In the middle of the global celebration of football, when stadiums are full, screens are glowing, and millions are watching the World Cup, a small Palestinian village near Bethlehem experienced something very different.

Battir lost its only football field.

For most of the world, football is entertainment. In Battir, it is something else entirely—it is space, identity, and a rare place where young people can breathe beyond the pressures of daily life.

The field was not a stadium. It had no grandstands, no giant screens, and no professional facilities. It was a simple community pitch. Yet for generations of children and young people in Battir, it meant everything. It was where they played after school, where friendships were built, where confidence grew, and where dreams quietly took shape.

Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.

The field itself was not new. It had existed since the early 1980s and had served the village for more than four decades.

I grew up playing there.

One of my earliest memories is returning home covered in mud after a rainy afternoon match, exhausted but happy. Like many children around the world, I fell in love with football while watching my first FIFA World Cup in 1982, when Spain hosted the tournament. The game became part of my childhood, and the field became part of my life.

Football accompanied me through school, university, and adulthood. Between 2009 and 2016, while serving as secretary of Battir Sports Club, I helped organize annual Ramadan football tournaments on the same field. These competitions brought together local teams and became cherished community events. The field also welcomed visitors from abroad and served as a meeting point where sport connected people across cultures and backgrounds.

For many years, residents hoped to improve the field. In 2022, Battir Sports Club, Battir Municipality, and members of the local community launched a project to rehabilitate the existing facility. The goal was not to build a completely new football ground, but to upgrade a long-standing community space with artificial turf, lighting, changing rooms, and basic infrastructure. The vision was simple: to provide a safe and dignified place where both boys and girls could participate in sport.

For a village that had waited decades to improve its only football field, the project represented hope.

That hope came to an abrupt end on June 30, 2026, when Israeli authorities demolished the field following orders that halted rehabilitation works. What disappeared that day was not merely a construction project. It was a community space that had shaped the lives of generations.

Battir Football Field is demolished. (Photo by Mahmoud Al-Butmeh)

The demolition did not make international headlines. There were no cameras, no commentary panels, and no countdown clocks. But for the children and young people who used the field, the loss was immediate and deeply felt. A place once filled with movement, laughter, and possibility became empty ground.

In a place like Battir, there are few alternatives. There are no nearby facilities waiting to replace what was lost. When one space disappears, it is not easily replaced. It simply vanishes from everyday life.

The timing is difficult to ignore. While the world celebrated football at its highest level during the World Cup, one small village has been left without the field that connected generations to the game.

Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.

What remains now is not only an empty field, but also a question that lingers in the community: Where do the children go next?

This is not just a story about a football field. It is a story about how everyday spaces shape childhood, how communities invest hope in shared places, and how quickly those places can disappear.

And it is a reminder that while the World Cup shows us football at its peak, there are places where the game survives only in memory—and in the hope that one day it might return.

Just as a great loaf of bread requires the right ingredients to rise, a winning civil resistance campaign needs three essentials to rise up: a compelling vision, broad community engagement, and a spark for action.

The De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign had all these ingredients, which is why it succeeded in forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group, operating dozens of detention centers for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Rhode Island bank severed its ties in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the country.

Hundreds of rallies, faith-led actions, shareholder demands, billboard and flyover campaigns, and withering financial pressure—withdrawals totaling $380 million, with more still happening—created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.

It is a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies. By chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.

While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.

“No, Citizens Bank won’t credit you at all for its decision, but it is what it is,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, during a 10-minute segment on the campaign win in late July. “Actions have consequences, including when you work hard, when you organize, and when you decide to just never give up.

"And then the day does come when you win.”

It Started With One Person

This civil resistance story began with a single person, a woman in Texas, taking a stand. She didn’t carry a protest sign or march alone. She built a website.

Horrified by ICE’s mass incarceration campaign early last year, research-nerd activist Laura Berlin, a mother of two teenagers, built a website, boycottcitizens.org, to expose Citizens Bank’s role.

While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.

Drawing on Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other documents, the website showed Citizen’s duplicity, loan-by-loan, year-by-year. Still, the website didn’t get much attention when it was launched 13 months ago, only a dozen or so views a day in the first few months.

That all changed in January when ICE’s aggressive crackdown sparked and exploded. Just as a dozen Northeast activists were organizing their first coordinated protest day against Citizens Ban—an effort of the new De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition—mother and poet Renee Good was gunned down January 7 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Campaign interest and traffic on Berlin’s website took off. When Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed 17 days later in the same city, momentum skyrocketed.

And It Kept Growing

On January 24, the campaign held three-dozen rallies in six states. By March, there were 70 protests in a dozen states. Three months later, 140 protests were organized nationwide, drawing in thousands of regular people angry about an immigration crackdown that has booked and detained more than 600,000 people, 66,000 of whom have been deported.

As protests swelled, coalition members brought new partners into the campaign. One brought in a key union group and activist students at Brown University. Others brought in faith groups. Dozens of local Indivisible groups also joined, including a Rightful Resistance group in New York City that specialized in billboard campaigns.

The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a powerful faith group with deep historic ties to Citizens Bank, was an especially important partner.

The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.

In the early 2000s, GBIO teamed up with Citizens to offer a financial literacy program for its immigrant members around Boston. The bank also lowered fees for immigrants sending remittances to their families. “We were proud to bank with Citizens, and I was proud to be a member of the bank’s board of directors at that time,” wrote Rev. Ray Hammond, a key GBIO leader, in a recent column.

By winter 2026, the good vibes were over.

In early March, GBIO sent a letter to the bank requesting it cut financial ties with the prison companies. In April, Hammond and other shareholders confronted Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun at the bank’s annual meeting in Providence. As Van Saun answered questions about reputation and legal risks, hundreds of protesters, young and old, sang and chanted loudly outside. They also pledged to withdraw their deposits if changes were not made.

The financial pressure campaign, "Not with Our Money, Citizens," came at a key moment. While rallies and billboards boosted awareness and sullied the bank’s reputation, the campaign now had a lever to harm the bank financially.

Within a few weeks, GBIO and the coalition had mobilized $20 million in withdrawal pledges by churches, synagogues, nonprofits, and individual customers angered by the bank’s role in bankrolling prisons. By May, GBIO had pulled $2 million of its deposits, while a similar faith organization in Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Congregations, was threatening to do the same.

Millions of withdrawals may sound like a lot, but it’s relatively small for a bank like Citizens, with $233 billion in assets. At weekly meetings, coalition members brainstormed how it could increase the financial bleeding—to turn those millions into hundreds of millions.

New Jersey Takes a Stand

The answer came in June and the spark came from New Jersey. After weeks of hunger strikes and protests at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall ICE prison in Newark, municipalities started fighting back. The first blow was Jersey City’s June 7 vote to close its accounts with Citizens and pull all $276 million of its deposits.

The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.

One month later, Montclair, New Jersey did the same—another $91 million in deposits out the door. And other communities, including Bloomfield and Hoboken, were looking to follow suit.

Three days after Montclair’s vote, Citizens Bank called it quits. With no public fanfare, it released a statement to a Boston Globe reporter saying, “Citizens has determined that it is now appropriate to exit the credit facilities for these clients.”

The bank called it a ‘business decision,” while repeatedly downplaying the role of activists.

We know better.

Drowning in my usual sea of online media saturation, I recently spotted an article in The Boston Globe that validated a long but increasingly less lonely quest against the perils of technocracy. It focused on a security safeguard we all know and love: two factor authentication and how it’s driving most of us bonkers:

How hard can it be to grab your phone, retrieve a six-digit code, and type it in—seemingly the simplest task in the world—to avoid, oh, having your bank account emptied, your identity stolen, or yourself rendered a kind of stateless person, adrift without access to your own life? Don’t get Thomas Lee, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician, started. “Two-factor authentication is sapping my will to live,” he said. Or litigator Kara Thorvaldsen. “It’s the bane of my existence,” she said. “Every time my husband tries to log into NESN, it somehow requires me to get a code and unlock something with Face ID, etc., etc., ad nauseam.” Or Kim Smith, a playwright, an actor, and an empty nester. “Sometimes the only reason I hear from my [youngest] daughter is when she needs the code that’s been sent to my phone,” she said. As porch pirate thefts mount, residents feel besieged. As two-factor—or, even worse, multifactor—authentication becomes inescapable, it’s safe to say that somewhere in America, a spouse is shouting from another room, “Did you get my code?” An employee can’t get into his work platform because he left his phone at the gym, or thinks he did. And an adult child is trying to help her cognitively faltering parents pay a bill, but can’t, for lack of that darn code.

Not a pretty picture but one that we all know all too well. For some reason, it got me thinking about T.S Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," a masterwork. In one of the more memorable lines, a disillusioned elderly man complains to himself muttering: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” He was basically lamenting that he has let himself be lulled into a diminutive humdrum existence—characterized by small and inconsequential actions making his own narrow life feel smaller and smaller.

This line keeps surfacing in my ruminations about our culture’s slow steady march into some kind of technocratic dystopia—a digital panopticon where we all peck our way through life… where every action, gesture, word, deed, or genetic footprint is recorded and—a more alarming trend of late—presumably watched. In a curious inversion, this humdrum and plodding digital existence has turned out to be the precise opposite of the “machines of loving grace” meme introduced decades ago by another poet, Richard Brautigan—one often quoted by the techno-utopians who are now in charge of… well… almost everything it seems. Then I came across a similar lament from Alex Ross writing in The New Yorker:

You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your email is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing… Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. AI systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant 10-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.

Living our collective cultural experience by “measuring our life in coffee spoons” seems to resonate perfectly. We seem to be in some kind of number punching purgatory like the four sad corporate drones struggling to reclaim their humanity in the popular TV series Severance. We click away and are hypnotized by our screens. We overdose on mandatory cuteness courtesy of goofy cartoonish emojis and robot figures that some programmer seems to think is going to brighten our day.

