Last week, the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing for President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Heidi Overton.

During the hearing, Dr. Overton followed suit with many of Trump’s previous nominees for federal agencies—avoiding questions, obscuring her true intentions, and feigning ignorance of her own public record on a range of topics.

Her nomination comes at a fraught moment for the agency. The FDA is facing heavy criticism following a Cyclospora outbreak that sickened many and rattled the public. The prior commissioner abruptly resigned after only 13 months in the role. The agency has also wrestled with political pressure on everything from reproductive health to vaccinations to flavored e-cigarettes, imperiling its historic scientific neutrality and risking a descent into partisan miasma.

Dr. Overton remains dangerously out of step with the general public, medicine, and science on the subject of medication abortion with mifepristone and her record explicitly showcases that she will do everything in her power to ban medication abortion.

The FDA works best when publicly unnoticed, operating smoothly and uncontroversially in the background of our country, keeping us safe. It is vital to our economy as well as our health. Take, for example, my home state of Ohio. Healthcare is our largest employment sector, and nearly half of our land is farmland. As a maternal fetal medicine physician, the scope of my work is providing the best care to my patients and advising on the available options to receive comprehensive medical care.

Therefore, we need an FDA leader steeped in objective, scientific neutrality rather than the culture wars Americans are so tired of — and Dr. Overton is a far cry from what is needed in this moment.

This week marks 26 years since the FDA initially approved mifepristone as safe and effective. Since the Dobbs decision, mifepristone has emerged as a linchpin in the preservation of access to abortion care for millions of patients. It also rests atop an enormous bedrock of research and clinical trials expounding its safety and efficacy.

As of December 2025, medication abortion has accounted for 65% of all US abortions, and one in four clinician-provided abortions were delivered through telehealth. Mifepristone specifically is used to support patients with their reproductive care and is even recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for miscarriage management.

The American Medical Association has stated that serious adverse events occur in fewer than one-third of one percent of patients who take mifepristone, and continuing a pregnancy carries roughly 14 times the risk of death than abortion related complications. Reimposing in-person requirements, the AMA warns, would eliminate access for rural, low-income, and underserved patients and limit the quality of care that doctors are able to provide. In February 2026, ACOG led a coalition of 15 medical organizations in defending mifepristone's safety record in court.

And yet, Dr. Overton remains dangerously out of step with the general public, medicine, and science on the subject of medication abortion with mifepristone and her record explicitly showcases that she will do everything in her power to ban medication abortion.

She celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade as “a huge victory for life,” dismissed federal legislation protecting abortion rights as “radicalism,” and has promoted misinformation about the safety of medication abortion that contradicts more than two decades of evidence. As a member of the America First Policy Institute, Overton authored position papers advocating draconian federal regulation of medication abortion. Such measures would dangerously cripple access to safe abortion.

Her nomination to this role is a threat to women’s health, the credibility of the FDA, and the wellbeing of every American. That’s why I joined over 160+ patients, physicians, and advocates from across the country in signing a letter to Senators to reject her nomination.

Beyond politics, it has been noted that Dr. Overton lacks the administrative experience necessary to manage an organization as large as the FDA, with thousands of employees. If confirmed, she would report to an HHS secretary who also lacked significant administrative experience. When RFK Jr. faced nomination, much of the focus was on his lack of training in science, medicine, or healthcare. Less discussed was his lack of management experience, the consequences of which have been evident in the organizational disarray at HHS.

Dr. Overton has laudable academic credentials, including a PhD from Johns Hopkins. But a prestigious degree and impressive publications alone are not enough to lead one of the country’s most consequential healthcare agencies. They are the table stakes, not the winning hand.

You have to have experience running a large organization to be charged with leading another large organization. Given the respective stakes at the FDA, we should not be rolling those dice.

A physician-leader who can do everything is a truly amazing person: someone who treats patients as a doctor, educates as a teacher, investigates as a scientist, and manages thousands of employees with administrative ease. Such people are rare, but they exist. We know who they are, and these are the people who should be considered for such a critical role at the FDA — not Dr. Overton

If confirmed, Dr. Overton will join the growing list of notably unqualified candidates this administration has nominated at the expense of the American people, and we must continue to speak up against these affronts on our democracy.

A provocative piece by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times recently compared the rise of AI to the technological explosion caused by the railroads in the late 19th century. The railroads, Bouie reminds us, had an enormous influence over American economic and political life.

They created vast fortunes for the few and dominated government at all levels, extracting land grants, minerals, loans, and other benefits while evading meaningful regulation.

Bouie points to the opposition that emerged against the railroads from the Populist movement, but he misses an important part of that history: Farmers and workers eventually built a new political party outside the two-party system to challenge not only the railroads, but also banks and other concentrations of corporate power.

Known initially as the Farmers’ Alliance, the People’s Party emerged nationally in the late 19th century explicitly attacking corporate monopoly and the political power of concentrated wealth. The People’s Party called for a new economic commonwealth based in part on cooperatives, businesses owned collectively—a vision that resonated with millions of farmers and workers.

Here we are again.

Today, AI companies and their executives have rapidly accumulated political influence in both parties. Individual voices from a range of ideologies, like Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right, speak forcefully against unfettered development. But without countervailing consolidated political power it is difficult to see where sustained pressure for meaningful AI regulation—and serious protections against job loss and growing economic inequality—will come from.

Consider the conflicts of interest already present in Congress.

A recent Sludge analysis of congressional financial disclosures found that 106 members of Congress—roughly one in five—reported household investments in AI developers, chipmakers, cloud infrastructure providers, data-center companies, or private AI startups.

Forty-four of those lawmakers, from both parties, sit on committees with jurisdiction over issues involving AI.

And then there is the torrent of AI political money.

According to the Washington Post, AI companies and their allies committed more than $185 million by March to influence the 2026 elections, as competing industry factions sought to shape how—and how much, or how little—AI would be regulated. The total today is surely much larger.

A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission filings found that AI companies, industry-connected groups, and leading executives donated at least $83 million during 2025 alone to federal campaigns and committees.

And the spending has produced political results. For example, of the 20 candidates receiving AI-industry support in early Texas and North Carolina primaries, 19 won or advanced to runoffs, according to the Washington Post.

Crime in the Suites

Meanwhile, autonomous AI systems have crossed lines that would have triggered serious law-enforcement action if performed by human hackers.

The latest example, just recently disclosed, involves an OpenAI agent that gained unauthorized access to an Australian government health-data portal. The incident occurred in June, but according to OpenAI, the company did not discover it until August, and the Australian government was not notified until September 10. Australian authorities say the agent subverted their website’s security and gained access to non-public files.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the incident unacceptable and ordered a forensic investigation. Australian authorities are considering possible legal action. At this time there have been no criminal charges filed in the U.S. against AI companies involved in the runaway agent events we’ve been told about.

Meanwhile, the hits keep happening as OpenAI’s rogue programs hacked the U.S. Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Which raises a question we should be asking much more loudly:

When an AI system or agent commits an act that would potentially be criminal if performed by a human, shouldn’t the executives of the corporation that created and deployed the system be legally responsible?

