The first televised U.S. presidential debate came way back in 1960. Few of us who happened to watch that debate remember much about it. But a look back at the transcript of that debate — a session that concentrated on domestic issues — shows that the evening’s proceedings mentioned not a single word about a stunning domestic transformation then about midway through its third decade.

That transformation? The United States had become a significantly more economically equal nation. With federal tax rates running as high as 91 percent on top-bracket income and unions representing more than a third of America’s private-sector workers — over five times today’s private-sector union share — the United States had given birth to the world’s first mass middle class.

In just a single generation, America had gone from a nation where the richest 1 percent held nearly half the nation’s wealth to a nation where that top 1 percent held only just over a fifth of that wealth.

This stunning reality came up nowhere in that first debate between the Democratic Party candidate John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, and Richard Nixon, the nation’s Republican vice president.

But what if that debate had explicitly recognized that reality? What if that debate’s panel of journalists had asked the candidates whether they would encourage or discourage, strengthen or trim, the tax and labor policies that had created a much more equal United States?

If those journalists had asked questions along that line, would John Kennedy, once president, have dared to ask Congress, as he did in 1963, to drop the top-bracket tax rate on America’s richest down to 65 percent?

That Kennedy-era Congress would end up lowering the nation’s top tax rate, from 91 to 70 percent. A bit over two decades later, in Ronald Reagan’s second term in the White House, that top rate would sink all the way down to 28 percent.

The current top rate? On income over $731,201, married couples filing jointly face a 37 percent tax rate. Taxpayers making 100 times that $731,201, over $73 million, face that same 37 percent top rate. And on “capital gains,” the profits from the sale of stocks and other assets, these rich pay taxes at no more than a 20 percent rate.

At last week’s first — and probable last — debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the two candidates faced no questions on how little in taxes our contemporary tax code expects rich people to pay. Few noticed. But last week, at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill, Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden from Oregon did his best to inject how much in taxes rich people don’t pay into America’s most high-profile political deliberations.

The bargain-basement tax rates on high incomes now in place, Senator Wyden made vividly clear, only hint at the tax windfalls our super rich are now regularly realizing.

Our billionaires, Wyden noted as he opened the hearing, can essentially “avoid paying taxes forever” through a neat trick tax justice advocates have come to label “buy-borrow-die.”

Our ultra-wealthy, Wyden went on to explain, are using their wealth to acquire valuable assets, then watching those assets appreciate and borrowing against the higher value of those assets to generate the cash they need to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. Eventually, of course, these deep pockets die, but any tax owed on their investment gains simply “disappears into the ledgers of history.” Their heirs face no tax whatsoever on the gains their benefactors have left them.

“This kind of tax trickery isn’t available to nurses and firefighters and tradesmen. Their taxes come straight out of every paycheck,” Wyden pointed out. “The ultra-wealthy get their own special set of rules.”

Long-time tax attorney Bob Lord, the current senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires network and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, expanded on “buy-borrow-die” and assorted other lucrative tax dodges in his testimony today before Wyden’s panel. Those dodges could — and should — take center stage in 2025, he agreed, as America’s lawmakers debate whether to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich set to expire by next year’s end.

Republican lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee spent a huge chunk of their time at today’s hearing depicting America’s rich as noble souls doing their best to create jobs in the face of a tax system that harasses them at every turn. Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts disputed that depiction.

“The wealthiest of the wealthy have figured out how to get richer and richer and richer and richer in ways that just don’t show up on a tax form,” Warren noted. “The result: The top one-tenth of 1 percent pays about 3.2 percent of their wealth in taxes every year while the bottom 99 percent pays more than double that.”

The Biden-Harris administration, the Massachusetts senator added, has advanced a proposal that would subject Americans with net worths over $100 million — the nation’s wealthiest 10,000 people — to a minimum 25 percent tax on their income, well below our federal tax code’s current 37 percent top rate.

But these wealthy, Warren continued, are claiming that they don’t have the money to pay that tax because their wealth is sitting “all locked up in stocks.”

“Are these 10,000 mega-millionaires actually cash-poor?” Warren asked Robert Lord, the veteran tax attorney witness. “Are they living like monks?”

“I haven’t seen,” Lord smiled in reply, “many monks on yachts.”

Azure waters and exotic islands are not the only attractions of Cabo Delgado in Mozambique. The province is home to the largest graphite reserve globally, prompting Syrah Resources’ Twigg to open the Balama mine. This is one of the dozen projects across the world chosen by the Minerals Security Partnership to secure and diversify the supply of raw materials.

The energy transition is dependent on critical minerals such as lithium and copper as the world electrifies transport and shifts to renewables. With most minerals currently controlled by China, many western countries are playing catch up. The Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), whose members include Australia, Canada, India, the U.S. and many European countries, is central to this effort.

History is full of not-so-pretty attempts by western nations to capture minerals supply chains, as many living in the Global South know first hand. So how can this partnership offer a truly different value proposition centered on sustainability and deliver truly responsible projects?

Strong transparent standards

Despite some effort, the current situation in the extractive industries is far from adequate. A recent report by the International Energy Agency notes that while governance in the minerals sector has somewhat improved, progress on water and greenhouse gas emissions is at best stagnating. (Add to this a deeply felt mistrust among communities and companies and you quickly realize how complicated the matters are.)

But it does not have to be this way. Most technologies for safer tailings management or better water treatment, rules for robust anti-corruption and human rights due diligence, and practices to engage communities and co-govern with Indigenous peoples all exist. They just need to be applied and upheld consistently. This is where the new minerals partnership can bring real value.

Yet right now the MSP principles lack any such concrete requirements. That’s a big omission. For example in the case of Cabo Delgado, concerns around involuntary resettlement of nearby communities and local value proposition abide. MSP-supported projects like this one will be judged as much by the volumes of critical minerals they supply as by their environmental and social stewardship.

The good news is that the MSP does not have to reinvent the wheel. The answer lies in applying the human right and environmental due diligence practices as stipulated in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) guidelines. The EU has recently done exactly that in its new battery law. This will require tracing, addressing and mitigating all manner of social and environmental risks, alongside upholding global treaties such as on Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

Any global miner, refiner, or recycler whose cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel are found in batteries on the European market will already have to track and mitigate all manner of social and environmental risks from 2026, including forced labor, water pollution, and biodiversity. MSP member countries can simply uplift these provisions into the partnership projects.

From rhetoric to action on the ground

Setting strong and transparent standards is the first step. These need to also be implemented so that they bring difference on the ground.

This means that the minerals partnership needs to quickly move from vision to a pipeline of responsible projects on the ground. So the focus should be on coordinating with local governments to bring local value and infrastructure, on engaging local communities to have a social license to operate and on bringing in finance instructions to make the projects happen.

Given how far ahead China is, there is no time to waste. A laser sharp focus to scale responsibly managed projects across the world is necessary to build a more diverse supply chain. But this should also come with better environmental stewardship and advancing the rights and livelihoods of those impacted, breaking from past behavior.

The Minerals Security Partnership shows global governments are waking up to the challenge of securing critical minerals responsibly. But whether projects like the Balama mine will become largest suppliers of quality graphite and raise the local community out of poverty will depend on how quickly responsible mining practices are scaled up on the ground.

As the U.S. elections come closer, there is growing pressure on many progressives in the Global South to make our voices heard in support of the candidacy of Kamala Harris. No act on your part is insignificant in these elections, we are told. The votes of your relatives in the United States could spell the difference in a very tight race.

The argument is fairly straightforward. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in the United States and to the interests of the Global South as well. Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, but the alternative, four years of Donald Trump, is worse.

Past Democratic administrations, the argument continues, may have failed to bring about a more equal society, rein in Wall Street and Big Tech, and make more progress in promoting the rights of minorities. But under the Democrats, there is at least the space to debate these failures and correct them, racism will not be given a free pass, the climate crisis will be given the urgent attention it requires, and fundamental democratic norms like majority rule in electoral contests will not be brazenly violated. Trump in power is very likely to push hard to bring the United States to the brink of authoritarian rule, if not fascism, and informally his administration’s ruling ideology will be unbridled White supremacy.

I have no quarrel with this assessment that a Harris victory would be in the interest of the majority of people in the United States. It is the claim that a Harris presidency would be better for the Global South than a Trump regime that I find questionable and worth an extended discussion.

Two Parties of Empire

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-Western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of empire.