Red Lights and Info-bureaucracies

As a thought experiment, I started musing about how much of my own time is frittered away on digital trivia. Elaborate verification processes just to use basic services. Endlessly punching numbers and codes into phones and computers and often reaching a dead end. The constant use of codes just to access our own stuff as if in some kind of military intelligence operation. Forcing us to constantly look over our shoulder about being hacked. (Is my life savings still there today?) Frequent visits to customer service hell which are only going to get worse as more and more AI chatbots get added to the mix by clueless companies. (Why is it that many popular companies can’t seem to figure out that customer service is the heart of their business?) Waiting on infinite hold because we might refuse to talk to some cartoon-like chatbot that’s clueless about dealing with anything with the slightest bit of complexity. (Wasn’t AI supposed to be “smart”? Or do companies just like to use “dumb AI” when it suits their purpose?)

I call the framework for these experiential trips to digital purgatory info-bureaucracies. They’re like real-life bureaucracies—only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal like the poor souls in Terry Gilliam’s strange but prescient movie Brazil. So here we are frittering away our already scarce and valuable time on these mindless digital chores when we could be doing things that enrich and sustain our lives.

Now that we’re rapidly moving to an “AI first” world, we won’t even be able to navigate these info-bureaucracies ourselves. Unfortunately, this will probably get worse before it gets better. Tech-enamored companies are increasingly using AI agents for customer service and the results are horrendous. Being able to speak to a human agent means mastering different workarounds for every 800 number you might have to call. And we can easily spend hours of our day on hold listening to someone else’s mind-numbing idea of snazzy music.

I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices.

Years ago, studies were done to determine how much time Americans spent waiting for red lights. According to some researchers, people in the US spend about 300 hours a year driving, a significant portion of which is spent waiting for traffic lights. One research organization calculated that this “comes up to a whopping four months of your life if you drive seven days a week for 50 years.”

Of course, arguably, this is simply one of the inconveniences we tolerate as expected time wasted in the complicated business of contemporary living. But I couldn’t help but think how much of our valuable quality time we now waste on the continual care and feeding of our Lilliputian-like digital lives. And how much already scarce quality time is also being spent on meaningless tasks plodding through digital labyrinths designed to increase corporate profit; unburden huge corporations from the anguish of having to hire more customer-service staff; and save them time while, of course, wasting ours.

More often than not, the AI agents we encounter turn out to be quite stupid by any human metric. I can assure you from years of working in high tech that companies unquestionably have the technical ability to provide much more user-friendly systems. But this isolation from human agents is intentional and serves their own interests. Many customers just give up trying to fix order problems and take a financial hit out of frustration. And these are vital systems of daily life. We’re talking about essential services such as banking, credit card transactions, paying taxes, and other functions. And once you’re in the tech soup, you’re forced to stay there if the matter is important enough.

Henry David Thoreau admonished us to “simplify, simplify.” But how can we accomplish this as the digital maze envelops us? I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices. I believe that Americans are intuiting this, and the AI data center pushback is a healthy and hopeful expression of this.

Another great American poet, Wendell Berry, captured it well. In “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” Berry said: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” It seems clear that this is the unavoidable existential choice we now face. We have to decide what kind of world we want to live in and then summon all the agency we can muster to bring it about.

Congress’ proposed National Defense Authorization Act’s Section 219 ‘US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative’ would require the countries to expand intelligence sharing and grow joint weapons research and production, including artificial intelligence surveillance, lethal drones, arms, tanks, and munitions. This comes as Israel’s military decimation of Gaza, apartheid rule over the West Bank, and occupation of southern Lebanon have triggered opposition across the world. Meanwhile, a more subtle, parallel violence grows in the form of US-funded Israeli agricultural occupation of Palestinian lands. This partnership expands Israel’s regional control spatially and financially, with US backing, but with little public knowledge.

Three years into the deliberate starvation of Gaza, the US and Israel have expanded and entrenched their longstanding agricultural cooperation through the US-Israeli Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD-ISUS). Despite global allegations of genocide against Palestine, weaponizing hunger and even of food aid itself, BARD-ISUS just approved $13.2M US for research and development of Israeli agritech on Palestinian lands.

Established in 1978 by the US and Israeli governments, BARD-ISUS has granted a total of nearly $430 million USD (as of 2024) to over 1,700 projects. In the US, the USDA Agricultural Research Service is on 19% of projects and top universities include University of California Davis (11% of projects); Cornell University (7%); and University of Florida (5%). Universities or public agencies in 48 US states (all except Alaska and North Dakota) have hosted hundreds of BARD-ISUS grants over decades. Nearly $84 million USD has gone to research grants partnering with California land grant institutions alone. The US Farm Bill has allocated additional funds to BARD-ISUS to go directly to agritech research, but also to fund Israeli postdoctoral fellows to be placed at US universities and Israeli graduate students to conduct research with US teams.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives version of the Farm Bill (HR 7567—Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026), tucks in a proposed expansion of BARD to signatories of the Abraham Accords—a 2020 mechanism by which the Trump regime pressures regional countries to normalize relations with Israel, in this case with additional promises for hundreds of millions of dollars of agritech transfer. The House passed another bipartisan amendment (H.R.7587 United States-Israel Agriculture Cooperation Improvement and Expansion Act) reiterating the expansion of BARD to Abraham Accord signatories, which also fast tracks commercialization of ag tech research in and with Israeli institutions and companies, while expanding the overall budget of BARD to $12M each year until 2030. The US Senate Committee on Agriculture has approved the extension of BARD-ISUS funding until 2031, with an allocation of $20 million per year ($80 million overall), atop the lucrative annual proceedings BARD receives from its $110 million endowment. Tellingly, as of 2020, BARD funding can now go to Israeli agricultural research projects in the West Bank’s Area C and the occupied Golan Heights.

The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty.

While BARD research appears at first glance to be apolitical “basic science” efforts to “improve crop productivity and resilience,” their website contains no mention of Palestine, or even euphemistic mentions of conflicts over land in the region. The well-funded BARD-ISUS has “generated a multitude of agricultural innovations, practices, and patents, impacting economies, industries, academia, and human health in both countries and beyond, with a high return on investment”—a claim that erases Palestinian land and agriculture, and distracts from the violence of settler occupation and genocide.

This year’s BARD grants were the “the highest funding amount awarded in the last 20 years,” indicating an entrenchment of US and Israeli academia and agrobiotech industries. The domestic relevance for this BARD expansion becomes acute amid the Farm Bill’s deference to the 2025 HR 1’s $187 Billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Even atop the ongoing deprivations in Gaza, BARD expansion comes as millions of people in the US in need are being kicked off SNAP, USDA employees are facing mass layoffs, and US farmers are reeling from the impacts that US and Israel’s attacks on Iran have had on fertilizers and fuel prices. Increasing funding for Israeli ag tech redirects resources away from urgent domestic agrifood needs.

The BARD-ISUS expansion also comes at a time when Israel and the US rapidly expand their targeting and destruction of not just Palestinian food systems and agricultural production, but rural and agrarian communities across Southwest Asia, in what Paul Kohlbry has termed “agrarian annihilation.” Israel continues to target Palestinian and Lebanese farmers and food systems, from the deliberate starvation of Gaza documented by international law and global civil society to the destruction of farms and waterways in the Occupied West Bank and now southern Lebanon. Israeli forces, funded by the US, continue to attack Palestinian villages, destroy agricultural lands, capture waterways, and kill farmers and pastoralists throughout the West Bank—with settler attacks hitting an “all-time high” in July 2026 according to the United Nations. The West Bank’s Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills have long endured Israeli settlements and violence—all of which have proliferated in recent years and especially in recent months. In the Jordan Valley, where an estimated 65,000 Palestinians farm some of the most fertile land in the West Bank, B’Tselem has recorded repeated demolitions of Palestinian water cisterns—structures that families build to collect rainwater because they are legally barred from connecting to piped water networks.

The expansion of USDA-funded agritechnologies—and BARD pressure for corporate commercialization—undermines the viability of Palestinian and Lebanese food security and food sovereignty; unchecked, it jeopardizes the long-term stability and viability of rural communities in the region who are increasingly displaced with these US-subsidized high-tech ag research projects. Rather than establish accountability for Israeli forces’ years of deliberate famine in Gaza, such funding subsidizes more land dispossession and obscures the well-documented starvation of Palestine with claims of agribiotechnology research for Global Food Security. BARD-ISUS just launched a new Food Security Technology Accelerator to “support collaborative R&D projects between Israeli and American agritech researchers and corporations, so as to “foster innovation in food security.” How can the countries responsible for massive food insecurity and famine across the region claim to be able to “foster food security”?

While Congress advances the US-Israeli military integration plan, Israel and the US attempt to expand their “soft power” through agritechnology development across the region. The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty. This would deploy more USDA funds to agritech development in countries willing to support an Israeli regime perpetrating genocide in Palestine, invading Lebanon, and initiating a war with Iran. In short, this USDA multimillion dollar agribusiness integration with Israel subsidizes expansionism and impunity—further undermining any authentic peace in the region.

Let’s go back a quarter century or so. Join me as I open up aa piece of the past, which I keep stored in containers on my computer, also known as old columns. I became curious about these oldies after I survived a vicious storm and temporary power outage the other day, and only missed the tornado that hit northeastern Wisconsin by a few miles.

Turns out I take electricity for granted! It was out in my retirement community apartment for about eight hours. I also take my personal safety for granted. As I browsed through some of my earliest columns, I also started thinking—up close—about life itself. The following column, called “Haunted House,” was written in November 1999, about a year after my wife died of pancreatic cancer. Here it is.

Haunted House

When my wife died, I spent my first month of mourning disentangling the house from its ghosts and clutter.

I was suddenly appalled at what a wreck the place was. Even under ordinary circumstances, we had fought a losing battle against miscellany. We shoved stuff into corners; chaos bestrewed itself with an easy shrug across every available surface of our lives. After a year of cancer—with such urgent matters as pain management, constipation relief, and a quest for miracles claiming every moment of our attention—all order in the house was shattered.

Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was.

