead, let’s reimagine it as an opportunity to reflect on our values and work toward a fairer, more sustainable future where people and the planet take precedence over profits.

"Predictions of increased jobs and prosperity under the WTO system have failed abysmally. Inequalities have soared, leaving hundreds of millions impoverished while billionaires metastasise like cancer,"—Deborah James in Al Jazeera, 5 years ago.

The organizers' N30History.org site writes:

On November 30, 1999, a public uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and transformed downtown Seattle into a festival of resistance. Tens of thousands of people joined the nonviolent direct action blockade which encircled the WTO conference site, completely preventing conference meetings from dawn till dusk. We held the blockade in the face of an army of federal, state, and local police making extensive use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber, plastic and wooden bullets, concussion grenades, and armored vehicles. After five days of protests and resistance, the talks at the WTO conference collapsed in failure.

25 years ago, for the six months leading up to the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle in 1999, I met Deborah in organizing meetings to prepare. Today, while many of us continue our efforts for a better world in many different places and movements, for 25 years Deborah has remained in constant combat with the WTO, together with global movements as part of the Our World is Not for Sale network. I asked if they could share insights on the impacts of the Seattle WTO confrontation and the current threat of the WTO–including obstruction of the needed transition off fossil fuels and the growing domination of Big Tech.

David Solnit: What impact did the 1999 mass nonviolent direct action shut down and protest have on the WTO and plans for the global economy?

Deborah James: If the round of negotiations to expand the WTO, the so-called Millennium round that WTO proponents tried to launch in Seattle, had concluded, the world would be a much more unequal, exploitative, and ecologically devastated place. We actually stopped a terrible, no-good institution from getting even worse. This is the legacy that I have tried to uphold in the subsequent 25 years of focusing my life: stopping the expansion of the World Trade Organization.

WTO After Seattle

Seattle mass blockades shut down the WTO on November 30, 1999. (Photo: Dana Schuerholz)

What happened after Seattle, when developing countries rose up and put a stop to another round of neoliberal expansion, is extremely important. Developing countries had realized that they had gotten a bad deal at the founding of the WTO, that it was actually a deal written by the big corporate interests of the U.S. and Europe for their mutual benefit and for the exclusion of developing countries from the gains of trade.

After Seattle, neoliberal proponents realized that they would have to compromise with developing countries if they wanted to launch a WTO expansion.

Since 2001, developed countries have never agreed to a single one of the demands of developing countries for flexibilities to the existing harmful rules; that was envisioned as the core of the Doha round. In fact, around 2015, the United States stated that it would no longer participate in any negotiations under the framework of the development agenda. Many other countries followed suit. Nevertheless, WTO developing country members never agreed to give up the development mandate that their ministers set in 2001, and reaffirmed many times since. Instead, most negotiations in the WTO have centered on the developed countries agenda of WTO expansion, in agriculture, non-agriculture market access, services, and more.

In one instant, the cops asked her, "Where to next?" I responded, "To Starbucks!" A few minutes later I was on top of a van, microphone in hand, leading a protest against Starbucks for carrying sweatshop coffee.

As terrible as the WTO is, it could be a lot worse. Without this ability to hold a strong defensive line of the development agenda, which directly followed the Seattle collapse, WTO members would have significantly expanded the WTO in the last 25 years. For example, at the time of the founding of the WTO, most developing countries found the radical deregulatory rules of the "General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)" to represent far too big of a sellout to foreign giant services corporations than they envisioned for their domestic economies with regards to services.

Most developing countries kept services like education, healthcare, water and electricity distribution, municipal services, environmental services, financial services, and many others out of the GATS. Giant services corporations, such as the financial industry, pushed extremely hard for developing countries to agree to "bind" more of their services sectors to the WTO deregulatory and privatization agenda. They mostly failed. This means that developing countries still have much of that regulatory space that they preserved. Unless, of course, they gave it up through a bilateral or regional trade agreement.

One important gain won by developing countries was that domestic food security programs, which largely do not affect trade, can be exempt from WTO disciplines under certain conditions. The program is far too limited to really scale back the way that WTO rules exacerbate hunger and the impoverishment of farmers, but it was a very hard-won step in the right direction for countries to be able to guarantee the Right to Food of their citizens. We are still fighting to expand this agreement to cover more crops, to be available to more countries, and with fewer conditions that make it extremely difficult to use.

DS: What are some lessons do you carry with you today?

Deborah James: I carry a lot of lessons from those days.

One, that real organizing of that scale takes a lot of resources, a lot of time, but it also takes a lot of dedication from thousands of people who have a sense that what is going on is so outrageous, that they are willing to put their own time and talent and resources into doing something about it. And that they believe that their investment is worth the time because it is multiplied by the power of collective action toward a common goal.

In 1999, I started the national movement for Fair Trade certified coffee. The certification agency, Transfair USA, had just begun operations that summer. I worked to get dozens of college campuses started with their first campaigns to demand Fair Trade certified coffee on campus. In addition, we decided to launch a campaign against Starbucks, to pressure them to carry Fair Trade certified coffee. Starbucks was already hated by many in Seattle. A local group had convened a protest at one of the shops downtown at the beginning of the week. In the lead-up to the opening of the WTO ministerial, my colleague Leila had organized a large demonstration against the Gap. Her demo seemed to be winding down. In one instant, the cops asked her, "Where to next?" I responded, "To Starbucks!" A few minutes later I was on top of a van, microphone in hand, leading a protest against Starbucks for carrying sweatshop coffee, and demanding that they carry Fair Trade certified coffee instead. It was an object lesson in seizing the moment: doing one's homework, preparing the field, and then, surrounded by the support of your allies and colleagues, having the courage to up your game when the moment arrived.

Countries are free under WTO rules to subsidize their fossil fuel industries to the extent they please, while their subsidies for climate-friendly energy production are severely curtailed.

Another is that you need to have both an "inside game" and an "outside game." "Inside" to me are the people that track the issue—that know what's going on in the nitty-gritty in Geneva: the players, the issues, the texts, the potential impacts. "Outside" are the people who have the ability to hold their governments accountable. It doesn't just mean protests, but it definitely includes that aspect; it could also mean putting pressure through media or other mechanisms; the specter of electoral results; or, in the case of some governments, progressive lobbying. In the WTO, the decisions are made in the capitals—that's where the pressure from affected communities is most important. But it's also important to have a strong game in the negotiations, which are usually in Geneva at the WTO, and then occur every two years (more or less) at ministerials. You've got to have both.

DS: What is the impact of the WTO in communities' lives?

Deborah James: The WTO is the largest rulemaking institution in the global economy, and its rules are binding. When the United states, the E.U., and other neoliberal proponents invented the WTO, they set it outside of the existing system of global governance, which is the United Nations. As a treaty-based institution with 164 members, its rules are extremely difficult to change.

Let's take a few examples—and these are just two of myriad agreements in the WTO!

AGRICULTURE: In agriculture, we can imagine a set of global trade rules that ensures: the rights of citizens to adequate and nutritious food, guaranteed as a human right by their governments; agricultural practices and markets that ensure a decent living for farmers around the world; and the ability of countries to preserve and support rural development. Unfortunately, most of the rules regulating agriculture in the WTO do quite the opposite.

At the time of the founding of the WTO, the Europeans and the U.S. did not want agriculture to be part of the WTO, because these advanced economies are not competitive in international agricultural markets without their subsidies and protectionist tariffs. The E.U. and U.S. agreed to cap these tariffs and subsidies at existing levels, and to reduce them over time. However, they have never made the reductions, so the United States still subsidizes its large agribusiness industrial production to the tens of billions of dollars, while poor countries are largely prohibited from using such subsidies. At the same time the European Union is still able to use tools like tariff escalation, which allows them access to cheap, slave-labor produced cocoa from West Africa, while ensuring that all of the value add of making fine chocolate stays within the E.U.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (aka BIG PHARMA PROFITEERS KILL!): WTO rules on intellectual property are some of the most damaging. It is important to note that the entire basis of industrial production in the United States was based on the combination of slave labor and of stolen industrial designs from England. However as the U.S. and E.U., along with countries like Switzerland and Japan, became industrial powerhouses, they sought to use patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property protections as a way to prevent competition, reduce consumer choice, and raise prices. This is the exact opposite of free trade.

The extremely protectionist system that the U.S. successfully exported into the WTO at the time of its founding, under the agreement on "Trade Related-Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)" has instituted a worldwide system of monopolization, harmful incentives, and restrictions on access to medicine that has resulted in the unnecessary death and sickness of hundreds of millions of people. Patents severely curtail access to existing medicines that could otherwise be obtained for pennies on the dollar. It has led to the financialization of the pharmaceutical industry, in which Americans drastically overpay for medicines while people in developing countries cannot afford to get access to life-saving treatments, diagnostics, and vaccines. The many-year campaign for a waiver on TRIPS rules for Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments exposed how the WTO rules protect the rights of big pharma to profit over the lives of billions of people around the world. The intransigence of patent-protecting states clearly resulted in millions of deaths that could have been avoided.

DS: What about WTO's impact on climate change and the needed just transition from fossil fuels?

Deborah James: At the time of the founding of the WTO, major oil producers were successful in excluding fossil fuel subsidies from WTO rules. At the same time, modern, more climate-friendly technologies such as solar and wind production are subject to WTO rules on domestic subsidies. These include the fact that countries are not allowed to give subsidies for domestic production that they do not make available to other WTO members. In the WTO, this is called "non-discrimination." What this means, in effect, is that countries are free under WTO rules to subsidize their fossil fuel industries to the extent they please, while their subsidies for climate-friendly energy production are severely curtailed in the WTO, especially if they try to use those subsidies to not only address climate change but to also create domestic jobs. WTO rules, in a word, blocks a just transition.

WTO and Big Tech: Rigging the Global Economy

Neighborhood marches prepare for mass protest at the WTO in Seattle in 1999. (Photo: Dana Schuerholz)

DS: How has global corporate capitalism changed in 25 years—and the WTO?

I'm thinking of how much of the economy is (electronic) e-commerce and also Yanis Varoufakis' argument that Big Tech has changed everything—from "capitalism to techno-feudalism," in which the owners of platforms extract rent in the same way that feudal lords did.

Deborah James: At the time of the founding of the WTO, each major industry got an agreement to reshape, and really to rig, the global economy in its favor. Big agriculture got the agreement on agriculture; the financial industry got the GATS; big industry got the "non-agricultural market access agreement (NAMA)," etcetera. "Big Tech" was not yet a thing.

Since then, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have become five of the largest corporations in the history of the world. They would like an agreement, permanently binding on 164 countries, and enforceable in the World Trade Organization. They came up with a "digital two dozen" list of disciplines that they infiltrated into the Obama administration. These rules either give Big Tech corporations rights, such as: to enter whatever markets they want, even without a local presence; to sell whatever products they want; to collect all the data that they want, and move it around and process it in whatever ways they want; to maintain monopolies and integrate vertically; to maintain whatever legal form they want; etcetera. Their list also included restrictions on governments' ability to regulate them, such as limiting the collection or movement of data; limiting the ability of governments to collect taxes, either on their transactions or their profits; or requiring that local workers, the local economy, or local communities benefit in any way from their presence.

