U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was working to “gather the facts” about U.S. citizen Aysenur Eygi’s killing by Israel military forces.

They Know

Blinken doesn’t need time to “gather the facts.”

The facts are already known to the Israeli military, the U.S. military, and the U.S. government.

They know exactly who assassinated International Solidarity Movement (ISM) member and U.S. citizen Aysenur Eygi on September 6, 2024.

They know which unit was in Beita village for the peaceful prayer demonstration against the illegal Israeli settlement of Evyatar. They know the names of the snipers who fired the shots.

They also know the names of the Israeli soldiers who killed the 17 Palestinians who have been assassinated in Beita in the past four years since 2020.

The Israeli military has the records of what unit was assigned to Beita every day that a Palestinian was murdered.

They have the names of every person in the unit and they know which persons fired tear gas and which persons fired live ammunition.

After each time live ammunition was fired they interviewed everyone who fired ammunition.

Additionally, and not surprisingly, the soldier who saw his bullet knock someone down would take credit for it each time.

So the Israeli military knows perfectly well who killed Aysenur and they also know who killed the 17 Palestinians who have been murdered by Israeli military in Beita since 2020:

– Mohammed Hamayyel, age 15 (March 11, 2020)
– Islam Dwikat, 22 (April 9, 2020)
– Karam Amin Dwikat, 17 (October 15, 2023)
– Issa Sliman Barham, 40 (May 14, 2021)
– Tareq Ommar Snobar, 27 (May 16, 2021)
– Zakaria Maher Hamayyel, 25 (May 28, 2021)
– Mohammed Said Hamayyel, 15 (June 11, 2021)
– Ahmad Zahi Bani Shamsa, 15 (June 16, 2021)
– Shadi Ommar Sharafa, 41 (July 27, 2021)
– Imad Ali Dwikat, 38 (August 6, 2021)
– Mohammed Ali Khbeissa, 27 (September 24, 2021)
– Jamil Jamal Abu Ayyash, 32 (December 1, 2021)
– Fawaz Ahmad Hamayyel, 47 (April 13, 2022)
– Immad Jareh Bani Shamsa, 16 (October 9, 2023)
– Mohammed Ibrahim Adili, 13 (November 23, 2023)
– Maath Ashraf Bani Shamsa, 17 (February 9, 2024)
– Ameed Ghaleb Said al-Jaroub, 34 (March 22, 2024, died of a bullet wound injury to the head sustained on August 21, 2023)

As someone who spent 29 years in the U.S. Army, I know the Israeli military knows the names of all of its snipers, just as the U.S. military knows the names of those who have been trained as U.S. snipers and who killed Afghans and Iraqis in the past decades.

Snipers: Assaults, Domestic Violence, and Suicides

However, if one had access to the data base of snipers, as well as drone operators, and the names of the Israeli and U.S. military who have been arrested for assaults, domestic violence and those who have committed suicide, I feel quite certain there would be a high correlation.

But the military—neither Israeli nor U.S.—will not do such a survey as the results would be extremely bad for recruitment.

For those in Israeli society who believe that the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and now in the West Bank must continue, get ready for your returning military.

Reaping What You Sow

As the saying goes, “You reap what you sow” and the Israeli government is already reaping a domestic backlash over the fate of the hostages and international backlash from the horrific genocide with more and more countries finally stopping sending weapons to Israel.

A bigger backlash is awaiting Israel with its assassin and killers coming home.

One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.

The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.

Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.

His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”

- YouTube youtu.be

So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.

Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.

Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.

Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.

Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.

Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.

“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.

Two decades after the summit that defrosted the Cold War and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.

“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”

Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.

If Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for U.S. president, were to take a decisive stance demanding that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded aid to Palestinians, she would expand her vote lead over her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

This is one of the key findings of a recent poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute working with pollster John Zogby. Between the Republican and Democratic conventions, AAI surveyed 2,505 U.S. voters to assess how the war in Gaza and U.S. policy toward Israel’s conduct of the war would impact their votes in November.

What the poll found was that 15% of all voters say that the crisis in Gaza would be “very important” in determining their vote (another 33% saying it’s “somewhat important”). But on this issue, like many others in today’s America, there is a deep partisan divide—with Republicans more supportive of Israel and Democrats favoring Palestinians.

When asked how it would affect their vote if Harris were to demand that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded human aid into Gaza, voters overwhelmingly support such a move, while only a scant number oppose it.

Looking more closely at the data, we find that the partisan divide actually results from deep differences in the views of the demographic groups forming each party’s base—with younger and non-white voters more sympathetic toward Palestinians and critical of Israel, and older, white, and “born-again” Christians much more favorable toward Israel.

For example, most voters in all groups, except Republicans and “born-again” voters, disapprove of the way Israel is conducting the war, feel Israel has used too much force in Gaza, want an immediate ceasefire, and oppose unrestricted financial and military support for Israel if it continues to operate in a manner that puts civilian lives at risk.

A plurality of all voters (43%) disapprove of how Israel is conducting the war, with only one-third approving. Those disapproving include 54% of Democrats and 52% of young voters.

In addition, 36% of all likely voters feel that Israel has used too much force, including 46% of 18–34-year-olds.

One area where there is near unanimity is with regard to the importance of an “immediate ceasefire.” Three-quarters of all voters say this is important to them—one-half say “very important” and another one-quarter say “somewhat important.” Only 11% say it’s “not important.” This super-majority includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents and majorities of every demographic sub-group. The most substantial majorities come, of course, from young and non-white voters. Only very small percentages in all groups say an immediate ceasefire is not important.

Another area where there is strong support from most sub-sets of voters is in response to a question asking whether Israel should continue to receive unrestricted U.S. aid or whether that aid should be conditioned on Israel’s use of that aid in a way that harms civilians. Only 28% feel Israel should always receive unrestricted aid, while 51% say there should be no unrestricted aid if Israel endangers civilians. On this question, GOP voters are evenly split at 40%, while by a margin of 59% to 20% Democrats oppose unrestricted aid to Israel. Independents oppose it 56% to 26%.

Overall, the Biden administration receives low marks for its handling of the war—31% positive and 50% negative—a negative view shared by voters in all parties and demographic groups. The poll reveals that this dissatisfaction provides an opportunity for Vice President Harris. When asked how it would affect their vote if Harris were to demand that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded human aid into Gaza, voters overwhelmingly support such a move, while only a scant number oppose it. A deeper look into the numbers shows significant gain and very little risk for Harris by taking this stand, including very positive outcomes and few negatives among most key groups, including a plurality of Jewish voters. It would also win her the support of a plurality of those traditionally Democratic voters who are currently supporting third-party candidates or who remain undecided. Overall, if Harris were to take this stand, her vote tally would increase from 44% to 50%.

One area where Harris can grow support is by building on her already stated compassion for Palestinian suffering, her call for an immediate ceasefire, and her implied concern for how Israel has acted in this war by making clear that there will be consequences if the war continues...

The same positive results hold true if Harris were to support a suspension of arms shipments and withhold diplomatic support for Israel until there was a ceasefire and withdrawal of forces from Gaza. Such a stand would increase her support from 44% to 49%.

The poll also revealed that Democrats, concerned with President Biden’s age and capacity, were overwhelmingly supportive of his decision to step down as a candidate. This was especially true among Democratic voters. The President’s policy toward Gaza was also a factor, especially among young and non-White voters.

At the start of August, VP Harris held a slim lead against former President Trump in both a head-to-head and multi-candidate contest. This poll found the same to be true.

Both Harris and Trump have consolidated support among voters from their respective parties. Harris’ favorable/unfavorable ratings are better than Trump’s, with her strongest support coming from young and non-White voters. Trump’s support is strongest among White and born-again voters. Given the deep divisions in the American electorate, the presidential contest will most likely remain close.

One area where Harris can grow support is by building on her already stated compassion for Palestinian suffering, her call for an immediate ceasefire, and her implied concern for how Israel has acted in this war by making clear that there will be consequences if the war continues, a step President Biden has been loath to take.

The number one issue in the election this year, polls tell us, is “the economy.” But what does that mean?

That depends on who you are and where you sit in the vast structure of inequality that engulfs us. If you’re sitting pretty, “the economy” means an expanding gross national product, the growth of your investments, higher stock prices, and lower personal and corporate income taxes. “The economy” for the well-to-do is all about increasing income and wealth with no interference from government meddlers.

For the rest of us, those sitting lower down, “the economy” is deeply connected to finding and holding onto a job that provides a decent income and benefits. Without a stable job it doesn’t much matter if housing or food is expensive, because if you don’t have work you can’t afford much of anything. You’re in trouble, big trouble. Proposals for systemic economic growth seem far removed from your day-to-day struggles.

A low unemployment rate, to be sure, is critically important to working people. Tight labor markets help drive up wages and create job more openings, but that’s not the same as having a stable job. Unemployment can be low and you still can be bounced from job to job, continually undermining your standard of living.

How do these corporations get the money for nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in stock buybacks each year? They lay off workers, freeing up cash by reducing payroll expenses. The more the better.

The research from my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, shows that more than 30 million workers have lost their jobs due to mass layoffs since 1996. The usual explanation for these layoffs puts the blame on new technologies and the inevitable decline of manufacturing jobs because of stiff global competition from workers in other countries who earn much less.

But that’s not the whole story. If it was, then why are high-tech workers also seeing their jobs disappear? (Spoiler alert, it’s not AI.) In 2023, approximately 264,220 jobs were lost in tech companies, the crown jewels of our post-industrial economy. So far this year, another 135,811 have evaporated.