I set to the task of cleaning and reorganizing more out of numb instinct than reawakened guilt. I needed a challenge, and this one was Herculean. But even more than that, I sensed that putting myself back together was somehow connected to putting the house back together.

I was at Barbara’s bedside when she died. I held her hand and watched her suffering dissolve in the last hour of her life; her ragged breathing grew calm and the pain furrows on her face loosened. A sudden cloudburst out the window caused me to glance up. When I looked back, her breathing had stopped. That was it. Death came as a gift of peace.

Despite its reputation, death, it turns out, is kind.

It helps to know this. It helps to know the only suffering, after the fact, is yours, the survivor’s; the only sharp edges are around the hole in your own life. But this can be endured, even welcomed. If there had been no great love, the ache would be small. So to me, grief in its intensity, the broken tear ducts—the downpour that came, for instance, when my daughter placed Mother’s Day presents, bubble bath, talcum powder, in Barbara’s still arms—is love all at once, love no longer paid out slowly, over the life of a marriage, but here now with the force of gravity. After death, love is a falling into her absence, not her presence. And that’s what grief is.

And cleaning the house my wife no longer lived in was a continuation of this, a falling in love all over again—a falling in love with the worn and familiar. As I began disturbing the settled dust, crawling around in three stories and 15 years of married life, I soon realized that everything I touched—this tumble of old letters and frayed linen, castaway toys and defunct appliances—was charged with Barbara’s absence. I wasn’t merely restoring order to a house, I was freeing the past, setting its genies scampering.

Basement storage: Cardboard box crammed with travel brochures and misfolded maps, the moldy remnants of trips spanning two decades. Out tumble Missouri and the Berkshires and Urquhart Castle and Kettle Moraine State Park.

Kitchen: That overflowing bookcase by the basement stairs. Spillage of old Weight Watchers pamphlets, never-used cookbooks, unwanted small appliances (gift Cuisinart that mysteriously alarmed Barbara, still secured in its Styrofoam packaging).

Upstairs linen closet: Baby blanket. Light blues and pinks, worn through in spots, numerous stains, the batting lumped in one corner.

Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was. In the language of life, these are metaphors, compressions of meaning almost too large for the heart to bear.

And my daughter’s tattered blankie is the most powerful of all, as I hold it against my face and know too much about loneliness. I fold it and remember what it was like to surrender everything for love.

Unfortunately, Labor Day has become a long weekend for mattress sales and political platitudes when it should be the annual day when working people present the case for taking control of our country back from the corporatists who shape our political economy. The first Monday in September is a massive, unused civic asset, a legally recognized national holiday that could function as a recurring general assembly of America’s workers—if we choose to reclaim it.

Instead of being about the power of labor over capital, Labor Day has been domesticated into barbecues and ballgames while giant corporations tighten their grip on our economy, our governments, and the daily lives of all Americans, regardless of political labels.

Tens of millions of workers are still paid wages that cannot support a decent life, forced into permanent economic insecurity by part‑time jobs, gig “contracts,” and union‑busting consultants. Workplace democracy doesn’t exist: You are more likely to be punished for organizing a union than to be protected for exercising your basic rights. Corporate crime—tax evasions, wage theft, unsafe conditions, and violations of environmental and consumer protections—goes largely unprosecuted. At most, corporations are punished with wrist‑slap fines that CEOs quietly treat as a cost of doing business. In the richest country on Earth, we still lack universal healthcare, universal childcare, paid family leave, and a fair progressive tax system to provide needed revenues. Worker productivity rises, and the wealth of the top 1% reaches obscene levels. It is time for unions to take on the corporate predators who are wrecking our economy and democracy.

Meanwhile, politicians of both major parties take to Labor Day podiums, praise “the hardworking men and women of this country,” and then return to Washington and state capitols to do the bidding of campaign donors. They vote for trade deals that outsource jobs, deregulation that strips away workplace protections, and budgets that starve labor law enforcement. Public‑sector workers are vilified as “special interests” for wanting a decent pension.

Reclaiming Labor Day requires workers, unions, and allied organizations to decide that enough is enough and that this one annual holiday is theirs, with the media taking notice.

It does not have to be this way. Labor Day can be converted from just a symbolic holiday into a day of mass action, democratic deliberation, and binding commitments. Imagine Labor Day not as a backdrop for store sales, but as a day when a pro-worker agenda is presented. In cities and towns across the country, Labor Day could be an occasion for workers to convene meetings—at union halls, school auditoriums, public parks, and town squares—to deliver their demands to elected officials and the public.

At the center of this reclaimed Labor Day should be a Worker Compact for America—a concise, concrete program of rights, protections, and public investments that elected officials pledge, in writing, to support (see my column: "Long-Overdue Domestic Compact for America"). The Compact could include a living wage pegged to the real cost of housing, food, and healthcare; card‑check recognition and real penalties for employers who retaliate against organizing; universal healthcare as a right; paid family and medical leave; universal, publicly supported childcare; and serious criminal and civil sanctions for corporate abuses such as wage and pension theft and workplace safety violations.

Labor Day should also be the moment when workers formally summon their representatives to account. Every senator, every representative, every governor, every mayor, and every state legislator whose constituents work for a living should receive a written summons well in advance of Labor Day: “You are Summoned and morally obligated to engage with a workers’ assembly in your district on this date, at this time, to answer questions and respond to demands of the Worker Compact.” Those who appear would be questioned, on the record, about their votes and their pledges to support the Worker Compact.

Those who refuse to appear would be named from the podium and in the local media as having chosen their corporate patrons over the workers who elect them.

Unions must be at the forefront of this transformation, but they cannot do it alone. The AFL‑CIO and national unions should provide muscle, resources, and experienced organizers. Local unions, especially those that have led recent organizing drives, should be the anchors in their communities. But civic groups, faith communities, student organizations, tenant unions, consumer advocates, and environmental justice campaigns—all of them have a direct stake in a stronger labor movement and should be invited to help expose the carnage caused by unchecked Corporate Power (see the AFL-CIO’s Worker Foundation of Trump’s Second-Term Agenda).

Much of the infrastructure already exists; it is the public reshaping of Labor Day that needs to change. Parades, where they still occur, should shift from generic celebration to worker agenda‑driven demonstrations. Floats should not just carry politicians waving; they should carry workers demanding specific changes: warehouse workers calling for safe staffing, nurses calling for safe patient ratios, and transit workers calling for investment in public transportation. Marching bands can be joined by marching delegations of workers—each with their banners and demands. Voter registration tables, ballot measure petitions, and sign‑up sheets for organizing committees should line the parade routes.

Because of the election calendar, Labor Day signals the final stretch of every general election. Candidate forums convened by workers on Labor Day should not end at sundown; they should kick off sustained, workplace-based, and neighborhood‑based organizing that runs through Election Day and beyond. Every candidate who signs the Worker Compact on Labor Day should be evaluated: Did they co‑sponsor the bills they promised to support, vote the way they pledged, and stand with workers in strikes and organizing drives? The next Labor Day, those records should again be publicized.

Reclaiming Labor Day requires workers, unions, and allied organizations to decide that enough is enough and that this one annual holiday is theirs, with the media taking notice.

The question posed every first Monday in September is the old union question: Which side are you on? If we are on the side of workers, then we must act like it—organizing, summoning, demanding, and voting for candidates who stand with the workers, not the vastly under-taxed corporate predators and plutocrats.

If you are interested in organizing events in your community, contact us at LaborDay@nader.org

Through a meme and a movement, Indian students have once again mobilized, this time in response to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s comparison of unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” attacking the system. This remark led to the creation of the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a mass-scale satirical movement with a mission to amplify the “voice of the lazy & unemployed.”

The political movement was fueled by compounding grievances. The precipitating factor was the leak of a medical entrance exam paper and irregularities in the government’s on-screen marking system forced millions of students to retake exams. But discontent has been building up for some time because of surging unemployment rates and a deepening disillusionment with the government. Student suicides associated with increasing academic pressure have reached as many as 13,000 a year.

Matters escalated further when hunger-striking activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly removed from a student protest site in Delhi and hospitalized by authorities. Tear gas and baton charges on student protesters catalyzed a countrywide youth uprising that would culminate in the resignation last week of the Modi government’s education minister.

Apart from material grievance, the student movement was ignited by what philosopher Axel Honneth argues is a form of moral indignation. Widespread feelings of injustice have changed the nature of emancipatory struggles from rational economic interests to ones that are personal and emotional. Framing students as parasites through dehumanizing language, rather than as citizens facing systemic and institutional barriers, strips them of political dignity and represents them as inferior and shameful in addition to diverting attention from the state’s own policy failures.

Region-Wide Discontent

Across South Asia, contemporaneous youth-led, digitally organized uprisings have taken place in quick succession. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protest in 2022 forced the resignation of both the president and the prime minister. Bangladesh’s student-led movement in 2024 against a quota system in government jobs, compounded by rising authoritarianism, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years in power. And in Nepal, a country where nearly 56% of the population is under 30, a generation disproportionately affected by economic precarity and a housing crisis, a Gen Z protest in 2025 toppled Prime Minister K.P Sharma Oli within days of a government ban on social media.

These cases mark different points on the spectrum of outcomes. Protesters in Sri Lanka and Nepal converted disruption into institutional turnover, resulting in the installation of new elected governments following the uprisings. Young people in Bangladesh toppled a government but have struggled to translate that disruption into a stable institutional order. In India, CJP called off its protest after the government met its three immediate demands—the education minister’s resignation, withdrawal of criminal investigations against protesters, and compensation for the families of students who died by suicide following the leak. However, the settlement remains contentious, as CJP raised concerns that the government was not honoring its commitments, with a spokesperson warning that the protest would resume if punitive action against student protesters continued.

Youth uprisings matter, then, not simply as sudden, spectacular action but as a means of amplifying the voice of a demographic majority and reshaping the terms of legitimacy and accountability between citizens and the state.

The movement’s broader charter—a new Public Examinations Act, reform of national examination bodies, a students’ rights charter, a national aspirant welfare fund, and permanent parliamentary oversight of examination authorities—is due to be taken up in a further round of talks with the government. The protests have yet to produce lasting institutional change, yet they have already demonstrated the capacity of young people to organize and exercise self-determination over their own political future.