The WTO has been wildly successful for the purpose for which it was built: to rig the economy in favor of large corporations in powerful countries to further profit from developing countries, and workers, and consumers around the world.

In 2016, the United States introduced these proposals in the WTO, hijacking the slogan "ecommerce for development." Because of the dominance of U.S.-based Big Tech in the business lobbies around the world, most major industrialized countries followed suit. One can only imagine the asymmetry in negotiating power between developed countries with Big Tech lobbyists seconded to their delegations, backed by armies of lawyers and economists whose job was to invent ways to rig the economy for the power and profit of their corporations, compared with the negotiators of many developing countries, which lack universal access even to electricity, let alone highly-skilled domestic technological sectors to turn to for expertise.

However, the global network of civil society organizations that works together to stop the expansion of the WTO, Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS), learned of these proposals. Our members spent a year in deep analysis of the implications of these high-tech proposals and sharing that analysis with developing country trade negotiators, particularly through the Third World Network and the South Center.

At the WTO ministerial in December 2017, Big Tech made its push—for the launch of a multilateral round of negotiations on a digital trade agreement, then still referred to as e-commerce. Fortunately, the Africa group and several progressive Latin American countries held their ground. To this day there are still no multilateral negotiations on digital trade. Years later, the developed countries with a smattering of the most economically dependent, or pro-neoliberal, developing countries, launched "plurilateral" negotiations on digital trade. Likewise, these provisions are now found in every bilateral and regional trade agreement under negotiation. Fortunately, due to the extreme damages caused by this highly deregulated sector, governments have begun to realize the importance of "reining in Big Tech." Efforts are underway in many countries toward common sense public interest oversight over data flows, monopoly and competition issues, labor rights in the tech sector, taxation of Big Tech, discrimination and abuse (such as deep fakes), and many more issues.

If the digital trade agreement had been concluded as originally put forward by Big Tech under the Obama administration, the necessary policy space for democratic debate and public interest regulation worldwide of the largest, most profitable corporations in the history of the world would have been eviscerated.

From a WTO Rigged for the Rich to a "Turnaround Agenda"

DS: You wrote "In 46 of 48 cases in which countries tried to defend their public regulation based on the public interest exceptions in the WTO, the body decided in favor of the 'right to trade' over the 'right to regulate.'" Given its domination by rich countries and corporations, can the WTO be changed or must it be replaced?

Deborah James: The WTO has been wildly successful for the purpose for which it was built: to rig the economy in favor of large corporations in powerful countries to further profit from developing countries, and workers, and consumers around the world.

However this is not the institution that we need. As human beings on a shared planet, we need rules that discipline corporate behavior when they trade among countries, while ensuring that governments (which have the obligations to ensure the human, social, and economic rights of their citizens) have the policy space to achieve them. Thus, we need a global institution to discipline big agriculture, while allowing farmers a fair livelihood, people the right to food, and the ability of governments to promote rural development. We need rules that will discipline giant services corporations, while allowing governments the ability to guarantee quality, accessible public services, and the regulation of private services in the public interest. We need global health rules that guarantee access to medicine on a universal basis, while providing appropriate incentives for innovation in the health sector. We need binding rules so that large corporations pay their fair share of taxes worldwide. We need binding rules to ensure that we collectively make a Just Transition away from highly polluting fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy production in a way that promotes economic benefits from the bottom up. This, and more, is the Turnaround Agenda of global civil society. For each area of the economy, we call for: an assessment of the impact of the current rules on communities, countries, and our shared environment; a series of immediate steps to ameliorate the most damaging of the existing of WTO rules, in the short-term; and a completely different set of rules that will achieve our shared goals of environmental sustainability and shared prosperity.

Amazingly, the 13th Ministerial of the WTO in Abu Dhabi (MC13) was a clear victory for the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) global network.

In order to achieve the global economy that we deserve, we need a different institution. At the same time, it is extremely important to keep in mind that our opponents never stop working to expand corporate globalization. That is why so much of our work in the WTO is "on defense." If one were to say, for example, "I don't believe the WTO is reformable; therefore, I will stop working on it because that's reformist," that cedes the entire territory to the pro-corporate forces. In that scenario, we can only lose. It is only by actually stopping the harmful expansion of the WTO that we create space not only to fight for flexibilities to existing harmful rules, but for the space to eventually bring about the larger shifts toward a more balanced and fair institution, which will only come about under dramatic shifts in geopolitics—and when workers in the Global North and the Global South work together for the transformation toward more fair rules for everyone.

DS: What was your experience—and that of movements and civil society, confronting the WTO at the last 2024 ministerial in Abu Dhabi?

Deborah James: Amazingly, the 13th Ministerial of the WTO in Abu Dhabi (MC13) was a clear victory for the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) global network. Corporate interests had a number of agreements they were trying to push through on digital trade, investment, and regulation of domestic services. Due to the increasing opposition to Big Tech's harmful practices, the digital trade agreement was not finalized enough to be brought forward. On the plurilaterals on investment and services regulation, our technical experts successfully intervened to bolster opposition by developing countries and ensure more accurate media coverage. This prevented neoliberal proponents from being able to ram through these WTO-illegal agreements at MC13.

On agriculture, we have changes we'd like to see to the existing agreement—flexibilities to allow for more food security and food sovereignty. But this was not on the table coming into the ministerial. Thus, preventing an outcome that would have made the existing rules even more harmful for developing countries was a victory. There was similarly an anti-development text being negotiated on fisheries disciplines, which our member, the Pacific Network on Globalization, also supported developing countries to reject.

Some of the most pernicious proposals at MC13 were actually about the functioning of the WTO itself. After many years of failing to gain significant new rights and powers through the WTO, corporate proponents have been seeking to weaken the power of developing countries and civil society to resist. They had therefore put a number of proposals on the table for "WTO reform," which would have increased corporate power even further, while decreasing the power and leverage of developing countries and civil society in the negotiations. Fortunately, these were also rejected by the majority of the WTO membership.

In the end, most of the negotiations were simply punted back to Geneva.

How does civil society accomplish such a herculean task when facing opponents with thousands of times more resources than our scrappy bunch? First, we know our stuff. Many of our members, such as the experts at the Third World Network, have spent years poring over WTO texts and analyzing their potential implications, and sharing this information with developing country delegates. Over the years we have built a network of development advocates, public interest organizations, environmental groups, labor unions, and other economic justice advocates in the Global North and the Global South who are able to share information both about the technicalities of what's happening in Geneva, as well as the geopolitical shifts occurring in their home capitals. Within OWINFS, we create a dynamic where every person's talents and skills are seen, welcomed, and put to strategic use. People feel respected, so they give their very best to the collective effort.

OUR WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE NETWORK: The "Our World Is Not For Sale" (OWINFS) network is a loose grouping of organizations and social movements worldwide fighting the current model of corporate globalization embodied in the global trading system. OWINFS is committed to a sustainable, socially just, democratic, and accountable multilateral trading system. OWINFS operates primarily through our national members around the world. You can learn more about negotiations on Digital Trade; Trade & Environment; the Development Agenda; Fisheries, Food, & Agriculture; Intellectual Property/TRIPS, Investment, Services / GATS, and WTO Reform on our website. Our MC13 work is aggregated here.

Earlier this year, I lost my dad to complications from diabetes. He was first admitted to the hospital two days before Thanksgiving of last year. Over the course of the next nine months, he suffered through 15 surgeries and 14 hospital stays.

In between those stays, he was shuffled between skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and board and care homes. While watching my dad’s decline in health, I learned the differences of what those terms meant in real-time as my family and I tried to navigate a complicated, and oftentimes unforgiving, health care system. All in all, he went to four separate hospitals and six outpatient facilities to receive his so-called “care.”

November is Family Caregiving Month. For some, caregiving means taking care of sick or aging family or community members. For others, it means having a support network or a good friend to give you a couch to crash on during tough times. For me, it has meant advocating for my father’s right to adequate, culturally-sensitive care in his final year of life.

As an immigration attorney and policy advocate by trade, I have always fought for those who are indigent and under-resourced, and yet, I failed when it came to advocating for the holistic care of my dad. Caregiving for my dad required all of me. Time and again, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of situations where my sister, my mom, or I had to push for quality care to be provided to my dad.

We pushed for the dressings of my dad’s wound to be adequately replaced on a timely basis. Pushed for my dad to be fed a warm meal after his surgery because he was neglected and missed his mealtime window. Pushed for his transfer to a private room so that he could have some peace and quiet from a roommate that had the TV on 24/7. Pushed for a time to meet with his several doctors, so that we could receive a full explanation and understand how his care was being handled. We had to push for so many things that should be the standard of care; after some time I lost sight of where the doctors’ responsibilities ended and where ours began.

Through this experience, I found that our healthcare system is not designed to cater to the needs of all patients, especially those who need culturally-specific care. We were met with little empathy or understanding of the fact that, despite living in the U.S. for over 40 years, my dad still had many language and cultural barriers as an immigrant.

We found out the hard way that only four facilities had Korean speakers who could help with his translation and interpretation needs. Only two facilities provided Korean food, which was a majority of his diet prior to being admitted. That was his comfort food, and he did not have regular access to it. I had to go to his favorite restaurant or bring home cooked meals several times a week so he could eat comfortably, while juggling my work and other responsibilities.

On top of worrying about his health and well-being, I often thought about how isolated and lonely he must have felt, not only being unable to go home, but also being ripped away from his culture, his routine, his food, family, and his language. Even board and care homes, where we paid out of pocket for his care and a privilege that not all families have, could not completely meet all of my dad’s needs.

We all know that the health care system in America is fundamentally broken — driven by profit and cruelty, and not patient-care, access, or even empathy. Despite knowing this to be true, I was still jarred from experiencing the depth of our healthcare system’s issues.

Stories like mine, and so many others, is what drives me in my work at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). Earlier this year, NAPAWF issued a policy report emphasizing the need for culturally informed solutions, targeted funding, and multi-sector collaborations.

We desperately need investment to support a true caregiving economy, both in infrastructure and language access for care workers — both vital to removing barriers to quality health care for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities.

Stories like my family’s should not be the norm, but sadly, when you speak to AANHPIs, you will find yourself inundated with stories of inadequate care and family members who have to bear the burden of guilt of a system that failed their loved ones.

I have struggled with how public I should go with this info given that my dad was a private person and we are deeply grieving his loss. I am also deeply angry about the lack of quality care he received in his final days.

But then I found this quote by Jamie Anderson when I needed it most: “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

And so, I’m doing this for my dad: I show him my love not just through my grief, but through my continued advocacy around this topic so stories like mine are no longer commonplace. We need a system that works for all of us — the stakes are too high for anything else.

United States environmental policy has not been a consistent straight line; that much, everyone can agree on. As national leadership oscillates between Democrats and Republicans, policies have switched from embracing fossil fuels to supporting the clean energy transition and back again and again.