The Challenger Report, which tracks overall corporate layoffs, finds that 75,891 jobs were cut in August 2024. It also shows that on average this year, 891 jobs per month were cut due to AI. (For a fuller description on why new technologies like AI are not the primary job killers, please see Chapter 11 in Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

Why is there so much job instability? For the most prosperous corporations, it’s not due to a lack of profits, technology, or foreign competition. Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft laid off more than 40,000 workers in 2022-23 despite booking hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.

These high-tech behemoths kill jobs because of what “the economy” means to their CEOs and to their major Wall Street investors. Their economy values higher stock prices, which translates into enormous incomes for investors and the company executives who are mostly paid through stock incentives.

How do they raise the stock price? Better products? Sure, that works but it takes too much time. The best and surest way to quickly raise the stock price is through a stock buyback, which before SEC deregulation in 1982 was an illegal form of financial manipulation. In a stock buyback, a company uses its own cash or borrowed money to repurchase its own shares in the stock market. These stocks are retired, reducing the number available and increasing the company’s earnings per share. The buyback doesn’t improve the company’s performance, it simply raises the price of the shares and shovels money to the wealthiest investors and company officials. This is plain and simple stock manipulation, something that Econ 101 tells us is a no-no in free-market capitalism where prices are supposed to be set by market supply and demand, not by one company’s self-dealing.

How do these corporations get the money for nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in stock buybacks each year? They lay off workers, freeing up cash by reducing payroll expenses. The more the better. Which is how the very same economy can look so very different to those siphoning off corporate wealth and those losing their jobs.

How are the two presidential candidates addressing this problem?

Trump wants to make it worse. He’s in love with Elon Musk, who he called in a recent interview “the greatest cutter.” He praises the way Musk laid off half of the workers at Twitter to help cover the costs of his purchase of the company. Trump now says he wants Musk to head a government efficiency commission, so he can cut, cut, cut government employees. And, if you think Trump will halt or even limit stock buybacks, please share your meds!

What about Harris? The Democratic Party platform in 2024 calls for an increase in the stock buyback excise tax from 1 to 4 percent. That’s better than nothing, but that’s nowhere near high enough to discourage stock buybacks and the job slashing that goes with them.

Voluntary buyouts are common for higher-level white-collar employees, why not make them the rule of the land for companies doing business with the government?

But buried in the 2020 Democratic Party platform is a little discussed line that could hold the key to reducing wanton job destruction. It reads, “Taxpayer money should not be used to pay out dividends, fund stock buybacks, or give raises to executives.” Unfortunately, this refers only to pandemic assistance funds to corporations, but it offers a way forward.

Harris could expand on that line to say,

“In my administration, no taxpayer money will go to corporations who lay off taxpayers and conduct stock buybacks. That means the $700 billion of taxpayer money per year in federal grants and contracts will not go to any corporation that lays off taxpayers or conducts stock buybacks.”

Corporations receiving tax-payer money would be free to restructure if they needed to, but would only be permitted to conduct voluntary layoffs, which means they would have to dip into their massive stock buyback funds to create wage and benefit severance packages sufficient to encourage workers to move on. Voluntary buyouts are common for higher-level white-collar employees, why not make them the rule of the land for companies doing business with the government?

In 1992, during Bill Clinton’s first campaign for president, James Carville famously said of the race’s most important issue, “it’s the economy, stupid.” Today, “the economy” means different things for the wealthy than it does for the rest of us. Maybe Carville’s mantra needs revision: “It’s job loss, stupid!”

Losing your job is one of the most stressful life events, but the troubles of those laid off are often papered over with promises of bright new jobs in the future that go to someone else. The candidate who turns this stress into action and calls for an end to the needless slaughter of jobs via stock buybacks could, in my humble opinion, run away with this election.

As U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump get ready to debate for the first time this week, what can we expect from their campaigns in terms of taxes?

Harris endorses multiple proposals to generate revenue from the richest people and the biggest corporations and deliver a middle-class tax cut—with the former paying for the latter. Trump would cut some middle-class taxes but promotes a new tariff tax on imports that would hike the price of nearly everything Americans purchase and, doubling down on past practice, he’d slash taxes for millionaires and corporations. He hasn’t identified a single business or billionaire that should pay more.

When Trump and congressional Republicans passed the 2017 tax law, they made massive tax cuts for corporations permanent but set the individual cuts, which were heavily skewed to the extremely wealthy, to expire at the end of 2025. This means taxes are on next year’s policy agenda in a way that rarely comes along. The approaches articulated by the campaigns would pull the nation in profoundly different directions.

Trump Proposals

Trump says he would again slash corporate tax rates, keep all corporate cuts from the 2017 tax law, extend 2017’s expiring cuts for everyone including the uber-wealthy, and impose large tariffs that fall on everyone who spends money on anything.

Trump’s tariff tax proposals—60% tariff taxes on imports from China and 20% on all other imports—would cost the typical American household over $2,600 a year according to economist Kim Clausing. Earlier analysis of a previously-discussed 10 percent worldwide tariff tax shows an increase in inflation resulting from the plan, which would also generate $2.8 trillion in revenue over the next decade, raised from consumers.

Much of that revenue would go to corporations. When lawmakers cut the corporate rate from 35% to 21% in 2017, corporate tax payments plummeted, and huge, profitable corporations continued to pay far below the statutory rate. We’d see this on steroids if Trump slashed the corporate rate to 15%. Such cuts increase income and racial inequality and send a massive windfall—40 cents of every dollar—to foreign investors.

The law that the Trump administration passed in 2017 delivered enormous tax cuts to those in the top 1%, a narrow sliver of well-off people with income over $800,000 a year. These individual cuts for the rich expire in 2025, but the Trump campaign wants to make them permanent, sending almost two-thirds of that money to the richest fifth of Americans. This would cost more than $280 billion in 2026 alone, slashing revenue that could otherwise provide tax cuts for middle-income Americans, reduce the national debt, or fund childcare, healthcare, or infrastructure.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance has mentioned more than doubling the Child Tax Credit but has provided few details and Trump has not signed on.

Harris Proposals

Harris backs most of the revenue raisers and middle class tax cuts laid out in President Joe Biden’s 2025 budget. The revenue components raise nearly $5 trillion over a decade, entirely from wealthy people and corporations, reducing inequality, both economic and racial, and generating funds for things the American people need.

Harris plans to boost revenue from corporations by raising the corporate rate, increasing the corporate minimum tax, increasing the stock buyback tax, and reining in corporate offshore tax avoidance. She’d better tax the wealthy by allowing expiration of the parts of the 2017 tax law that exclusively help those making more than $400,000. For those who make over $1 million a year, Harris would eliminate tax breaks on capital gains and dividends. For incomes exceeding $100 million a year, she’d tax currently exempt investment income that many billionaire CEOs receive. These provisions would do much to reform a tax code that most Americans say raises too little from corporations and the wealthy.

Harris would fully extend temporary tax cuts from the 2017 tax law for people earning less than $400,000 and try a new down-payment assistance program for some first-time homebuyers. She’d also expand the Child Tax Credit to $6,000 for newborns, $3,600 for children up to age five, and $3,000 for older children. This is one of the best and most well-proven ways to cut poverty, reduce inequality, and help middle-class families.

Tip Gimmick

Both campaigns support eliminating taxes on tips. This could encourage wealthy professionals to reclassify fees as tips and there are better ways to help workers—raising the minimum wage, eliminating the paltry $2.13 sub-minimum wage, and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. Harris would limit her exemption to workers earning less than $75,000—an improvement Trump leaves out—but this doesn’t redeem a fundamentally flawed proposal.

In Sum

Campaign proposals reveal two very different paths. The Harris campaign seems eager to tax the rich and corporations, cut taxes for middle-income taxpayers, reduce poverty, reduce inequality, and raise revenue for public spending. Trump vows to preserve and expand tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations and says little about how to pay for that beyond a tariff that raises much less than Harris’ plans and falls on consumers. His proposals would inevitably force cuts to important public programs or run up the national debt.

The entire tax code is up for debate in 2025. Our system asks far too little of wealthy people and corporations. Americans should listen closely to both campaigns and push for policies that raise more from those most able to pay, give tax cuts to those who most need them, and generate resources to invest in public priorities.

Abortion is currently the top issue for voters in the election. Maybe Kamala Harris can spin her support for Israel into a way to reinforce her pro-choice bona fides.

The post Kamala Is Even Pro-Abortion Overseas first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

What do two South Pacific countries, two North American countries, one country in the Middle East, and (until recently) one country in southern Africa have in common with Europe? The answer is rooted in centuries of imperialism and conquest in the ideologies that have sustained them — and in the four-letter acronym “WEOG.”

Five countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel (and for several years during apartheid, the South African regime) — are part of the UN diplomatic grouping known as “WEOG,” together with 20 European states.

WEOG stands for the “Western Europe and Other Group.” The “WE” for Western Europe is self-evident. But the “other” in the group is more coded, representing states founded by European settler colonialism.

WEOG is one of the five official “regional groupings” of the United Nations. But while the other four are all defined by regional boundaries (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean), WEOG is cross regional and represents something else: the white world.

The White World’s Bloc

This will instantly shock the casual reader, but for practitioners and academics in the world of international relations, it’s a familiar concept. The West has long centered its approach to international relations on race. Indeed, the study of international relations began in the West as “race relations.” And Foreign Affairs, the leading U.S. publication on international relations, was originally the Journal of Race Development.