How Do We Control AI?

I have argued that prosecutors should test the boundaries of existing law when autonomous AI systems gain unauthorized access to computer systems. If current law is unable to hold anyone responsible, Congress should close that gap. Otherwise, AI corporations and their agents could effectively avoid legal responsibility for bad behavior, something very close to operating above the law.

But regulation and prosecution ultimately depend upon political power. And that power within the two parties is increasingly influenced by AI money.

That brings us back to the Populists.

The farmers and workers of the late 19th century did not limit themselves to asking politicians already dependent on powerful economic interests to protect them. They organized independently, developed their own programs, and eventually created the People’s Party, which elected in the 1890s approximately 1,500 candidates to local and state offices, including three governors, five US senators, and 10 members of the House. The party became a force to be reckoned with across the Great Plains and Midwest, and their impact is still felt today. (See the Bank of North Dakota, the only public bank in America.)

Could something analogous happen today?

The potential constituencies for a new party are obvious: Communities fighting the spread of data centers and the political deals that enable them; workers worried about losing their jobs to AI automation; workers facing mass layoffs to enrich corporate investors; and tens of millions of voters alienated from both major parties.

What is missing is an independent political movement capable of bringing them together.

That will require education, organizing and, above all, many acts of defiance—including a willingness to challenge political arrangements that many people have come to regard as permanent.

My book, A Party of Our Own, contributes to a discussion about starting a new party, but a book can’t build a movement. That will take many more people, active organizations, and effective experiments to find a path forward. To be sure, It will be an uphill struggle.

But the history Bouie invokes also reminds us that political arrangements that appear permanent don’t have to remain that way. The American people are capable of building great movements.

Let’s hope it happens again—and soon.

President Trump delivered a startling speech at the United Nations General Assembly in which he threatened to annihilate Iran with nuclear weapons. Even more shocking, journalists and international statesmen largely greeted this insane outburst with a shrug.

The post Just Trump Being Trump appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On September 18, the US Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations) is everywhere in our mixed-economy country.

Here is an incomplete list of public goods, services, benefits, and institutions that Democratic candidates can invoke in asking their GOP opponents: “Which one of the following will you tell voters you want to get rid of?”

1. Public Lands - Parks and National Forests
2. Public Schools and Universities
3. Public Transit
4. U.S. Postal Service
5. Public Drinking Water Departments
6. Public Electric Utilities
7. Public Fire Departments
8. Public Libraries
9. Public Roads and Highways
10. VA hospitals
11. Mandatory Minimum Wages
12. SNAP Food Stamps
13. Unemployment Compensation Payments
14. Social Security
15. Medicare
16. Medicaid
17. Head Start
18. Peace Corps and AmeriCorps
19. Meals on Wheels
20. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The list can go on. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon begged the big drug companies to work on anti-malaria medicines. Malaria was the second leading cause of hospitalization for US soldiers in that undeclared war. Big Pharma refused, saying there was too little profit in one-time anti-malarial shots, compared with medicines soldiers were taking every day. So, the Pentagon chose socialism, setting up its own drug development entity in its two military hospitals. Pentagon scientists and doctors developed three of the four anti-malaria drugs in use and offered them to any country for use, without imposing patent monopolies.

Probably one of the nation’s earliest and foremost mixed-economy-minded civic founders was Ben Franklin. A successful businessman, he also knew the meaning of the phrase later coined by Amory Lovins: “Markets make a good servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” Societies have many necessities that markets—meaning private companies—don’t supply when immediate profits are insufficient. Franklin helped create institutions to meet some of those needs: Philadelphia’s subscription Library Company, the volunteer Union Fire Company, and the Academy and College of Philadelphia, a precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in colonial postal administration. These were not all government-operated public agencies, but they were civic institutions intended to serve broad public purposes.

Public works were crucial in enabling private business enterprises to flourish. Consider the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It created a navigable commercial route between the Atlantic economy and the Great Lakes interior, reducing transportation costs and accelerating settlement and trade. The growth of the nation-building national post office is an example of a spectacular universal “democratic socialistic” public institution.

When these and other socialistic enterprises generated consumer or worker demand, private corporate usurpers moved to undermine them, seize a piece of this governmental success and their publicly created value, rip them off as vendors, or persistently disparage these services to get the public to lose confidence in them. This corporate propaganda never stops.

For years, health insurance companies have carved out or hollowed out parts of Medicare and Medicaid. For the former, it is called “Medicare Advantage” (we call it Medicare Disadvantage), a cleverly deceptive trap, heavily advertised for elderly beneficiaries, costing traditional Medicare many billions of dollars a year, going for profits to the likes of giant United Health Care Corp. and Aetna. Both the Biden and Trump Justice Departments have gone after these in-built long exposed corporate frauds.

For example, the Justice Department has pursued Medicare Advantage fraud and False Claims Act cases involving inflated risk scores, unsupported diagnosis codes, and other practices that increase taxpayer payments. Recent settlements include $556 million from Kaiser Permanente affiliates, $172.3 million from Cigna, and up to $98 million from Independent Health. Medicare and Medicaid are highly vulnerable to waste, overpayments, and fraud. Federal estimates placed combined improper payments in the two programs at more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2023 (See Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Fiscal Year 2023 Improper Payments Fact Sheet).

For years, private freight companies have been undermining and restricting the Postal Service’s business—using Congress, for example, to ban the US Postal Service from transporting beer and wine, among other limitations while private carriers may transport alcohol.

The hyper-corporatists do not like to talk about the democratic socialist institutions listed above in taking today’s Democratic Socialists of America to task. So, they seize on some DSA apparatchiks’ media-grabbing declarations such as calls for closing down prisons or defunding the police. Like right-wing extremists, they have learned that to start getting media attention, they have to say off-the-wall or extreme things in absolutist language.

In contrast, elected democratic socialists or candidates generally focus on expanding the frayed “social safety net” for many millions of Americans, restoring taxes on the undertaxed giant companies that pay little or no US income tax or the superrich with their clever tax lawyers, and cracking down on corporate crooks ripping off hard-earned consumer dollars and savings.

To illustrate how modest these elected self-described democratic socialists are, consider New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He has never supported, even while a state assemblyman in Albany, repeal of an enormous daily electronic rebate of a tiny sales tax on stock sales. Under legislation signed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977 and fully phased in by 1981, Carey agreed to a deal with the stock market brokerage industry, that has rebated hundreds of billions of dollars back to Wall Street. Still, Mamdani, who needs money for his free childcare, free buses and other programs, is unwilling to demand a stop to the rebate. We’re also still waiting for Mayor Mamdani to call for greater enforcement against corporate crime, fraud, and abuses in the city. (See my columns: Mamdani’s Magnificent Primary Win—What Follows, June 27, 2025 and Open Letter to Zohran Mamdani – Political Moderate, December 5, 2025).