One recent switch on environmental policy within the soon-to-concluded Biden administration took place in April, when the U.S. endorsed global limits on plastic production, which are desperately needed to protect people from toxic chemicals and climate change. And then, following political defeat, the administration backtracked with no real explanation, abandoning the millions of Americans and people around the world who are desperate for change.

In a moment when the U.S. and the world are confronting exponential uncertainty, now is not the time for the Biden administration to go quietly into the night.

In this final push, the Biden administration must support measures to limit plastic production, prioritize a human-rights approach, and reduce or eliminate toxic chemicals in plastics.

As we approach the end of the final round of negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty—which represents one of the most significant opportunities of our lifetime to protect human health and end plastic pollution—the urgency has never been clearer. This is our chance to confront the plastic crisis head-on.

With a new administration on the horizon—one that has shown hostility toward science and an affinity for corporate polluters—the Biden-Harris administration must, as one of its final acts, stick to its word and champion a robust treaty that cuts plastic production.

Plastics are making the climate crisis worse—99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels and corporations keep making more. To date, it is estimated that only 9% of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled globally, and production is projected to increase in the years to come. We will never be able to solve this crisis with just waste management and cleanups.

In the lead-up to the presidential election, Americans witnessed the devastating effects of climate change firsthand: Florida and North Carolina were battered by unprecedented storms, droughts parched vast regions of the country, and wildfires raged uncontrollably. This past summer was the hottest on record, with global temperatures soaring 2.25°F above the long-term average.

Scientists warn that we need to cut plastic production by at least 75% to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. The United Nations has echoed this urgency, stating that global climate action is lagging and that immediate, dramatic efforts are essential to meet international temperature targets.

Plastic is also harmful at every step of its life cycle, from sourcing raw materials (like oil, gas, and coal) to production, transportation, usage, recycling, burning, and disposal. The chemicals in plastic have been linked to death, illness, and disability.

More than 3,200 identified chemicals found in plastics have been associated with severe health concerns, including cancer, nervous system disorders, and hormonal imbalances. These chemicals have been implicated in the development of diseases such as cancer, heart conditions, and obesity.

In addition to the immediate dangers of oil and gas-fueled climate chaos, countless Americans unknowingly face a silent crisis: plastic pollution. They consume food and water contaminated with microplastics and harmful chemicals that pose serious health risks. Communities located near plastic production and disposal facilities suffer the most, breathing air laden with toxins that lead to cancer, diabetes, neurological disorders, and other health issues. This public health crisis comes with an estimated annual cost of $250 billion to our healthcare system—a toll exacerbated by the plastic industry's recalcitrance to stop runaway plastic production.

Yet, as we close out 2024 and brace for an uncertain future under an administration that openly denies science, headed by a president who has often dismissed climate change and its impacts, there remains much that President Joe Biden can do. After all, he has built his career on a commitment to public service; backtracking on promises to support global controls to reduce plastic production, in the final months of his presidency, would be a stain on that record. Now is the time to serve all Americans by rising to this challenge, and securing a greener, more just world for generations to come.

We stand at a pivotal moment: the Busan talks—the fifth and most critical stage of negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty. World leaders must rise to the occasion and take bold action to curtail plastic production and end single-use plastics. A weak treaty is a failure; we need a strong, ambitious agreement that protects our health, our communities, our climate, and our planet.

In this final push, the Biden administration must support measures to limit plastic production, prioritize a human-rights approach, and reduce or eliminate toxic chemicals in plastics. We call on him to champion our planet, our communities, and our health for generations to come. The time for action is now. Our future depends on it.

The country’s largest and most important government anti-hunger program faces a renewed threat as Congress returns from recess next week: privatization.

Congress needs to reauthorize the now-expired Farm Bill—the enormous legislative package that includes funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps)—but a privatization scheme was attached to the bill.

Congress should not be using much-needed disaster relief as a back door to privatize the SNAP program’s workforce.

Earlier this Congress, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) introduced the “SNAP Staffing Flexibility Act,” which was also adopted as an amendment to the current version of the Farm Bill. The bill would allow state agencies to hire outside contractors to administer key requirements of the SNAP program under certain conditions, such as in the aftermath of natural disasters or during pandemics and public health emergencies. Rep. Bacon and supporters of this proposal now aim to tack this provision onto the emergency disaster relief package under consideration this year. Make no mistake: This is an attempt to use emergency disaster relief as cover to privatize the SNAP program and workforce, instead of giving the SNAP program enough money to operate effectively.

Privatization is often touted as a solution to bureaucratic red tape or cutting “wasteful” government spending, but in practice, it can mean cutting the experienced public workforce who administer complicated government programs. This can result in prolonged delays, more people wrongly denied benefits, and ultimately worse outcomes for people who need the benefits most.

SNAP Is Our Most Important Anti-Hunger Program, But It Is Facing Renewed Privatization Threats

SNAP serves tens of millions of low-paid working families and other households with low incomes (including disabled and older adults). Like unemployment insurance, SNAP is responsive to the business cycle—meaning SNAP is particularly important during economic downturns when poverty and food insecurity rise. Between fiscal years 1980 and 2008, anywhere from 7 to 11% of U.S. households received SNAP. Participation grew dramatically during the Great Recession, peaking at 18.8% in fiscal year 2013 (47.6 million people).

Participation spiked again during the Covid-19 pandemic amid increased poverty and food insecurity. In fiscal year 2022, although total participation was lower than during the Great Recession (12.4% of all U.S. households participated in the program), SNAP saw a record-high participation rate among eligible individuals, equivalent to 41.2 million people receiving benefits in an average month. Expanded SNAP eligibility—alongside other relief measures such as Child Tax Credit expansions, universal free school lunches, and federal stimulus payments—kept food insecurity at bay during the height of the pandemic in 2021. However, as those programs expired—and the shocks of pandemic reopening and the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to food prices growing at an unprecedented rate—food insecurity increased in 2022.

As part of the SNAP quality control process, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) examines each state’s application processing timeliness (APT). The rate is calculated by dividing the number of SNAP applications processed by the number of applications that were expected to be processed during that period, typically 30 days since the application was submitted. In fiscal year 2023, APT rates ranged from a low of 39% in Alaska to a high of 98% in Idaho, with a median rate of 85% across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2023, only four states met the FNS benchmark rate of 95%. Failure to meet this benchmark is not a new phenomenon. Based on available data, no more than a third of all states have ever met the 95% timeliness standard in any given year.

Proponents of SNAP privatization often point to slow application processing rates as evidence that the existing program is inefficient and in need of “reform.” However, this argument ignores important context on these rates and its connection to declining federal funding for SNAP and shrinking public-sector employment.

Chronic Underfunding of SNAP Strains Workers and Delays Processing of Essential Benefits

SNAP is a federal-state partnership, so the federal government pays the full cost of nutrition benefits and splits the costs of administration with states, but federal spending on SNAP administration has declined over time. Meanwhile, SNAP administrators’ caseloads have grown dramatically. Many states point to administrative problems—including low staffing, hiring freezes, and high turnover—as one of the biggest barriers to improving slow processing times and backlogs.

To be clear, low APT rates are a cause for concern because they indicate that many eligible households in need of food assistance are not quickly receiving those benefits. But the solution to ensuring applicants receive their benefits quickly is simple: Policymakers must increase funding for SNAP and restore sufficient staffing levels so that case workers can process applications effectively and efficiently.

Starving SNAP of Funding Serves the Long-Term, Right-Wing Privatization Agenda

The push to privatize SNAP eligibility determinations is decades-old and has produced serious problems in states that have contracted out these services or automated certain functions of the process. When Texas outsourced its SNAP eligibility determinations to a for-profit company in 2006, thousands of people were unable to apply or were given incorrect information and many were wrongly denied benefits. Public-sector staff were then forced to fix mistakes, and eligible SNAP participants were subject to long delays to receive benefits.

Efforts to defraud the SNAP program, including misuse of benefits or selling them for cash, is very rare. However, attention to purported fraud has increased in recent years, and SNAP workers have been forced to take on additional anti-fraud measures, further delaying processing and potentially contributing to low APT rates.

The SNAP Program Needs Support, Not a License to Cut More Corners

Congress should not be using much-needed disaster relief as a back door to privatize the SNAP program’s workforce. There are other real and urgent problems with the SNAP program this year—for instance, families have had their SNAP benefits stolen by card “skimmers” when they swipe their cards at grocery store cash registers. In 2022, Congress passed a provision that would allow states to pay back the stolen benefits to victims of theft, but that has since expired.

Farm Bill reauthorization should focus on preserving nutrition assistance benefits without cuts and on reducing administrative burdens and red tape for SNAP recipients, applicants, and staff—all of which could help reduce backlogs and improve how quickly people can receive their benefits. And disaster relief spending should focus on providing aid to vulnerable communities trying to rebuild after storms—not opportunistically trying to cut corners and privatize vital services.

A ceasefire that ends Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon is welcomed and long overdue. However, it remains unclear whether this deal actually will work, given that the agreement gives Israel 60 days to withdraw. As long as Israeli forces remain on Lebanese soil, the risk of the conflict reigniting—deliberately or inadvertently—will remain significant.

Had the Biden administration exercised its leverage and prioritized U.S. interests, this conflict would never have reached this level to begin with. And ironically, though the deal was struck by Biden's team, the parties in the conflict appear to have agreed to it mainly with an eye to Donald Trump's expressed desire to see the fighting end before he takes office in January.

Contrary to Biden’s spin at the press conference on Tuesday, the agreement text appears more balanced. Both Israel and Hezbollah agree not to take any offensive actions against each other, while recognizing both Israel and Lebanon’s right to continue to use force in self-defense.

It puts the Lebanese government—which includes Hezbollah—in charge of supervising and controlling any sale, supply, and production of weapons or weapons-related materials.

The agreement also established a committee “acceptable to Israel and Lebanon” to monitor and assist in ensuring the implementation of the deal.

Netanyahu, who is wanted by the ICC for war crimes, has declared victory. There is some truth to Netanyahu's narrative: Through this agreement, Hezbollah appears to have given up a key position, that is, the refusal to disconnect Gaza from Lebanon.

But on the other hand, Netanyahu promised to destroy Hezbollah, which clearly he has not achieved. Though the organization is weakened, its ability to shoot at Israel—including penetrating Israel's air defenses, continues to be intact. Just Sunday, they shot more than 250 rockets and other projectiles at Israel.

Indeed, Hezbollah's capacity to inflict pain on Israel may have been a key reason why Netanyahu agreed to the deal. Had his campaign against Hezbollah been more successful, he'd likely be less inclined to stop the fighting.

Tehran has reportedly pressed Hezbollah to agree to the terms of the ceasefire, even though it betrays Hezbollah's earlier position. Tehran has several reasons for doing this: It has opposed the expansion of the conflict from the outset, given its own challenges at home. While it is in a conflict with Israel, the timing of this war suits Israel far more than Iran.

But Tehran may have also seen this as a gift to Trump, demonstrating Tehran's ability to help deescalate the situation while signaling Iran's own desire to strike a deal with Trump rather than to return to a state of heightened U.S.-Iran tensions.