Generation Gap

The United Nations estimates that the world is home to 1.3 billion young people, more than half of them living in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Almost half of South Asia’s 1.8 billion people are under the age of 24, giving the region the world’s largest youth labor force until 2040.

Yet political power across South Asia remains generationally divided with the average age of Indian parliamentary representatives at 56. In Sri Lanka, only 4 of 212 MPs are under 30, while in Pakistan it’s just 7 of 311.

These figures expose a widening generational gap between aging political elites who have long monopolized legislative power and a younger generation that has grown up in the digital age expecting greater accountability but experiencing political marginalization. A related tension is a growing disconnect between economic liberalization and meaningful employment opportunities and social mobility for a generation of youth pursuing higher education.

In India, a democracy of 1.4 billion people, youth representation in the country’s legislative politics remains strikingly narrow along lines of age, gender, and caste. Over the past few decades, the share of young MPs aged 25-40 in the lower house of India’s parliament has fallen from 30% to just 10%.

Youth uprisings matter, then, not simply as sudden, spectacular action but as a means of amplifying the voice of a demographic majority and reshaping the terms of legitimacy and accountability between citizens and the state. These movements have galvanized global solidarity around regional struggles. They have been made increasingly possible by digitally mediated technology and decentralized, leaderless organizing.

Digital Pluses and Minuses

Central to the profound historical shifts in social movements is the emergence of the internet as a space for dissent. Sociologist Manuel Castells frames the internet as a “hybrid space of autonomy” where cyberspace and physical urban space merge into a new kind of social location for political actions. These networked movements, Castells argues, are characterized by spontaneity, virality, decentralization, and ad hoc collaborative deliberation with no single leader.

As the CJP movement tweeted, filmed, and Instagrammed in real time, its networked visibility diversified participation and displaced the state and the traditional media’s monopoly over the narratives of its violence and police brutality. However, Zeynep Tufekci cautions against the fragility of networked movements, which mobilize with extraordinary speed but often lack the internal capacities, leadership structures, negotiating experience, and resilience that older movements built over years of slower political organization.

Their activism reflects a wider shift toward collective action that is increasingly contentious, globalized, and proactive.

Although digital movements enable horizontal mobilization and egalitarian participation in emancipatory struggles, post-uprising outcomes often remain uncertain. Social movement scholars have noted a recurring pattern. Movements built on decentralized coordination excel at forcing concessions or toppling governments, but they struggle to convert that same horizontal structure into hierarchical institutional governance. This leaves established political actors better positioned to reassert control during the transition, making it harder for movements to transcend regime change and translate initial disruption into long-term democratic transformation that the participants demanded. Nevertheless, these movements have expanded democratic possibilities by opening up new locations of collective belonging, political self-expression, and altruism.

In the end, the collective benefits of a social movement can outweigh the success or failure of a challenger’s program because social movements have many influences, both tangible and intangible, that go beyond the explicitly stated goals. In CJP’s case, these benefits include the representation of youth voices and the democratic rights of the country’s largest demographic group. Their activism reflects a wider shift toward collective action that is increasingly contentious, globalized, and proactive. In a larger sense, this contributes to a more participatory polity where Indian citizens exercise political rights and shape political outcomes directly.

Just days after OpenAI's new model went rogue in an unprecedented cyberattack on another company, where did we find CEO Sam Altman? In closed door meetings on Capitol Hill and in the White House, shaking hands across Washington.

With a looming deadline to finalize the details of the White House's AI executive order, Altman and other Big AI executives are working overtime to make sure they get their way on the most consequential AI policy in history. And they're not alone: Big AI's agenda is being shepherded by Democratic and Republican operatives alike, backed by record levels of lobbying money and super PAC spending.

Democrats now face a choice. They can stay quiet while a handful of billionaires write the rules for the most consequential technology of our time—or they can own this issue and stand up to the lobbying blitz.

The stakes could not be higher. What's on the line is nothing less than the free and open debate our democracy depends on. And rarely has doing the right thing been such good politics—voters across party lines overwhelmingly want guardrails on AI. But make no mistake, the Big Tech AI goliaths we are up against will not give up without a fight.

Voters are not waiting to be convinced that Big AI has too much power; they are waiting for a party willing to say it with them.

Washington is crawling with Big AI lobbyists, whispering in the ears and stuffing the pockets of elected officials. In the first half of this year, OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying to a record $2.22 million. Anthropic almost tripled theirs, topping their competitor's spending at $3.53 million. In May, OpenAI established its first lobbying office in DC called the Workshop, just blocks from the White House. In the last six months, tech companies including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic have retained 234 lobbyists for AI policy specifically—that's about 1 lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress. According to a watchdog analysis, 25% of the 13,000 federal lobbyists in DC are involved in AI issues—a marked jump from 2023.

Behind the scenes, Democratic and Republican operatives alike, with deep ties in Washington, are helping to enable Big AI’s agenda. Chris Lehane, famously nicknamed a "Master of Disaster" during his time in the Clinton White House, was involved in establishing Leading the Future and plays a chief role in OpenAI's political strategy as chief global affairs officer. Also on the OpenAI side is Ann O'Leary, a longtime aide to both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Senate, the White House, and on the campaign trail, who became Gov. Gavin Newsom's chief of staff in 2018. Today she operates as OpenAI's vice oresident of global policy.

Their efforts toward controlling influence extends beyond Washington to this cycle’s consequential midterm elections. Leading the Future—an anti-regulation corporate super PAC funded by Trump-aligned billionaire executives at OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz—has so far raised $140 million toward its effort to influence the 2026 midterm elections. The goal of this lobbying is to push through OpenAI's self-interested AI narrative at the expense of a broader conversation around the future of technology in this country and the world.

The danger here is grave, and the potential impact of the success of this strategy will be lasting. Our political system depends on the free and open debate of ideas in the public sphere. If Big AI proves that they can repress that debate by crushing public servants, our democracy will crumble.

To head up Leading the Future, Lehane reportedly tapped Zac Moffatt and Josh Vlasto, a powerful pair with experience on both sides of the aisle. Vlasto is a Democratic strategist who formerly served as press secretary to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and chief of staff to disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Moffatt is a leading Republican strategist who also serves as the CEO of Targeted Victory. With decades of experience as political operatives, they are laser focused on defeating candidates who support AI regulation. Unfortunately, their approach may be working: New York Assemblymember Alex Bores (D-73) lost his congressional primary campaign, and they've recently seen victories for their supported candidates in Arizona.

However well-funded these groups are, they are on the wrong side of what American voters want—and Democrats should say so, loudly. In a recent Johns Hopkins poll, a broad majority of Americans—even those who trust the technology—support AI regulation. And in a recent Gallup poll, confidence in Big Tech sits at an all-time low. Voters are not waiting to be convinced that Big AI has too much power; they are waiting for a party willing to say it with them.

That’s why Democrats cannot treat AI as a niche tech debate, or quietly accept the industry's money while its super PACs pick off their colleagues one primary at a time. Some campaign veterans, including our team at Guardrails, are already standing up to push back against the autocratic takeover of the Trump administration and the tech industry. The party should put its money, its message, and its midterm strategy behind them. Bores' defeat should be a rallying cry, not a cautionary tale.

Despite what Altman may have told legislators this week in Washington, the war for the future of AI policy is not over—but it will be, quickly, if Democrats refuse to fight.

Few issues matter more to the future of societies than how we fund the systems we all depend on. Yet tax remains one of the most misunderstood and poorly communicated public issues of our time.

For many people, taxation is associated with complexity, bureaucracy, and cost. Public debate often centers on what individuals or businesses are required to give up, rather than what those contributions make possible.

That is the problem. Tax's biggest challenge isn't policy. It's a narrative challenge that every society faces, whether in the United States, Argentina, Botswana, Thailand, or anywhere in between.

Too often, tax is framed as a burden instead of a form of shared investment. It is discussed as a technical obligation rather than the foundation that allows modern societies to function. Schools, healthcare systems, transportation networks, courts, emergency services, climate resilience measures, and public safety systems do not emerge on their own. They depend on sustained and predictable collective investment, and taxation remains the primary way societies make that investment possible.

When people can see what their taxes make possible, tax becomes more than a cost. It becomes part of the social contract that helps communities function and thrive.

Seen this way, tax justice is not only about rates, revenue, or technical reforms. It is about whether societies have the resources required to deliver opportunity, security, and resilience in a consistent and equitable way.

Most people do not experience taxation through fiscal policy debates. They experience it through outcomes. They see whether schools are adequately resourced, healthcare is accessible, roads and infrastructure work, and governments can respond effectively to economic shocks, climate risks, and public emergencies.

That means the conversation should not begin with forms, rates, or technical policy language. It should begin with a more immediate and universal question: What do we want to contribute to make our world better, and how should we fund it? Do we want to reduce cancer rates, prepare communities for extreme weather, ensure every child receives a quality education, keep bridges and roads safe, breathe clean air and drink clean water, and build healthcare systems that can care for people as they age without placing the full burden on the next generation?

But changing the narrative around tax also requires rebuilding trust. People are more likely to see taxation as a shared investment when they understand where public money goes, how decisions are made, and how those investments improve daily life. For example, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report examining public perceptions of tax systems across 29 countries found that in two-thirds of countries surveyed in Asia and the Anglophone Pacific, more respondents agreed than disagreed that public services and infrastructure represent a fair return for their taxes, compared with 30% of countries surveyed in Western Europe and Latin America. This shows that when people can see what their taxes make possible, tax becomes more than a cost. It becomes part of the social contract that helps communities function and thrive.

Federal, regional, and local governments have a responsibility to build that trust, but the scale and complexity of public institutions can make the connection between taxation and public benefit difficult for people to see. This is where philanthropy can play an important supporting role, not by replacing government, but by strengthening the civic infrastructure that helps people understand, scrutinize, and participate in tax debates.