The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic senators voted to commit U.S. troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms.

Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshalling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than have the Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the U.S. moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of U.S. power, that is, to clothe the iron fist with a velvet glove. These are differences of style that are minor and marginal in terms of their consequences.

Critics from the Global South have rightly pointed out that Obama’s elimination of Qaddafi with the approval of the UN Security Council may have had more “legitimacy” than Bush’s overthrowing of Saddam Hussein via his much denigrated “coalition of the willing,” but the results have been the same: the overthrow via the exercise largely of U.S. power of a legitimate government and the consequent disintegration of a society.

The Great Republican Exodus

Over the last few months, however, there has been an interesting phenomenon. More and more people who played key foreign policy roles in previous Republican administrations have declared their support for the Democratic candidate, first Joe Biden, now Kamala Harris. The most notable recent addition to the Democratic bandwagon is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was one of the key architects of Bush Jr’s interventionist wars in the Middle East, who recently signed up to support Harris along with daughter Liz. More are expected to defect in the less than two months remaining before the elections.

There are two reasons why former foreign policy hardliners have been leaving the Republican fold. The first is that they can no longer trust Trump, who now has total control of the Republican base. In their view, Trump during his first term weakened the Western alliance that Washington created over the last 78 years by speaking badly of allies and demanding they pay for U.S. protection, declaring the Republican-sponsored invasion of Iraq a mistake, and crossing red lines that the U.S. Cold War elite put in place, the most famous being his stepping across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea to talk to Kim Jong Un. More recently, he has repeatedly suggested disapproval of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, while his running mate JD Vance, wants to eliminate aid to Kyiv altogether.

Trump, these Republican deserters feel, is not interested in sticking to the cornerstone of the bipartisan consensus that the U.S. elite, despite their sometimes rancorous quarrels, have adhered to: expanding and maintaining a “liberal” empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order promoted under the political canopy of multilateralism, legitimized via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy, and defended by a Western military alliance at the center of which is American power. They worry that Trump is playing to the not insignificant part of his base, pesonified by Vance, that is tired of bearing the costs of empire and see this as one of the key causes of America’s economic decline. They know that what makes “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) attractive to many people is its promise to build a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world and focused on rebuilding the imperial heartland. They are apprehensive that under Trump, the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be allowed to wither away. They fear that selective, pragmatic deal-making, like the one Trump tried with Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, would, instead, become the norm in U.S. diplomacy and unilateral military action rather than allied initiatives via NATO would be the principal means to coerce and discipline the Global South.

The other reason hardline Republicans are engaging in the once-despised practice of crossing party lines is that the Biden administration is now carrying out the kind of aggressive militarized foreign policy once associated with the Bush Jr administration in the Middle East in the 2000s. Biden has given full-throated support to Israel, which the hardline Republicans have sanctified as the only reliable ally in the Middle East, followed Bush Jr’s policy of isolating Russia by supporting Ukraine, reinvigorated NATO after Trump’s morale-sapping bad-mouthing of U.S. allies and expanded the alliance’s reach to the Pacific, and mounted the full-blown containment of China that Bush Jr and Cheney wanted to carry out but had to shelve owing to their need to win Beijing’s participation in their administration’s “war on terror.”

Biden has, in fact, taken the containment of Beijing beyond Trump’s approach of curtailing trade and technology transfers by carrying out the aggressive military encirclement of China. He has done what no other American president had done since the historic 1979 Joint Communique articulating Washington’s “One China Policy,” which is to explicitly commit Washington to a military defense of Taiwan. He has ordered the U.S. Navy to send ships through the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to bait Beijing and deployed five of the 11 U.S. carrier task forces to the Western Pacific. Not surprisingly, his gestures have given the green light to worrisome bellicose rhetoric from the top military brass, like the statement of General Mike Minihan, chief of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, that, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”

That the Democratic party elite now has a monopoly of promoting expansive imperialism was in full display during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention on August 23, when she accused Trump of abdicating American gobal leadership, seeking to abandon NATO, and encouraging “Putin to invade our allies” and “do whatever the hell they want.” Republican defectors like Cheney and daughter Liz could only cheer when Harris promised to make sure the U.S. armed forces would be “the most lethal fighting force in the world” and committed herself to making sure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”

Two Paradigms of Empire…

In sum, what we have in contention on November 5 are two paradigms of empire. One is the old Democratic/Republican expansionist vision of empire that seeks to make the world safe for American capital and American hegemony. The opposing view, that of Trump and JD Vance, his vice presidential pick, considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would disengage from what Trump has called “shithole countries”—meaning most of us in the Global South—and focus more on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).

As far as the exercise of force is concerned, the MAGA approach would most likely be in the Israeli style of periodic unilateral strikes against selected enemies outside the wall to keep them off balance, without consulting any allies or giving a damn for whatever havoc they cause.

If these are what are on offer in the November 5 elections, then it would be foolish for us in the Global South to take sides since both paradigms are detrimental to our interests.

From Helpless Hostages to Decisive Actors

Still, some say, you have to cut the Democrats some slack. In terms of their composition, Democrats and the Republicans are not, strictly speaking, twin sides of the same imperial coin. Owing to the constraints of the U.S. electoral system, there is a large contingent of progressives whose only political home is the Democratic Party. In terms of values, these folks are our allies. They have more in common with us than with their party’s elite, and they have been, for the most part, ignored and taken for granted by the latter, whose attitude towards them can be summed up as: “You have no choice but to support us.”

This view has merit. But the problem is that, so far, most of these progressive Democratic supporters have passively accepted Harris’ and the party elite’s imperial rhetoric and gestures, like Harris’ refusal to grant the rather modest request of giving a pro-Palestinian Democrat a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention

My sense is that the progressive bloc in the Democratic Party probably underestimates its strength. In the circumstances surrounding these elections in particular, they can transform themselves from helpless hostages to awful policies to significant actors that can force Harris and the party elite to think twice or thrice about embracing the rabidly imperialist platform that Harris enunciated at the convention—but only if they’re bold enough to act on their convictions, like Rep. Barbara Lee did in casting the sole dissenting vote against the war in Afghanistan, an act of great courage that history has vindicated.

Progressive Democrats should realize that the only way to get the party elite to listen and change tack is to organize themselves and like-minded voters to abstain from voting if Harris does not retreat from her imperial platform—which, in a tight race, could effectively throw the elections to Trump. If I understand it correctly, this was the approach that the Uncommitted Movement from Michigan originally planned to follow to force Biden to reverse his pro-genocide policy in Gaza. This strategy is risky, but it can work if the party elite gets the message that the progressives are determined to carry out their threat. Fortune has never rewarded the timid. This is the only way to get the party elite to begin to change course. Otherwise they will act like they’ve always acted, from Clinton to Obama to Biden, which is to take your support for granted and run over you.

Democratic Party progressives have less than two months to go until election day to organize and prove that a Harris presidency would represent less of a threat to the interests of the Global South than a Trump-Vance regime. Unless we get clear proof that Harris has backtracked from her rabid and bellicose imperial posture, we in the Global South would be well advised not to take sides in this dogfight between rival parties of empire.

In recent months, a curious phenomenon has emerged in American politics—the endorsement of Democratic candidates by figures traditionally associated with the Republican far right. Most notably, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney made headlines by throwing their support behind Kamala Harris' presidential bid. This unexpected alliance has been framed by centrist media outlets as a heartening example of cross-party unity in the face of former President Donald Trump's purported threat to democracy. However, a more critical examination reveals that these endorsements are less a triumph of democratic values and more a damning indictment of the current political status quo.

The Illusion of a 'Popular Front'

Defenders of this unlikely alliance argue that it represents a necessary "popular front" against the authoritarian threat posed by Trump and his supporters. They contend that in times of crisis, we must set aside ideological differences and unite to preserve the foundations of our democracy. But this framing relies on a fundamentally flawed premise—that the system these centrists and right-wingers are rallying to protect is itself truly democratic.

The political establishment that the Cheneys and their Democratic allies seek to preserve is one that perpetuates endless wars and military interventions across the globe, from Iraq to Libya to the ongoing support for Israel's assault on Gaza. It allows for and exacerbates grotesque levels of economic inequality, with wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. This system routinely supports and arms authoritarian regimes when it aligns with U.S. corporate interests, from Saudi Arabia to Thailand. It oversees a mass incarceration system that disproportionately targets communities of color and fails to take meaningful action on existential threats like climate change due to the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists.