To the people of America: You have a people’s economy—much of it still intact—to preserve, strengthen, and bring up to date. Greet the Chamber’s Free Enterprise Bus when it comes to your state (check the Chamber’s website) with signs like: “Stop the Corporate Crime Wave,” or “Get the Rich Off Welfare.”

See my book, Let’s Start the Revolution, Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.

As Cicero wrote in The Tusculan Disputations (three centuries before Julius Caesar, the dictator who ruled Rome), the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, tired of the flattery and envy of his courtier Damocles, invited him to sit on his throne. Damocles enjoyed the banquet for no more than a few minutes. When he looked up, he saw a sword hanging above his head, suspended by a horsehair. It was a warning: Those in power live under a constant threat. If they are aware of it, they will be alert to the consequences of their decisions.

At that time, the common people were more feared than the city’s wealthy. At that time, it was the wealthiest who had to foot the bill for most of the wars they dared to wage. But Julius Caesar was assassinated a year later, not by his own people, but by a group of senators representing the Roman oligarchy. It was an act of mutual betrayal, since these senators had been his main allies in government. Exactly 30 years later, Plutarch reported on the assassination of Quintus Sertorius in Hispania at the hands of mercenary officers, who did not receive the expected compensation—a classic reminder that “Rome does not pay traitors.”

Two thousand years later, we have achieved the opposite marvel: It is not the rich who pay for the wars they invent, but they are who profits from them. It is the people who provide all the money and all the blood that fuel a system administered by the sect of neo-feudal lords—a system infinitely more corrupt, more degenerate, and more brutal than the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire combined.

A business owner’s “sacred right” to fire someone who, in his judgment, is not meeting expectations does not apply to those at the top.

Systematically, and especially in so-called liberal democracies, the traitors are the Julius Caesars and their oligarchs; they are the Quintus Sertoriuses and his officers. They are the puppets that the puppeteer will make kill one another, to the people’s amusement. They are the Yamandú Orsis and the Delsy Rodríguezes on the left. They are the Javier Mileis, the José Antonio Kasts, the Alberto Fujimoris, the Jair Bolsonaros, and the Abelardo de la Espriellas on the right.

We have built republics where the sword of Damocles hangs over the citizen’s head—not over that of the ruler. Puppet presidents, after having betrayed their people and themselves, sleep soundly. They know—or believe—that for four or eight years, no matter what happens, no one can touch them. As history shows, this is an illusion; but history also shows that justice delayed is justice denied, because we humans cannot wait 100 years. We don’t even have a reserve supply of young people to make up for lost time.

Every four or five years, citizens of countries that perceive themselves as full-fledged democracies—such as Uruguay—sign a blank contract. They elect a president, and if they later discover that the promises were mere window dressing, all that remains for them is therapy, resignation, and republican patience until the circus returns to town.

Uruguay takes pride—with some justification—in its civic tradition, which includes plebiscites and referendums, such as the one in 1989 that confirmed impunity for human rights violators and, in the 1990s, halted privatizations despite the almost unanimous support of politicians in favor of the Washington Consensus. But neither Uruguay, nor Argentina, nor Brazil, nor Chile, nor Paraguay, nor Peru has a mechanism for citizens to recall their presidents. Impeachment proceedings are unreliable, because they are mediated by a representative body invented to ensure “responsible stability” for the major shareholders in each country.

In controlled democracies, laws are written by the powerful—the feudal lords of capital—who are almost always residents of the imperial capitals. When workers’ interests do not offend or inconvenience them due to their modesty, these laws are also passed off as achievements of the organized people. However, a law can be repealed; a term of office cannot—especially when the puppet plays along with those who hold the real power to promote, buy, extort, and remove.

Other societies have this instrument of removal, though it has rarely been used. In California, Gov. Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, while Gavin Newsom survived his recall in 2021. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico, the recall process has been included in those countries’ constitutions during the presidencies of Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Manuel López Obrador. In Colombia (approved by César Gaviria), recall is available for mayors and governors, but the requirements are so high that there are almost no cases.

As is more than obvious, this mechanism is not enough to ensure a more just and direct democracy, but it remains a useful sword of Damocles; however, a democratic instrument is not measured by how often it is used, but by what it prevents. A fire extinguisher isn’t meant to put out fires every day either. Recall is not merely a punishment. It is, above all, a form of political education.

The objections are predictable: The instrument could become a weapon for sore losers; it could lead to a state of perpetual campaigning. Historical experience suggests otherwise, and, moreover, we must always begin a political reflection by asking ourselves whether these arguments serve those who hold the real power or the people. Even generous donations are used to do harm. That is why every reform bill must be carefully worded to guarantee this popular right and prevent good intentions from being hijacked once again.

To prevent abuse, the process might require that a high percentage of citizens sign the petition and that it cannot be initiated in the first or last year of the term. Designing the instrument correctly is the civilized way of ensuring it is not abandoned.

It will also be said that Uruguay already has impeachment and elections every five years. But impeachment is a matter for the elites—resolved among legislators who answer to the same parties that support the president or the opposition, both more or less anointed by the owners of capital. When the gap between campaign promises and government actions is displayed with brazen paternalism, citizens watch as spectators as they are humiliated. The school of resignation and futile complaining has been the mother of this political pornography.

A society that learns that voting is an irrevocable gamble ends up voting with distrust and, in the long run, ceases to participate. The old observation we wrote in 2013 for a legal journal: The worst thing that can happen to a democracy is for its citizens to leave politics in the hands of politicians (Revista Forumul Judecătorilor, No. 1/2014).

After all, in a world shaped by capitalist dogmas, it is always the heads of large corporations and their puppets in the political system who do not abide by their own laws. A business owner’s “sacred right” to fire someone who, in his judgment, is not meeting expectations does not apply to those at the top. The freedom of the powerful is protected by money and the law; the freedom of the powerless, by rights and legitimacy.

Neither can be achieved or defended without some form of radical struggle.

Millet, sorghum, fonio, Bambara groundnut, cowpea, amaranth, pigeon pea, taro. For decades these crops were treated as the food of the past. Research money, extension, subsidies, and markets went to maize, wheat, and rice. Yet African farmers, most of them women, kept planting them, saving the seed, sharing it with neighbors, and cooking with them. They did it with very little help.

Now, suddenly, the same crops are fashionable. Climate change, poor diets, and tired soils have pushed them into conference halls and donor strategies. I welcome that. But I keep coming back to one question: Who gets to decide what happens to them next?

The question hit me again at a side event on African adapted crops during the Africa Food Systems Forum, hosted by the Africa Adaptation Crops Initiative, the Food Action Alliance, AGRA, TechnoServe, and Bain & Company. I went in encouraged. Before long, the discussion had slipped into a familiar script: raise productivity, formalize seed, mechanize, attract private investment, link farmers to big buyers. I am not against research, processing, or markets. My worry is what happens when crops that African communities developed and protected over generations are treated first as business opportunities. We could change the crop and leave the system exactly as it was.