Philanthropy can fund civil society organizations working on tax transparency, accountability, and fairness. It can support independent research that shows how tax policy affects communities, journalism that follows public money, watchdog groups that hold institutions accountable, and civic engagement efforts that help people connect tax decisions to the schools, hospitals, housing, roads, climate protections, and care systems they rely on every day.

In that sense, philanthropy can help rebuild the bridge between contribution and trust. It can make tax feel less like an obligation and more like part of a shared public conversation about what societies need, what people value, and how those priorities should be funded. Philanthropy can also take risks, support innovation, and surface ideas that may later scale through public systems. Taxation provides the foundation. Philanthropy can help strengthen and extend it.

This matters not only for governments and philanthropy today, but for the next generation of wealth holders, donors, advisers, and civic leaders who will shape how contribution is understood in the years ahead. As the world undergoes one of the largest transfers of wealth in modern history, tens of trillions of dollars will move between generations. Those shifts will influence not only private wealth, but also the ability of societies to invest in their collective future.

That makes wealth stewardship an increasingly important conversation. Investment decisions, advisory practices, philanthropic strategies, and family office decisions all influence how wealth is deployed and how contribution itself is understood. These systems help set norms around responsibility, participation, and the relationship between private wealth and public life.

Rebranding tax does not mean making it simple or pretending it is painless. It means making visible what tax makes possible. It means connecting contribution to the public goods people rely on every day. And it means building a shared understanding that a better world is not funded by good intentions alone, but by the choices societies make together.

The fastest-growing movement in the country is running on almost no institutional money, and it's effectively fighting against some of the world’s most rapacious billionaires.

It is an organic, grassroots movement to stop AI data centers.

Data centers not only raise electricity bills, they are draining water often already in short supply, drive pollution and emissions, and are routinely negotiated in secret.

Communities have figured this out faster than local governments, and with stunning success, local groups are winning their campaigns against data center projects all over the country.

Fund the organizers and trainers who can turn 833 local fights into a coherent national and international movement without flattening what makes each one local. And fund fast.

Opponents successfully blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026, matching all of 2025 in three months. Active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states. Legislators filed more than 300 data center bills in the first six weeks of the year.

None of this came from a philanthropic strategy, but rather from neighbors and unlikely allies in church basements and county planning hearings.

Movements at this stage have energy and passion. And they have potential and momentum. But what they don't have is the resources that can sustain a strategic fight. No staff to hold momentum between hearings, no legal defense when developers sue, no trainers to turn a first-time zoning meeting attendee into an organizer, and nothing linking the fight in Prince William County to the ones in Hancock County, South Jersey, Dublin, and Santiago.

The anti-fracking movement and the coalition behind the Inflation Reduction Act were both built in part on early philanthropic bets on local and national organizing. Data center resistance can follow the same pattern, but only if the money shows up while the moment is live.

As the most significant institutional funder of non-violent, disruptive climate activism, Climate Emergency Fund directs resources where grassroots energy, public concern, and campaign opportunity most clearly align. Right now, that is the AI data center resistance. So far in 2026, more than a third of our granted support has gone to groups planning campaigns around data centers and AI. Our venture philanthropy model moves early-stage funding to new groups fast, sometimes before they have a name, and stays close through what we call intensive accompaniment. The data center fight rewards exactly this approach, because the decisive moments are rezoning votes and permit hearings that will not wait for a grant cycle.

I know the objections, because I hear them from funders and civil society. Some say climate philanthropy should retreat to safer ground while nonprofits are under attack. Some, following the Gates Foundation's lead, want to pivot to affordability. Others, like Sunrise Movement, argue the fight against authoritarianism comes first. I understand all three impulses, and I think the data center fight answers all three.

This is the affordability issue: Electricity prices are, as Charles Hua of the consumer group PowerLines put it, “the new eggs,” with residential bills in Indiana up 17.5% in a year and Georgia Power customers absorbing six rate increases in two years.

This is the democracy issue: communities discovering projects negotiated in secret, behind nondisclosure agreements and shell companies, then organizing to demand consent. They understand fundamentally that the future belongs to all of us, not just seven tech billionaires and their allies.

And it is the climate issue: The International Energy Agency projects that gas and coal will meet more than 40% of new data center electricity demand through 2030, with retired coal plants at risk of coming back online.

Funders do not have to choose among their priorities here. This is the nexus.

It is also, frankly, the most defensible grant a climate or democracy funder can make. At the very least, supporting a community group that testifies or protests at a county board meeting is constitutionally protected, small-d democratic activity with bipartisan support. What a strange thing that fear of an administration touting threats against “anti-tech extremism” would cause funder retrenchment around perhaps the most politically unifying issue we’ve seen in a generation. In an era when funders worry about risk, this is what low risk and high leverage look like at the same time.

So the ask is specific. Fund general operating support, because these groups need salaries, not deliverables. Fund pooled legal defense, because litigation designed to drain and intimidate is coming. Fund the organizers and trainers who can turn 833 local fights into a coherent national and international movement without flattening what makes each one local. And fund fast.

Philanthropy likes to say it provides risk capital for social change. The people are already in the room. The only question is whether we will fund them to stay there.

July 19 is a key date in Nicaragua’s calendar—the anniversary of the victory of its Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the overthrow of the vicious US-backed Somoza dictatorship that terrorized Nicaraguans for 43 years prior. Every year, huge crowds gather in celebrations across the country, culminating in a nationally broadcast speech by President Daniel Ortega. In recent years, Ortega has used the moment to discuss the country’s successes in the year prior, and lay out the agenda for the following year, while lauding not just the Sandinista Revolution’s triumph in 1979 but also the country’s resistance to the 2018 coup attempt—and lamenting the death and destruction it caused before peace was restored.

This July 19, while discussing that violence, Ortega proposed a blanket electoral ban on candidates who participated in fomenting the riots which plagued Nicaragua for months in a violent, US government-sponsored coup attempt that left hundreds dead:

There will be no elections like that again here—no more elections through which they can try cheating their way to government or cheat their way to taking power. We need to create laws that will put up a wall, a barrier, against the coup-plotters, against those who are traitors to their country. And no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t succeed!

Even for casual observers, it was clear that the head of the Nicaraguan government was proposing restrictions on candidates funded and directed by a hostile foreign power situated in the US. But in corporate newsrooms across the country, editors pounced on the phrase “there will be no elections.”

Only days before Ortega’s speech, Trump railed against foreign interference in US elections, promising measures to protect their integrity.

Quoting the president’s statement completely out of context, The New York Times shrieked that Daniel Ortega planned to abolish elections completely, strengthening his “authoritarian grip” on the country. A headline in business journal Bloomberg blared: “Nicaragua’s Dictatorship Should Be Marco Rubio’s Next Problem.” Right on cue, Rubio issued a statement accusing the Nicaraguan government of “thwarting the basic tenets of our democratic hemisphere.”

At US legacy media outlets, clarification was sought not from the government or its supporters, but from right-wing apparatchiks financed and directed by Washington. The Times went to Felix Maradiaga, leader of an opposition group which “operates in secret in Nicaragua,” who claimed that “Ortega buried Nicaraguan democracy a long time ago.” Unmentioned by the NY Times was that Maradiaga is aligned with the far-right Atlas Network and was a key actor in the 2018 coup attempt, for which he received copious US funding.

As Max Blumenthal revealed in The Grayzone in 2018, the Yale-trained Maradiaga’s Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP) had received at least $260,000 from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy since 2014.

The BBC, falsely asserting that Nicaragua’s next elections were now “cancelled,” rolled out another opposition activist, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, who labelled Nicaragua “the North Korea of Latin America.” Chamorro and his oligarchic family have historically been the biggest recipients of US funding directed at regime change in Nicaragua and almost certainly still are.

During the 2018 coup, Juan Sebastián Chamorro promoted the strategy of erecting tranques, or roadblocks, where opposition hooligans kidnapped, brutalized, raped, and even killed common Nicaraguan citizens in a failed bid to strangle the country’s economy and ultimately take over its cities.

It’s no secret that Maradiaga and Chamorro are competing to be Washington’s favored candidate if regime change were to ever occur. Reuters described Maradiaga as a “presidential hopeful,” while Chamorro is joint author of a new Atlantic Council report calling for Washington to back his “transition plan” for Nicaragua. Opposition media put this pair at the top of a list of eight potential candidates.

Washington’s plans for regime change in Nicaragua are hardly a secret, either. The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee in February that his organization is funding media in Nicaragua with an eye to undermining its Sandinista government. Commenting on latest developments, he said: “The Ortega-Murillo regime may seek to abolish elections, but it cannot abolish the Nicaraguan people’s desire for democracy. We will stand with them until that right is restored.”

The NED, a CIA cutout, currently spends over $2 million annually on Nicaraguan opposition groups—its highest funding level for any country in the region. And of course, the NED is only one source of US regime-change support for political groups who failed to overthrow Nicaragua’s government in 2018 and intend to try again.

In Nicaragua itself, figures such as Maradiaga and Chamorro have little credibility. Opinion polls consistently show that the government has significant popular support. For example, its approval levels ranged from 40-60% in Argentina’s CB Global Data polls over the course of 2026. This is hardly surprising in a country which now has the most modern and extensive public health system in Central America, the region’s best highways, and is building over 7,000 homes each year for those on the lowest incomes, all the product of 19 years of Sandinista rule.

Most Nicaraguans are well aware of what a government headed by the likes of Maradiaga or Chamorro would entail. Not only do they recall the violence and destruction of the coup attempt, but many remember that the last US regime-change operation—a heavily manipulated election in 1990—resulted in 16 years of neoliberal government which left the country with barely functioning schools, potholed highways, and only intermittent electricity supply. Ortega’s call for elections that bar the golpistas (coup mongers) from taking part was therefore met with cheers from the July 19 crowds.

Next-door Honduras provides a lesson of US electoral interference. Not only did President Donald Trump threaten Hondurans with aid cuts if they failed to vote as he wanted in last December’s poll, he also freed the convicted, narco-trafficking former president, Juan Orlando Hernández. To the horror of most Hondurans, he is returning to the country as I write this.

Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is being pushed by Florida Republicans such as Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez to ensure that “after Cuba, Nicaragua is next.” Yet he must be aware the opposition has virtually no support in Nicaragua itself. This week, one of Ortega’s most prominent critics, Manuel Orozco of the Inter-American Dialogue, admitted to CNN, “Nobody is thinking about what it would mean for the United States to remove these people from power when there is no opposition, the public does not know who the leaders in exile are, and there is economic stability.”

While proclaiming “the statement by Daniel Ortega that under his family’s dictatorship Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature,” Rubio threatened, “The Trump Administration and the international community will not stand by as the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship deepens repression at home and manufactures instability that threatens US national security.”

Nicaragua has already been included in a fresh round of US tariffs, and economic sanctions and attacks on its trade with the US will certainly continue. However, the political focus is likely to stay on electoral interference, now that Nicaragua’s National Assembly president has repeated earlier assurances that elections will indeed take place.

This brings us back to Daniel Ortega’s declaration during the celebrations in Managua. His government has the sovereign right to fight foreign interference in its electoral process. The US exercises the same right itself: Only days before Ortega’s speech, Trump railed against foreign interference in US elections, promising measures to protect their integrity.

Rubio’s statement supporting Trump’s address seems especially ironic in light of his escalation against Nicaragua. “Under @POTUS,” Rubio declared, “the Trump Administration will rout out foreign interference in our elections and safeguard our democracy. America’s future belongs to Americans.” Change the wording to refer to Nicaragua rather than the US, and you have a summary of what Daniel Ortega promised to Nicaraguans just two days afterward.

The original version of this piece appeared in The Grayzone.

By Ralph Nader July 31, 2026 Unfortunately, Labor Day has become a long weekend for mattress sales and political platitudes when it should be the annual day when working people present the case for taking control of our country back from the corporatists who shape our political economy. The first Monday in September is a…

Other than the continual circus in the White House, the most important political story in America may be the resurgence of democratic socialism. Ignited by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the movement achieved its biggest victory last year when self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Now, fueled by backlash to the extremist MAGA agenda and multiple ongoing crises, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have claimed 38 electoral wins so far this year and 120,000 active members, making them the largest socialist organization in US history.

Naturally, this has the establishment's hair on fire in both political parties. On the Democratic side, leadership oscillates between snubbing democratic socialists and disowning them outright, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) calling Mamdani’s rise a “gift to the Republicans” that makes Democrats look radical. Centrist-liberal magazine The Atlantic referred to DSA as “a parasite” that was “hijacking the Democratic Party.”

On the Republican side, the hysteria is even more severe. President Donald Trump, who seems quite enamored of Mamdani on a personal level, called him a “100% communist lunatic.” Recently Trump has been trying to resurrect the Red Scare, labeling DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists” and invoking communism some 94 times in just a few weeks. Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, connected leftist politicians, communism, and political terrorism into one vast conspiracy and declared it the “fatal cancer of civilization.”

Despite the delirium, many democratic socialist policies are popular, particularly those that expand public services and safety nets for healthcare and childcare. Such ideas only sound radical in a nation grown numb to the extremes of capitalism. But following decades of upward redistribution, worsening public services, deteriorating labor power, and all the other abuses of our current system, democratic socialism isn’t radical at all—it’s a compromise.

Defining “Democratic Socialism”

Like most political labels in America, “socialism” has been thoroughly twisted and misused. In 1952, President Harry Truman remarked that socialism was “a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” It was a Republican slur for the New Deal, public power, social security, bank deposit insurance, free and independent labor organizations, and “almost anything that helps all the people,” in Truman’s words.

To this day, that’s about as good a definition as any. In America, “socialism” is often used to describe—or denigrate—almost any publicly funded, government-run service: libraries, parks, fire departments, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, highways, public schools, safety net hospitals, animal shelters, community pools, and so on. Under this definition, the US military might be the most expensive socialist program in history.

Elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting.

This American concept of socialism, though, bears little resemblance to the theories formulated by Karl Marx. Marx articulated socialism in direct opposition to capitalism, under which individuals or companies own and control land, natural resources, and means of production. Capitalists rent labor—at least in societies where they can’t own it—and fight to make the terms of that rental as favorable to themselves as possible. This tug of war between owners and workers, in Marx’s view, is the central struggle of history. Marx sought to invert that structure, advocating that ownership, control, and the fruits of labor belong to workers, and theorizing that the only way to achieve such a reality was through revolution.

Democratic socialism, then, is also distinct from Marxist socialism. Both may strive for populist control of the political economy, but democratic socialists in America largely pursue their goals through reform, working within existing institutions. Democratic socialism often more closely resembles the Nordic model: a capitalist economy in which government takes a larger role in protecting human rights and guaranteeing certain essential goods and services.

Actually, this compromise of preserving the fundamentals of capitalism while trying to achieve the egalitarian goals of socialism is precisely what more committed Marxists don’t like about democratic socialism. They might argue that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, exploitative, and unreformable, relying as it does on never-ending growth and abuse of labor, and that working within it is doomed to only limited successes at best.

Reforming the Second Gilded Age

Whether or not one agrees with such ideas, it’s a discussion that free people are within their rights to have. Though we often treat capitalism as a national religion, there’s nothing sacred about it. Even the US Constitution is surprisingly agnostic on questions of economic organization. It’s not encoded in our DNA—in fact, we are much more naturally inclined toward cooperation than competition. Humans have a virtually infinite number of ways we can arrange society, and we are in desperate need of rethinking ours.

Because for the last few decades, the American economy has grown ever more off-balance, to the point where many analysts now say we’re in a second Gilded Age. We recently minted the world’s first trillionaire, while about half of us would be wiped out by any major illness, accident, or job loss. Workers have lost power, essentials like housing and healthcare are increasingly out of reach, and practically all the gains of our productivity have been accumulated at the very top, with corporations posting record profits. Billionaires are multiplying their wealth faster than ever, building anti-revolution doomsday bunkers, and plotting to rule their own fiefdoms as CEO-kings.

We live in a society that’s obsessed with law and order for things like shoplifting or overstaying a visa, but largely looks the other way on corporate crimes like pollution, wage theft, and fraud—not to mention war crimes and genocide. The president is a convicted felon who wants you to ignore his decades-long friendship with a child sex trafficker and instead fear and hate the immigrant next door.

In such a system, elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting. The wealthy surely all took note of the public reaction to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City. Mangione became a cultural icon who was openly celebrated in many circles, making clear the rage simmering within America’s dispossessed.

There’s a reason the progressive California Rep. Ro Khanna refers to a tax on wealth as an anti-revolution tax, or an attempt to save capitalism from itself. Progressive Democrats like Khanna often mediate between capitalist centers of power and the party’s left-wing base, who largely feel fed up with the party’s incremental approach of making small tweaks here and there. Democratic socialism, as practiced in today’s America, is still essentially incrementalism, but they’re much bigger increments.

Such a model works well in places like Finland, Iceland, and Denmark. These countries have high taxes, but they get far more out of them than we do. As a result they are consistently ranked as the happiest countries on Earth, with excellent numbers for education, homelessness, poverty, healthcare, life expectancy, and infant mortality—all areas in which the US, with its profit-first approach to every problem, is lagging behind.

High taxes and a mixed economy also once worked well in the United States. We dug ourselves out of the Great Depression with the New Deal. Government programs brought electricity to rural areas and established safety nets and Social Security. Our middle class boomed after World War II, when taxes were the highest they’ve ever been.

Republicans and Big Business called that socialism, too. They even conspired to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now, faced with another socialist menace, they’re playing just as dirty.

The Billionaire and Republican Backlash

The rich and powerful pay good money for their political representation, and the main things they expect in return are to be untaxed and unregulated. When Mayor Mamdani announced a pied-a-terre tax on luxury second homes, The Washington Post—which is owned by megabillionaire Jeff Bezos—published a column criticizing Mamdani’s “‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” Billionaire Steve Roth said on an earnings call, “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’... to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs… [the rich]... should be praised and thanked.”

So it goes whenever anything similar is proposed: Socialism punishes success; the rich will flee if we tax them and leave us simple folk immiserated; and the government will take your home, car, TV, coffee machine, and everything else until, eventually, we’re all sitting in the dirt, eating worms and hitting each other with sticks.

There is no limit to the hysteria Republicans can drum up around socialism, no lie so bold that they won’t tell it with a straight face on TV. In 2016, for instance, the right-wing Institute for Policy Innovation accused the Democratic Party of going even beyond full-blown communism for supporting things like higher wages, vacation time, a 30-hour workweek, maternity leave, and universal health insurance—each of which sound like terrific ideas that would improve human lives, and almost none of which, sadly, are actually supported by establishment Democrats.

Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital.

By design, Americans have come to expect very little from our system. We’re taught to regard the very concept of government as fundamentally incompetent, wasteful, and oppressive, rather than a tool we can take control of and use to improve lives. Despite the popularity of socialistic policies and goals, the word itself remains divisive. Some of those who have the least are the most aggressively anti-socialist. For this reason, there’s an open debate whether the movement should even label itself socialist.

However, public opinion is slowly evolving. Self-identifying as a socialist could have upsides, like signaling loftier aspirations for people who are desperate for change. And since Republicans will call anyone left of Sean Hannity a communist anyway, reclaiming the word could also blunt their attacks if people come to equate socialism with popular reforms like raising taxes on the wealthy and public options for healthcare.

Unfortunately, winning hearts and minds may not be enough. Because if the wealthy are unable to protect their power legally at the ballot box, the Trump administration has already declared its intention to combat democratic socialism with brutality and repression.

According to polls, Trump and the Republicans are heading toward a trouncing in the midterms, particularly in the House. As a result, Trump is already setting the stage for rigging or cancelling the election, using the threat of communism as one of his predicates. Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also been on the offensive, attempting to characterize leftist movements as inherently terroristic and calling on the state to “keep our people safe” from such threats.