The Democratic Party's willingness to embrace far-right endorsements puts the lie to their posturing as champions of the working class and foes of elite power.

This is the system that the so-called "popular front" is mobilizing to defend. Not a beacon of democracy, but a corrupt oligarchy that masquerades as one. The fight against Trump's authoritarianism, while certainly necessary, is being used as cover to shore up support for a status quo that is itself profoundly anti-democratic in its functioning.

The embrace of figures like the Cheneys also reveals a deeply troubling moral relativism at the heart of the Democratic establishment. Dick Cheney, after all, was one of the primary architects of the Iraq War—a conflict built on lies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and destabilized an entire region. He has been an unapologetic defender of torture and a champion of unchecked executive power.

That Democrats would welcome such a figure into their tent speaks volumes about their own moral compass and political priorities. It suggests that in their calculus, the taint of association with war criminals and corporate oligarchs is outweighed by the potential electoral benefits. This is not principled politics—it is cynical maneuvering that betrays any claim to real progressive values.

The Bankruptcy of Centrism and the Democratic Establishment

Central to understanding this phenomenon is recognizing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of political centrism as it exists in the United States today. Centrists pride themselves on their supposed pragmatism and willingness to reach across the aisle. But in practice, this "pragmatism" almost always skews rightward, dragging the entire political spectrum in a more conservative direction.

We see this in the way that ideas once considered radical right-wing positions have become normalized as "centrist" compromises. We see it in the adoption of Republican framing on issues like crime, fracking, welfare, and national security. And we see it now in the lionization of figures like Dick Cheney as principled defenders of democracy, memory-holing their long records of supporting deeply anti-democratic policies.

This narrowing of the political spectrum has profound consequences for American democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens whose views and interests are not represented by either major party.

The Democratic Party's willingness to embrace far-right endorsements puts the lie to their posturing as champions of the working class and foes of elite power. Their rhetoric may occasionally nod to populist themes, but their actions reveal a party that is fundamentally comfortable with the current distribution of power and wealth in society. By welcoming figures like the Cheneys into their coalition, Democrats are sending a clear message—they are not opposed to elites per se, only to those particular elites who threaten their own place in the established order.

This elite consensus is evident in the policy priorities of Democratic administrations. Whether under former President Barack Obama or current President Joe Biden, we see a consistent pattern of bailing out banks and major corporations while offering only crumbs to struggling workers. We see promises of a new direction in foreign policy coupled with a continuation of the same interventionist approach.

The result is a democracy where the differences between the two parties, while real, are far narrower than their rhetoric would suggest. Both ultimately serve the interests of corporate power and the military-industrial complex, merely disagreeing on the details of implementation. This narrowing of the political spectrum has profound consequences for American democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens whose views and interests are not represented by either major party.

Moreover, this centrist consensus serves to stifle genuine debate and innovation in policymaking. By defining the range of "acceptable" ideas so narrowly, it excludes potentially transformative solutions to the pressing problems facing the country. Ideas like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or serious corporate regulation are dismissed as fringe or unrealistic, while failed policies of the past are recycled under new branding.

The Urgent Need for Alternatives

As we survey this bleak political landscape, the urgent need for genuine alternatives becomes increasingly apparent. While strategically it remains important to influence local and national elections, recent events in France serve as a stark reminder of the limitations of this approach.

French President Emmanuel Macron's appointment of Michel Barnier, a conservative politician, as prime minister following a fractured election result illustrates how centrist parties will ultimately betray the left in favor of the right. Despite the left-wing New Popular Front coalition winning the most seats in snap elections, Macron chose to align with the right, including placating the far-right National Rally. This decision reveals where the true class allegiances of centrist politicians lie—with the established order and corporate interests, rather than with progressive change.

Ultimately, the spectacle of Democrats embracing far-right endorsements should serve not as cause for despair, but as a clarion call for genuine, transformative change.

This pattern is not unique to France. In the United States, the Democratic Party's embrace of far-right endorsements follows a similar logic. By welcoming figures like the Cheneys into their fold, Democrats signal their willingness to preserve the status quo at the expense of meaningful reform. This move rightward is not an aberration but a reflection of the party's fundamental priorities.

The danger in this situation lies not just in the immediate policy implications, but in the long-term erosion of political possibilities. By supporting these endorsements, even tacitly through not challenging the Democrats to reject them, progressives risk ceding the ground of real transformative change to the right wing. The language of anti-elitism and systemic change, divorced from a genuinely progressive economic and social agenda, becomes the domain of right-wing populists.

The challenge, then, is twofold. On one hand, there is an urgent need to build political power outside of the two-party system. This means investing in grassroots organizing, mutual aid networks, and alternative economic structures that can provide a glimpse of a different way of organizing society. It means fostering a political culture that prioritizes the needs of working people over the demands of corporate donors.

On the other hand, there is a need for a more forceful and unapologetic progressive movement within electoral politics. This movement must be willing to challenge the Democratic establishment, to reject compromises that betray core values, and to articulate a vision of change that goes beyond incremental reforms. It must be willing to call out the hypocrisy of embracing far-right figures in the name of "unity" while marginalizing progressive voices.

Ultimately, the spectacle of Democrats embracing far-right endorsements should serve not as cause for despair, but as a clarion call for genuine, transformative change. It exposes the hollowness at the core of centrist politics and underscores the need for a political movement that truly represents the interests of the many rather than the elite few.

In the old 1990s Nike commercials, Mars Blackmon, played by Spike Lee, asks basketball great Michael Jordan, “Is it the shoes?”

In a much more serious, disturbing incident, Tyreek Hill, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was taken down, handcuffed, kneed in the back, and manhandled by Miami-Dade police not far from the stadium where he plays.

I can guarantee you it wasn’t the shoes that got the attention of officers in a potentially deadly encounter.

It was the car, the constant criminalization of Black men, and a refusal to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.

But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?

Hill, a well-paid athlete, was driving an expensive car. He’s paid his dues, sacrificed, and should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a short distance from his Black job.

But “Driving While Black” has long been a crisis in America, and you don’t have to drive a fine car to be targeted.

“Almost every African-American or Latino can tell a story about being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason other than the color of his or her skin, especially if he or she happened to be driving in the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ or even driving the ‘wrong car,’” said the American Civil Liberties Union, citing cases stretching back to the 1990s.

Hill was born March 1, 1994.

“Victims of these racially motivated traffic stops rarely receive a traffic ticket or are found guilty of any violation of the law. It’s a practice called Driving While Black,” said the ACLU. “The U.S. Supreme Court established an open season on motorists in 1996 when it ruled that police could use any traffic offense as an excuse to pull a car over.” Black and White drivers engaged in illegalities “at about the same rate—28.4% in searches of Blacks and 28.8% in searches of whites.”

Yet, the ACLU noted, 41% of Black Americans say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their race and 21% of Black adults, including 30% of Black men, reported being victims of police violence.

Hill came before microphones September 8 saying he did nothing wrong and was confused about what happened and why. He calmly explained how his mother taught him to be respectful and cooperative, how he wanted to be a police officer and respected them. There are bad apples everywhere, he continued. But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?

Death.

“If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us,” Laura Washington wrote earlier this year about a controversial Chicago case.

Body cam footage of his killing, which many call an execution, captured the 26-year-old Black man sitting in his SUV. Five cops in street clothes jumped out on him in a city known for often violent, deadly carjackings.

“One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting,” Washington wrote. A civilian oversight body said an officer was wounded in the wrist.

“The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying ‘motionless on the ground,’ according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,” wrote Washington.

“This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car.”

“Did Reed shoot out of terror?” she asked in a Chicago Tribune piece.

Organizing around Reed’s death has been going on in the Windy City with many outraged and demanding justice.

“Chicago police officers reported making more than a half million stops last year on the city streets, continuing to stop Black and Brown motorists at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the driving population,” the ACLU reported in 2024. “In 2023, CPD officers stopped Black drivers at a rate 3.75 times that of white drivers and stopped Latino drivers at a rate 2.73 times that of white drivers. These disparities are similar to racial disparities reported in prior years in Chicago. CPD has never explained why it disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers.”

There are bad apples in every system. But when institutions fail to act to correct wrongs—especially with folks having guns, handcuffs, and badges—the whole system is rotten.