By Ralph Nader November 27, 2024 Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party…

           We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by, especially by, those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)

            One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.

            Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free healthcare cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.

            Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that—we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.

            Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least three to six percent organic matter. But forty percent of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over nine billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits—an essential move toward saving ourselves—there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.

            Thirty percent of the world’s commercially-fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions—or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.

            So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to ten percent of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.

“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Millions of Genghis Khan’s chomped their way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.

            A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a six percent chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100 and a ten percent chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill ten percent of global population. (World War II killed under four percent.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.

            Many climate experts say that the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”

Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” A cyclone might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.

A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a six percent probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.

            The U.S. and other nations—but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example—should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:

            In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

The post Put the Planet First first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Put the Planet First appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A clear consensus has emerged that the economy was the key factor behind Trump’s stunning victory. However, that may not be a very accurate description about what led a disaffected electorate wanting to see Trump back in the White House as the U.S. economy had been in a rather good shape from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2024 and was in fact outperforming all other advanced economies by a wide margin. Indeed, surveys had consistently shown that the majority of voters had negative views on the economy at large, thus revealing a disconnect between economic numbers and public sentiment. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in decades, consumer spending was up, and inflation had cooled off. Yet voters still thought the economy was trash.

The U.S economic system does stink, no matter what the numbers show, and the political system is totally dysfunctional, which explains why so many voters were not fazed by Democrats’ core message that Trump posed a threat to democracy. They were probably wondering where democracy was to be found when economic elites run the show. Forty-five years of neoliberal economics have exacerbated capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward economic inequality, created a permanent state of economic insecurity, and led to the rise of an oligarchy.

It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump...

The United States is the most unequal society in the developed world. The rich are growing richer with every passing year while the middle class shrinks, and the poor are left to their own fate for survival. Massive social inequalities and economic disparities destroy trust and confidence in government and leave people thinking that the future is unavoidably grim. This is the primary reason for the rise of ethno-nationalism and authoritarian populism in the developed world, including of course Trumpism in the United States. It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump who promise a return to a golden era.

The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal. In that regard, there is nothing fascistic about Trump when it comes to the economy. Statism lies at the heart of fascist ideology. The state is the all-powerful entity for fascists. The question of state-controlled planning of the economy is of paramount importance to fascism. For fascists, the state should not control all the means of production, as is the case with traditional socialism, but should dominate them.

The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal.

Trump’s proposals for the economy are seen as a mixed bag. That’s because while he has proclaimed himself a champion for deregulation, he is in favor of protectionist trade policies. But Trump’s trade policy should not fool people that he is not a neoliberal. With protectionist trade policies, Trump, as with the way he runs his own business, only sees the short-term advantages in economic policy. Moreover, protectionist trade policy does not depart from neoliberalism. As has been acutely pointed out by British political economist Tom Wraight, Trump simply uses “the coercive power of the state to force other nations to conform to market-based economic logic.”

Trump has promised an anti-regulation blitz from Day One upon his return to the White House on virtually all aspects of the economy, including environmental and public health regulations. After spending months lying to voters about his knowledge of Project 2025, Trump has picked scores of people who worked on this ultra-reactionary policy manifesto for top posts in his administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the economy, if fully implemented, would create a far more unequal and harsher society as it entails policies that will lead to massive cuts on all social programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food assistance, and calls for massive disinvestment in public services and a host of new tax cuts for wealthy households and corporations.

Project 2025 is the ultra-right wing game plan for the full completion of the neoliberal economic vision and political nightmare that started nearly half a century ago. It will produce far greater social dislocation and greater economic anxiety than any other time since the onset of the neoliberal counterrevolution. Most of those who voted for Trump on the basis of their perceptions about the direction of the economy and their belief that the country is on the wrong track will be deeply disturbed by the new economic and social realities that will emerge in the United States during the second Trump reign and will hopefully rethink their support for Trumpism. The problem is that the Democratic Party is either incapable or unwilling to offer citizens a new vision for the United States, one that will end the rule of oligarchy, restore democracy, and put people and the planet above profit.

Here are some policies that should be included in a socio-economic agenda for the specific needs of the people in the twentieth-first century United States of America:

1. Implementing Universal Health Coverage (UHC). That is, a publicly administered system that guarantees that all people have access to the full range of quality health services when and where they need them. Financing of UHC could come entirely from broad-based tax revenues. Coverage would be universal and automatic. Covered services would include inpatient, outpatient, dental, mental health, and long-term health, as well as prescription drugs. All three levels of the U.S. government (federal, state, and local) would be involved in the health care system.

2. Getting rid of all challenges and obstacles of union organizing, which include making illegal threats to close a plant if workers select a union to represent them and threatening workers with loss of jobs or benefits if they join a union. Current U.S. law makes it difficult for workers to join unions and even excludes certain categories of workers.

3. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining with active participation in social dialogue. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining will secure the best economic compensation possible for workers.

4. Undertaking a large-scale federal program of social housing construction. The United States faces a deep and persistent housing affordability crisis that demands active government intervention. It is beyond naïve belief to think that the market can fix the housing crisis. Repairing the house market with market-oriented solutions such as liberalizing zoning rules and other regulations have never worked. They do not lead to a major increase in housing supply or in more affordable housing. A strong housing safety net should also be introduced to address the problem of homelessness and ensure home security for the most vulnerable.

5. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 or even $20 per hour. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has been stagnant since 2009 and maintaining it is a scandal of grand proportions. No decent society, let alone the richest country in the world, should accept having such a thing as the “working poor.”

6.Fighting poverty and inequality. Poverty should not be defined one-dimensionally based on income alone. Poverty should be seen as access to a variety of resources, such as education, health, energy, jobs, rights and personal security. The task of eliminating poverty should include both short-term (cash handouts) and long-term approaches (delivering social services and addressing the structural causes of poverty with initiatives such as the guaranteed-jobs program).

7. Implementing the Green New Deal. Greening the economy is a vital and urgent task to save humanity and the planet from the impacts of global warming but also provides a macro-economic approach to sustainable economic growth. It’s a win-win situation and only vested interests (fossil fuel industry, banks, oil-producing nations) and lack of political stand on the way to transitioning to a green economy.

8. Cutting military spending. The United States spent $820 billion on national defense during the fiscal year 2023. It spends nearly 8.4 times as much on its military as Russia does and more than three times the amount of China. While the U.S. comprises just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for nearly 40 percent of global military spending. Between 2001 and 2022, the U.S. spent $8 trillion on war. The notion that such enormous defense spending is important for national security questions is utterly absurd. The U.S. homeland has never been invaded and no nation threatens U.S. national security. The obscene amount of money that the U.S. spends on defense, which different methodologies estimated to be above $1.5 trillion for the fiscal year 2022, is for the building and maintenance of the U.S. empire. The U.S has over 750 overseas military bases, which only provoke geopolitical tensions and harm the United States, as David Vine demonstrates in his book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. Money saved from cuts in the defense budget can go towards supporting social programs and/or for reducing the national debt. Arguing for reforms in Social Security and Medicare when the country spends so much money on the military is morally indefensible and will become politically unacceptable if people realize how wasteful and harmful military sending is.

At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services. The neoliberal claim is that economies would perform more effectively, producing greater wealth and economic prosperity for all, if markets were allowed to perform their functions without government intervention. This claim is predicated on the idea that free markets are inherently just and can create effective low-cost ways to produce consumer goods and services. It is all rubbish, of course; nothing but an ideological pretext to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Neoliberalism is indeed not simply an economic doctrine but also a socio-political ideology that places individual self-interest before the common good, displays indifference to social inequalities and economic disparities and subsequently justifies plutocracy.

At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services.

Trump’s approach to government and corporate interests, which he will undertake with an extra heavy authoritarian twist, will magnify all aspects of the neoliberal nightmare that has engulfed the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations for the past several decades. Unfortunately, a majority of the U.S. electorate refused to see what Trump really stands for and was duped into believing that their great leader is the one to take on the detestable liberal/neoliberal establishment and create in turn a system that works for the average citizens, not just the rich.

The next four years promise to be one of severe cruelty for the most vulnerable people in the United States and a nightmare for the environment. We should raise walls of resistance as much as we can. More important, though, we should demand from the democratic forces to adopt a socio-economic agenda that puts people’s needs above corporate interests and consigns neoliberal capitalism to the dustbin of history.

President-elect Donald Trump recently announced his nomination of Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as secretary of labor.

She is one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and one of only eight Republicans to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Both bills would help reform our nation’s badly broken system of labor law. While Rep. Chavez-DeRemer’s support for these needed reforms is encouraging, if confirmed, she will be secretary of labor for a president who steadfastly pursued an ambitious anti-worker agenda during his first term in office.

Chavez-DeRemer has stated that “working-class Americans finally have a lifeline” with President-elect Trump in the White House. If workers truly have an ally in Chavez-DeRemer, she will advance policies that improve workers’ lives. Here are a few policies that will reveal whether the second Trump administration will actually aid working-class Americans or be a continuation of his first administration’s agenda attacking workers’ rights.

If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.

Win funding for the Department of Labor (DOL) that enables the agency to serve the U.S. workforce: DOL and other worker protection agencies have been chronically underfunded. As the workforce has grown, the budgets of these agencies have shrunk, leaving workers without effective enforcement of basic minimum wage and overtime and health and safety protections. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for and secure at least a $14 billion budget to ensure that U.S. workers have health and safety inspectors and wage and hour investigators on the job to enforce their rights.

Protect workers’ overtime: Overtime pay ensures that most workers who put in more than 40 hours a week get paid 1.5 times their regular pay for the extra hours they work. Most hourly workers are guaranteed the right to overtime pay, while salaried workers’ eligibility is based on their pay and the nature of their duties. DOL recently issued a rule to raise the pay threshold for salaried workers to be eligible for overtime, which stands to benefit 4.3 million workers. Despite this benefit to U.S. workers, corporate interest groups and conservative states challenged the rule in court. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for workers’ right to overtime and continue to defend this rule in litigation. She should not allow the Trump administration to, once again, institute a low-salary threshold for overtime eligibility that leaves millions of workers without these protections and forced to work long hours for no additional pay.

Refuse to reinstitute the Payroll Audit Independent Determination program: This program was instituted during Trump’s first administration and essentially permits employers who have stolen workers’ wages to confess and get out of jail free. If an employer proactively notified DOL of the failure to pay minimum wage or overtime or for taking illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks, then DOL waived all penalties and liquidated damages. Wage theft is rampant, costing U.S. workers as much as $50 billion each year. Any program that makes it easier and less costly for employers to steal workers’ wages is a program that hurts U.S. workers and their wages. Chavez-DeRemer should make it harder for employers to steal workers’ wages, not easier.

Promote policies to protect workers’ health and safety: DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for ensuring U.S. workers are safe on the job. Still, 344 workers die each day from hazardous working conditions. Under the prior Trump administration, OSHA scaled back safety inspections. Chavez-DeRemer should ensure that OSHA does not repeat this under her watch and instead expands inspections to ensure that all workers have a safe workplace. Further, she should fight to protect safety standards like the recently proposed standard protecting workers from extreme heat. Workers’ health and safety must be a priority for any secretary of labor and administration claiming to be pro-worker.