That approach was never horizontal, but rather one in which whiteness was centered and supreme. While sometimes obscured by a more genteel façade, below the surface the same dynamics continue today.

The message is clear: the defense of settler colonialism (and its inherent atrocities) trumps all other values, all other interests, and all other rules. The wagons must be circled. The colonial project must be protected. Human rights and international law be damned.

Of course, WEOG avoids any such direct racial billing, instead describing itself as a group of “western democracies.” The problem they have, however, is that their membership includes some states that are not (geographically) western, and some that are not democracies. Israel, former member South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are all situated outside the West.

And as for democracies, original WEOG members Spain, Portugal, and Greece were governed during their membership by dictatorial regimes until the mid-1970s. South Africa and Israel were both admitted under apartheid regimes. And the United States had a formal system of racial segregation until the mid-1960s and was therefore hardly a “democracy” for a significant part of its population.

In other words, WEOG is not now and has never been a group of “western democracies.”

At other times, WEOG has been described as a principally anti-communist or anti-Soviet alliance. But there have been plenty of countries in the global South that opposed the Soviet Union and communism but were never admitted to WEOG. And while the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, WEOG has continued on the same course for over three decades since, proving that this is not principally a Cold War alliance either.

Institutional Inequity

Those tempted to view this as a matter of mere academic interest should first consider that WEOG wields disproportionate power in the UN. WEOG countries represent only about 11 percent of the global population. They are the second smallest UN group — with 29 members compared to the 54 members of the Africa Group, for example.

Nevertheless, three out of five permanent members of the Security Council are WEOG members, and the group enjoys an additional two elected seats on the Council beyond the five permanent members, for a total of seven out of 15 seats. Similar patterns of structural inequities privileging WEOG are reflected in the composition of other intergovernmental bodies as well.

They are also grossly over-represented in the UN’s senior management team. The post of head of political affairs is unofficially reserved for an American, as is the head of UNICEF and of the World Food Programme. The head of peacekeeping is reserved for the French, and humanitarian affairs for the British. And of the nine Secretaries-General in the organization’s history, four have been from WEOG countries.

The group also benefits from the formidable sticks and tempting carrots of the U.S. empire. Regardless of who occupies the rotating chair of the group, the dominant actor remains the United States, the group’s “first among equals.” Even though it sometimes claims to be an “observer,” the United States conveniently accepts full membership when electoral slates for UN bodies are decided.

This disproportionate influence is brought to bear across the UN agenda. The imperial, colonial, and white supremacist roots of WEOG run deep, and they directly impact the policy positions taken by the group (especially the “OGs”) in UN voting. Voting patterns bear this out especially in the defense of colonialism, apartheid, and political Zionism, and in opposition to Indigenous rights, the anti-racism agenda, Palestinian rights, and to the right to development.

This colonial logic is evident in WEOG’s opposition to guaranteeing people control over their own national development, to efforts to control mercenaries (often deployed to deny peoples’ self-determination), and to moves addressing the devastating impact of unilateral coercive measures (like sanctions) imposed by Western governments on countries of the global South.

Members of WEOG actively oppose anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives on trade, debt, finance, and intellectual property. And when the UN moved to recognize the human right to food in 2021, only the United States and Israel, both WEOG members, voted no. Virtually every effort by formerly colonized countries to break from the exploitative economic relations and destructive racial legacies imposed by their former colonial masters is resisted by WEOG states.

Colonial Values

A clear demonstration of the true nature of the sub-group can be found in its position on the UN’s official global program to combat racism, known as the Durban Declaration.

The global Durban Conference that drafted the declaration in 2001 was boycotted by Israel and the United States — and both the subsequent Durban II review conference and the Durban III meeting were boycotted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, and the United States, along with a few European states. The group’s opposition is regularly registered in voting, in diplomatic demarches, and importantly, in positions taken in annual budget negotiations.

Worse still, the United States, Israel, and a hodge-podge of pro-Israel lobby groups, often with the complicity of some European nations, have carried on a decades-long campaign of disinformation to discredit the Declaration, going so far as to call it antisemitic, which is especially ironic given that the Declaration specifically commits the UN to combatting antisemitism.

The Declaration’s real offense? It directly challenges institutionalized racism, including in these countries, and sets out a program of remedial measures. Needless to say, the settler-colonial pedigree of these countries, and their long histories of institutionalized racism, put them squarely in the bullseye of the Declaration, a position that they cannot and will not tolerate. In their view, human rights critique is for the countries of the global South — not for the wealthy, white world of WEOG.

The world saw the same positioning again when the UN General Assembly convened on September 13, 2007 to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, after 20 years of debate. The Declaration was adopted with the overwhelming majority of states voting in favor, a handful abstaining, four countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) voting against. Israel skipped the vote altogether.

Obviously, the shared history (and continued policies) of these five countries in persecuting, dispossessing, and exterminating the Indigenous peoples of the lands they colonized stands in direct contradiction of the provisions of the UN Declaration, and this realization was front and center when they joined forces to oppose it in 2007.

The settler-colonial agenda of the alliance is also evident in voting on Palestine. While most countries of the world recognize the State of Palestine, WEOG is once again the outlier.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several European states (and, of course, Israel) have still not recognized Palestine. Israel and the United States (which also uses its veto in the Security Council to block Palestine’s full UN membership) consistently vote against UN resolutions supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people, while Canada often votes no or abstains, and Australia and New Zealand frequently abstain. Apartheid South Africa, during its tenure, was one of Israel’s closest allies and routinely supported it in the UN, while post-apartheid South Africa would become one of Palestine’s closest allies.

Indeed, perhaps most revelatory of the strident commitment of these countries to the defense of settler-colonialism is their lock-step support of Israel, even as Israel perpetrates history’s first live-streamed genocide against the indigenous Palestinians. WEOG countries that had previously made human rights and international law key centerpieces of their international public positioning (however cynically) have turned on a dime to openly distort, devalue, and dismiss these rules in order to buttress Israeli impunity.

Some have even crossed the line into direct complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, exposing themselves both legally and politically. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, and several other European states have provided arms, financial investments, intelligence support, and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes, even while they are being committed.

Calls for Reform

The message is clear: the defense of settler colonialism (and its inherent atrocities) trumps all other values, all other interests, and all other rules. The wagons must be circled. The colonial project must be protected. Human rights and international law be damned.

But the UN has been on a constant trajectory of change, peaking in the mid-1970s after the entry of a large number of newly independent states — and again now, as the unipolar moment of the United States begins to fade.

Calls for reform are growing. And if the UN is to survive, the vestiges of the colonial era will need to give way to more equitable diplomatic, political, and economic arrangements. The principles of the organization, including self-determination, human rights, and equality will need to play a more central role in intergovernmental processes.

And WEOG will need to find its place in a diplomatic museum, alongside the top hats, all-male meetings, and smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear.

To understand the primal stakes in this year’s election, and to understand the very exciting possibility for rapid progress in the climate fight, a new set of numbers is extremely useful.

They come courtesy of Electrek’s Michelle Lewis, reporting on the longtime renewable researcher Ken Bossong’s analysis of the data on electric generation provided each month by the Energy Information Administration. And what they show is the remarkable transformation over the last decade. In 2014, solar power “utility-scale solar provided a mere 9.25 GW (0.75%) of total installed US generating capacity.” Which is to say, less than one percent. But “by the middle of 2024, installed solar capacity had risen to 8.99% of total utility-scale capacity.” (Add another few percent for rooftop distributed solar).

That still sounds like a relatively small percentage—under ten percent. But in fact what it measns is that we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible. Indeed, as Bossong pointed out on Twitter, “the combination of utility-scale and “estimated” small-scale (e.g., rooftop) solar increased by 26.3% in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.” Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

Pretty much the same thing is happening with wind, and pretty much the same thing is happening around the world. Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year.

For a long while, you could see this growth coming, but it hadn’t yet added up to enough to materially dent the use of coal and gas and oil. But that is starting to change. Here’s the most important number I can give you, supplied to me this afternoon by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has been keeping careful track of the California electric grid. As I wrote earlier, it’s been moving to renewable energy faster than almost anywhere in the country. The result: “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” I’m going to repeat that. “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,

All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.

And if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out. But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

Almost half of the states in the country have made it harder to get an abortion since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the federal right to get an abortion. Fourteen states ban abortions in almost all circumstances, and another eight in almost all cases after 6 to 18 weeks of pregnancy.

Nonetheless, the number of abortions provided in the U.S. has actually grown since the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, rising 11% since 2020, to over 1 million abortions a year.

This increase can partially be explained by the fact that the number of people who crossed state lines to get abortions more than doubled from 81,000 in 2020 to 171,000 in 2023.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the 2022 Dobbs decision that states cannot legally prevent their residents from going to another state to get an abortion, because he believes there is a “constitutional right to interstate travel.”

The U.S. Constitution does not, however, explicitly recognize a “right to interstate travel.” But the Supreme Court has issued decisions as far back as 1867 that can be interpreted to protect this right – and some scholars are confident that such a right exists.

But that hasn’t stopped states such as Idaho and Tennessee from enacting laws that make it harder to travel for an abortion – and some people have even attempted to legally punish their own partners for traveling to end a pregnancy.

As law professors who teach about reproductive justice, we view attempts to restrict abortion travel as one of the frontiers in the anti-abortion rights movement, raising new legal questions for courts to unravel.