Like millions of Americans, I came from elsewhere, but now wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

I was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and was forced to flee war when I was just 14 years old. After almost two decades of waiting in Uganda, separated from my family, I was approved for refugee resettlement in the United States in 2016 and eventually found a permanent home in Fort Worth, Texas.

After my initial resettlement in New Jersey, graduate school in Vermont, and a first job in Connecticut, I was happy to reunite again with my mother and brothers in Texas. In addition to the warm weather—which my elderly mother is thankful for as she takes daily walks—I love this state and this country for all the diverse cultures we experience. Every day, I meet people from around the world and I am reminded that refugees are some of the most resourceful and entrepreneurial people on this planet. We are grateful to be here and eager to give back to the communities that welcome us, we just need the opportunity to do so.

When given the chance, Americans choose to welcome.

I became a citizen in 2022, and I am proud to call myself an American. While my refugee journey had a happy ending, many other people just like me are still living in refugee camps, waiting to resettle somewhere safe and looking for ways to plan their futures and put their talents to work. Less than 1% of the total refugee population ever gets resettled, even though prolonged conflicts and restrictions on local integration in most refugee hosting countries make third country resettlement the only durable solution for most refugees.

The United States has a proud history of being a global leader in refugee resettlement, but that spirit isn’t always matched by some of our elected officials, including in my adopted state. Yet despite the rise of misinformation and anti-immigrant political rhetoric, many officials are standing up for the truth that refugee resettlement benefits this nation. This includes the bipartisan group of nearly 500 state and local elected officials who signed onto a new letter urging U.S. President Joe Biden to strengthen the U.S. resettlement program “to improve our capacity to welcome, enable our communities to more nimbly provide humanitarian protection, and preserve the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for years to come.”

Strengthening the U.S. refugee system and reuniting more families are in the interest of our country, with a positive ripple effect on our economy and on our lives. Refugees contribute billions of dollars to the local economy in my home state of Texas alone. Across the state, thousands of refugee entrepreneurs own businesses that earn more than $500 million each year, and refugees and immigrants could fill job shortages in essential sectors like nursing. This is true wherever refugees live across the U.S.

Thankfully, I know firsthand that Americans from all backgrounds, faiths, and political beliefs believe in welcoming refugees. Polling shows that Americans across party lines support refugee resettlement, and that number goes up significantly when people personally know a refugee. Across the country, people have been signing up for Welcome Corps, a new program where Americans sign up to directly participate in their community’s resettlement process. It’s a reminder that when given the chance, Americans choose to welcome.

As President Biden looks toward his final months in office and his legacy, supporting a strong and sustained resettlement program will be a way to reaffirm America’s commitment to humanitarian values and secure a lasting impact for future generations. Strengthening this program is not only the right thing to do but also a smart and compassionate decision that reflects our nation’s core values. Together, we can build a more inclusive and hopeful future.

The past 20 years have been critical in the fight for bold and sustainable climate solutions. The next five years will be even more vital—and young people like me are fighting hard to make sure our leaders get it right.

Research shows we have about five years left to avert global warming beyond 1.5°C, the tipping point when even more severe climate disruptions could exacerbate hunger, conflict, and drought worldwide.

Climate change—long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil—impacts our livelihoods and our lives. It harms our health and well-being and threatens our access to vital resources, from water to food to housing.

We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got.

Communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are already paying the price for inadequate climate action. Pacific islands like Tuvalu are already sinking and expected to be completely submerged in coming years. Meanwhile, scientists predict that rising sea levels will leave 60% of Miami-Dade County under water by 2060.

While we can’t count on certain stubborn politicians to save our only planet, we can count on the young people at the heart of the climate movement.

The global youth-led climate movement has a long history of standing up to corporate giants and their political allies who exacerbate climate change. Despite failed attempts by some politicians to patronize, belittle, or discredit the teenagers and 20-somethings leading protests and driving policy demands, young climate activists are fueling hope—and winning change.

In June 2023, youth climate activists won a landmark lawsuit, Held v. Montana, when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional. Similar suits are underway in many other states.

Universities also have a prime role to play in encouraging students to practice sustainability and foster social change. At my university, Virginia Tech, students can participate in a Climate Action Living Laboratory (CALL), where they work with faculty and staff on sustainability projects and research, using our campus and surrounding community networks to work towards the university’s climate action goals.

In my Virginia Tech coursework, I got to harvest food for our dining facilities at our campus farm, compost on an Indigenous farm, visit a local community garden, and tour a food sorting facility—all while working closely with campus partners I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

Across the country, institutions like Colorado State, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Dickinson College, Furman, and the University of Vermont have implemented living learning labs of their own. In addition to advancing sustainability initiatives, these labs combine disciplines and skills—and unite diverse groups of people—to incubate innovative climate solutions.

You can help us grow the movement, too. Consider supporting domestic climate activist youth movements in your local community and organizations like Sunrise D.C., a local branch of the youth climate organization where activists in the nation’s capital get involved at both the local and national level.

We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got. Join us.

The D.C.-based Heritage Foundation has long spread disinformation about elections, claiming there is widespread voter fraud despite ample evidence to the contrary. More recently, it has gained attention for its authoritarian and antidemocratic Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration.

Ahead of this fall’s election, Heritage has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers, laying the groundwork for election deniers to use in case the results don’t go their way.

Now its efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn—a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none. In July, men working with Heritage knocked on the doors of suspected noncitizens in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they are registered to vote. The pair misrepresented themselves as being with a company that assists Latinos with navigating the election system and secretly videotaped their interactions.

In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment.

Several of the people said they were noncitizens and had registered, which the Heritage Foundation touted as supporting its false claims on the topic—but according to state investigators, The New York Times reported, there is no record of any of these people being registered. At least one of the people recorded told investigators that she was just giving answers she hoped would make the two men go away.

But Heritage posted the videos to its website and claimed that based on a mere seven people, 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered to vote—an estimated 47,000 people. It’s a ludicrous assertion. The office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state dismissed the video as a “stunt.”

Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation used its social media presence to amplify similar deceptive behavior, which led to online harassment and death threats for the leader of a nonprofit assisting asylum seekers. In April, Anthony Rubin—the founder of Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Heritage—and his brother misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. Rubin kept trying to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for U.S. President Joe Biden. In a multi-part thread on social media, Heritage posted a snippet of a conversation between Rubin and the head of the nonprofit, in which she is misconstrued as encouraging noncitizens to vote.

In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment. Secretly videotaping people in conversations under false pretenses is not a way to expose voter fraud,—which itself is vanishingly rare—but it is a way to get false information, risk intimidating eligible voters in violation of federal and state laws, and sow doubt in the integrity of our elections.

The Heritage Foundation is using old scare tactics

While these methods may be new to the organization, we’ve seen them before from others. And it hasn’t ended well for the perpetrators.

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, long used unverified, undercover, and deceptively edited recordings to misconstrue the truth, including about supposed voter fraud. In 2020, the group published an unverified video that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had collected ballots illegally, as well as videos falsely alleging voter fraud in one Pennsylvania city. In the Pennsylvania incident, the group ended up settling a lawsuit brought by the local postmaster and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.

In 2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws, and was required to pay $120,000 in damages. And in 2009, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded conversations with staff at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was a network of community-based organizations advocating for low and moderate-income families. The deceptively edited videos construed ACORN employees as advising O’Keefe on tax evasion. But the videos set off a political firestorm that led to public funding for ACORN to be cut off, effectively shuttering the organization. Later, O’Keefe faced a civil lawsuit from a former-ACORN staff member and settled for $100,000.

In 2016 and 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal organization, published two reports purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. The reports included the home addresses and phone numbers of many innocent people, including U.S. citizens. Four of those citizens sued PILF for defamation and voter intimidation. The case settled in 2019, and the leader of PILF was required to issue a written apology.

The disgraceful tactics employed by these groups have failed to hold up in court time and again, and now Heritage looks like it wants to join their ranks.

As for the issue of noncitizen voting—it’s a myth. Noncitizen voting does not occur in any significant manner, and it’s already illegal under federal and state law. The Heritage Foundation’s actions are hurting our democracy, not helping it.

Last month, the International Rescue Committee, described the crisis in Sudan as the top global humanitarian emergency. On August 28, Lawrence O’Donnell described the war in Sudan as the “least reported humanitarian crisis on the planet”.