Hold employers accountable for exploiting workers: Some employers use workers’ immigration status as leverage to exploit workers, threatening them with deportation if they report violations of labor and employment laws. For workers in labor disputes, the current administration granted deferred action, which is a determination to defer removal (deportation) of an individual from the U.S. In order to qualify for deferred action, a worker’s employer must be the subject of an open investigation at a labor agency, like DOL, and the labor agency conducting the investigation must submit a letter supporting deferred action to the Department of Homeland Security which oversees the program. Deferred action helps hold lawbreaking employers accountable, and Chavez-DeRemer should continue to support this for workers whose employers are being investigated for violating the law. If she is confirmed, she should fight to ensure the Trump administration provides deferred action for workers whose rights have been violated and should work to issue letters in support of deferred action for eligible workers.

These are just a few actions Chavez-DeRemer could take to demonstrate her commitment to workers. If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.

Octopuses, with three hearts and remarkable intelligence, remain among the most intriguing non-human species ever studied. Despite their unsuitability for domestication, multiple plans are emerging to farm them intensively.

The most worrying proposal comes from the company Nueva Pescanova, which aims to establish Europe’s first octopus farm in the Canary Islands, as well as breed and kill over 1 million octopuses per year.

In the United States, hope takes the form of the OCTOPUS Act. Already passed in Washington State and California, this bill seeks to ban octopus farming altogether before it ever becomes reality. Animal rights organizations are not stopping there, as they plan to introduce this preventive bill in at least five additional states.

What exactly are preventive policies? Why are they becoming a preferred strategy for animal rights organizations?

Preventive policies function as a preemptive strike, making it possible to ban or regulate activities that have the potential to cause harm. Such policies are particularly valuable in the context of animal welfare because they can stop inhumane practices before they become ingrained, or before powerful lobbying groups form around them. As the old English proverb goes: “Better safe than sorry.”

Why do animal rights organizations favor preventive policies?

One of the most powerful, albeit challenging, ways of countering animal suffering at scale is through policy change. Over the past three decades, preventive policies have gained momentum as a key tool for environmental protection. More recently, animal rights organizations have also turned to this strategy as a way of protecting animals.

The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.

Preventive policies are also more politically feasible. At present, octopus meat is caught wild, and local fishermen have not been targeted by the policy. They are even in favor of the OCTOPUS Act because it will protect their activities. There is less resistance to such a ban because no industry currently exists for farming octopuses. Contrast this with efforts to end factory farming for chickens or pigs, where deeply entrenched lobbies make change difficult.

Overall, preventive policies lay the groundwork for long-term, sustainable change. They can create a ripple effect, setting a precedent that can inspire other countries to follow suit. Eurogroup for Animals has already suggested that the European Union should consider similar legislation: “If the U.S. can do it, the E.U. can too.”

Do preventive policies live up to the expectations?

While preventive policies are powerful, they are not without drawbacks. Policies take a long time to draft, introduce, pass through the appropriate legislative bodies, and, at last, implement. In the interim, harmful practices may even develop in other jurisdictions. Preventive policies do not offer the immediate relief that animal advocates are hoping for.

Another concern is that restricting a practice through legal means could give rise to covert practices that are even more harmful or make it more difficult to ensure animal welfare standards. The demand for octopus meat could lead to illegal activities, such as black market trade or trafficking.

It is also challenging to quantify the precise impact of any one policy on animal suffering. Animal protection is multifactorial. Policies are just one piece of the puzzle that includes advocacy efforts, campaigns, public awareness, and social pressure as well as shifts in cultural attitudes. While the OCTOPUS Act may prevent octopus farming in the United States, how much animal suffering will be reduced? We cannot assume that harm will be entirely eradicated without continued effort across multiple fronts.

How can we ensure that preventive policies make a difference?

We must endorse a holistic approach to ensure that policies like the OCTOPUS Act carry the weight we intend. Science and research should inform the drafting of legislation, ensuring that laws are grounded in deep understanding of animal cognition and welfare. Simultaneously, advocacy campaigns and public pressure help generate the social momentum to push these policies forward.

Creative expressions—whether through art, film, or photography—can also play a significant role in raising awareness, in fostering empathy for animals, and in driving change. My Octopus Teacher is a brilliant example of this. While the impact of these efforts is even harder to quantify, they are often the spark that leads to legislative change.

Preventive policies alone are not a silver bullet, but they are an essential tool in the fight for animal welfare. The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.

May this bill pass in many other states, create change internationally, and set a precedent to safeguard the lives of billions of animals.

During this year’s presidential election campaign, I was puzzled and increasingly troubled that the issue of truth-telling — and the spectacular lack of it from one candidate — wasn’t getting the sort of focus or emphasis in the news coverage it should have received. We heard or read about Donald Trump’s specific false statements just about every day (because they happened just about every day). But we didn’t often hear about the deeper questions those falsehoods raised and continue to raise: What will it mean to have a president of the United States who has no regard for the truth and often no idea what it is? What will it do to public life if a president’s words can’t be trusted, no matter what he’s talking about? What are the possible consequences if a president consistently ignores or distorts proven facts, and how much will those distortions shape his policy decisions and actions?

For obvious reasons those questions became more significant, not less, with Trump’s victory. His habitual disregard for the truth isn’t just an old story from a past presidency, but today’s and tomorrow’s news for the next four years. So, journalists, opinion-makers, and anyone else whose voice reaches the public need to keep raising the issue in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second inauguration and after he takes office. That means not just calling out individual falsehoods but connecting the dots, reminding us of his overall record and what it should tell us about the next phase of American public life. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute and a co-founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, got it right in a fundraising email two days after the election when he reminded supporters that “facts are the foundation of our reality.” Checking facts, he went on, “is time-consuming but essential… There is no off switch on the dial of misinformation.”

For the most part, we have no way of knowing which of Trump’s false statements are conscious lies — when he’s saying something he knows isn’t true — and when he believes his own words because they fit into the made-up world he’s concocted in the insulated bubble of his mind. But that distinction hardly matters when it comes to what kind of president he’ll be. A chronic liar or chronically delusional, either one is a dangerous person to have in the White House for the next four years. That makes it essential to keep a spotlight not just on specific factual issues as they crop up in the news, but on the broader credibility question as well, tracking the misinformation Trump and his crew will almost certainly spew out and, where possible, countering its influence on policy decisions and official actions.

On Immigration, A Stunning Record of Untruths

Perhaps the most immediate and urgent need for that kind of fact-checking will be on immigration policy, where Donald Trump has consistently misrepresented essential facts for many years. The sheer volume of those falsehoods is breathtaking. A recent report from the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site, documented 12,000 false statements of his on that issue alone — no, that’s not a misprint, twelve thousand untrue statements! — during his years in the public arena. I searched but found no indication that Trump has ever backed down from any of them or acknowledged that anything he said on the subject was untrue. Corroborating that impression, Anna Flagg, one of the coauthors of the Marshall Project paper, wrote in response to an email inquiry that she is “personally not aware of Trump correcting any of these statements.”

Far from correcting such falsehoods, he has often repeated them even after they were thoroughly and conclusively debunked. One of many examples was his claim in a late September blog post that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris’s] three and a half year period as Border Czar — Also currently in our Country because of her are 15,811 migrants convicted of rape and sexual assault.” Journalists quickly established that those numbers, listed on a chart prepared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), were, in fact, a count of people who had entered the country over a more than 40-year time span, including Donald Trump’s four years as president. That airtight refutation didn’t stop him from repeating the same false allegation a month later, when he declared in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that “other countries are allowed to empty their prisons into our country with murderers, we had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years.”

Nor were those murderers able to “freely and openly roam our Country,” as Trump claimed in yet another post. The list of convicted murderers, a DHS spokesperson told CNN, included “many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” (Confusingly, the DHS chart lists all 13,099 as “undetained,” but that means only that they weren’t in the custody of the U.S. immigration agency, not that they weren’t in state or federal prisons.)

Another example came during Trump’s September 10th debate with Kamala Harris, when, speaking about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he alleged that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there” — a story police and local officials had already declared to be untrue. Trump also regularly exaggerates the number of Haitians actually in Springfield, as when he told listeners to the Rogan podcast that “32,000 migrants that don’t speak the language” had been “dropped” there. The actual estimate is 10,000-12,000.

Reminding us of the facts when it comes to those and numerous other distortions is crucially important now that Trump will again be in a position not just to bluster about immigration but to execute policies that will affect huge numbers of men, women, and children. Starting now, fact-checkers should do everything they can to make Americans aware of the actual facts — such as the strong likelihood that the mass deportations he’s vowed to launch “on day one” of his presidency will upend the lives of many people who are not illegal immigrants but are in the U.S. legally (a category that includes almost all of the Haitians in Springfield that Trump wants sent “back to their country”).

In that effort, truth-tellers should also monitor statements by advisers who have their own records of incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric — particularly, Tom Homan, Trump’s prospective “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, one of the principal architects of the sweeping ban on Muslim immigrants that Trump imposed early in his first term, who is slated to return to the White House as deputy chief of staff.

Other Places to Set the Record Straight

Along with spreading the truth about immigration, fact-checkers monitoring Trump and his team should do what they can to correct counterfactual statements on other important issues the new administration will be dealing with. Climate change is one example of a crucial issue where Trump has regularly minimized the risk, espoused policies (“drill, baby, drill”) that will increase the danger, and misrepresented scientific evidence (as in his assertion that “the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years,” a figure thousands of times less than the 10 to 12-inch rise over 30 years predicted by the U.S. government’s Interagency Task Force on Sea Level Change).

Fact-checking will also be highly relevant on a looming subject that has potentially significant implications not for government policy but for public trust in the American legal and judicial system: the end, permanent or temporary, of criminal proceedings against Donald Trump himself. Barring unforeseen surprises, it appears certain that the cases against him will either be dropped or put on indefinite hold, probably before he even takes office. When that happens, he will undoubtedly insist that he’s been completely exonerated, did nothing wrong, and was unjustly prosecuted for political reasons. Presumably, that claim will be challenged, but it’s another case where fact-checkers should be at work reminding the public of what he’s been accused of doing, detail by detail, and recalling what the evidence has shown us about Trump’s past actions and the true origins of those cases. (Some new material on the subject may be added to that record before inauguration day in a report special prosecutor Jack Smith is expected to submit to the Justice Department after he closes out the two federal cases against Trump that he’s overseen for the last two years. At this writing, it’s not 100% certain when or even if Smith’s report will be officially released, but it’s hard to imagine that any significant new information in it will be successfully suppressed.)

More broadly and looking further ahead, fact-checking — not just labeling particular statements false as they occur, but systematically keeping track of and reporting on the cumulative record of Trump’s misstatements — should be a top priority during the new administration. A possible model is the Washington Post’s project during Trump’s first presidency, when its staffers maintained a database of his untruths. The Post’s final tally was 30,573 false or misleading claims during his time in the White House — an average of 21 untruths a day for four years! If the Post and other publications do something similar this time around, I hope they will periodically publish their findings, both as front-page stories and perhaps a front-page box every week or two with the totals and notable examples during the preceding interval.