Let the women who kept these crops alive sit where decisions are taken. And judge success by diets, biodiversity, soil health, incomes, and farmers’ control over seed, not only by tons and dollars.

The same worry applies to the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, known as VACS. It was launched by the US State Department with the African Union and Food and Agriculture Organization to promote diverse, nutritious, climate-adapted crops grown in healthy soils. On paper, it takes neglected crops seriously and brings soil back into the conversation. Both are long overdue. So the issue is not whether to invest, but what kind of investment, and controlled by whom.

Look at who was in the room when VACS was designed. Early research profiling possible “opportunity crops” was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and in December 2023 Washington announced $150 million in support for that year. African farmer organizations were not consulted while the program was being planned. Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, whose members have campaigned for years to promote nutritious local crops, was never approached. When the journalist Alexander Zaitchik asked me about it, I had to tell him that nobody from VACS’ leadership or affiliate groups had ever reached out to us or our networks.

Who was at the table instead? Zaitchik’s reporting for Truthdig, from the World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, is revealing. Cargill, Bayer, Syngenta, and John Deere are listed as “VACS champions,” alongside the Rockefeller and Gates foundations. The World Food Prize Foundation, where VACS was showcased, is chaired by a former president of Corteva, the seed giant formed from the Dow and DuPont merger. Cary Fowler, the US special envoy who championed VACS, has told audiences that “the answers to the world’s food insecurity issues may lie in for-profit companies.” When the world’s biggest grain, seed, and agrochemical companies are champions of a program on Africa’s seeds, and African farmers are not even asked, we are entitled to ask whose programme it really is.

Zaitchik’s larger point is that VACS, for all its new language, carries the assumptions of the Green Revolution. The crops are different, but outside expertise is still placed above farmers’ knowledge, and yields above food sovereignty. It was telling that at a 2023 VACS event, then Secretary of State Antony Blinken held up Norman Borlaug as the precedent. The pattern is familiar: Experts define the problem, breeders supply the technology, financiers bring the money, companies build the markets, and farmers adopt and supply.

And opportunity for whom? For the woman who has kept Bambara groundnut varieties alive? For the farmer selling millet at the weekly market? For a public breeder at an African university? Or for a seed company, a food multinational, or investors looking for the next growth market? These interests are not the same.

This is why seed is the heart of the matter. CGIAR, VACS’ main research partner, reports breeding work on Bambara groundnut, finger millet, okra, sesame, taro, amaranth, and pigeon pea, guided by market intelligence and “Target Product Profiles.” VACS officials say CGIAR treats its seeds as public goods. But what outside actors do with those seeds, including patenting them, is up to them. With seed companies among the champions, the risk is plain: Crops that farmers bred over centuries could become more valuable just as farmers lose control of them. As I told Zaitchik, no project involved in advancing punitive seed patent regimes has the interest of African farmers at heart. Seed governance, farmers’ rights, and benefit sharing must be settled before breeding programs are designed, not after.

Farmers have been plant breeders for thousands of years, and diversity is Africa’s real strength: hundreds of cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruits, roots, and local varieties. Once donors and markets pick a short list of “opportunity crops,” money and breeding capacity crowd around them. My concern is everything left off the list. Diversity is not inefficiency. It is our insurance. A farm with millet, cowpea, vegetables, fruit trees,and a few animals may produce fewer tons of millet than a monoculture, but more nutrition, fodder, healthier soil, and a steadier income in a bad year. Judge only the millet yield and we will end up with higher-yielding Indigenous crops on simpler, more fragile farms.

Markets need the same care. A mother buying millet in a village market is demand. A school buying vegetables from nearby farms is demand. Public procurement by schools and hospitals could create reliable markets for these foods and keep money in local economies. Processors and exporters can take part, but policy should not be written backward from their specifications.

So what would I ask of AGRA, VACS, and the others? Start by talking to African farmer movements, and give them a real say in governing research agendas, not a consultation after the decisions are made. Put public money into farmer-managed seed systems and participatory breeding. Commit clearly that seeds developed from African crops will not end up under corporate patents. Let the women who kept these crops alive sit where decisions are taken. And judge success by diets, biodiversity, soil health, incomes, and farmers’ control over seed, not only by tons and dollars.

The world has discovered that crops African farmers refused to abandon may matter for everyone’s climate future. But they were never lost. They were being planted, selected, exchanged, cooked, and protected all along. The people who did that work must not now become raw-material suppliers for someone else’s revolution. Africa’s crops do not need rescuing from African farmers. They need investment that puts those farmers at the center of what comes next.

A tale of two couples:

Barney and Betty are both 66. Betty works as a hostess at a local restaurant. She makes $15,000 in hourly pay, plus another $25,000 in tips. Barney owns an interest in his family’s business, organized as a Subchapter S corporation, from which his annual income is $50,000. Over the holidays, Barney works long hours at a local big box store. He makes $10,000, $2,500 of which is the premium for overtime.

At tax time, Barney and Betty report $100,000 of adjusted gross income. In computing their taxable income, they take deductions of $25,000 for Betty’s tips, $12,000 in deductions for seniors, a $10,000 qualified business income deduction for Barney’s income from the family business, a $2,500 deduction for Barney’s overtime pay, and a standard deduction of $35,500, leaving them with taxable income of $15,000 and a federal income tax bill liability of $1,500.

The only path out of this mess is to rebalance our income tax structure. The Working Americans Tax Cut Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.O would accomplish that rebalancing.

Fred and Wilma are both 64. Wilma no longer works. Fred makes $100,000 per year as an accountant with a local firm. Although he works long hours during tax season, he is not paid overtime because of his base compensation and position, which includes managerial duties. At tax time, Fred and Wilma report $100,000 of adjusted gross income. They take a standard deduction of $32,200, leaving them with taxable income of $67,800 and a federal income tax liability of $7,640.

These are, of course, concocted examples. But they show how tax policy in the US under President Donald Trump has returned to the Stone Age. There are couples with tax pictures virtually identical to Barney and Betty’s and other couples with tax pictures virtually identical to Fred and Wilma’s. Do they ever compare their respective situations? Do they question the Swiss cheese tax code we have courtesy of two Trump tax bills?

Could it get worse? Absolutely. As Brian Faler at Politico reported, members of Congress have a slew of new “no tax on” proposals ready to campaign on. No Tax on Boat Loan Interest? Yep. Taxes on Utility Bills? Absolutely, and it’s bipartisan no less! I spoke to a senior congressional staffer a few months ago who was just giddy about all the “no tax on” proposals his office hoped to include in a 2029 budget reconciliation bill.

The “no tax on” provisions currently in the tax code are set to expire after 2028. Will they be extended? Of course they will. As I commented to Politico, if you do away with no tax on tips, you can kiss the state of Nevada goodbye. And imagine how this will play in the other swing states in 2028. “No tax on auto workers” sure will sound sweet in Michigan. And if you want to carry Georgia, you damn well better sign on to “no tax on peanut farm workers.” By the time we get to the 2032 campaign, the pandering will be stripped of all pretense and we’ll be hearing “no tax on Pennsylvanians.”