Levon Sevunts is a former journalist who works for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. He had recently returned from Chad, a country hosting 633,867 people who have fled Sudan. Sevunts spoke to me, about his trip:

“For me, this was an absolutely surreal experience to be back in Chad almost 20 years to the day after I went to Chad as a Canadian journalist, covering the conflict in Darfur, seeing the same stories, the same refugees, only on a much bigger scale."

Sevunts said,

“The stories I heard from speaking to Sudanese women refugees, who had seen members of their families executed in front of their eyes, of women who told me about worrying about how they’re going to feed their kids, worried every time they went fetching wood beyond the security of the camp that they would get raped or assaulted—worried, but they had to do this anyway because they needed to feed their families.”

Sevunts recalled,

“I was with a journalist in this border town called Adré, a town on the Chadian side of the Sudan border, but it’s right on the border. This is the place where most of the refugees come fleeing from violence. I was speaking with my colleagues about the kind of cases they were seeing, and they were saying there is a big difference now, because in the initial months when the conflict started in mid-April, especially around June when the violence spread in Darfur, they were seeing a lot of people coming in with injuries and gunshot wounds, shrapnel.”

He told me that

“What you are seeing now is that a lot of people are coming in extremely malnourished. This is basically a man-made food crisis. Because of the war, farmers are not able to plant in their fields; they have missed one planting season already, their crops were burned, and their livestock was destroyed or taken away from them. So you have this incredible humanitarian situation inside Sudan, but it’s also playing out on the Chadian side of the border because before the war, this part of Chad used to get most of its food imports from Sudan, and now it’s vice versa. So now they have to truck food all the way from Libya because the area doesn’t provide enough food for the population. Food is trucked all the way through the Sahara desert, all the way from Libya, south to Chad, and from Chad, some of it goes to Sudan. And this means that prices have jumped. So not only do humanitarian agencies have to buy items from local markets, but the prices of things at the market have gone up because of the logistical difficulties that the war has created."

Sevunts explained that it’s not just the refugees; it’s the local population who are worried about putting food on the table for their own families.

Sevunts noted that many displaced people, “have been displaced time and again. They flee to one city or region that they think is safe, and then a couple of months later, war spreads to that region, and they have to flee again and again.” He called on the international community to step steps in with immediate humanitarian assistance.

He also noted that, “humanitarian aid is just a band-aid solution” and said that, “what they really need is peace in Sudan. Because unless there is a lasting ceasefire and peace talks, this conflict threatens not only to destroy Sudan as a functioning state, but it also threatens to destabilize the entire region, a very, very fragile part of East and Central Africa.”

By Ralph Nader September 13, 2024 My new book is hot off the press. It is full of hundreds of practical ways to help candidates to motivate voters and do good for America. Incumbents and challengers, cocooned by their corporate-conflicted political advisors, could benefit from this unique guide to political victory. Giving voice to two…

On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world.  Boeing employees vote to go on strike, the US Congress is trying desperately to avoid a government shutdown, and the black nationalist group Uhurus are found guilty of conspiracy.  To add to all  that the US will allow Ukraine to use long range missiles inside Russia.    In the opening segment, Ted and Steve discuss the turbulent American political scene.  Trump doubles down on Hattians eating pets, and he rules out a third debate.  Tyler Nixon weighs in with his analysis.     Then The Final Countdown team speaks to Jeremy Kuzmarov the managing editor of Covert Action Magazine. Jeremy will walk us through the conviction of the Uhurus dissident group of conspiracy in St Petersburg, Florida.   At the top of the second hour The Final Countdown team then speaks to Tennessee Congressman Cong Tim Burchett about the budget battle currently going on in Washington.  Is a shutdown possible?       The post The Final Countdown – 9/13/24 – Trump Rejects Second Debate With Harris as Election Approaches first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A crass new iteration of anti-Haitianism has recently received a remarkable amount of attention. This novel form of racism with deep anti-Black roots was even referenced in this week's U.S. presidential debate.

Recently racist and ignorant social media users have circulated the idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance greatly boosted the anti-Haitian claim with a post to X stating, “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”

Vance’s X post had over 11 million views with Donald Trump even referencing the claim in the presidential debate. This despite an absence of any evidence whatsoever. Springfield officials haven’t received any credible reports of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets.

The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims. In the early 1980s Haitians were stigmatized as the originators of the HIV virus in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) labeled Haitians as a risk group, which gave rise to “The Four H’s” designation of Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Heroin addicts, and Haitians. At the time the Canadian Red Cross publicly identified Haitians as a “high-risk” group for AIDS, the only nationality singled out. In 1983 they called on homosexuals and bisexuals with multiple partners, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs and recent immigrants from Haiti to voluntarily stop giving blood. A Canadian government pamphlet, which was distributed in shopping malls, also linked Haitians with AIDS. Again, this was despite a lack of evidence that the incidence of AIDS in Haiti was greater than in the U.S. By 1987 it was lower in Haiti than in the U.S. and other Caribbean nations.

But, as a result of the unfounded stigmatization, the country’s significant tourism basically collapsed overnight. Out of fear the virus may transmit through goods, some Haitian exports were even blocked from entering the U.S.

The Haitians are responsible for AIDS allegation still pops up. During an explosion of xenophobia against Haitian migrants in Guyana in 2019, reports focused on HIV/AIDS and Voodoo and in a 2016 radio outburst former Canadian Member of Parliament, André Arthur, labeled Haiti a “sexually deviant” country populated by thieves and prostitutes responsible for HIV/AIDS.

In another example of stigmatizing Haitians over disease, CDC incident manager for the Haiti cholera response, Jordan W. Tappero, blamed Haitian cultural norms for the 2010 cholera outbreak that caused tens of thousands of deaths. He told Associated Press journalist Jonathan Katz that Haitians don’t experience the “shame associated with open defecation.” As was then suspected and later confirmed, cholera was introduced to Haiti by UN forces who followed poor sanitation practices.

Ten months earlier influential U.S. pastor Pat Robertson suggested the terrible January 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas was due to a “deal made with Satan” two centuries earlier. Robertson claimed Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever … And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’” Robertson added, “You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

Canadian Protestant groups have promoted similar thinking about the August 1791 Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman) Vodou ceremony that helped launch the Haitian Revolution. In the book “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Bertin M. Louis points out that some Haitian Canadian Protestants believe Haiti was consecrated to the devil. Mainstream Canadian voices have repeatedly denigrated voodoo.

After the 2004 US/France/Canada coup the National Post published an editorial headlined “Voodoo is not enough”, arguing for “a coalition of the willing to permanently extract the country from the quagmire. A 1952 Globe and Mail story attempting to be sympathetic to the country began by noting, “Haiti’s principal export is not, as popularly supposed, Zombies.” One of the first books to expose North Americans to the voodoo zombie was Magic Island, a 1929 book by William Buehler Seabrook. The book sensationalized encounters with voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.

Voodoo has been demonized by white supremacist and Christian forces for over two centuries. Important for defeating slavery and securing Haitian independence, the religion offered spiritual/ideological strength to those who revolted against their slave masters in maybe the greatest example of liberation in the history of humanity.

The 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution was simultaneously a struggle against slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy. Defeating the French, British, and Spanish empires, it led to freedom for all people regardless of color, decades before this idea found traction in Europe or North America. The Haitian revolt rippled through the region and compelled the post-French Revolution government in Paris to abolish slavery in its Caribbean colonies. It also spurred London’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

The Haitian Revolution led to the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. “Arguably,” notes Peter Hallward, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.”

But, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution thousands of photos, articles and books denigrated Haiti, depicting the slaves as barbaric despite the fact 350,000 Africans were killed, versus 75,000 Europeans, over the 13-year revolt. Anti-Haitianism has deep roots.

It’s easy to mock those who claim Haitian immigrants are eating cats. But overt anti-Haitianism is also relayed by ‘sophisticated’ liberals. Their high-minded commentaries calling for foreign tutelage of the country appear regularly in the pages of the Globe and Mail and Boston Globe.

Anti-Haitianism flows out of and reinforces the country’s weakness, which is spurred by imperial domination. Technically “independent” for more than two centuries, outsiders have long shaped Haitian affairs. Through isolation, economic asphyxiation, debt dependence, gunboat diplomacy, occupation, foreign supported dictatorships, structural adjustment programs, “democracy promotion”, coups and rigged elections, Haiti is no stranger to the various forms of foreign political manipulation.