Don’t Just Challenge Trump

One more suggestion for journalists: while tracking Trump’s false statements in the coming weeks and months, don’t just seek comments from him or his mouthpieces, but follow up on factual questions with other Republican politicians. Whenever possible — at confirmation hearings, say (if Trump doesn’t succeed in bypassing that check-and-balance procedure) — reporters should press congressional Republicans to respond to his falsehoods and declare on the record what they believe is true. For example: “Senator, do you believe that 13,000 murderers from other countries were admitted to this country during the Biden administration and are now walking around free in American cities and towns?” And if the senator or representative dodges the question, as many undoubtedly will, follow it up: “Senator, are you aware that those murderers came over a period of 40 years, not just the last four, and that quite a few of them are in prison, not ‘walking around free’?” You get the idea.

If and when a Republican politician does actually acknowledge a Trump falsehood, the reporter shouldn’t let it go at that, but ask a further set of questions: “Have you told people who voted for you and your party that this story isn’t true and what the actual facts are? Do you and other members of your party have any obligation to act against the spread of such false beliefs so that what your supporters think will be based on verified facts and not the president’s false information?”

It’s almost impossible to believe that any ongoing fact-checking effort will change Trump’s style or make his public discourse any more truthful. Nor will it convince his diehard supporters, who will continue to trust his statements no matter what the evidence shows. But there must be people out there who voted for him but are still open-minded enough to be convinced by the actual facts. Presumably, more of those people will accept more of those facts when they hear them not from Trump’s opponents or the news media but from their side of the political divide, from Republican office holders or others they believe represent their views. So, it will be critical for fact-checkers to keep the pressure on elected officials and others who have some credibility with Trump’s constituents and challenge them to publicly correct the falsehoods that we can confidently expect will continue pouring out from his White House.

The record of that group up to now does not inspire much hope. With only a few honorable exceptions, Republican politicians’ loyalty to Trump has consistently outweighed any loyalty to the truth. But now, when his conscious and unconscious falsehoods are about to be combined with presidential powers and so will pose potentially unfathomable dangers for American public life, reversing the balance between those conflicting loyalties is more urgent than in the last eight years or perhaps ever in our history. Confronting lies and correcting untruths will be essential in meeting that threat — and I hope fact-checkers and truth tellers will rise to the challenge.

Yes. We lost. And yes, as Thomas Paine pronounced in late 1776 in The Crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nonetheless, as we argue here, this is not a time to despair and hide away. For as Paine went on to write in that pamphlet: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Words that encouraged Americans to sustain the Revolution and, yes, go on to win battles and ultimately, victory.

We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—and regularly reaffirmed by our greatest leaders—to remind us all that we, native-born and newly-arrived alike, are the children and grandchildren of generations of progressives and radicals who, in the course of almost 250 years, made that promise their own and fought to realize it.

Do not underestimate the power of that promise. And surely, you feel it too.

'We Can't Do This Without You!'
'We Have It in Our Power...'
'Let Them Call Us Rebels'

Consider the testimony of the great self-emancipated black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his speech in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass lambasted the country and his fellow Americans: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” And yet, in the end, even he did not surrender to despair: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery... I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

So, yes, we lost. But the struggle continues. And in that spirit, we want you to know that when Martin Luther King, Jr. would find himself growing despondent about the state of America and the forces opposing the civil rights struggle, he would recall Thomas Paine’s revolutionary words from Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

In the weeks and months ahead, we plan to create a continuing series of comics reminding us of who we are and what that demands—and, hopefully, encouraging us all to pursue progressive and radical-democratic action.

This is not a time to seek a solitary life, but to act in solidarity.

Once again, the 2024 election provided us an opportunity to test whether the U.S. media system can withstand the pressures of an authoritarian threat. And once again, we observed a media system that far too often privileged profit over democratic concerns. This capitulation was, in some ways, more subtle than what we witnessed before, especially in 2016, when coverage of Trump’s campaign was marked by overt sensationalism. Yet, media’s role during the 2024 election season was no less troubling for what it bodes for U.S. democracy’s future.

Media malpractice

Media outlets should have been well prepared this time. Everyone knew exactly what to expect. There were no ambivalences or ambiguities about Trump’s incessant lying or his rabidly xenophobic, transphobic, racist, and misogynistic rhetoric. And yet, despite it all, our media institutions didn’t rise to the occasion to challenge the obvious dangers that Trump posed to democracy. While billionaire owners blocked endorsements of Kamala Harris or outright weaponized their media properties, as in the case of Elon Musk and X, much media coverage was, once again, complicit in normalizing Trump.

From “sanewashing” (sanitizing Trump’s outlandish rhetoric and behavior) to false equivalence, from trivializing policy implications to horse race coverage and the fetishizing of polls, we saw it all over again. The inveterate media critic Jay Rosen had long pleaded with journalists to emphasize “not the odds, but the stakes.” But too often, milquetoast media coverage reverted to a kind of he said/she said anodyne “bothsidesing” narration that left audiences insufficiently alarmed at what policies Trump was proposing.

To be sure, it’s tempting to conclude that, in an era of social media influencers and innumerable podcasters, legacy media no longer matter. In this light, blaming news media institutions seems as pointless as it is inaccurate. After all, few Trump voters are turning to the New York Times for guidance on how to vote. But our elite and incumbent media still play an outsized role in setting discursive parameters and establishing official narratives. The border crisis, run-amok urban crime, the tanking economy—all these crises, to varying degrees, were manufactured and amplified through media.

Such recurring narrative patterns bring into focus more subtle and less measurable—though potentially more profound—media effects worthy of further consideration. In addition to the general problem of pervasive, low-quality information, a long-term problem is the ideological policing and hegemonic narratives that accrete over time. I flag these issues for future areas of concern that deserve more attention from media scholars, who tend to focus on short-term effects.

Uncovering structural roots

If we were to pan out for a moment and consider the big picture, we might be more likely to see how the predictable patterns of selection, omission, and emphasis in media coverage suggest a common structural underpinning—that many problems in standard election reporting stem from deeper pathologies, especially those connected to commercial logics.

Extreme commercialism afflicts most aspects of the U.S. media system. Pegging news media so directly to market relationships has led to systemic failures: Racial and class-based redlining, market censorship, ever-expanding news deserts, and degraded information. It also creates the conditions for monopolistic control over entire sectors of our communication and information infrastructures that allow oligarchs to capture them.

Indeed, “media oligarchy” is an apt phrase for describing our current state of affairs: From the right-wing tech titans such as Elon Musk and his ilk, to opportunistic monopolists like Jeff Bezos, to the villainous media baron Rupert Murdoch and his progeny. These unaccountable billionaires own and control vast swathes of U.S. information and communication infrastructure—a dangerous predicament according to the most elementary democratic theory.

The challenge ahead

Ultimately, these moments of crisis can be clarifying. They cast into stark relief the power structures that shape our media. They illuminate just how ill-equipped our media institutions are to perform the basic tasks of democracy. And they point to pressure points that we can exploit to create a better system, one that actually serves our information and communication needs.

The fact that Trump prevailed is a damning statement on the health of our media systems. These institutions have all failed us. This means that we must radically reform them, especially our media, at a systemic level from the ground up. But to do so requires a structural critique of commercial media—one that treats capitalism as an independent variable—and the anti-democratic institutions that sustain these systems.

Most media scholarship, especially in the U.S., takes the commercial system for granted, treating capitalism as the natural steward of journalism. While journalism scholars are quick to indict the practices and routines of individual news organizations and journalists, better norms will not save us. We need a structural overhaul of our media institutions. This requires renewed emphasis on political economy and policy as well as ideology and discourse. We have much work ahead of us.

This was first published at Election Analysis-US and appears here at Common Dreams with permission.

Whatever you think about Donald Trump’s cabinet picks for his second administration, whether or not you think they are qualified, very clearly he and his transition team are having a wild time choosing them and dropping them on a shocked establishment…maybe a little too wild.

P.S. With the holidays soon to be upon us, remember: you could buy the Original Line Art for this cartoon! Either for a friend or yourself. Price is $400, includes shipping within US and a personal hand-signed dedication by yours truly. Contact me here: here.

The post To the Spoiled Go the Victors first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post To the Spoiled Go the Victors appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When Pam Bondi, president-elect Donald Trump’s new pick for U.S. attorney general, was the state attorney general of Florida, she was one of the best money can buy.

Despite the fact that a state attorney general’s job is to represent the public interest—not private, special interests—Bondi routinely took the side of corporate fraudsters and polluters during her two-term tenure that ran from 2011 to 2019, coincidentally after receiving political donations, free trips, and other generous perks from interested parties.

Instead of protecting the people of Florida, she failed to prosecute corporate fraud and defended the fossil fuel industry at the expense of public health and the environment.

A prime example of one of these alleged quid pro quos came up in the news coverage following Trump’s announcement that he had selected Bondi to replace his first choice, Matt Gaetz, to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer. In 2013, Bondi abandoned the idea of joining the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against Trump University after a Trump family foundation donated $25,000 to a pro-Bondi political action committee.

The Senate should take a closer look at the circumstances surrounding that incident when considering her appointment. But it also should keep in mind that it was not a one-off. It was emblematic of a pattern of behavior.

Wining and Dining

In the fall of 2014, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by Eric Lipton examining the upsurge in corporate lobbying of state attorneys general. The first installment, “Lobbyists, Bearing Gifts, Pursue Attorneys General,” featured Bondi front and center. At the time, she was chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), an organization founded in 1999 with the primary purpose of electing Republican attorneys general.

Lipton found that state attorneys general had become “the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences, and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements, or pressure federal regulators.” He even discovered cases where attorneys general used legal briefs drafted by private lawyers nearly verbatim and relied on them to provide much of the research as well as the cost of litigation in exchange for a percentage of any settlement.

Although state laws generally require corporate lobbyists to register if they are trying to influence legislation, there are no explicit rules when it comes to lobbying attorneys general.

That “aggressive pursuit” Lipton described goes both ways. According to emails and documents obtained by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Republican attorneys general offer lobbyists and lawyers private, confidential meetings in exchange for contributions to RAGA, which—as a 527 political organization—can raise unlimited amounts of cash from individuals and corporations. Another RAGA document, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Documented, detailed the degree of access funders get at RAGA conferences, retreats, and summits depending on how much they spend on their annual RAGA membership fee, which in 2019 ranged from $15,000 to $250,000.

This explosion of lobbying and dealmaking, Lipton pointed out, has taken place largely behind closed doors, because “unlike the lobbying rules covering other elected officials, there are few revolving-door restrictions or disclosure requirements governing state attorneys general.” Although state laws generally require corporate lobbyists to register if they are trying to influence legislation, there are no explicit rules when it comes to lobbying attorneys general.