How problematic is this from a tax policy perspective? Huge. The federal income tax system depends on voluntary compliance. The system must make sense to taxpayers for them to voluntarily comply. If you’re Fred or Wilma, would our tax system still make sense to you? Hardly.

How, then, do we rein this craziness in? We start by identifying the source of the problem. As gimmicky as provisions like no tax on tips are, and even though they benefit only a tiny percentage of workers, they address a need millions of Americans feel and millions more Americans understand. When people hear “tipped worker,” they don’t picture the blackjack dealer at the Venetian making $150,000 a year. They don’t even picture a worker like Betty, who together with her husband enjoys a comfortable income. They picture the struggling unmarried server at their local Denny’s slinging dishes for $35,000. And they understand well she doesn’t have enough income before federal income tax, let alone after, to pay her basic living expenses.

Now, consider struggling non-tipped workers and their reaction to no tax on tips. Do they think their tipped counterparts are getting an unfair break like the ultra rich get on their lightly-taxed investment gains? Or do they think that they should have their income tax burdens reduced as well, and that the rich should be required to pay more?

Asking those questions, of course, answers them, and shines a light on the real problem: The federal income tax is fundamentally flawed at both ends of the income spectrum. At the lower end, incomes not even sufficient to cover basic living expenses are subject to federal income tax. At the upper end, marginal rates top out at a fraction of the country’s highest income levels. Doctors making in the high six figures face the same marginal tax rate as CEOs making 50 times that much.

The only path out of this mess is to rebalance our income tax structure. The Working Americans Tax Cut Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.O would accomplish that rebalancing. Their bill provides an exemption from federal income tax for income up to the basic cost of living, with a progressively smaller income tax reduction for those with incomes just above the basic cost of living. At the same time, the bill imposes a surtax on income in excess of $1 million, and larger surtaxes on incomes above $2 million and $5 million.

If the Working Americans Tax Cut Act becomes law, the ghastly “no tax on” provisions could be allowed to expire. The great majority of tipped workers, like that struggling server at Denny’s, won’t care, since they’d pay no federal income tax either way. A handful of taxpayers would still benefit from no tax on tips. But nobody will waste political capital on a tax break for affluent blackjack dealers.

Members of Congress face a choice. They can continue their vote-pandering through “no tax on” proposals. Or they can address the glaring structural flaws in the federal income tax and, in doing so, perhaps save our tax system and our democracy.

Let’s hope they make the right choice. Stone Age tax policy won’t end well for any of us.

This article was originally published on Bob Lord's Substack.

The US Supreme Court opens its new term on October 5 with oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder—the most consequential climate case it has heard to date. The fossil fuel defendants are trying to block local governments from suing them for climate deception and harm. In an alarming display of corporate allegiance, the nation’s largest property insurance associations have sided with the oil companies seeking to avoid responsibility for climate losses, over the public entities and policyholders footing the growing bill.

In recent years, insurers have pointed to growing climate risk as the reason for raising rates and dropping coverage. Now, they’re supporting the very industry driving that risk rather than the communities facing it. Why?

Suncor v. Boulder and the Demand for Fossil Fuel Accountability

From establishing cooling centers and flood protection plans to equipping firefighters and emergency responders, communities are shouldering the mounting costs of climate change. The burden is both untenable and unfair. That’s why a growing number of states and local governments have turned to courts to make fossil fuel companies pay their share for driving the climate crisis.

Fossil-fueled climate destruction threatens human life, health, the economy, and vital ecosystems on which all depend. That reality should incentivize insurers to break free from fossil fuels faster and protect the public from climate peril.

Of the nearly three dozen such suits pending across the US, Suncor v. Boulder is the first to reach the Supreme Court.

The case, brought by the city and county of Boulder, alleges Suncor and ExxonMobil knowingly contributed to climate change for decades by producing fossil fuels while deceiving the public about their dangers. Boulder argues the companies should be on the hook for the resulting climate harms and the rising costs of adapting to a warming world.

Rather than address the legal claims on their merits, the fossil fuel defendants have instead sought to get the case thrown out. They are urging the Supreme Court to bar Boulder’s suit on the grounds that it aims to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, something they claim only federal law can do. But as the plaintiffs and dozens of supporters explain, Boulder is seeking to recoup the costs of local harm and to hold the fossil fuel defendants accountable for misleading consumers, not pollution controls.

If the court rules for the defendants, it could close the door not just on this suit but others like it nationwide—leaving the public and local governments, rather than the companies that caused the harm, to keep covering the costs.

Who’s Backing the Fossil Fuel Defendants?

Nearly 70 friend-of-the-court briefs were filed in the case—many, like the Center for International Environmental Law’s, supporting the plaintiffs. Others, however, came in on the side of the fossil fuel industry. Among the 38 briefs backing Suncor and ExxonMobil, Consumer Watchdog found that 25 of them have documented financial ties to fossil fuel companies or the dark-money networks behind decades of climate denial.

Three major US insurance trade associations—the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), the Complex Insurance Claims Litigation Association, and the Reinsurance Association of America—also submitted a brief in support of the defendants. These trade groups weren’t part of Consumer Watchdog’s analysis. But insurers, including members of these very associations, have their own story to tell of financial entanglement with the fossil fuel industry.

Betting on the Problem

Like others helping the fossil fuel industry dodge accountability, the insurance sector has well-documented financial ties to oil and gas companies. Property and casualty insurers hold a growing financial stake in fossil fuels—the same products causing the climate losses that are driving insurers to hike premiums and withdraw coverage.

As of 2023, the US property and casualty insurance industry held $84.6 billion in fossil fuel investments. The share of insurers’ portfolios tied up in fossil fuels climbed from 3.8% in 2014 to 4.4% by 2023.

Every premium dollar that flows into those investments comes from policyholders, many of whom are already struggling to afford coverage in fire- and flood-prone areas. While warning it can no longer absorb climate risk, the insurance industry is betting on the very companies creating that risk.

The Real Insurability Crisis

In their published brief in support of the Suncor defendants, the insurance associations argue that allowing state tort claims like Boulder’s could make it harder for fossil fuel companies to get liability insurance—potentially creating uncertainty and instability in the insurance market.

But they ignore the actual uncertainty and instability facing tens of millions of homeowners and tenants in the US who are bearing the brunt of climate losses and a deepening insurance crisis. In 2025, the US saw more than 23 billion-dollar weather events. The country racked up the lion’s share of global insured losses last year from what the industry continues to call “natural catastrophes,” which include climate-intensified events.

Citing climate risk, insurers are raising rates, dropping policies, and widening the climate protection gap. Home insurance premiums in the US grew by almost 50% between 2020 and 2024—more than double the rate of inflation. And since 2018, insurers have dropped more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide, contributing to a rising number of uninsured homes.

Yet the insurance industry opposes efforts to make the fossil fuel companies responsible for rising climate risk pay their fair share for resulting climate harm. If insurers are sounding the alarm, it should be about the reality of climate change, not the prospect of climate accountability.