Rubio said: “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist… It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation.” Leftists, Rubio said, are “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.” Miller said: “The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred… We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

These dehumanizing comments echo some of the worst periods in history, including the Red Scare of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Exactly what the administration plans to do is kept vague on purpose. The framework to take extreme actions—effectively criminalizing certain political beliefs—is laid out in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Perhaps, if democratic socialism appears too strong on the ballot in November, they will see fit to protect the voters from their own bad decisions.

Society Is in Desperate Need of Rebalancing

While the establishment tries to trigger a panic about democratic socialism, Mamdani remains popular in New York and his brief tenure as mayor has already been, by many measures, a success. There are no gulags, and he hasn’t seized anybody’s home. He’s the first high-profile politician in recent memory to speak to, and start delivering on, people’s desire for more access to dignity, time, and their personal pursuit of happiness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that message is resonating.

Every society has a mix of public and private endeavors. America is no different. The goal of the left is, broadly, to tilt the balance toward public support for education, healthcare, environmental initiatives, jobs programs, and so on. The goal of the right is to eliminate public investments, if not civic life altogether, and let people fend for themselves in a cutthroat social Darwinism. Our challenge as a society is to find a balance that fosters the kind of world we want to live in.

Capitalists will argue that our inequality is a natural consequence of the brilliance and drive of business leaders, that we all benefit from the largesse of the rich and anyone can get a piece of the pie if they work hard enough. But our inequality goes far beyond, say, a brain surgeon owning nicer golf clubs than an op-ed writer. The issue is a rigged system powered by insatiable greed, where a tiny handful own private islands and the masses can’t afford insulin.

Make no mistake: Corporate America wages class war constantly. Profit is their main motivation, and by definition, profit is created by getting more out of a deal than you put in. A little bit may be fine. Most people happily pay extra for good service or a worthy product. But trillions in profit means trillions in unpaid wages, overcharged rent, exorbitant medical bills, unpaid insurance claims, usurious lending, or any number of other ways the rich and powerful squeeze the poor.

In a business-run, profit-oriented society, human needs will inevitably suffer because they are simply not a factor in the decision-making. Libertarian right-wingers will argue that free-market capitalism meets human needs naturally through the invisible hand, but this amounts to a lot of hocus-pocus. If you value a more egalitarian distribution of labor, leisure, comfort, health, education, and happiness, the only way to achieve it is through some form of socialism.

Once you peel back the hype and fearmongering, democratic socialism looks more and more reasonable. Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital. They want to pool our collective resources, distribute them communally, and work toward a more dignified life for everybody. It wouldn’t actually be socialism, though Republicans will surely call it that—but it could be a start toward something better.

Less than 10 days after President Donald Trump described the electoral system as “dangerous and under threat,” a federal appeals court blocked his administration from enforcing an order tightening mail-in voting rules in 23 states. The ruling showed that the dispute is not only about cybersecurity or foreign threats, but also about the rules that will determine the legitimacy of the 2026 midterms. Democracies begin to erode when citizens no longer believe the ballot box reflects their genuine will. Electoral legitimacy depends less on a flawless voting process than on public acceptance of rules that allow even the losing side to accept the outcome.

Viewed from this perspective, the most significant element of Trump’s White House speech was not his claims about China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, but the way he portrayed the American electoral system itself. Trump described it as “dangerous and under threat”—a characterization that goes beyond a warning about cybersecurity or foreign interference. It raises a fundamental question: Is the principal problem the external threats facing America’s electoral system, or the effort to persuade Americans that the system itself can no longer be trusted?

To support his claim, Trump presented a series of alleged threats. He said declassified intelligence documents showed that China obtained information from 220 million American voter-registration records and that intelligence officials concealed the matter. He also warned that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can penetrate America’s electoral infrastructure. Yet these countries are not the center of his narrative. Rather, they serve as evidence for a broader claim: that the US electoral system is vulnerable, insecure, and needs fundamental redesign.

The distinction between issuing a security warning and discrediting an electoral system becomes clear here. Few deny that foreign powers attempt to influence rival states’ political and information environments. Like many democracies, the United States faces cyber threats and influence operations. But there is a crucial difference between strengthening election security and cultivating the belief that the entire electoral process is fundamentally unreliable. The former protects democratic institutions; the latter erodes public trust.

If a society believes elections are valid only when they produce one faction’s preferred outcome, the problem is no longer a particular election; it is the erosion of democratic competition and the transformation of elections from a solution to political conflict into a source of crisis.

The significance becomes clearer when Trump’s remarks are placed within the US political context. The 2026 midterms are not an ordinary contest for the president. Declining approval ratings, public dissatisfaction with the consequences of the war with Iran and rising energy prices, and the risk of losing the House have placed Republicans in a difficult position. If Democrats regain the House, another effort to impeach Trump could follow—a possibility he has raised. For Trump, who refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, elections are not merely an institutional process; they are part of a struggle over his political legitimacy.

This backdrop helps explain the Trump administration’s effort to expand the federal role in election administration. The White House’s pressure on congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act—which would require proof of citizenship at registration, photo identification when voting, and the sharing of voter information with the federal government—rests on a single assumption: that the existing system requires sweeping changes to improve security and public confidence. The question is not whether electoral reforms are open to debate, but how they are presented: as reforms to improve a functioning system, or an attempt to rescue one that has already failed?

Here the meaning of Trump’s speech becomes more apparent. Before the election, he is constructing a framework through which the outcome is interpreted. If Republicans prevail, the election will be presented as proof of the system’s integrity. But if the result contradicts White House expectations, explanations are already prepared: foreign governments, the intelligence community, structural weaknesses, or the electoral process itself. This is political failure insurance.

Failure insurance does not require conclusive proof of a conspiracy. It consists of building a narrative that reduces the political cost of defeat before it occurs. Within this framework, losing is no longer necessarily the consequence of voters’ choices; it can be attributed to a “dangerous and under threat” electoral system. This is the key difference from 2020. Then, Trump’s allegations emerged after the results were announced. Now, the narrative of distrust is being constructed before voting begins. The objective is no longer merely to challenge an outcome, but to suggest that only a result delivering victory to Trump or his movement is legitimate.

Democracies have never been built on the assumption that elections are flawless. They rest on the principle that political disputes can be resolved within a shared institutional framework and that even the losing side accepts the legitimacy of the process. If a society believes elections are valid only when they produce one faction’s preferred outcome, the problem is no longer a particular election; it is the erosion of democratic competition and the transformation of elections from a solution to political conflict into a source of crisis.

The irony is that, for decades, the United States applied this standard when assessing elections in other countries. Washington argued that without public trust, even legally conducted elections cannot enjoy political legitimacy. Today, however, the president is invoking the same logic to describe America’s own electoral system. This is more than a domestic dispute; it raises questions about the credibility of the democratic model America has long sought to project abroad.

Ultimately, the central question raised by Trump’s recent speech may not be whether China gained access to voter-registration data, or how capable Russia, Iran, and North Korea are of penetrating America’s electoral infrastructure. The fundamental question is why, on the eve of one of the most consequential elections of his presidency, the president of the United States has chosen to convince millions of Americans—before the first ballot is cast—that their electoral system is “dangerous and under threat.”

Placed alongside political realities, the implications are troubling. Trump’s speech cannot be understood as a warning about election security or dismissed as another chapter in the disputes following the 2020 election. It represents an attempt to redefine the relationship between the voter and the ballot box—a relationship in which electoral legitimacy derives not from public trust and established institutions, but from the narrative advanced by those in power. This is how democracy begins to erode from within, long before fraud or foreign interference damages it. The greatest threat to American elections may lie not in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang, but in the moment when the president, seeking to insure himself against defeat, persuades his own citizens that the ballot box can no longer be trusted.

The valuation trends up and down, but one thing’s for sure: Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this summer. At the height of the SpaceX IPO he was briefly worth around $1.45 trillion.

Then SpaceX stock tanked, rallied, then tanked again. But the most important thing about Musk’s wealth isn’t whether it stays above the 13-figure threshold—it’s that 94% of it comes from not having to pay taxes on unrealized gains.

That’s right: Musk’s fortune effectively comes from not paying taxes.

It’s no exaggeration to say that trillionaires (Musk likely won’t be the last) are creatures of the tax code. They ought to be called “taxillionaires.” If it weren’t for laws that permit the wealthy to endlessly defer paying taxes by keeping their gains unrealized, there would be no trillionaires—and many fewer billionaires.

We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes.

According to Musk’s own account, when he sold his stake in Paypal in 2002, he netted $180 million, invested it all in SpaceX and Tesla, and borrowed to pay his living expenses. To get from $180 million to a trillion today implies annual returns of over 40% (returns that would be considered impossible for ordinary investors).

Allowing these returns to compound untaxed supercharges growth.

Musk paid some taxes along the way, when he exercised stock options or sold some Tesla shares, but any taxes he paid are insignificant compared to his wealth. By contrast, for most working Americans earning a good salary, total state and federal taxes are significant—typically around 40%.

They can put limited amounts in tax-deferred IRAs, 401(k) plans, and the like. But most of their savings comes from net paychecks after withholding for federal, state, local, Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare taxes. Musk is effectively exempt from these taxes.

But he doesn’t have to be.

Suppose he were subject to the same taxes on his annual wealth increase that most higher-earning Americans pay on what they make, and had to sell some Tesla and SpaceX shares to pay those taxes. We crunched the numbers based on the latest figures, and found he’d be worth around $47 billion today—rich enough to afford the most lavish lifestyle imaginable, but not a trillionaire, and not richer than the GDP of most countries.

It’s the same story for Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and other multibillionaires.

The vast bulk of their fortunes came from not paying taxes on their wealth as it grew. Without endless tax deferrals, they would have only a tiny fraction of what they own today (although that tiny fraction would still be a huge amount of money). Yet as things stand today, nothing stops them from wielding the power and influence their wealth buys to benefit themselves.

In the 2024 elections, Musk was the largest campaign donor, giving $291 million. That’s chump change for him, but it bought unprecedented power: lucrative contracts, the suspension of investigations of Musk’s businesses, access to government data, and the authority to dismantle government programs—including disruptions to foreign aid which are projected to result in over 14 million people dying from preventable diseases.