Bondi Cashes In

Bondi first appears in the Times story when she was at a RAGA retreat at an exclusive California resort where rooms cost as much as $4,500 a night. She was joined by other RAGA members as well as representatives from lobbying firms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and such Fortune 500 companies as Altria, Comcast, and Pfizer.

RAGA members’ airfare, meals, and hotel bills for such events are generally paid by the corporate sponsors or state taxpayers. Corporate donors, Lipton found, had provided Bondi nearly $25,000 worth of airfare, hotels, and meals for RAGA-sponsored events during the previous two years. Florida taxpayers, meanwhile, had covered nearly $14,000 in Bondi’s expenses since she took office in 2011 to go to meetings hosted by the nonpartisan National Association of Attorneys General and the Conference of Western Attorneys General, where corporate lobbyists were also in attendance. In a statement, Bondi told the Times that the financial support she had received for these events, either directly or through RAGA, did not have any influence on her decisions as attorney general.

The Times story went on to cite several examples when Bondi, after lobbying by the Dickstein Shapiro law firm, declined to investigate its corporate clients’ unethical practices that other state attorneys general deemed illegal. The firm’s clients included Accretive Health, whose bill collecting operations had been shut down by Minnesota’s attorney general for abusive practices; Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit online school whose sales pitches, according to Iowa’s attorney general, were “unconscionable”; and Herbalife, the maker of nutritional drinks and other products, which settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2016 to pay $200 million back to people who the company conned with misleading moneymaking claims.

Besides mingling with Bondi at RAGA conferences and treating her to expensive dinners, Dickstein Shapiro lawyers helped place a cover story on Bondi in InsideCounsel, a magazine for corporate lawyers, and sponsored a fundraising event in 2014 for Bondi at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

When contacted by the Times about her reluctance to pursue the cases involving Dickstein Shapiro clients, Bondi said in a statement that her encounters with the firm’s representatives had no impact on her decisions and insisted that her office “aggressively protects Floridians from unfair and deceptive business practices.”

Killing the Clean Power Plan

The second installment in Lipton’s Times series, “Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General,” was based on thousands of pages of correspondence between energy industry executives and Republican attorneys general trying to block Obama administration proposals to address the climate crisis. In 2014 alone, Lipton found, the fossil fuel industry donated some $16 million to at least a dozen Republican attorney general candidates.

Apparently it was money well spent. As CMD reported, less than two weeks after representatives from fossil fuel companies, electric utilities, and their trade groups attended a RAGA conference in August 2015, Bondi and more than 20 other state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have established the first-ever limits on U.S. power plant carbon emissions. Among the conference’s attendees were lobbyists from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal industry trade group now called America’s Power, which gave RAGA $378,250 between 2015 and 2016; Charles Koch’s Koch Industries, which donated $350,000; coal giant Murray Energy, which contributed $250,000; and Southern Company, which gave RAGA $85,000, according to materials reviewed by CMD.

Bondi also benefited directly from corporate lobby firm and fossil fuel industry largess. In the run up to her fall 2010 victory through her two four-year terms as Florida’s attorney general, her campaigns raised nearly $397,000 from lawyers and lobbyists (who lobbied on a range of issues) and more than $46,000 from the energy sector, including electric utilities and such oil and gas companies as Chevron and Koch Industries, according election finance data compiled by Follow the Money. Forty percent of the nearly $6 million Bondi’s campaigns raised came from the Florida Republican Party, which in 2015—when Bondi and her colleagues challenged the Clean Power Plan and the last year she served as RAGA chair—received $775,000 from lawyers and lobbyists and more than $800,000 from the energy sector.

If Bondi were really serious about protecting her constituents, however, she would have joined the District of Columbia and the 15 states that backed the Obama administration and were ready to begin complying with Clean Power Plan rules.

In an October 2015 opinion column in The Florida Times-Union, Bondi maintained that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had no legal authority to impose the Clean Power Plan and that it would have resulted in higher electricity bills across the country. Four months later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a controversial 5 to 4 ruling, blocked the plan (and Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, repealed it in 2017), but Bondi’s assertion that replacing fossil fuel-powered electricity with renewables would lead to higher bills has been proven wrong.

According to a July 2024 analysis by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a nonpartisan think tank, “Since 2010, residential electricity rates have not increased faster than inflation, while electricity bills have declined in inflation-adjusted terms. Many of the states with the largest increases in wind and solar generation since 2010—including Iowa, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma—have seen rates rise slower than inflation.” Energy Innovation found that the key drivers of rising electricity rates have been the cost of fossil fuels, combatting wildfires, and transmitting and distributing power.

Climate Crisis? What Crisis?

Bondi justified challenging the Clean Power Plan as a bipartisan effort, although only a couple of the 27 state attorneys general who signed onto the lawsuit were Democrats. She also insisted she was just protecting her constituents.

“Let me tell you who we are looking out for: We are looking out for consumers,” Bondi told reporters. “And we will continue to look out for our consumers and our businesses, especially when this affects their finances. That’s what this is about.”

If Bondi were really serious about protecting her constituents, however, she would have joined the District of Columbia and the 15 states that backed the Obama administration and were ready to begin complying with Clean Power Plan rules. After all, Florida is the most vulnerable state to climate change.

How bad will it likely get? Florida is currently the second hottest state, and the South Florida is projected to experience the biggest increase in the number of hottest days across the country. Palm Beach County, for example, projects that by 2040, it will suffer 35 to 49 days with temperatures over 95°F annually. By 2070, that number could be between 81 and 112 days, according to the county’s estimates.

At the same time, routine flooding is already a major problem, and by the end of the century, some 1 million Florida homes will be at risk. That’s largely because the state sits on porous limestone and the sea level around the state, which has gone up 8 inches since 1950, could rise another 14 to 16 inches by 2050, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Meanwhile, the state has been hit by 52 billion-dollar extreme weather disasters since 2010. About 40% were caused by hurricanes, which have been turbocharged by rising levels of carbon emissions. One of the most recent, Hurricane Ian, slammed into the state’s Gulf Coast in September 2022, causing more than $112 billion in damages. It was the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history and the third-costliest in U.S. history, according to a 2022 NOAA report. This year, three hurricanes made landfall, two of them less than two weeks apart.

Regardless, Pam Bondi doesn’t like to “philosophize” about climate change. In October 2015, when she announced Florida was joining other states in suing the Obama administration over the Clean Power Plan, a Politico reporter asked her if climate change was “man-made.” Bondi replied: “I’m not going to get into a philosophical discussion with you about climate change.”

She then pivoted to defend the lawsuit, saying that the plan would be costly for Florida’s consumers and businesses. The reporter pressed her again, asking her about her take on climate change and “whether it was an issue of science rather than philosophy.” Bondi refused to take the bait. “I’m not going to get in a discussion about climate change right now,” she replied.

Florida Rolled Back Environmental Safeguards

Bondi’s opposition to the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era EPA air pollution proposals, including a new rule for power plant startups and shutdowns, was also legalistic. Although the Clean Air Act grants the federal government the authority to set pollution standards, she maintained it is the states’ responsibility to implement them. “States play an important role in protecting air and water,” Bondi wrote in her October 2015 Florida Times-Union column, “and state attorneys general in particular have long been the last line of defense to protect states against gross federal overreach.”

States do have an important role in protecting the environment, but according to a September 2014 Tampa Bay Times editorial, the record of Rick Scott, the governor when Bondi was attorney general, was “an environmental disaster,” and the paper was only referencing his first four years in office. His second term, according to many accounts, was just as bad.

“Scott has bulldozed a record of environmental protection that his Republican and Democratic predecessors spent decades building,” the Tampa Bay Times editorial noted. “He weakened the enforcement of environmental laws and cut support for clean water, conservation, and other programs. He simultaneously made it easier for the biggest polluters and private industries to degrade the state’s natural resources. While the first-term Republican attempts to transform himself into an environmentalist during his reelection campaign, his record reflects a callous disregard for the state’s natural resources and no understanding of how deeply Floridians care about their state’s beauty and treasures.”

There are too many examples of Scott trashing Florida’s environmental safeguards to list here, but there are a few that are notable for their outrageousness.

• Shortly after Scott—a hard core climate science denier—took office in 2011, Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials issued a directive barring thousands of employees from using the terms “climate change,” “global warming,” and “sustainability.”

• Scott later denied he banned the terms, but he closed down the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, which was established by his predecessor Charlie Crist to implement policies reducing carbon emissions and preparing for climate change-related impacts.

• When asked by a reporter in 2014 if he thinks man-made climate change is real and significant, Scott famously replied with the standard Republican mantra: “I am not a scientist.”

• Scott also killed funding for Florida Forever, the state’s landmark conservation program that Gov. Jeb Bush created in 2001. The program was reauthorized in 2008, but in 2011, Scott called for eliminating it, and it was completely defunded in 2016.

• A year later, he approved Florida House Bill 989—the so-called “anti-science law”—which enables legal challenges to teaching the realities of climate change in state classrooms.

More recently, after Hurricane Helene blew through Florida in September, Scott—who has been representing Florida in the U.S. Senate since 2019—acknowledged that the climate is “clearly changing.”

However, when asked by a CNN anchor if Helene was part of a trend in which storms “are simply bigger than they once were, perhaps because of climate change,” he replied: “Who knows what the reason is, but something is changing. Massive storms. Massive storm surge. So we’ve got to figure this out.”

Bondi Failed to Do Her Job

According to the nonpartisan National Association of Attorneys General, a state attorney general’s duty is to represent the public interest by, among other things, protecting consumers from fraud, regulating utilities, enforcing environmental laws, and instituting civil suits.

Bondi did the exact opposite: Instead of protecting the people of Florida, she failed to prosecute corporate fraud and defended the fossil fuel industry at the expense of public health and the environment.

As attorney general, Bondi oversaw her office’s Consumer Protection Division, which is charged with protecting “consumers by pursuing individuals and entities that engage in unfair methods of competition or unconscionable, deceptive, or unfair practices in trade of commerce.” During her eight years as attorney general, the cop was apparently off the beat when Bondi succumbed to the enticements of corporate lobbyists.

Florida has already sustained billions of dollars in climate change-related damage. Regardless, Bondi routinely joined—and spearheaded—lawsuits and other actions to block federal environmental safeguards, especially those designed to mitigate the impact of global warming. Why? At least partly—if not largely—because the organization she chaired, the Republican Attorneys General Association, received massive financial support from fossil fuel companies, electric utilities, and their respective trade groups.

As a state’s top legal officer, attorneys general are supposed to function as the “people’s lawyer,” representing the interests of state residents. All swear to faithfully discharge their duties. By failing to prosecute corporate fraud and putting the interests of the fossil fuel industry ahead of the health and safety of her own constituents, did Pam Bondi violate her oath of office?

By dint of geography, history, culture and human evolution, Turkey is one of the most influential nations in the world and certainly that’s the case throughout Asia. The trade and cultural gateway between Europe and Asia, Turkey has recently taken a light authoritarian and nationalist turn under the presidency of Reyup Erdogan, who has been serving as president for the last decade.