States push to stop abortion travel

Idaho bans abortion at all stages of pregnancy. In April 2023, it also became the first state to impose travel restrictions with what it called an “abortion trafficking” law.

This law prevents people from helping minors who are not their children get abortions – without parental consent – including in another state.

Idaho’s attorney general has interpreted the law to mean that health care providers cannot refer patients to abortion clinics in other states. And based on this interpretation, the new law also means that a grandparent or teacher, for example, could not provide advice to a pregnant teenager.

An abortion access fund and a few others have challenged this law, saying that it violates the First Amendment and infringes on pregnant patients’ constitutional right to travel.

A federal district court temporarily blocked the law from going into effect in November 2023, but the case is currently being appealed at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

More recently, in July 2024, Tennessee enacted copycat legislation, which is also being challenged.

Other states – Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma – have considered similar abortion trafficking laws but so far have not enacted any.

A spiraling effect

Idaho’s and Tennessee’s laws don’t directly prevent interstate travel, because they focus on people helping minors get an abortion. But some abortion rights activists still say these laws could lead to more explicit bans on interstate travel for abortion.

In the meantime, four Texas counties and a handful of Texas cities are imposing what they call “abortion trafficking laws.”

Under these laws, people can sue anyone who travels through their cities or counties to get an abortion in another state. Supporters of these laws describe “abortion trafficking” in broad terms, because as one anti-abortion activist has said, “the unborn child is always taken against their will” by a pregnant person.

This understanding of “abortion trafficking” effectively treats the fetus as a person, in line with other fetal personhood efforts by anti-abortion rights groups. They are also carefully crafted to avoid constitutional challenges.

In some cases, it is individual people, not states, who are trying to block people from traveling to get an abortion.

In February 2024, for example, a man named Collin Davis tried to prevent his ex-partner from traveling from Texas to Colorado to get an abortion.

While Davis failed to prevent the abortion, he later filed a lawsuit to investigate his ex-partner and people who assisted her in having the procedure. His goal is to “pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child.”

An uncertain future

As the courts consider whether it is legal to ban interstate travel for abortion, it is useful to consider the 1975 Supreme Court case, Bigelow v. Virginia.

This case materialized after a Virginia newspaper published an advertisement for an abortion clinic in New York. The state of Virginia convicted the managing editor for violating a Virginia law that made it a misdemeanor for any person “by publication, lecture, advertisement, or by the sale or circulation of any publication” to encourage getting an abortion.

The Supreme Court struck down the Virginia law as violating the First Amendment, and it also noted that Virginia could not “prevent its residents from traveling to New York to obtain” an abortion or “prosecute them for going there.” This language about the right to travel was not, however, essential to the court’s final decision, so it can’t necessarily be relied upon.

The Bigelow case was also decided just a few years after Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion. Such a right no longer exists after Dobbs.

This legal situation raises uncertainty about whether and how the Supreme Court would protect the right to travel for abortion.

States trying to protect abortion rights

There are approximately 22 states that have responded to other states’ abortion bans and other restrictive measures on interstate travel by adopting statutes called “shield” laws. These laws seek to prevent states with abortion bans from investigating their residents’ efforts to get an abortion in the shield state.

Along these same lines, the Biden administration issued a rule in 2024 that protects the privacy of people’s personal health information with respect to abortion when such care is legal.

The Dobbs decision returned the question of abortion to the states. But it has not settled many other legal issues related to abortion, such as whether there is a right to travel to get an abortion.

Some Western supporters of Ukraine have been presenting the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian province of Kursk as a great victory that will significantly change the course and outcome of the war. They are deceiving themselves. While legally and morally justified, the attack has failed in all its main objectives, and may indeed turn out to have done serious damage to Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. One U.S. analyst has compared it to the Confederate invasion of the North that led to the battle of Gettysburg — a brilliant tactical stroke that however ended in losses that crippled the Army of Northern Virginia.

The Ukrainian attack has not captured any significant Russian population center or transport hub. It has embarrassed Putin, but there is no evidence that it has significantly shaken his hold on power in Russia. It may have done something to raise the spirits of the Ukrainian population in general; but, as Western reports from eastern Ukraine make clear, it has done nothing to raise the morale of Ukrainian troops there.

Understandably, they are focused on the situation on their own front; and that situation is deteriorating sharply, in part it seems because many of Ukraine’s best units were diverted to the attack on Kursk, and new Ukrainian conscripts are inadequately trained and poorly motivated.

"One of the objectives of the offensive operation in the Kursk direction was to divert significant enemy forces from other directions, primarily from the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions,” Ukrainian commander in chief General Alexander Syrsky said.

In fact, precisely the opposite seems to have happened; and this is leading to intensified criticism both of President Zelensky and the Ukrainian high command from ordinary soldiers and citizens.

The Russian army is advancing rapidly towards the key Ukrainian logistics hub of Pokrovsk. In the words of one of the Ukrainian defenders: “For a long time, the situation in Donbas was aptly described as ‘difficult, but controlled.’ However, now it is out of control. Currently, it looks like our front in Donbas has collapsed.”

If or when Pokrovsk falls, it will mean that Russia controls almost all of the southern Donbas, and could strike either north, against the remaining Ukrainian positions in northern Donetsk province, or east, with a view to rolling up the entire Ukrainian southern front.

There is now no prospect that even with Western military supplies, Ukraine can inflict a crushing defeat on Russia and recover its lost territories by force. There is a danger of Ukrainian military collapse, which might lead to pressure in the West for direct intervention. This is one thing that the Russian government's signaled change to its nuclear doctrine is intended to deter.

Present Russian nuclear doctrine states that nuclear weapons will be employed in response to a nuclear attack on Russia, or a conventional attack that “threatens the existence of the state.” In the words of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov;

“[T]here is a clear intent to introduce a correction [to the nuclear doctrine], caused, among other things, by the examination and analysis of development of recent conflicts, including, of course, everything connected to our Western adversaries' escalation course in regards to the special military operation."

If a direct NATO intervention in Ukraine led to Russian defeat there, it would certainly threaten the survival of the present Russian government, and usher in a period of profound national instability and weakness, conceivably even leading to the disintegration of the Russian Federation. There is little reason to doubt that, faced with this threat, Russia would indeed escalate towards the use of nuclear weapons, albeit initially on only a limited and local scale.

Ryabkov’s statement is also of course intended to deter the U.S. and NATO from bowing to pressure from Kyiv and some NATO governments and politicians and allowing Ukraine to use the new NATO-supplied long-range missiles and F-16 warplanes to strike targets deep inside Russia. It is not that such attacks would provoke Russian nuclear retaliation; but if successful, it is easy to predict that Russia would hit back at the West through sabotage of European infrastructure. Russians believe the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has given them a moral and legal right to do this.

Such sabotage operations appear already to have begun, though on a small scale and as what appear to be warning shots rather than a campaign. If however this were to become a full-scale campaign, it could in turn provoke harsh Western responses leading to a cycle of escalation ending in catastrophe. The Russians also believe — not without reason — that the Ukrainian authorities have a strong interest in creating such an escalation so as to bring NATO in on their side; and that NATO must therefore be pressured into continuing to place limits on Ukraine’s use of NATO weaponry. The fact that Ukraine felt able to invade Russian territory using NATO weaponry has intensified Russian fears in this regard.

Once again, it is necessary here to separate what Ukraine has a right to do, from what is wise for Ukraine to do, and the West to allow. For it should be recognized that like the attack on Kursk, a Ukrainian campaign of bombardments of targets in Moscow and elsewhere deep in Russia with NATO missiles would essentially be a gamble, the outcome of which is highly doubtful.

After the failure of last year’s Ukrainian offensive, the Biden administration abandoned hopes for complete Ukrainian victory and instead started to say that support for Ukraine is intended to “strengthen Kyiv at the eventual negotiating table.” In recent months, the Ukrainian government has also shifted towards this position, and away from its previous refusal to negotiate with the Putin administration and insistence on complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as a precondition of talks with Russia.

There has long been a growing recognition in private among Western experts and officials that it is in reality impossible for Ukraine to recover its lost territories through victory on the battlefield. However this has not so far led — even strictly in private — to suggestions that Ukraine and the West might propose terms that the Russian people (let alone the government) could accept as a basis for negotiations.

In the meantime, the evidence suggests that it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is strengthening its military position for eventual negotiations; and it is not at all clear that Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia would significantly change this trend.

This is also true when it comes to Western aid. Even before the crushing defeat in local elections of German ruling coalition parties by those opposed to continuing support for Ukraine, the German government had announced that German direct aid to Ukraine will be cut by almost half, and by more than 90 percent in 2027. In that year, France will hold presidential elections which on present form seem likely to be won by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National — also opposed to open-ended support for Ukraine. A drastic reduction in European aid would not in itself end U.S. aid. It would however force a U.S. administration greatly to increase that aid if it wished to prevent a collapse of the Ukrainian budget and economy.

There is no reason therefore to think that time is on Ukraine’s side in this conflict, and that it makes sense to delay the start of negotiations. That however does not mean that all the cards are in Russia’s hands, and all the Kremlin has to do is wait for Ukrainian collapse. The economy has performed far better than the West hoped, but the Russian Central Bank itself is warning of serious problems next year. As for the situation on the battlefield, while Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted, that also appears true of many Russian troops.