What Are Insurers Afraid of?

It’s no wonder fossil fuel companies are seeking to stay out of court. The facts are not on their side—and neither is the law. Why, then, are the insurers?

Make no mistake, real climate accountability would be destabilizing for the fossil fuel industry. But climate change is already more destabilizing—for everyone. The inevitable and transient upheaval that will come from holding polluters responsible for the harm they have caused will be far less destabilizing than the predicted and irreparable impacts of unchecked climate change.

Fossil-fueled climate destruction threatens human life, health, the economy, and vital ecosystems on which all depend. That reality should incentivize insurers to break free from fossil fuels faster and protect the public from climate peril, rather than insulate polluters from the climate costs they have knowingly unleashed.

The message to the insurance industry is clear: Insure our collective future and make fossil fuels a thing of the past.

Last week, I was pleased to once again participate in a meeting with one of my US Senators, Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a consistent leader for peace, justice, and human rights in Congress, and especially for ending US support for Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing against the people of Palestine.

The subject of the meeting was his bill, with a vote expected early next week, Senate Resolution 852, to hold Israel accountable for its horrific actions against US citizens killed or detained by Israel. The goal of the resolution is very simple: within 30 days of passage, to require a State Department report on Israel’s alleged killings of nine US citizens, and more broadly, on the commission of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights by Israel.” The resolution cites US law, section 502(B)(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

The resolution reads, in part “...since January 2022, at least nine United States citizens have been killed by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces in the West Bank, including Omar Assad, Shireen Abu Akleh, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, Mohammad Khdour, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, Amer Rabee, Sayfollah Kamel Musallet, Khamis Ayyad, and Nasrallah Abu Siyam” and “...the killings of these Americans in the West Bank have been met by a lack of accountability from the Netanyahu government and an inability to secure justice by the United States Government.”

This resolution can help bring an end to US support for Israel’s atrocities, something most people in this country, especially nearly three-quarters of Democrats, support.

Asking the Department of State to produce such a report sounds like the absolute minimum we, as taxpayers, deserve from our government, and certainly the families of those killed by Israel, likely with US-provided weapons, deserve that and much more. The resolution is supported by 84% of voters, on a bipartisan basis, in a just-released poll, and has 24 Senate co-sponsors. And as the resolution states, and many supporters note, protecting US citizens abroad is constantly touted as the top priority for US foreign policy, even by the current rogue Trump regime that regularly flouts domestic and international law, with the most egregious example being the illegal US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

Peace advocates regularly support much stronger legislation, and will do so repeatedly, until peace, justice, and human rights are the real foundations of US foreign policy, and not just paid cynical lip service. Soon there will likely be a Joint Resolution of Disapproval (JRD) in Congress to stop the proposed shipment of 40,000 one-ton bombs to Israel. The Biden administration, as bad as it was in its support for Israel during the razing of Gaza, had put this sale on hold, but President Donald Trump is now moving it forward. But the relatively modest Van Hollen resolution would be an important step toward ending Israel’s impunity, and if we can’t get justice for American citizens killed by Israel, then Congress is completely derelict in doing its job.

Peace Action and our colleagues have already generated over 57,000 letters to the Senate in favor of Sen. Van Hollen’s resolution, and many groups are pushing to get that figure close to 100,000, if not more.

With the mess in Congress (not to mention the administration and Supreme Court), there is no guarantee this resolution will pass, or even get a vote, though it is considered privileged, so it can’t be bottled up indefinitely under Senate rules. It could get punted to the lame-duck congressional session after the midterm elections. Regardless, along with other proposed legislation such as the JRD in the pipeline, this resolution can help bring an end to US support for Israel’s atrocities, something most people in this country, especially nearly three-quarters of Democrats, support.

While I doubt hardcore supporters of Israel in this country will be swayed by much of anything, there is a growing political inevitability at play here. Regardless of what one thinks of the state of Israel, its actions, or its “right” to certain territory, US taxpayers are not going to continue to put up with endless amounts of US weaponry and military going to support genocide, apartheid, and gross human rights violations. And it’s easy to connect to the “affordability crisis” in the US and elsewhere. Young Americans who can’t afford to buy a car, let alone a house, and lack the free universal healthcare Israelis enjoy, have especially turned against Israel. The pipeline of US military support is going to be shut off eventually, and perhaps sooner than expected. Politicians of any party ignore this reality at their own peril.

President Donald Trump is in trouble and he knows it.

• He promised “no more foreign wars,” but started a war with Iran that he has lost.
• He promised to tame inflation, but tariffs and his war of choice have made it worse.
• He promised to deport only the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has terrorized American cities as agents sometimes arrested, detained, wounded, or killed US citizens.
• He promised to make the United States the most respected country in the world, but he has destroyed America’s reputation and alienated its allies.
• He calls himself the best president in history, but his approval rating has dropped to the mid-30s—his lowest ever and approaching President Richard Nixon’s final approval rating of 24% shortly before his resignation in 1974.
• He tells his audiences to pretend he’s on the ballot in November, but many Republican congressional candidates are distancing themselves from him.
• Sen. John Curtis (R) from ruby-red Utah is not up for reelection, but he has urged an investigation into the Trump family’s financial dealings and the potential for corruption.
• Trump promised lower interest rates on home mortgages, but 30-year fixed-rate mortgages now exceed 7%—the highest since May 2024.
• He promised gasoline below $2.00 per gallon, but the price has soared to an average of $4.50 per gallon. The price of diesel has increased even more dramatically—to a record-shattering $6.50 per gallon.

The list goes on and on. So Trump turned to a familiar foil and a proven strategy: Attack the press to divert public attention from his failures.

Same Old Playbook

CNN, MSNOW, and Politico won the first round in Trump’s latest attempt to subvert the First Amendment. But Trump’s shiny object consumed the media. His goal now is to extend the controversy.

Act I

While many of his most senior advisers were away at 3:00 pm on Friday, September 18, Trump announced on social media that he was banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. At first nothing happened, but by Saturday morning the press passes for reporters at those organizations no longer allowed them past White House security.

On Monday morning, September 21, the news organizations sued the Trump administration for violating their First Amendment right to a free press and their Fifth Amendment right to due process of law.

On Tuesday, September 22, the White House sent the organizations what it purported were notices of the revocations, giving them until Friday to respond.

Act II

At a court hearing on Wednesday, September 23, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted the laughable argument that the White House letter sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, September 22—days after Trump revoked the press passes—somehow satisfied the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process prior to any revocation.

The DOJ also told the judge that amorphous “national security” concerns justified revoking the passes. But Trump’s own statements of his reasons for the revocation undercut that argument.

Without reaching the First Amendment issues, the court based its constitutional ruling on Trump’s failure to provide due process. Judge Timothy J. Kelly—a Trump appointee—granted a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to restore the revoked press credentials immediately.