JD Vance’s anti-Haitian musings have deep roots in centuries of anti-Black racism and U.S. imperial ambitions. All those who fail to support real Haitian independence are tainted by this legacy and present-day reality.

The following is a statement released by a group of international organizations representing human rights and climate interests on September 11, 2024.

We, the undersigned civil society organizations, movements, groups, and individuals, highlight the urgent need to address serious human rights concerns in Azerbaijan in the lead-up to its hosting this year’s United Nations Climate Conference, or COP29, to be held in Baku from November 11 to 22, 2024.

Azerbaijan’s government has a longstanding and well-documented pattern of repressing independent civil society and silencing critical voices. Hosting an international gathering such as COP29 in this context raises grave concerns about the ability of civil society, including environmental activists, human rights defenders, and journalists, to participate freely and safely before, during, and after the conference.

Robust and rights-respecting climate action requires the full and meaningful participation of civil society in climate negotiations, including the key outcome documents of COP29.

The rare international spotlight on Azerbaijan as it prepares to host COP29 represents a critical opportunity to mark strong concern about its crackdown on independent civil society and press for an end to abuses.

Azerbaijani human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people are behind bars in the country on politically motivated charges. A new wave of detentions is currently under way, with dozens of activists and media figures arrested on baseless, serious criminal charges.

Among those targeted is Gubad Ibadoghlu, a well-known academic and anti-corruption expert who has specialized in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas industry. Dr. Ibadoghlu was violently arrested on July 23, 2023, and the authorities pressed bogus charges against him involving counterfeit money and distributing extremist religious materials. During his nine-month detention, his chronic health conditions deteriorated sharply as a result of the authorities’ refusal to provide him with adequate medical treatment. Dr. Ibadoghlu is currently under house arrest. If convicted, he could face up to 17 years in prison.

Another emblematic case is that of Anar Mammadli, a prominent human rights defender and a founding member of the recently formed Climate of Justice Initiative, a civil society undertaking that seeks to use COP29 to promote civic space and climate justice in Azerbaijan. Mammadli was arrested on April 29, 2024, amid Azerbaijan’s escalating crackdown on independent voices, and charged with spurious currency smuggling.

At least 18 journalists and other individuals affiliated with Abzas Media, Toplum TV, and Kanal 13, the last remaining independent outlets in Azerbaijan, are either behind bars or otherwise implicated in baseless criminal prosecutions. Just on August 21, authorities arrested Bahruz Samadov, a PhD candidate at Charles University in Prague and a regular contributor to numerous international and regional publications and media, while he was visiting Baku to spend time with his grandmother. Samadov is in pre-trial detention facing treason charges, widely believed to be related to his outspoken peace activism. On July 22, the authorities arrested another researcher, Igbal Abilov, also on spurious treason charges. He, too, remains in pretrial custody.

In his opening address to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2024, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk highlighted Azerbaijan for specific concern, “urg[ing] the authorities in Azerbaijan to review, in line with international human rights law, all cases of journalists, activists, and other individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” and to immediately release them.

The government of Azerbaijan has to date refused to heed this and numerous, similar calls by its international partners.

Robust and rights-respecting climate action requires the full and meaningful participation of civil society in climate negotiations, including the key outcome documents of COP29. The dire human rights situation in Azerbaijan makes it incumbent on the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat and member states to take concrete steps to ensure safe space for diverse civil society participation at COP29. They should ensure that the government of Azerbaijan does not inhibit individuals and groups critical of the government from participating in the conference and that the host government respects the rights of all participants to speak freely and to peacefully assemble inside and outside the conference venue.

This year’s climate conference is the third in a row to take place in an authoritarian country—following Egypt and United Arab Emirates as hosts of, respectively, COP27 and COP28. As highlighted by the U.N. and other independent experts, respect for freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and allowing critical voices and the free flow of information, are integral to effectively and meaningfully tackling the climate crisis, and should be a core requirement for hosting events such as COP.

The UNFCCC should set human rights criteria for future COP hosts, including an obligation to realize the rights to freedom of speech and assembly that are preconditions to ensure an ambitious COP outcome. In addition, for this and future climate COPs, the UNFCCC should make host country agreements—which set out arrangements between COP summit organizers and host country authorities—public and accessible in a timely manner, and ensure that they comply with international human rights law.

The UNFCCC and member states should also ensure that interests of the fossil fuel industry do not undermine the credibility and outcome of climate negotiation at COP29 and future COPs.

We urge UNFCCC and member states to press the Azerbaijani government to respect its human rights obligations, including by immediately and unconditionally releasing arbitrarily detained activists and human rights defenders. They should also call on Azerbaijani authorities to implement concrete, measurable, structural reforms, such as amending its laws regulating nongovernmental organizations and media, to ensure that positive changes endure beyond COP29, and put into place mechanisms for follow-up monitoring, to verify that progress is upheld and to enable effective and timely intervention in the event of any backsliding, especially in any cases of retaliation or backlash traceable to engagement in or around the climate talks.

We urge the government of Azerbaijan to uphold its commitments as a member of numerous multilateral organizations and initiatives that have human rights elements, and its obligations as a party to key international human rights treaties, by taking the following steps:

• Immediately and unconditionally release all human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society activists wrongfully held on politically motivated grounds, and drop the bogus charges against them;

• Cease the use of criminal prosecution as a tool to suppress government critics and members of civil society; and

• Lift undue restrictions on civil society by amending laws related to registration and funding of nongovernmental groups and media, bringing them into compliance with international standards and recommendations issued by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.

UNFCCC member states and Secretariat, and other key international actors and organizations, such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank Group, as well as companies with business interests in Azerbaijan, should all stand in firm solidarity with Azerbaijan’s independent civil society.

Many civic actors, at great personal risk, continue to fight for human rights and climate justice in the country and the region. Azerbaijan’s international partners should put their weight behind the calls for specific steps made here, hold Azerbaijan accountable, and help ensure that the government takes them as a matter of urgent priority.

If you or your organization are interested in joining the statement, please complete this form.

Organizations:

Anar Mammadli Campaign to end repression in Azerbaijan

CEE Bankwatch Network

Center for American Progress

Climate Rights International

Committee to Protect Journalists

Crude Accountability

Endangered Scholars Worldwide

European Exchange European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE)

FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders

Freedom Now

Heinrich Böll Stiftung

Human Rights Foundation

Human Rights House Foundation

Human Rights Watch

International Partnership for Human Rights

Natural Resource Governance Institute

New University in Exile Consortium

Norwegian Helsinki Committee

Open Contracting Partnership

PEN America

PEN International

People in Need

Publish What You Pay

ReCommon

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders

Individuals:

Corinna Gilfillan

Simon Taylor, Co-Founder & Director, Hawkmoth

President Biden has already accomplished an incredible amount to help create a federal judiciary that works for everyone. From the confirmation of more than 200 qualified and diverse lifetime judges (and counting) to advancing a long-overdue conversation about modernizing and reforming our Supreme Court so that we can one day trust that it provides equal justice for all, we are making important progress. At a time when the extremist majority on our nation’s highest court has rolled back the progress we have made—taking away the fundamental right to abortion, removing a vital tool for eliminating unfair barriers to educational opportunity, weakening voting rights for communities of color, and more—the task of improving a damaged judiciary is daunting.

It’s no surprise that the public’s trust in the judiciary is declining, as reports persist about some Supreme Court justices’ deeply concerning unethical behavior. Our justices should be serving all of us, but some of them are showing that they are only concerned about the interests of the wealthy and powerful. As we live in this reality, we must also do the work to foster a federal judiciary that respects, recognizes, and advances our civil and human rights.

Our justices should be serving all of us, but some of them are showing that they are only concerned about the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

It is incumbent on every generation to protect the progress made and work toward a more inclusive and thriving democracy and society in which everyone is treated with respect and dignity. Unfortunately, in the past few years alone, a manufactured and coordinated campaign has taken us back—but we are not backing down. We are fighting for a better future where our rights, our lives, and our future are respected. For this to happen, our Supreme Court justices must be held to the highest ethical standards, and Congress must explore all options to improve how the Court functions and thus examine its structure, including limiting the amount of time justices can actively serve. In the next few months, there’s also important work that must be done that will make a real difference in our lives. Federal judges decide important cases from who can access health care to whose votes are counted. And for our democracy to endure, we need highly qualified, fair-minded individuals in courtrooms across our nation who will advance equal justice for all.