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the American presidency, there has been speculation that Erdogan’s natural stylistic affinity to Trump may draw him closer to the United States as Turkey — like all countries between great powers — balances the US and its European allies against Russia and perhaps even plays them off against each other. On the other hand, Russia has gained the upper hand in Ukraine. And Trump seems to want to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. Then there’s the country’s complicated relationship with Europe: it’s been a member of NATO since 1995 but its application to join the EU has stalled since Erdogan became president.

Dr. Hasan Ünal, professor at Baskent University in Ankara, has published extensively on Turkish foreign policy-related matters. He joins TMI Show hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan to explore Turkey’s dilemma: East or West? Which to Choose?

The post The TMI Show Ep 28: “Turkey’s Perspective on Trump, NATO, Ukraine” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post The TMI Show Ep 28: “Turkey’s Perspective on Trump, NATO, Ukraine” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution sure will be.

In this new political era, the dominant military power in the capitalist world-system is ruled by a Venn Diagram of baddies—ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security hawks. These elites take their opportunity to direct state power from the legitimacy afforded a single man. One of the only common elements about the diverse (but majority white and male) votes cast for Donald Trump is that they all saw Washington liberal elites as the enemy.

To put it differently, Trump voters were against one set of ruling-class elites and so cast their vote for a man who has surrounded himself with a different cadre of ruling-class elites, all of whom seem to fashion themselves as enemies of the previous dominant set. MAGA politics marks the emergence of political counter-elites with nothing short of revolutionary ambitions.

But what does that mean? Why is nobody talking about what is obviously emerging—counter-elites who are literally talking about revolution?

Defining Terms

In parsing the distinctions and overlaps among conservatives, reactionaries, and the forgotten category of counter-revolutionaries, everything is at stake.

Everybody’s go-to text today for these terms and concepts—terms that typologize the political right—seems to be Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. A fine book, but a product of its moment (2011) and definitely a distinct take rather than a consensus view about the right. Joe Mackay has also done some work parsing conservative and reactionary in particular.

George Lawson, meanwhile, has made a convincing case that in the context of the age of empires, “counter-revolution” was about countering the revolutionary projects that emerged after the French Revolution. This gave counter-revolution back then a Burkean quality, which is to say conservative in the literal sense—preserving the old order, tradition, and distributions of power. This is the conventional way of understanding counter-revolution.

But in the West right now, and specifically in America, there is no left-revolutionary situation to counter. This is why the dust-binned work of Arno Mayer might be the ideal way to make sense of where this current configuration of right-wing political power is taking America.

Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.

Mayer wrote many classics, but the one that really speaks to our moment is Dynamics of Counter-Revolution. In that book, he offers three types of right-wing “forces of order” with different agendas. Two are straightforward but deserve explaining, while the third is both more controversial and more important to grasp right now.

He defined conservative thought as “designed to give coherence to the defense of traditional social, economic, and political institutions and of traditional aesthetics, morals, and manners.” Reactionaries, meanwhile, “advocate a return to a mythical and romanticized past. In this past they seek the recovery and restoration of institutions…which sustained a hierarchical order of privileges and prerogatives.”

Mayer’s counter-revolution is particularly relevant to the current moment. He defined this concept as the forces of “order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, obedience, tradition, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and nationalism [that wield revolutionary methods,] mobilizing and regimenting superannuated, unhinged, and inert individuals and groups… that enables them to become a new but claimant political counterelite.”

Unpacking counter-revolutionaries even further, Mayer goes on to say that they combine “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behavior patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences… its constructive purposes remain deliberately inchoate and equivocal.”

It is common to use reactionary or far-right to describe MAGA and NatCon politics. These guys are no Edmund Burkes, after all. Neither of these terms is wrong, but they say nothing about counter-revolution, which is something they actively talk about. To wit:

— (@) You Say You Want A Revolution, Well, You Know

It’s not just that they invoke revolution in their rhetoric. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talked about revolution rhetorically while running for president, but proposed a pretty gradualist reform agenda… and a non-violent one at that.

The MAGA/NatCon crowd on the verge of taking over government, by contrast, have made speech after speech outlining their ideas to wield radical violence on behalf of objectives as wide-ranging as eliminating the FBI to invading “sanctuary cities” to bombing Mexico and initiating mass deportations of immigrants from everywhere. Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.

The “fascist debate” about MAGA has been frustrating and unhelpful. Mayer’s category of counter-revolutionary, though, captures important features, only some of which are present in the “fascist” discourse:

• Nationalist
• Glorification of tradition
• Authority
• Hierarchy
• Counter-elite elite
• A need to purge “agents” who have corrupted the nation
• Mobilizing “unhinged and inert” groups of people

That checks out!

According to Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions, revolution consists of “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures… accompanied by and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.” Counter-revolution, then, is a similarly rapid and radical transformation of the world but with two distinctions. One is that it comes from the top (by elites) even more than from below. The other is that the content of the revolution, following Mayer, is reactionary.

And now that MAGA has more institutional power to transform America than any group in the past 100 years, the future will look less like Nazi Germany 2.0 than a project of counter-revolution to transform the social order and existing distributions of power in society. American government will be ethnonationalist. It will be patriarchal. It will be violent. It will redound to the benefit of oligarchs. And it will threaten to destabilize the world.

Disturbingly, the architecture for this counter-revolutionary project has much source material to draw on in the form of existing U.S. foreign policy and the existing balance of forces between capital and labor. Even the counter-revolutionary’s impetus to dehumanize its enemies has gotten a substantial boost from the dehumanization that permeates U.S. policy, from the Mexico border to Palestine.

That “normal” U.S. politics has gifted the counter-revolution so much of what it needs to wreak havoc on the world should prompt a re-examination of what is normal.

Is “Counter-Revolution” Right?

Mayer’s various arguments are not beyond critique. His analysis of counter-revolution ties closely to the making of World War I, which he saw as an external solution to domestic political conflict between left and right. But all the belligerents in World War I were not polarized in the same ways when it came to left-right conflict. And although there is evidence that the world war had domestic political motivations, there’s not enough evidence to suggest it was more important than alternative motivations (inter-imperial competition, the boomerang effect of colonialism, the balance of power’s inevitable system failure, the “cult of the offensive,” national status pathologies, etc).

A slightly amended argument would carry more weight: World War I tilted Western politics in favor of counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries, even if that was not its primary purpose. It’s hard to argue with that.

Nevertheless, what makes Mayer notable is the very shape of these important arguments. He’s bringing together an analysis of geopolitics with left-right politics. His formulations are compatible with neoclassical realism in international relations but have much more meaning and content than that theoretical tradition.

And in the final analysis, if Mayer’s counter-revolutionary diagnosis applies to the current admixture of ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security bros, then the political horizons of the progressive left are going to have to transcend donating money to the Democratic Party.

Buried deep in the 10th paragraph of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Wall Street Journal screed on their new Department of Government Efficiency is a line that should worry anyone who cares about the accountability role media must play to sustain the health of any democracy

“DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended," they write. One of the items in topping their list of targets is the $535-million annual congressional allocation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that allocates federal funds to public-media outlets across the country

Zeroing out federal funding for public media has long been a dream of Republicans. But it’s one that’s never come true. Past efforts have run up against a noisy public, including people of every political persuasion, that believes federal funding for public media is taxpayer money well spent.

If anything has a popular mandate, it’s the use of federal funds to support public media.

In 2005, I stood in front of the Capitol Building alongside Clifford the Big Red Dog and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to protest a George W. Bush-era push to strip public broadcasting of nearly half its funding. “What parents and kids get from public TV is an incredible bargain,” then-Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at the event. “The question is not, ‘Can we afford it?; but rather, ‘Can we afford to lose it?’”

Millions of people wrote and called their members of Congress to defend institutions like NPR and PBS, a mass mobilization that succeeded in saving public broadcasting from the ax.

The high cost of losing public media

Twenty years later, we face similar headwinds. In 2025, Republicans will control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. They will be acting on the false belief that the November election delivered them a mandate to disassemble the federal government and remake it in Donald Trump’s authoritarian image.

But the actual numbers tell a different story. Trump won by a razor-thin margin, securing less than half of the popular vote (a mandate denying 49.9 percent to Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent). And the Republican majority on the Hill isn’t large enough to dictate such drastic cuts to federal spending; only a fraction of their members would need to defect for Musk and Ramaswamy’s extreme cost-cutting proposals to fail. Having Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene lead the effort in the House is a move that could easily backfire as well.

Undermining a publicly funded media system makes perfect sense if clearing a path for graft, corruption, and a lack of accountability is the goal.

If anything has a popular mandate, it’s the use of federal funds to support public media. According to several polls, Americans routinely rank PBS among the most trusted institutions in the country, and a “most valuable” service taxpayers receive for their money, outranked only by national defense. Moreover, large majorities of the public believe the amount of federal funding that public broadcasting receives is just right, or even too little.

Comparatively, this is true. The United States already has one of the lowest levels of federal funding of public media in the developed world—at approximately $1.50 per capita. That’s nothing next to the United Kingdom, which spends more than $81 per person, or France, which spends more than $75. Head further north and the numbers head north as well: Denmark's per-person spending is more than $93, Finland’s more than $100, and Norway’s more than $110. And it isn’t just a European trend: Japan (+$53/capita) and South Korea (+$14) show their appreciation for publicly funded media at levels that put the U.S. outlay to shame.

It’s about accountability journalism

Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, and their ilk don’t just want to freeze out Frontline and foreclose on Sesame Street, but to pull the plug on every network, station and program that gets public support—from Gulf States Newsroom to the Mountain West News Bureau, from Pacifica Radio to New Jersey Spotlight News.

And that’s the point. The Trump purge of federal spending is not just about downsizing the government so billionaires like Musk will have no obligation to pay their fair share in taxes. It’s about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms, including the sorts of journalism that hold our country’s rich and powerful responsible for their misdeeds. (Republicans are also pushing legislation that would empower President Trump’s Treasury Department to falsely label any nonprofit news outlet as a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip it of the tax-exempt status it needs to survive.)

Undermining a publicly funded media system makes perfect sense if clearing a path for graft, corruption, and a lack of accountability is the goal.

The Trump purge of federal spending is not just about downsizing the government so billionaires like Musk will have no obligation to pay their fair share in taxes. It’s about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms...

A 2021 study co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professor (and Free Press board chair) Victor Pickard finds that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy—with increased public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage and lower levels of extremist views.

Moreover, the loss of the quality local journalism and investigative reporting that nonprofit outlets provide has far-reaching societal harms. The Democracy Fund’s Josh Stearns, who’s also a former Free Press staff member, has cataloged the growing body of evidence showing that declines in local news and information lead to drops in civic engagement. “The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market,” Stearns writes. “They are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.”

For now, Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy are leveraging a lie about a popular mandate to redefine the “public interest” as anything that Trump wants. Trump’s totalitarian dream will not be possible with a thriving, publicly funded and independent media sector. To save this kind of accountability journalism we need people to make as much noise today as they have in the past, and deliver our own mandate for a public-media system that stands against Trump’s brand of authoritarianism.