It’s a vicious cycle of wealth begetting power which begets more wealth, diverting it from the needy and vulnerable. We’re in the grip of unprecedented power accumulated by private, super-rich individuals.

We can check their power by fixing the untaxed wealth problem. We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes. We should adopt sensible policies requiring them to pay their fair share, such as the Billionaires Minimum Income Tax Act introduced in Congress in 2023.

Over the next decade, we will face crisis-level national debt and unmet needs for healthcare and retirement income. That will force us to decide whether to leave the vast pool of billionaire and trillionaire wealth untouched, or tax them like the rest of us to curb their influence and address public needs. The choice is ours.

Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. "The US Mint stopped producing pennies," I said to her. “They might be valuable.”

She quickly replied, "I need gas."

Rising gas prices are an outcome of the US war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside.

One thing is plain as day. Ceasefires between Iran and the US are temporary and connect with fluctuations of oil prices, currently increasing. Rising prices of oil drive price increases at the gas pump.

The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically.

Meanwhile, this sentence in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation report stands out like a third thumb. “The index for energy increased 15.7% over the past 12 months due in large part to the index for gasoline rising 26.7% over the same period." That spike is despite presidential announcements about how well the war against Iran is going for the US to his dual audiences of MAGA voters and capitalist investors.

Apparently, repetition of a falsification has limitations. Don’t tell the president, though.

Inflation as a result of supply disruptions as we experienced with global value chains during the pandemic is a systemic contradiction. Global economic integration, e.g., the shift of US industry abroad that increases the distances of supply chains, is no risk-free strategy to increase profits and market share for corporate America.

We see in real time that the global economy which requires oil to operate feeds the imbalance between consumption, production, and distribution of commodities such as energy. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea with Yemen’s entry into the Iran-US war are driving the decrease in oil production and distribution, and therefore consumption.

Under the current phase of capitalism, or neoliberalism, the government shores up the weakening buying power of the working class with direct support of the corporations and the wealthy. In the case of the Iran-US war, despite the endless American taxpayer outlays for military spending with bipartisan support, the dwindling supply of energy from the Persian Gulf that businesses and consumers rely upon is driving inflationary pressures. The rise of gas prices is proof of that. There’s more.

Spending a bigger chunk of household income on gas means that working families spend less in other areas. Take fast food spending. Consumption of fast food is down 4% in May 2026 from its peak in September 2025, according to the US Bureau of Economic Affairs.

It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war, now including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities in the US. The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically. Claiming to know what's next is a fool's errand.

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

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

Today we discuss:

• Trump’s announcement of a Gaza deal, in which Hamas disarms and hands over its weapons to a Board of Peace first, raises unanswered questions. Neither Hamas nor Israel has issued an official statement acknowledging the deal, makes one wonder if this is real, or Trump dissembling?

• Hackers attack more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota, forcing some utilities to switch to manual operations. Investigators are blaming Iran.

• Colin Gray, whose son killed four people at a Georgia high school in 2024 with a gun Gray bought him, gets sentenced to 15 years in prison. The elder Gray had given his son an AR-15-style rifle and left it in the boy’s bedroom even though the teenager had psychological problems and an obsession with school shootings.

• 49,000 migrants cross into Spain’s North African colony of Ceuta from Morocco in 24 hours via land and sea. 18 have died. Spain’s Supreme Court ruled this month that migrants stopped at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla, another Spanish exclave, cannot be summarily returned to Morocco.

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The post Hamas Agrees to Disarm, Trump Claims | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Michigan Democrats face a critical choice next Tuesday in what polls show is a tight primary race for the US Senate. It pits Rep. Haley Stevens, one of the more hawkish and pro-corporate Democratic members in the US House of Representatives, against public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive advocating Medicare for all, progressive taxation, and getting corporate money out of politics.

Much attention has been given to the Stevens campaign’s dependence on contributions from corporate donors and conservative political action committees (PACs), including those affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Various PACs supportive of Israel’s far-right government have donated up to $30 million to her campaign in appreciation of her strident opposition to conditioning military aid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

Stevens has supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, voted to defund United Nations agencies helping Palestinian refugees, denounced Amnesty International and other human rights groups for documenting Israeli war crimes, and attacked the International Court of Justice for investigating Israeli violations of international law.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza and the US’ provision of military aid. He has underscored the importance of conditional military aid in adherence to internationally recognized human rights standards to all nations and supports international legal institutions that consistently advocate for universal standards. He has stressed the differences between criticizing a government and attacking the religion or ethnicity of a nation’s population. For example, he also opposes US military aid to Egypt, an Arab Muslim country from which his parents came.

She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.

But Stevens’ dismissal of international humanitarian law goes well beyond Israel. She opposes any accountability for war crimes by any US ally.

Stevens was one of only a handful of Democratic members of the House to support a 2024 Republican-sponsored bill designed to punish anyone who directly or indirectly participates in the investigation or prosecution of those suspected of war crimes if they are part of a government allied with the United States.

The bill, which passed the House that June but never made it to the floor of the Senate, was rooted in the belief that the prosecution of suspected war criminals by the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be based not on the available evidence, the severity of the crimes, or what the law says, but on the geopolitical orientation of the government of those accused. While Stevens has no objections to prosecuting war criminals belonging to organizations or governments that the US government opposes, her backing of this bill would seem to indicate that she believes those supported by Washington should somehow be held unaccountable.

It’s not as if the ICC has an anti-Western bias. Since its founding in 2002, the ICC has indicted 73 people, including African warlords, Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials, and Hamas terrorist leaders. Only 2 of those 73 indicted have been affiliated with US-allied governments. However, it would appear that even that is too many for Stevens.

Indeed, Stevens’s list of those impacted by the sanctions she supported would have included some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers and international jurists, along with their immediate family members. Their property and other assets held in the United States would have been subjected to seizure and they would have been banned from entering the country.

Almost all of these targeted individuals have been involved in other war crimes prosecutions, including those stemming from atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Liberia, and elsewhere. None of them have ever shown any ideological bias against Israel or any other US ally. They simply believe that international humanitarian law should be defended regardless of political considerations—which is exactly what seems to upset Stevens.

Among those targeted by these sanctions would have been Theodor Meron—a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada, and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—because he was one of the experts consulted by the ICC regarding suspected war crimes committed by Israeli leaders.

Another target would have been the prominent British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been involved in human rights cases in dozens of countries. She would be subjected to sanctions for her participation in an ICC Panel of Experts in International Law which, in addition to recommending the prosecution of three Hamas terrorist leaders, also supported the prosecution of two Israeli leaders. She is married to American actor George Clooney, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, and would have been banned from ever again living with or even visiting her husband in California.

The Biden administration, despite its own criticisms of the ICC and support for Israel in the face of large-scale war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, issued a statement in June 2024 saying that it “strongly” opposed the bill because it “could require sanctions against court staff, judges, witnesses, and US allies and partners who provide even limited, targeted support to the court in a range of aspects of its work.”

Stevens, however, sided with Trump and her Republican House colleagues against the Democratic administration.

Indeed, the Trump administration imposed its own sanctions on the ICC in February 2025, although they were not quite as severe or comprehensive as those supported by Stevens. She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.

Stevens’s hostility to the ICC is not popular. Polls show that Americans have been broadly supportive of the ICC, with only a small minority supporting sanctions. And a poll released July 23 showed that Americans, by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, support arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was indicted by the ICC in 2024 (along with a Hamas leader) for multiple war crimes, including crimes against humanity.

This could be a big political mistake. If Michigan Democrats nominate someone so out of touch with her constituents and so supportive of Trump’s opposition to international law and human rights, many thousands of Michiganders will likely vote third party or stay at home in November, thereby risking handing this critical Senate seat to a right-wing Republican.

The words "killed," "injured," "maimed," and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: "13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded." Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.

It is this "and so on" that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel's daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read "Santa Monica Beach"; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to United Nations and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.

What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel's barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.

Yet the outcome remains unchanged: The death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.

A July 23 joint report by the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme found that 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza face acute food insecurity.

The report also warned that more than 74,000 children under 5 are expected to require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming year.

This report was released on the same day that Gaza health authorities updated the official death toll to over 73,311 Palestinians. That number is already higher now, as more have been killed since.

On that same day, Thameen Al-Kheetan of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that "no place in Gaza can be considered safe."

That statement is true, of course, but it is also the most well-known fact in the world right now. No one is contesting it. And yet, no one acts: Israel keeps bombing, the US Congress continues assigning it more weapons, and the rest of the world tracks the death tally.

Meanwhile, Israel—which has seized control of even more territory in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire—is now constructing massive earth barriers stretching an estimated 23 kilometers across the strip.

Though it was never fair to begin with, even the original Trump Gaza plan never mentioned the building of interior borders, the theft of additional land, or the concentration of displaced Palestinians into tiny enclaves within an already small piece of land.

Israel's long-term plan is not only to maintain permanent military control over Gaza, as top Israeli officials have declared, but also to prolong its torment indefinitely.

Even as I write this article, news reports indicate that four more Palestinians have just been killed. It is unlikely the number will remain that low; the Israeli army rarely kills in small numbers.

But even these small numbers represent human beings whose grief cannot be measured in statistics, summed up in official statements, or reduced to clichéd headlines.

Nor do survivors cling to the empty promise of international law prevailing over US-backed impunity. History has made Palestinians cynical. For generations, through every massacre and land theft since the 1948 Nakba, waiting for justice has yielded nothing but hollow promises and rising body counts.

The only difference between the past and the present is that today, we all know, see, and hear exactly what is happening in Gaza and across Palestine.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

If we allow that to happen, we become culpable, too: Israel does the killing, using American arms, while we sit by, counting the dead and shaking our heads at the sad state of the world.

If the trillions spent on wars and the military were divvied up among Americans, no one would have any trouble getting by. But that’s not our system.

The post Government Efficiency appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.