President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin have helped to make a significant impact, stewarding more than 200 confirmations of lifetime judges and justices to our federal courts. This includes ushering in the most diverse slate—both demographically and professionally—of federal judges in history. Nearly two-thirds of these confirmed judges are women, nearly two-thirds are people of color, and more than 40 percent have significant experience protecting people’s civil and human rights. Of course, President Biden appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman and first former public defender to serve on our nation’s highest court, and her service to date has been remarkable. A few weeks ago, President Biden also announced his support for long-needed changes to the Supreme Court, including a binding code of conduct for Supreme Court justices.

Transforming our federal judiciary so it not only looks like America but also recognizes and respects the rule of law—and how laws impact people's lives—has been a cornerstone of President Biden’s administration. Together we have changed the default of who is considered fair and qualified for the federal bench because we know that a judiciary staffed with brilliant people committed to equal justice—people whose experiences have been historically excluded—yields better decisions and is more reflective and representative of America. We celebrate this remarkable progress. But we cannot relent.

Time is of the essence. We need laser-like focus to fill every vacancy possible by the end of the year.

The jurists who President Biden has appointed will be serving for decades to come—far outlasting his impressive four years in office. To honor his legacy and to ensure justice is served in more corners of our country, progress must accelerate. Over the next few months, senators must urgently prioritize the confirmation of diverse judges who possess a deep commitment to our civil and human rights.

Now that the Senate has returned, we urge senators to seize every opportunity to make an immediate and lasting difference. The Democratic-led Senate, under the leadership of Majority Leader Schumer, has already confirmed several nominees this week and has now confirmed 209 lifetime nominees during the Biden administration. Dozens more are awaiting action in committee or on the Senate floor. This includes numerous nominees with critical civil and human rights experience, including experience defending religious freedom and protecting the rights of working people and those involved in the criminal-legal system. Time is of the essence. We need laser-like focus to fill every vacancy possible by the end of the year.

For some comparison, President Trump during his one term in office was able to confirm 234 nominees to lifetime judgeships with the avid assistance of then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In the final months of his one term, the Republican-led Senate confirmed 30 judicial nominees, including a Supreme Court justice. We can exceed the previous administration both in numbers and quality—and we must. While we have a long way to go until we have equal justice, it’s imperative that Schumer accelerate this progress and continue to use every moment over the next few weeks and months to fill as many judicial seats as possible. With focus and determination, the Senate can leave President Biden the legacy of appointing a stunning number—more than the last administration—of superbly qualified judicial nominees.

Focusing on confirming judges will make a tremendous difference in our lives and for our fundamental rights and freedoms. We need to take all necessary steps to strengthen our judiciary so that our multiracial democracy can thrive and equal justice prevails.

President Biden’s legacy deserves no less. And our future depends on it.

Maybe you’ve heard some of the buzz about “Project 2025.” What is it — and what would it mean for you and your family?

Project 2025 is a proposed “transition plan for a new Republican administration” put together by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. It’s an in-depth list of what conservative groups will push for in the event of a Trump victory in the fall.

And it poses serious dangers to families and the middle class. It would drastically defund social programs that millions rely on, including Medicaid, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It would defund public schools, roll back housing assistance, and cut regulations that protect consumers and the environment.

It’s a dense document, but here are six key takeaways on this pending catastrophe for working people.

1. Millions of Americans will lose health care.

Project 2025 not only slashes Medicaid but would entirely eliminate the Affordable Care Act, the popular healthcare program that helps Americans afford care and guarantees coverage to customers with pre-existing medical conditions. This would cause millions to lose their coverage.

Though we have yet to fully realize the dream of equality and justice for all, we can only achieve it by expanding the hard-won, effective social progress we’ve achieved so far.

The plan also rolls back the Inflation Reduction Act provision allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. Currently, the law caps life-saving insulin at $35 per month and caps out-of-pocket Medicare costs at $2,000 annually. Care for seniors will get a lot more expensive if those protections are taken away.

2. Children will be sicker, poorer, and hungrier.

Children, especially those in low-income households, would be harmed the most. Their reduced access to health care could lead to higher rates of illnesses, developmental delays, long-term inequities in opportunities, and even preventable deaths.

Proposed cuts to food assistance programs, such as free school meals and SNAP, would increase food insecurity for millions of Americans — especially children. And children who experience hunger and malnutrition are at a greater risk of long-term cognitive and physical developmental challenges, which can poorly affect their life outcomes.

3. Public schools will suffer.

Project 2025 calls to eliminate the Department of Education, which funds programs for students with disabilities and meals for hungry kids, helps parents get before care and after care, enforces civil rights protections, and helps people pursue postsecondary education.

This extremist agenda would also eliminate Head Start. The subsidized preschool program, which has served over 40 million kids, promotes early childhood development and provides childcare to parents who are working or studying to escape poverty.

Instead, public funding would be funneled into wasteful private school vouchers and charter schools.

4. Millions of families will be criminalized.

Mixed-status families, which include both citizens and undocumented immigrants, face the unthinkable reality of a loved one being deported under Project 2025. And families that include LGBTQ+ members face the dystopian reality of discrimination and criminalization.

5. Food, water, and air will be poisoned.

Project 2025 also drastically reduces or eliminates regulations that protect our communities, workplaces, and environment. This is especially dangerous for people in low-income areas and communities of color, which are more often located near industrial areas and exposed to pollution and environmental hazards.

6. Only the wealthy win.

Project 2025’s other main goal is yet more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which would starve public investments and codify inequality by only helping those who need it the least.

This dangerous, sweeping takeover of a society that’s made huge strides toward equality over many decades threatens to take us back to a “Gilded Age,” where only the very wealthiest white families and corporations benefit from government policy.

Though we have yet to fully realize the dream of equality and justice for all, we can only achieve it by expanding the hard-won, effective social progress we’ve achieved so far. Project 2025 is a blueprint to end that American Dream.

As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) this September 13, the horrific death of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei, who was set on fire by her ex-boyfriend just last week, reminds us that the fight against domestic violence is far from over. While domestic violence is sometimes portrayed as a scourge relegated to developing countries, it remains a significant and deeply troubling issue right here in the U.S., too, affecting individuals and families across all communities, regardless of socioeconomic status. Each day, three women die in the United States because of domestic violence; a woman is beaten by an intimate partner every 9 minutes; and 1 in 4 women will experience severe intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Yet headlines still manage to get their stories wrong and movies like the recent blockbuster It Ends with Us do a disservice to correctly capturing the experience of victims. The Violence Against Women Act, when it was passed in 1994, was a landmark step in addressing this issue. But the challenges that survivors face have changed in the last thirty years - while the paltry protections offered them have largely remained stagnant. We have a long way to go in supporting women, particularly in terms of enforcement and support for survivors.

On any given day in the United States, 13,335 requests for victim services go unmet due to a lack of funding. Of those unmet requests, 54% are for safe housing. Intimate partner violence has worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with calls to domestic violence hotlines spiking. Affordable and safe housing is one of the biggest barriers that survivors face when leaving an abuser; in fact, domestic violence is one of the main causes of homelessness for women and children - 63% of homeless women have been victims of domestic violence. In 2023, the federal government gave out $43.1 million in grants for transitional housing for domestic violence victims – but this is pennies compared with other federal grants, such as the $7.5 billion currently allotted for electric car charging stations. Having an immediate place to live is a matter of life and death for many victims. More funding, particularly for shelters and permanent affordable housing for victims and their children, is absolutely essential in 2024.

In addition to increasing funding for services, we must enforce laws that are already on the books. When a gun is present in a home where there is a domestic violence situation, a woman is five times more likely to be killed. Nearly half of the 4,484 women killed in 47 major U.S. cities from 2008-2018 died at the hands of an intimate partner. Many victims seek protection for themselves through civil restraining orders, but their abusers still have access to firearms because of poor enforcement, loopholes in licensing laws, such as the boyfriend loophole, and the proliferation of ghost guns (firearms assembled from kits without the usual serial numbers and background checks on purchasers). In my twenty years as an attorney representing victims of domestic violence, I cannot recall a single case where a defendant was forced by the courts or law enforcement to give up his guns. Shockingly, we operate on the “honor system,” which relies on abusers to voluntarily relinquish their firearms.