The army with which Russia began this war has been destroyed. The exact level of casualties is unclear, but the dead and disabled are almost certainly in excess of 200,000. The Black Sea Fleet has been crippled. As Russian establishment interlocutors acknowledged to me, Russia probably does not have the troops to capture major Ukrainian cities, unless President Putin launches an intensified wave of conscription — something he is clearly unwilling to do.

This means that if given a clear choice between what they could regard as a reasonable peace and a continuation of war to complete victory, it seems probable that a majority of Russians would opt for peace; and that it would therefore be very difficult for Putin to continue the war, if to do so meant the conscription of many more Russian sons and husbands. Such a compromise peace would be very far from what the Ukrainian and Western governments hope. It would also be very far from what Putin hoped for when he launched this war in February 2022.

There is a pretense of novelty in Israel’s most recent offensive in the West Bank, which it has glibly called “Operation Summer Camps.” Even before it began, Israel announced that the operation was the most wide-ranging invasion of the West Bank since 2002. What is most striking about this framing is the charade that each new operation represents a fresh response to an emerging threat. In truth, these actions are part of a continuous, unbroken chain of suppression and a bloody impulse through which Israel exercises its power to kill and arrest, all the while undergirded by a continuous desire to see Palestinians disappear.

Many have already observed that Israel’s need for constant initiative across its numerous battlefields is central to the hyped-up nature of its offensive. In Gaza, Israel finds itself consolidating its presence in the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, with little military initiative elsewhere in the strip beyond maintaining relentless pressure on a Palestinian population that has endured all manner of horrors over the past 11 months, including daily massacres that are tearing apart the social fabric of the small and dense coastal strip.

In the north, the Lebanese resistance and the Israeli military trade blows within a highly regularized set of rules of engagement. Despite earlier escalations, the battlefield remains largely fixed within specific rhythms, extracting a toll from both sides without any clear resolution in sight.

In other words, Israel’s military campaigns, if not approaching a stalemate, have settled into a war of attrition. The way to regain the initiative is to open up another, perhaps “easier” front that might offer a clearer image of “victory,” even as the actual prospects for decisive victories in other theaters fade. But to whom does Israel want to demonstrate this initiative?

A projection of strength

First and foremost, Israel’s military machine is being driven by the demands of its own settlers and the right-wing agenda that pushes the country toward perpetual war. The need to see things happening — soldiers breaking into homes, Palestinian fighters being killed — is imperative for the type of war Israel is currently waging.

Israel’s disposition toward war is perpetual, and its war on the Palestinians is a daily reality fueled by the complicity of its allies, an endless supply of weapons, and a staggering lack of accountability.

This pressure for more war, originating in a certain segment of Israeli society, is juxtaposed with another pressure from a different segment, which concedes the need for more war but insists on getting back the captives held in Gaza first.

In a prolonged military campaign fraught with economic costs, social and political divisions, and an underlying fear of peace that pervades Israeli society, the military machine must continually find new campaigns to justify its actions — often designating them with bombastic and at times perverse names.

These campaigns serve to placate a restless public, with each operation presented as a fresh initiative, even if they bear a striking resemblance to numerous operations that Israel has regularly carried out in the past.

This narrative of tactical accumulation — the constant movement of troops and the ability to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously — serves to project an image of strength. But it conceals an underlying rot, which is Israel’s lack of viable solutions when it comes to directly confronting its arch-nemesis, Iran, or engaging in open warfare in the north with the Lebanese resistance.

This is why the West Bank offers a convenient respite — a new theater where the illusion of control and progress can be temporarily sustained, even as the broader strategic picture grows increasingly dire.

Psychological warfare and testing boundaries

Second, these operations are also “cognitive” in nature, a term favored by Israeli military leaders and strategists to describe the collection of tactics that include engaging in information warfare, making Israel’s military presence felt, committing war crimes, and causing widespread destruction to infrastructure.

Israel employs this range of military tactics to create an impression — on its own people, but more importantly, on the Palestinians.

In this context, Israel describes the Gaza model as replicable in the West Bank and flirts with the possibility of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign. Additionally, as it reenacts some of Gaza’s imagery in the northern West Bank, Israel is testing the tolerance levels of its international allies and satisfying its right-wing base all at once, gauging the extent to which it can get away with changing the realities on the ground in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and the region.

It forces Palestinians in the West Bank to grapple with the anxiety of a looming war of annihilation without the concrete capacity to resist. It’s a form of collective psychological torture that impacts everyone in the West Bank, who hurry to reckon with the campaign’s purported novelty, intensity, and violence. Rumors spread, and the Palestinian Authority, operating in the shadows, feeds Palestinians talking points that serve to exalt the policy of Mahmoud Abbas — who by not confronting Israel and cooperating with its security apparatus, protects against the replication of the model of annihilative war in the West Bank. This is exactly the conclusion Israel wants Palestinians to reach.

Taking the fight to the resistance

Third, on a tactical level, the military campaign is designed to take the fight directly to the armed movements in the northern West Bank. This is particularly crucial in light of growing signs that some factions within the mosaic of groups in the north are shifting toward more offensive actions. These include failed attempts to plant a bomb in the heart of Tel Aviv and the resurgence of car bombs originating from the south of the West Bank. The campaign aims to put the Palestinian resistance on the defensive.

Yet even on those terms, the Israeli campaign already seems to be a failure, since during the campaign three car bombs were discovered elsewhere in the West Bank (one near Ramallah, and two near Bethlehem), and a shooting attack by a former member of the PA Presidential Guard left three Israeli security personnel dead in the southern West Bank hills of Hebron, far from the center of Israeli operations in the North.

As the West Bank increasingly transforms into a hotbed of resistance and a theater for regular military operations, the Israeli army — already stretched thin across multiple fronts — will be compelled to commit substantial resources not only to conduct offensive operations but also to maintain a robust defensive posture across a territory spanning 5,000 square kilometers.

This dual demand on manpower and resources presents Israel with a problem that is already forcing a discussion about the potential impact of a third front on the military operations on the Lebanese borders and Gaza. In the past, Israel’s more pragmatic leadership made calculated decisions that allowed it to secure significant gains in its wars with the Palestinians. During the Second Intifada, Israel strategically chose to withdraw from Gaza, allowing it to concentrate its military efforts on suppressing the Intifada in the West Bank. However, Israel is now governed by leaders who vehemently opposed the Gaza disengagement, with a Prime Minister more preoccupied with his own political survival and legacy than with long-term strategy. This leadership clings to the belief that perpetual war will somehow advance Israel’s interests, despite mounting economic, political, diplomatic, and military costs. They frame Israel’s current struggle as a second “independence” war, yet as the conflict spirals and deepens, their mismanagement of strategic dilemmas starts to take a toll.

Israel is essentially relying on time and military force to resolve its challenges, but like any gamble, the outcome remains uncertain. While force may provide short-term gains, the longer-term risks and costs are accumulating, and betting on indefinite conflict could ultimately prove to be a severe miscalculation.

Beyond the operation: strangling the West Bank

More fundamentally, Israel’s policy of “economic deprivation” in the West Bank, alongside efforts by its right-wing factions to decouple Israeli trade, labor markets, and infrastructure from the territory, gives a glimpse of the type of war advocated for by figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Since October 7, the leaders of the messianic settler movement, who are now driving Israel’s government agenda, have intensified their efforts to arm settlers en masse and are directing the state to further decouple Israel from the West Bank economically, financially, and infrastructurally.

This strategy reflects a broader vision of the right-wing: by cutting off the West Bank from Israel’s economy, they aim to deepen Palestinian isolation, further entrench Israeli territorial control, and weaken the relations that have created a comfortable status quo for the Israeli state in the past two decades.

It also aims to artificially induce economic collapse and shrink the Palestinian economy in the West Bank. Some of these policies, such as pirating Palestinian customs taxes, have been in place for a long time, but Bezalel Smotrich is now pushing for more aggressive measures. He has hinted in the direction of financial decoupling from Palestinian banks and other forms of economic warfare designed to create abject conditions in the West Bank. These moves would deepen the economic isolation of Palestinians. It would also delink Israelis from any interests in trade and labor with the West Bank and create the conditions for an economically- fueled ethnic cleansing — but more importantly, it will set the stage for a forcible campaign of ethnic cleansing.

While the mere flirtation with such policies is itself a form of power, instilling fear, anxiety, and disorientation among Palestinians, it also outlines the gradual erosion of their daily lives. These policies signal the slow but steady loss of economic and social stability.

Let us be clear: these measures are not merely empty gestures or intimidation tactics; they serve as a clear indication of what is to come. The groundwork is being laid for a more comprehensive and systematic effort to further isolate and delink Israel from Palestinians in the West Bank, make more aggressive land grabs, and prepare for a broader offensive.

Israel’s disposition toward war is perpetual, and its war on the Palestinians is a daily reality fueled by the complicity of its allies, an endless supply of weapons, and a staggering lack of accountability. When Israel Katz declared on X that Israel must “address this threat by all necessary means, including, in some cases of intense combat, allowing the population to temporarily evacuate from one neighborhood to another within the refugee camp,” he was not merely making a tactical suggestion. Katz was speaking directly to Israel’s counterparts around the world, laying the groundwork for an escalation in the use of firepower in the West Bank and normalizing the forced displacement of Palestinian populations from their homes in refugee camps, towns, and villages.