Act III

Judge Kelly issued his opinion around 1:00 am on Thursday, September 24. But as the business day began, the affected reporters’ press passes were still disabled, prompting the news organizations to file an emergency motion before Judge Kelly. The Justice Department responded with a declaration stating that press access had been restored at 9:55 am, so the judge cancelled the hearing.

But that evening, reporters for CNN and MSNOW were turned away from the state dinner arrivals at the White House, where Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Act IV

To satisfy Trump, government attorneys are probably working on a new strategy. Here’s one possible scenario:

1. The White House imposes less drastic restrictions on its disfavored press outlets. Slow walking the reinstatement of press passes and preventing CNN and MSNOW reporters from covering arrivals at the state dinner for President Xi Thursday night could be previews of coming attractions.
2. The White House gives the news organizations new notices and an opportunity to be heard before suspending their press passes again. The notices would concoct arguments, probably with a focus on Trump’s favorite phrase for justifying his consolidation of power—“national security.”
3. The White House would then revoke the press passes.
4. The news organizations would file another lawsuit challenging the revocation.
5. Trump would lose again, but he would press ahead in the hope that eventually the US Supreme Court would bail him out. If Trump loses in the DC Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court probably would refuse to take the case—leaving his loss in place.
6. If the Supreme Court accepted the case, I predict it would issue a 7-2 opinion—with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting—confirming that the First Amendment still means what it says.
7. All of this will take time. And most importantly, it will remain a big news item that diverts at least some attention away from the broader failures of Trump’s presidency.

“The People’s House”

Trump has been eager to tear down the East Wing, reshape the White House grounds, turn the interior into a gilded spectacle, and otherwise impose his dramatic construction ideas at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yet shortly after revoking the press credentials of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, he told reporters: "It's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff.”

In the next sentence, he revealed himself: “Now, if they want to write them, that's fine. But I don't have to let them into my, into the people's house."

Trump thinks the White House belongs exclusively to him. But his lease ends in two years, and no security deposit is sufficient to cover the profound damage he is inflicting on the nation.

Meanwhile, it is vital to beat back Trump’s repeated assaults in the Constitution. But it’s also important to remember that among the most important underlying goals of his most outrageous actions is diverting Americans from the mess that he has made of the country.

The interest rate on 30-year bonds rose to 5.4%, the highest rate since July of 2003. It’s not clear exactly why the rate rose, but expectations of higher inflation do not seem a plausible explanation. The interest rate on inflation-indexed bonds has been rising pretty much in tandem with the rise on 30-year bonds. This means we are looking at higher real interest rates.

There are several plausible reasons why real interest rates would increase. A standard explanation is higher government budget deficits. I have always been skeptical of any direct link between deficits and interest rates, but if investors believed that the Fed would respond to deficits by pushing the federal funds rate higher in future years, that would lead to higher interest rates, whether or not a larger deficit was directly the cause.

And we are certainly looking at larger budget deficits now than at the start of the year, due to the war on Iran. This has led to large expenditures to fund the war and will almost certainly lead to larger expenditures in the future, as President Donald Trump seeks to replenish depleted weapon stockpiles and reconstruct bases destroyed in the war. He is requesting a budget of $1.5 trillion, almost 5% of GDP, which would be $600 billion more than the last Biden budget.

There is also the Trump-crazy premium. There are many ways in which the world was reasonably predictable before Trump but no longer is.

The trillions of dollars that the hyperscalers plan to spend building data centers also creates huge demand for borrowing. This spending can also play a role in pushing up rates.

There is also the Trump-crazy premium. There are many ways in which the world was reasonably predictable before Trump but no longer is.

Under Trump, US trade agreements are no longer meaningful. He openly ignores them at will, saying they were signed by “dumb” presidents, including the agreements that he negotiated. Trump has also threatened wars or military actions all over the world, including against longstanding US allies like Denmark and Canada. And he has shown a lack of respect for domestic law, repeatedly violating orders from judges when he disagrees with them.

This erratic behavior almost certainly adds a substantial cost to borrowing. While under other presidents it would have been virtually inconceivable the United States would default on its debt, that is no longer the case. It is entirely plausible that Trump would at least selectively default, not paying off the interest and principal to bondholders he didn’t like. As Trump is fond of saying, he can do whatever he wants.

While that may be fun for him, Trump’s erratic behavior makes life more expensive for everyone else. He has pushed mortgage rates over 7%, making homeownership ever more unaffordable. Higher rates also mean that people have to pay more on car loans and credit card debt, as well as the interest rates businesses and state and local governments have to pay.

The basic story is that while Donald Trump is apparently having a good time, the rest of the country is paying a big price in the form of higher prices for gas, food, electricity, and many other items, as well as higher interest rates. Trump apparently hasn’t noticed this reality, and any of his aides who have are too scared to tell him. It’s very MAGA!

On Saturday the world observes the United Nations International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, known as Nuclear Weapons Elimination Day. It was first observed on September 26, 2014 subsequent to the UN Declaration in December 2013 following high-level United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament. The day provides an opportunity to educate the public and elected officials about the benefits of eliminating nuclear weapons, as well as the humanitarian, social, and economic costs of their continued existence.

Today, our world faces the greatest threat of nuclear war with the devastating possibility of the extinction of humanity. Current nuclear arsenals have roughly 12,187 nuclear weapons, hundreds of which are on hair-trigger alert with the potential to cause the deaths of billions from the use of only this small percentage of the world’s arsenals.

We have seen a breakdown in relationships between the largest nuclear armed states. The expiration of the New START Treaty occurred on February 5 this year. This has left the world for the first time since 1970 with no agreed-upon nuclear limitation treaty. We have witnessed reckless and immoral threats against adversaries and ultimately to all of humanity by the nuclear “superpowers,“ including US President Donald Trump’s not-so-veiled nuclear threat to annihilate Iran and its people before the world community at the UN's 81st General Assembly on Tuesday of this week. Such vitriol and illegal statements regarding the threatened use of nuclear weapons cannot be tolerated. Imagine our reaction if we heard any other nation espousing similar comments before the international community.

An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way.

We have also recently acknowledged the illegal placement of weapons in space by the United States. In our technologically reliant world, the existence and potential use of such weapons threatens much of our day to day lives with the possibility of rendering technology impotent.

Each of these facts when combined with the potential for disruptive technologies, including discussions and testing of artificial intelligence in nuclear war scenarios, led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to reset their famous Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight earlier this year, the closest it has been since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 81 years ago.

The challenge to rein in these weapons seems daunting and impossible.

Yet, at this time of great peril, it is also a time of great opportunity if only we will act. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to take them apart. We have made tremendous progress through the decades reducing global arsenals from roughly 64,000 in 1985 to the current totals. What is needed is the political will and courage.

Internationally, nuclear weapons are illegal to possess, develop, test, acquire, transfer, use, or threaten to use, by virtue of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was adopted on July 7, 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021. This treaty evolved from the inertia of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with the understanding of the humanitarian consequences of even a limited war, and the refusal of the non-nuclear nations to be held hostage any longer by their nuclear counterparts. Initially adopted by 122 nations, the treaty currently has 101 nations that have signed it and 75 that have ratified it through their legislative bodies representing a majority of the world‘s population. The lion's share of effort on this treaty has been by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN is a coalition of 733 international partner organizations.