The result is that, this summer in Chicago, a 31 year-old mother of three was shot in the chest and murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Back in 2022, she had obtained a restraining order and requested seizure of his firearms, which the judge outright ignored. In July 2020, a California man shot and killed his wife in front of their children. The victim had an active restraining order at the time, and had informed the court that her husband had a gun and provided details of him threatening her with it in an application for a restraining order. Yet the judge accepted the man’s answer of “no” when asked whether he had any firearms. In 2017, a woman in St. Louis was shot by an ex-boyfriend four times through her apartment window. Police found an active restraining order lying on top of a microwave just a few feet from her body.

These homicide victims did everything they could under the law to protect themselves, but our system failed them. The landmark gun case decided by the Supreme Court in June, United States v. Rahimi, should have shined a spotlight on this gap – the defendant Rahimi was found in possession of firearms months after a civil restraining order was issued against him (arising from domestic abuse), which specifically banned him from having them. The Supreme Court validated the constitutionality of stripping him of his Second Amendment rights in this context. But we are not actually stripping abusers of their guns. There is a simple fix: when law enforcement serves a defendant with a protective order, and the victim has affirmed under oath that he has access to guns, these guns should be confiscated on the spot by the police.

Life is devastatingly complicated for victims with children. Many women make rational decisions to remain in abusive situations because the alternative may be worse for themselves and their children. Abusers use the court system to control their victims, by filing for custody for example, if their victim dares to leave. Under the current judicial climate, the “default” order is shared legal and physical custody, even in domestic violence situations. I see this time and again as an attorney – victim parents are not believed and are forced to comply with custody orders that perpetuate the abusive power dynamic. Over a decade ago, a study by the Department of Justice found that abusers do, in fact, use decision-making in shared parenting to regain control (by not agreeing to anything the victim wants, for example) and that they use visitation exchanges to harass and assault victims. But still we issue orders that have little regard for this evidence. Taken to the extreme, this results in outrageous situations like the one recently faced by a Colorado woman: Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins was jailed last week for refusing to comply with a custody order that provided for visitation to her ex-husband who had been criminally charged for sexually assaulting their daughters.

The myth that contact with an abusive parent is always beneficial for a child must be dispelled. Cases with two safe parents are not the same as cases with an alleged abuser. Tragically, a 2023 study found that in the last 15 years, over 900 children involved in contested custody cases (ones litigated in court) had been murdered, mostly by abusive fathers. In many of these cases, judges disbelieved or minimized reports of abuse and gave the killers the access they needed to their children.

Finally, providing family court judges with generalized “training” in domestic violence, as we do now, is not effective. Professionals without more specialized training tend to believe that women make false reports and that abusive parents pose little safety to their children. Moving forward, judges should be required to undergo more rigorous and comprehensive training in the nuances of domestic violence and the risks to victims and their children of post separation custody orders.

Just last week, Rebecca Cheptegei’s children watched their mother burn right before their eyes. This type of horror happens in the United States, too. "I was bleeding on the baby"—this is what the Chicago mother told the judge when pleading her case for an emergency restraining order prior to her murder in July. These monstrous deaths—everywhere around the world—are a vile reminder that domestic violence does not discriminate by geography, profession, or status. We must commit to combating this epidemic, strengthening laws like VAWA, and ensuring that they are backed by sufficient resources and legal mechanisms which actually work to protect victims.

The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.

And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.

The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation

The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)

At present, the treaty is on life support. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.

Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.

Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.

Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.

The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.

In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)

Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.

The Three-Way Arms Race

Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.

Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.

Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.

Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.

As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.

The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.

“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.

The Need for Citizen Advocacy

For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.

And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.

As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: “Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”

A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.

Kamala Harris is portraying herself as a blank slate by refusing to articulate issues other than those that appear to be popular after they were developed by Donald Trump. But her desire to be popular only goes so far.

The post Your Thoughts Are Her Heartfelt Policy Positions first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

If nothing else, former U.S. President Donald Trump is forcing mainstream America out of its jail cell of clichés and political correctness—even though his apparent “vision” for America is primarily a dark comedy of lies.

Yeah, I watched the debate. Was the Trump character played by Rodney Dangerfield? Maybe Don Rickles? He could have been. The problem, however, is that there’s nothing funny about racism, which seemed to be the primary core of Trump’s blather.

Did Vice President Kamala Harris “win” the debate? Uh... this wasn’t a ping-pong game, much as “Who won?” seems to be the media focal point. My question is: Did anybody win? Did the whole country lose?

In her “victory,” what deeper truth did Harris advance?

One thing I must concede is that, in listening for 90 minutes to Trump’s arrogant irreverence toward the country’s centrist rituals and propriety, I must acknowledge at least this much: Our would-be dictator-in-chief is trying to push the country beyond the military-industrial status quo of the moment. His irreverence is so blatant he is driving neocon Republicans crazy, as exemplified by former veep Dick Cheney’s recent announcement that he plans to vote for Harris, declaring that Trump can “never be trusted with power again.”

Maybe, as the media notes, this was a big boost for Harris, but I find myself unable to separate Cheney from his legacy of hideous militarism: the Iraq war in particular, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, the “weapons of mass destruction” lies, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners. Suddenly, in the media, those are now simply historical abstractions, hardly worth mentioning in detail. The American past is sealed shut and mythologized as the good old days.

What matters is a unified America, right? As Time Magazine reported: “Harris was asked about the Cheneys’ endorsement while on the campaign trail, visiting a spice shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She said she was ‘honored’ to have their endorsement, and that it represented the opportunity to ‘turn the page’ on partisan divisiveness.’”

She added that Americans are “exhausted about the division”—seeming to imply that the country was once solid and unified, fully in agreement on the nature of American values and such matters as who are enemies are. This seems to be one of the media talking points of the moment, which is ironic almost beyond belief. A nation born in a state of legalized slavery has never been a unified nation. What unity that does currently exist isn’t the result of Americans simply deciding to get along—or all agreeing on a specific, external enemy—but rather the result of decades and decades and decades of intense struggle, a la the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the workers’ movements, etc., etc., and the ongoing creation of the country as it exists today.

Fascinatingly, in the wake of Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!”

I note this not because I believe anything whatsoever that Trump says, but only to writhe in the irony that the main guy talking about peace (i.e., “peace”) on the national stage is a darkly comedic liar and narcissist whose primary talking point is racism.

During the debate, most of what Trump blathered was screw-loose nonsense, mixed, of course, with his special brand of racism, that is to say: the invasion of illegal aliens. This was the issue Trump rambled on about regardless of what he was asked to address, be it the economy, abortion, the January 6 riot, or whatever. To wit:

“Millions of people are pouring into the country—from prisons, jails, mental institutions, insane asylums. These are people she and Biden let into our country.”

“She’s a Marxist!... Twenty-one million people are pouring in. Many of these people are criminals.”

In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants are “eating dogs and cats—the pets of people that live there.”

Regarding Venezuela and other countries: “They’ve taken their criminals off the streets and given them to her (Harris). Crime is down all over the world—except here.”

Enough, enough! Trump’s audacious charisma apparently has given him some sort of media immunity. His lies—racist and otherwise—are simply too numerous to be questioned. But as I listen to him, screaming to myself, I also sense the nature of his appeal. He’s such a brat—so shameless in his attack on conventional wisdom, so blatant in his contempt for mainstream norms and certainties—that he has defied Cheney and the neocons and created his MAGA base: followers who have had it up to here with the rules of centrist dominance and political correctness.

The media consensus seems to be that Harris won the ping-pong game—I mean, the debate—because she spoke with clarity, factual accuracy, and sufficient contempt to continually put Trump in his place.

And yes, I get this, she won the ping-pong game. But in her “victory,” what deeper truth did Harris advance? What not-yet-existing country did she envision and present to the American people... and the world? I heard the clichés, especially the military clichés, but I didn’t see the vision.

When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.

Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.

Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base—and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.

Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.

It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing—and infrastructure built to support larger populations—can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.

It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.

So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”

One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.

Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.

“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”

In fact, it was earlier waves of migration—including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad—that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.

But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.

“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”

So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls—that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.

“According to interviews with a dozen local, county, and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride”—who are about as lovely as they sound.

“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.

Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else—like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Spingfield in the first place—all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.

Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.