What history tells us, especially in the context of Israel’s war on the Palestinians, is that wars are often won by accumulation — through a relentless combination of psychological warfare, overwhelming firepower, and the deliberate creation of unbearable conditions designed to drive the Palestinian population to leave. This is the lens through which we should view the current struggle in the West Bank and the inevitable military operations that will continue to define the region for the foreseeable future. These actions are not isolated incidents but part of a slow, yet steadily escalating strategy, edging both the Palestinians and the world closer to the brink of the abyss.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs,” but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined "When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?" a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

Even if I have to say so as co-author with Mark Green of “WRECKING AMERICA: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All,” I know of no book on Trump to be as practically useful for the 2024 presidential election. Useful, that is, for those Americans who are appalled at how this egomaniacal delusionary man has gotten tens of millions of voters wanting him back in the White House.

The fervent Trumpsters may believe all politicians are delusionary. Trump, however, is proudly open about his assertions proving it. He is a bombastic blowhard who rants and raves in all directions.

Trump is too unstable, too unreliable, too dangerous—especially to exercise lawfully the enormous power held by a President of the U.S.

In our book, we assembled Trump’s own words to define his “delusionary” state of mind. He made these boasts without a smile and in all seriousness:

“Nobody knows more about taxes than I do, and income than I do.”

“Nobody knows more about construction than I do.”

“Nobody knows more about campaign finance than I do.”

“I know more about drones than anybody.”

“Nobody knows much more about technology … than I do.”

“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”

“I know that H-1B [visa], I know the H-2B. Nobody knows it better than me.”

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.”

“Nobody knows more about environmental impact statements than me.”

“I understand the power of Facebook maybe better than almost anybody.”

“I know more about renewables than any human being on earth.”

“Nobody knows more about polls than me.”

“I know more about courts than any human being on earth.”

“I know more about steelworkers than anybody that’s ever run for office.”

“Nobody knows more about banks than I do.”

“Nobody knows more about trade than me.”

“I know more about nuclear weapons than he’ll ever know.”

“I understand the tax laws better than almost anyone.”

“I know more about offense and defense than they will ever understand.”

“Nobody even understands it but me. It’s called devaluation.”

“I understand money better than anybody.”

“I understand the system better than anybody.”

“Nobody knows more about debt than I do.”

“Nobody knows the game better than me.”

“And who knows more about the word ‘apprentice’ than Donald Trump?”

“I understand politicians better than anybody.”

“Who knows the other side better than me?”

“I was the fair-haired boy. Nobody knows more about it than me.”

“I know a lot. I know more than I’m ever gonna tell you.”

For a mass media that concentrates so heavily on the politics of personalismo, it is remarkable that journalists have not more forcefully taken account of this braggadocio on steroids. Imagine any other candidate – Democratic or Republican – bellowing two or three such grandiosities without being taken to task. This is what happens when politicians like Reagan and Trump succeed in constantly lowering the bar of expectations by the reporters. Trump gets away with saying things for which other candidates would be excoriated or harshly ridiculed.

“WRECKING AMERICA” is replete with clearly written narratives on what damage Trump and his administration did to many aspects of life, laws, social norms, justice, health, safety, trust and truth in our country. During his business and political careers, he has gotten away with serial lawlessness. He bragged publicly in 2019: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” And he proved this dictatorial license regularly.

Last June by a vote of 6 to 3 the U.S. Supreme Court went very far in saying that Trump could do what he wants to do, should the Electoral College select him again as President in November.

On page 251 we devoted a few pages to speaking to wannabe Trump voters, elaborating how they and anti-Trump voters suffer the same under the impact of Trumpist policies and practices. That is if you are not part of either the Plutocracy and the Oligarchy.

Such hubris or arrogance is not just rhetoric. It led directly to him saying about Covid that “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Trump also suggested that using a “powerful light” might be used to fight Covid.

He even wanted to explore injecting a disinfectant. The Michigan Poison Center reported, “Popular disinfectant companies like The Clorox Company and Reckitt Benckiser, the parent company of both Lysol and Dettol, quickly released statements emphasizing that their products should not be consumed. Despite warnings from healthcare providers and other officials, [some] people acted on Trump’s advice and ingested chemicals, including bleach, across the country. In at least five states, poison centers reported they had an increase in calls within 18 hours of Trump’s broadcasted stupidity.”

This “know-it-all” delayed mobilizing the Executive Branch for weeks and his actions caused tens of thousands of Covid-related deaths.

Moreover, through Trump’s own carelessness, he exposed himself and White House aides to Covid, sending him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Tragically, before he left the White House in January 2021, 400,000 people died from Covid.

Trump’s delusional campaign promises know no bounds. In his first run for the presidency, The Guardian newspaper reported Trump’s “Promises to save US manufacturing and prevent American jobs moving abroad were a key part of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. But since Trump took office in January 2017, nearly 200,000 jobs have been moved overseas, based on Trade Adjustment Assistance certified petitions.”

Trump also promised clean air and water. But he pushed to weaken the Clean Air Act and clean water protections. Making empty promises is nothing new for Donald Trump. Expect more of the same between now and election day.

Presently, assailing Kamala Harris, Trump is going off the rails into very vulgar territory where no presidential candidate has ever dared to dwell. His advisors are frantic, trying to have him read their talking points and wondering how they are going to focus erratic Donald during his September 10th ABC network debate with Harris.

They are unlikely to succeed. Trump will sweep aside most reporters’ questions and launch into the same diatribes, falsehoods and bloated assurances to fix everything immediately which he repeatedly delivers at his rallies.

His delusions by definition are here to stay.

It’s a new day here in Pennsylvania, where folks waking up eagerly check the internet to see how the frackers did last night, where the ideal weekend getaway is a quaint mountain bed-and-breakfast animated by the constant whine of natural gas wells, and where contented people have been known to blurt out, “I love the smell of tert-Butylthiol in the morning!”

OK, that’s not actually the Keystone State I’ve come to know and love since I moved here 35 years ago (where the number one fall issue among voters is probably Bryce Harper’s banged-up body), but that is the portrait of Pennsylvania someone who lives in Oregon or Oklahoma might get from watching too much cable TV news, where political pundits insist our love for unconventional extraction of fossil fuels is more powerful than our desire for cheesesteaks.

Fracking—which was more of a hot-button issue back in the 2010s—is back in the news with the sudden arrival of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris had said in 2019—while appealing to left-wing Democrats as a 2020 White House hopeful—that she opposed fracking before changing her position when she joined President Joe Biden’s ticket. According to the TV talking heads, even that brief flirtation with opposing Pennsylvania’s most beloved gas-drilling process might cause her to lose the commonwealth to former President Donald Trump in November.

Maybe a good question for Harris at Tuesday’s make-or-break debate here in Philadelphia would be not to yet again ask her why she briefly opposed fracking in 2019, but to prod her on how she can support it now when little kids are getting cancer.

After Harris’ widely publicized CNN interview last month, host Abby Phillips questioned whether the fracking issue even matters much “except in Pennsylvania”—echoing comments I’ve heard on CNN and MSNBC probably a dozen times that the Democrats must pledge allegiance to the fracking gods to have any hope of winning our 19 electoral votes.

None of them really know what they’re talking about.

Here’s the truth from someone who actually lives in Pennsylvania. Most folks, especially in areas like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and their suburbs where many voters reside, don’t really talk about fracking—certainly not as much as the big issues like the economy or abortion rights. And when we do discuss it, many Pennsylvanians—perhaps even a majority—oppose fracking, because we don’t want to prolong the climate destruction of fossil fuels, or because folks who live near these fracking pads are sick of the smell, the noise, and the threat to their health.

A 2021 poll commissioned by the pro-sustainability Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) found just 31% of Pennsylvanians support continued fracking here, and that a majority want the process to end either immediately (25%) or see it phased out over time (30%). Other surveys show the state more evenly divided, but unfettered support for unconventional gas drilling doesn’t top 50%. One reason for the split is that the economic benefits to Pennsylvania that are cited again and again by TV pundits just haven’t materialized outside of just one or two of the state’s 67 counties. A series of studies have shown that fracking is not a major job category here, that the number of new hires has never matched the industry’s overblown promises, and that counties with fracking activity have mostly underperformed the state and national economy.

“I find the whole discussion”—around fracking—“pretty deeply frustrating,” Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for ORVI, told me this week. “I think most Pennsylvanians are at best ambivalent about fracking as a technology.” And he thinks a fair amount of the public support for fracking is reinforced by politicians—including Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro—constantly overstating the economic rewards.

This means that when it comes to the presidential race, the so-called experts are getting the issue completely bass-ackward. Think about it: The voters who see fossil fuels as a gift from God and nod along to Republicans’ “Drill, baby, drill” chants are in Trump’s back pocket already. But Harris’ resolute endorsement of fracking—minus a more concrete plan to end America’s addiction to oil and gas—could slow her momentum with young voters who rank climate change as a top issue and have been drifting back to the Democrats since Biden’s withdrawal.

But the myth that fracking is overwhelmingly popular in Pennsylvania has become a feedback loop between politicians—some of them heavily funded by oil-and-gas campaign dollars, some of them seeking the endorsements of trade unions that have bought into the job-creation hype—and a lazy news media. Since fracking resurfaced as a campaign issue, reporters for outlets like CNN or The Washington Post have flocked to places like Washington County, where the ORVI found the economy has performed somewhat better than other heavily fracked counties—partly because of exurban Pittsburgh job growth unrelated to fossil fuels—and hunt down the local bar owner who’s slinging pitchers to parched well workers.

They never seem to go to a community like Dimock in north-central Pennsylvania. The small Susquehanna County community, which was made semi-famous in the 2009 documentary Gasland when a resident lit his methane-contaminated tap water on fire, had enjoyed a 12-year ban on fracking activity. Some residents felt deeply betrayed when the Shapiro administration cut a deal last year that allowed Coterra Energy to resume drilling in return for admitting past pollution and $16 million for a new clean water line. That won’t come until 2027 at the earliest, but the fracking started immediately.

“We sit here pretty unhappy,” Victoria Switzer, a Dimock resident and anti-fracking activist, told me. She said lateral drilling for gas is passing under her nearly seven-acre property in what she’d thought would be a rural paradise, and that “I swear you can feel it and you can hear it as it whines, a horrible noise.” Switzer and other fracking opponents in their politically divided community say they feel “betrayed” by Shapiro’s deal that allowed drilling to resume.

ORVI’s O’Leary said that people who actually live in Pennsylvania’s southwest corner or north-central regions “know fracking imposes significant burdens—health burdens, quality of life burdens, and you know, if you live in those regions, it is not a source of jobs and income.” The institute’s 2021 study found that 22 Appalachian counties with significant fracking saw only 1.7% job growth when the national average was 10%. People often moved away from communities like Dimock, which lost nearly 18% of its population in the 2010s. The broken economic promises—which are now being repeated, and broken, for fracking-related projects like ethane crackers and hydrogen hubs—are reason enough to be cynical about fossil fuels and politicians’ reluctance to phase them out.

But what’s much more morally unconscionable is both political parties’ refusal to take seriously the now well-documented health risks for people who live near active wells. A major Pennsylvania-funded study released last year found that children living near fracking sites faced a higher risk of developing lymphoma, a form of cancer, and also showed links to low birth-weight babies and dramatically higher rates of asthma. The politicians who normally tell voters that nothing matters more than the life of the child managed to sweep this bombshell report under the rug.

Maybe a good question for Harris at Tuesday’s make-or-break debate here in Philadelphia would be not to yet again ask her why she briefly opposed fracking in 2019, but to prod her on how she can support it now when little kids are getting cancer. Maybe that level of scrutiny would prompt her not necessarily to back an immediate fracking ban—even many environmentalists like O’Leary say that isn’t realistic or practical—but to get more specific on a plan to phase out fossil fuels and create thousands of clean energy jobs as quickly as possible.

Until she does that, Pennsylvania voters like Dimock’s Switzer are going to be wary of the Democrats’ newly minted nominee. “I wish maybe she’d take a look at it [fracking] when she’s safely in office and have some kind of panel,” she said, recalling how Barack Obama once promised fracking was “a bridge” to clean energy, and yet “that bridge keeps getting longer and longer.”

That’s what a lot of Pennsylvanians would tell Harris and her campaign—as long as they listen to us and not the clueless political experts up and down I-95.

School shootings are recurring markers of a societal sickness, an unshakeable acceptance of violence and senseless death. The murder of two 14-year-old students and two teachers on Wednesday, and the wounding of nine others, at a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, is the latest in this seemingly permanent contagion.

Ninth-grader Colt Gray, 14, had an “AR-platform-style weapon,” the popular semi-automatic gun all-too-widely available in the U.S., with hundreds of variations and modular accessories flooding the multi-billion dollar gun market.

We know that the accused lived in a home with guns, thanks to a statement from the FBI issued on Wednesday, that read in part:

In May 2023, the FBI… received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns.

Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for action. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject… there was no probable cause to take any additional law enforcement action.

Authorities had advance warning over a year earlier. Apalachee High School then reportedly received a telephoned threat on the morning of the shooting, warning five schools would be targeted, starting with Apalachee.

The so-called “AR platform” has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. At the Uvalde mass school shooting in Texas on May 24, 2022, the teenaged shooter killed 21 people, injured 21 more, and held 400 law enforcement personnel at bay, while he killed children one by one for over an hour. It was the lethality of the AR rifle that kept those hundreds of heavily armed agents too frightened to intervene.

As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019, Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator from California, made a renewal of the assault weapons ban a central part of her campaign. She called for the same as recently as December, 2023, while still just the running mate for President Joe Biden.

But now, amid a tight general election race against former President Donald Trump, Harris is being more measured. As news broke of the Apalachee shooting, Harris was taking the stage at a rally in New Hampshire.

“Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families, of course, and we are grateful to the first responders and the law enforcement that were on the scene. But this is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies,” she said. “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country, once and for all… it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Kris Brown is the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after James Brady, the former press secretary for former President Ronald Reagan. Brady was shot in the head during the attempted assassination of Reagan. Brady survived, and went on with his wife Sarah to campaign for gun control.

“Jim and Sarah Brady are responsible for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was put into effect the year after the Brady Law passed in 1993. During the 10-year time period that that assault weapons ban was in effect, you saw a marked decrease in the kinds of mass shootings involving those firearms than in the previous period,” Kris Brown said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the Apalachee shooting.

Brown is optimistic that positive change is possible, despite the entrenched power of the gun lobby.

“There is a growing desire for an assault weapons ban in this country,” she said, “including among Republicans and including among gun owners. So we will certainly push the Harris administration, if we have one, to make that a priority.”

These weapons of war, marketed to U.S. consumers as benign “modern sporting rifles,” need to be banned.

Assault weapons bans can work. A 1996 mass shooting in Australia left 35 dead and 23 injured. Almost immediately, that nation of gun lovers passed an assault weapons ban and mandatory buyback law. There hasn’t been a shooting anywhere near that scale there since.

Success won’t be so swift here in the U.S., a nation awash with hundreds of millions of guns. Still, the Harris-Walz campaign should make an assault weapons ban a central demand and take it to the voters in November. The lives of our nation’s children depend on it.

Australia’s Climate Council has issued a new report on clean energy in the country’s states.

Winter is ending in Australia, but it is worrisome that their August was among the hottest on record this year, presaging a hot dry summer to come, and raising the real risk of further massive bush fires of the sort that scorched the countryside and killed billions of animals in 2019-2020. The continent-country is highly vulnerable to climate change, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, right on the sea and facing coastal erosion from sea-level rise. It is unfortunate that so many Australian politicians and firms have found it so difficult to let go of coal and fossil gas. Although Australia is a relatively small country, the emissions of which are not all that consequential, it just sets a poor example for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries, if a very vulnerable country like Australia is a big coal user. How can it scold China and India for using so much coal, which really is consequential for the fate of the world, if Canberra is itself so irresponsible?

Although Australia has had a love affair with coal, the dirtiest and unhealthiest of the fossil fuels, even that addiction is beginning to subside. Less that 50% of the country’s electricity now comes from coal, an unprecedented development.

Given how sunny it is in the U.S. South and Southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more [rooftop solar], but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles.

Obviously, not all the states are as environmentally conscious and ambitious as South Australia.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are particularly bad actors, actually expanding their use of coal and fossil gas.

Some other states have made great strides and have ambitious goals. South Australia has gone in big on solar energy and has largely dumped coal, and is employing batteries to store and use the solar energy when it is needed at night and at usage peaks during the day. The state wants to have all its electricity come from renewables by 2027, in only three years. And it is a highly plausible plan. Already, 70% of the electricity in South Australia comes from renewables, the best record of any large state by far, though the small Australian Capital Territory in which the capital of Canberra nestles has reached 100% renewable electricity generation and in Tasmania it is 98.2%. South Australia is lightly populated, but some of the more populous states are beginning to make strides as well.

In the country as a whole, there is good news. Since 2018, Australia has doubled the share of renewables in its electricity grid, and much of this increase in clean electricity has been spearheaded by states and territories rather than the federal government.

With a population of 26 million (a little bigger than Florida, a little smaller than Texas), Australia has about 10 million households. A full 3.6 million of them, about 36%, have rooftop solar installations. Half of all households in Queensland now have panels on their roofs.

In the U.S., a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar. To be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar. Given how sunny it is in the U.S. South and Southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more, but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles. Australia’s homeowners clearly have managed to outmaneuver the Coal Lobby there. (We have solar panels, and even in Michigan they much reduce our bill most of the year.)

The most populous Australia state, New South Wales, with over 8 million people, has made some strides in renewables. Some 35.6% of its electricity is from renewables, and 34% of its households have rooftop solar. 13% of its travel uses shared transportation, and there is an uptick in purchases of electric vehicles, though the absolute numbers remain small. NSW has banned offshore drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

South Australia, despite its thin population, is a technological leader in renewables. Not only do renewables supply 74.4% of electricity, but it has large battery projects that allow sunshine to be captured and used at night and at peak hours. The state hopes to phase out gas electricity plants in only a few years.

Batteries have also been key to California’s remarkable uptake of renewables.

Now Australia as a whole has six enormous battery projects in the pipeline.

At $1.7 trillion, Australia has the 13th largest GDP in the world. If the G20 states can get to carbon zero by 2050, that will solve the bulk of our climate worries, since all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution will be absorbed by the oceans over time. The temperature will immediately stop rising and will decline over time. If we go on spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere after 2050, however, we will outrun the capacity of the oceans to absorb them, and the world will get very hot, and the climate could go chaotic.

I’ve always felt that working in customer-facing jobs is my calling. I’m passionate about making people feel comfortable when they enter a business, be it a retail store or a restaurant.

But it was hard to keep that passion when I worked at Dollar General. Like workers at many other big retailers, we were so short-staffed and poorly trained that it was next to impossible to give good customer service.

My interview and first day on the job went well. Managers, co-workers, and customers all seemed pretty happy. The second day was a complete 180. All of a sudden I was thrown into my duties with zero training. They even scheduled me to close out the store that day without instructions.

Dollar General has also been taking profits that could go toward worker pay or fixing up their stores and spending them instead on stock buybacks.

Quickly I had shifts where I was the only worker for hours at a time, dealing with long lines of impatient customers, tons of merchandise to stock, and frustrated vendors subject to long wait times.

I frequently had to get overstock items from unstable top shelves and constantly worried I’d fall. The back door also wouldn’t close correctly—and even though I brought it up to management several times, it remained an easy way for anyone to sneak in.

I didn’t know it then, but Dollar General has repeatedly faced huge penalties for workplace safety violations.

Once I was called out to help with a truck delivery of refrigerated and frozen products. I went to grab a tote bag full and had to do a triple take because it was full of black mold. Another afternoon, I picked up a bag of potting soil to stock and realized it was covered with dead insects, which got all over the floor and other products.

When I had problems like these with merchandise, I was expected to contact the warehouse myself. But that was hard to do, given how understaffed we were.

Dollar General isn’t the only tough place for retail employees. At many big stores, workers are short-handed and face difficult working conditions—even when their companies are highly profitable.

Where is all the money going? Well, I can tell you not much went to me.

I made $14.75 an hour for part-time hours, even though I often wound up working full-time. After the first few weeks, my schedule became so unpredictable that I sometimes worked only a few hours a week. Eventually it just wasn’t worth all the hard work and stress, so I quit.

By contrast, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos made nearly $10 million last year—521 times as much as a typical worker at his company, the Institute for Policy Studies reported recently.

Dollar General has also been taking profits that could go toward worker pay or fixing up their stores and spending them instead on stock buybacks. That’s when a company repurchases its own shares to inflate the value of its stock and make CEOs even richer. Between 2019 and 2023, the company spent $9 billion on this financial scam.

I also learned from the Institute’s report that 88% of Dollar General workers who are eligible to participate in the company 401(k) plan don’t have one dime in their accounts. Low-wage workers like me just don’t earn enough to be able to save for our retirement.

I saw up close how a business that’s focused on exploiting employees to make those at the top even richer isn’t just bad for workers like me, but for customers as well. And anyone who’s worked for one of these low-wage companies can tell you Dollar General is hardly unique.

If we want a strong economy, we need to do more to make sure all workers can make a decent living and feel safe and respected in their workplace.

“As I said then, I say today, Israel had a right—has a right to defend itself.”

This is militarism set in stone. The words are those of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, in her extensive CNN interview last week—quick words that lead the charge and spew the glory, no matter how blatantly false they are.

Oh, and by the way: “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

She had to add some vague, paradoxical empathy, apparently, just because the nation she hopes to lead—USA! USA!—is kind of growing up, at least a little bit, and a certain (inconvenient) segment of its voters now maintain skepticism about the effectiveness, not to mention the moral sanity, of militarism. Harris, alas, had no intention of addressing the issue with intelligence, nor does the media push her to: What, in fact, does self-defense mean? Does it always, unquestionably, require violence?

The violence in Palestine—in Gaza and also the West Bank—goes on and on, to what end? Nothing I write here is new, but what I want to do is push the matter beyond the realm of glorious, media-certified abstraction. Israel has the right to defend itself. What does that actually look like? Here’s a brief, recent example from the Drop Site:

For nearly a week, the Israeli military has been laying siege to hospitals in Jenin and other cities in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, severely restricting access to medical care, targeting medical workers and ambulances, and cutting off water and electricity, as part of a massive military offensive in the occupied West Bank, the largest operation in the Palestinian territory in over two decades.

...The move mirrors tactics by the Israeli military in Gaza, where every hospital has been targeted and only a fraction are partially functioning, leaving the healthcare system in ruins.

And the Palestine Red Crescent noted that “Israeli troops have ‘directly targeted’ ambulances, injuring two medical workers and a volunteer doctor. ‘Our teams have been prevented from transporting various casualties, patients, and elderly suffering from chronic diseases, and women in labor. The further marginalization of already vulnerable communities renders the area uninhabitable.’”

But Israel has the right to defend itself! Just imagine if the mainstream media refused to report on war—on “self-defense”—as an abstraction, especially when hospitals are being targeted, ambulances are being targeted, refugee camps are being bombed. Even if there’s a justification of some sort for any particular action, this is what self-defense looks like. Real journalism will not quietly look away from it.

Nor will it take events out of context for the purpose of creating a “good guy/bad guy” narrative. Maybe creating such a narrative is part of the game of politics, but honest journalism refuses to submit to it. For instance, as per the website Decolonize Palestine:

Framing is important. Being able to dictate the narrative, to be given the freedom to explain events in a way sympathetic to your worldview, can be an incredibly powerful tool. As many studies have shown, there has been an empirically proven bias toward the Zionist and Israeli narrative in U.S. media. This means that Israelis have had enormous advantages in framing what is happening in Palestine.

In other words, the Hamas attack of October 7 stands all by itself: a shocking act of barbaric violence perpetrated (for no reason except hatred) on innocent Israelis. But in fact, horrific as the act was, it happened within a context: seven decades of Israeli occupation, Gaza turned into an open-air concentration camp, Palestinians living without freedom and dignity.

Ignoring this is the equivalent, let us say, of a Hollywood-constructed brutal Indian attack on a wagon train of American settlers. The white guys are the victims! They have a right to defend themselves.

But this is just the starting point. Journalism is supposed to speak truth to power. This is easy to say, but truth is not necessarily simple—let alone simplistic.

Israel has the right to defend itself. Let me take a moment here to agree with would-be President Harris. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But what does that actually mean? Self-defense is far, far more than an us-vs.-them standoff. If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen. And of course, this truth goes in all directions.

Anyone who isn’t aware of this is... deeply ignorant? Or do I simply mean part of both parties’ voting base? I listen to Harris triumphantly declare that the United States has the most lethal military force on the planet, followed by a resonating cheer from the voters, and it all sounds as phony as the worst movie script I can imagine. But apparently we remain trapped in our military budget.

As I wrote a few months ago: “We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security—we will not evolve—if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty.”

And yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. So does Palestine. So do all of us—we have the right to defend ourselves from our own militarism.

By Ralph Nader September 6, 2024 Even if I have to say so as co-author with Mark Green of “WRECKING AMERICA: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All,” I know of no book on Trump to be as practically useful for the 2024 presidential election. Useful, that is, for those Americans who are appalled at…

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket hasn’t just shifted the 2024 electoral calculus—it’s also reignited the battle for the party’s ideological soul. Just as progressives have outlined their hopes for a Harris administration, so too have bad faith actors looking to turn back the clock on the most significant progressive achievement of the Biden era: the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.

The revival of anti-monopoly politics has been met with predictable ire from corporate interests that have got off scot-free for decades. This has been largely directed at Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair who has taken on some of America’s most entrenched monopolies. Rather than accede to the demands of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, Harris should embrace—and entrench—the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts.

It goes without saying that progressives have the right to be disappointed with the legacy of the Biden administration in many respects. Whether one lays the blame on the White House or congressional math, many of the most promising initiatives pushed in 2021 never made it to law. However, the early Biden administration’s focus on reinvigorating antitrust enforcement is one that has paid dividends in the years that followed. The Reagan-era defanging of antitrust helped pave the way for the present-day monopoly crisis, which has left its mark on everything from the tech sector to the rental market to grocery shopping.

The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.

The Biden administration deserves credit for breaking with his predecessors’ hands-off approach to taking on corporate monopolies. Both Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), have taken a tough line against anti-competitive behavior. Khan and Kanter’s efforts to block illegal mergers have been met with rage from corporate America’s worst offenders. This has resulted in frivolous demands for their recusals from key antitrust cases, as well as broader efforts to kneecap antitrust regulation itself. With a “changing of the guard” on the Democratic ticket, these same actors have taken to demanding Harris abandon Biden-era antitrust efforts, complete with a change in personnel.

Harris should reject these demands, and instead look to Khan and Kanter’s successes as a road map for enacting change in Washington. Time and time again, Khan and Kanter have delivered victories for consumers in the face of a hostile press and a right-wing judicial landscape. In August, the DOJ emerged victorious in its historic U.S. v. Google antitrust lawsuit, one that Kanter fittingly says belongs on the “Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases.” In the years following House Democrats’ 2020 report on monopoly power in the tech sector, Biden administration enforcers have filed antitrust suits against Amazon and Apple, along with a separate Google suit set to go to trial this month.

If successful, these lawsuits stand to rein in some of the tech sector’s worst abuses. But make no mistake: The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust efforts target far more than just the abuses of the “Big Tech” giants. This year, the DOJ launched a blockbuster antitrust suit against Ticketmaster, which was largely given a pass for its abuses in previous administrations. The DOJ Antitrust Division has stood with tenants by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage over the company’s role in enabling rental price gouging. The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.

Antitrust enforcement is both crucial to building a fairer economy and broadly popular with the general public. For this reason, Harris should firmly reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission. Doing so would send a strong signal that under a Harris administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.

Instead of turning back the clock on antitrust, a Harris administration should build upon the progress of the last three years by launching other needed antitrust initiatives. This could include, among others, taking on YouTube-related competition issues, which advocates have sounded the alarm on. More broadly, the DOJ and FTC under a Harris administration should continue to probe would-be monopolists in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Given the scope of monopolistic behavior in today’s economy, regulators under a Harris Administration must take a vigilant approach to anti-competitive practices across sectors.