Here in the United States, a similar grassroots coalition exists called “Back From the Brink.“ This coalition includes 505 organizations encompassing every sector of society, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 594 local and state officials, 70 members of Congress through Congressional Resolutions H.Res 317 and S.Res 323, and 28 community hubs across the nation. Addressing the urgent danger of nuclear weapons, the campaign works to build awareness and support for the need to abolish these weapons coupled with the immediate actionable precautionary measures necessary to prevent nuclear war until their elimination is achieved.

As such, Back From the Brink calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war. It urges the US to enact these five policy solutions:

1. Pursue global elimination of nuclear weapons through a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
2. Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
3. End the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack;
4. Take US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
5. Cancel the plan to replace the entire US arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Working with Back From the Brink is Students for Nuclear Disarmament (SND). As a national, nonpartisan, organization dedicated to raising awareness among Gen Z about the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, its growing presence in high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation educates and empowers young people to take action against the growing threat of nuclear war.

To succeed in this critical effort to save humanity, we must remain informed and work to inform others. Our movement, while still barely noted by corporate media, is unstoppable and must continue to move quickly and strategically. An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way. We must demand wise public officials to act immediately and move away from the brink of nuclear war.

We’re nearly two years into President Donald Trump’s second term in office—his first where his fascist dreams took flight—and I’m not the only one to notice. Millions of people in groups as large as city blocks, and as tiny as a corner in a village without a traffic light, have gathered to protest under the banner, No Kings.

Its success was in bringing together disparate groups of people. At some I had the impression that out of thousands of people, no two had a similar political orientation. That’s the good part. It’s also a weakness.

At the same time, and now with increasing regularity, respected media (from The New York Times down to those that take their lead from it) editorialize in stark terms against the administration. Editorials read like a list of grievances, not unlike the Declaration of Independence. But unlike the Declaration, they lack a political message.

Fascism is not a throwaway word. Trump told people he was returning the nation to its “rightful place,” and pretty soon hastily organized federal police ganged up on people and shot them in the streets.

No Kings is an historical descriptive designed to engage our intellect, but it asks nothing. It demands nothing. It, like media editorials, sounds an alarm but an alarm is endless without a call. What’s missing is a bold call for removal. Remove him!

By what mechanism? Do I mean by impeachment? No, I do not. Do I mean by the 25th Amendment? No, I do not. Do I mean by the Democratic Party? No, I do not.

It is not up to those that call for removal to state or provide a mechanism. The call signifies itself. If the causes are alarming enough—and I suggest we are presently living under a fascist regime—there is nothing left to be done but what was once done.

The Declaration of Independence keenly notes that people “are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Before enumerating the greatness of the causes for separation, the Declaration expresses a sentiment that Washington’s gatekeepers would have us forget: that it is the right and the duty of the people to throw off such government as is reducing them to despotism.

The gulf must be acknowledged between what the leaders of a country in 1776 declared and did, and what, not the leaders, but the followers of a country in 2026 are prepared and able to do. The situations cannot be compared, but they can be instructive.

The Declaration is a radical document. It did not wait for the government of the mother country to have a change of heart, as we wait for the midterm elections. Suffering what we must.

What is our cause for alarm? And should it mark the time for a call for removal? Even if it only articulates what we want?

Fascism is not a throwaway word. Trump told people he was returning the nation to its “rightful place,” and pretty soon hastily organized federal police ganged up on people and shot them in the streets. They’re coming for people. They may not have come yet for you and me.

By Ralph Nader September 25, 2026 On September 18, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations)…

This week, I watched New York’s East River swell with armed speedboats as cars, ferries, and planes ground to a halt for President Donald Trump’s motorcade to the United Nations General Assembly’s 81st session. Stranded temporarily, I had plenty of time to consider Trump's winner-takes-all rejection of the United Nations.

And yet, as UNGA81 continues, this dismissive bluster aims to hide the global ripple effects of a crumbling world order. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development oil inventories are at their lowest in decades as the US and Israel continue strikes on Iran, and as Russia continues to wage its war on Ukraine. The real costs continue to fall on those with the least cushion, including the 50 million people the World Food Program says will be pushed into acute hunger. While only 15% of the world’s population lives in what we call the Global North, that 15% continues to drive the greatest of climate and economic catastrophes imposed on the Global Majority.

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly felt like a descent into surrealism. This year, the world order is fully under attack. In the face of health and climate crises and unilateral wars, we can’t afford to ignore internationalism or to quietly retreat from institutions meant to buffer those most at risk.

Trump may have usurped the podium at UNGA to malign multilateralism, but we're doing the work beyond the podium.

This does not mean wholesale protection of multilateralism as we know it. From foundation leaders to UN officials to civil society, we hear calls for "reimagining" the UN and global governance. Indeed, we cannot build a future fit for purpose for us all if we don’t bring the lifelines we need—from the International Criminal Court to the Paris Agreement.

That is what makes this week so critical. UNGA takes place in the shadow of elections in Russia that are anything but free or fair and heading into midterms in the United States that, while free, rest under the pressure cooker of strong and clear cross-border efforts to attack open societies. If internationalism is to survive, we have to make the case for multilateral cooperation and global funding. Internationalism is the only way we can see ourselves through the crises that we’re facing.

Crises from the Covid-19 pandemic to the risks of unregulated AI have shown us that if we go at it alone or try to address just one country or one policy at a time, we will invariably fail all. We cannot withstand the polycrises we face if we don’t consider ourselves intrinsically linked to movements around the world. And philanthropy's purpose is precisely to fund what markets won't.

We—those who seek to protect human dignity and rights—are not alone. Autocratic leaders, who bask in impunity and lambast institutions like the UN, have a secret: They are the ultimate internationalists, under the guise of nationalism.

The irony is that autocratic forces have mobilized with one another, carefully, strategically, and across borders, over the last 20 years. They have trained each other, learned how to keep and barter power, and worked with the very same billionaires to mobilize breathtaking amounts of money to dismantle and destroy progressive policies and strip away our basic civil and political rights. "Make America Great Again" and "Russia United" are playing by the same authoritarian playbook to keep the opposition in check.

They have another secret: They need us, too. Leaders like Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are still showing up to UNGA81 (albeit in a flurry). They still care enough to ridicule allies, to bully others into foreign aid budget cuts their citizens oppose, and to push back wherever they could be held to account, whether by the International Criminal Court or reports by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Indeed, 10 countries—including the US, Russia, Israel, and North Korea—opposed an extended four-year mandate for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.

These debates are not symbolic. They are signals that descent into isolationism and away from multilateralism is not a foregone conclusion. They point to where the fight is—and the spaces we must not cede. And, lest we lose sight of the larger lesson, the possibilities indeed, in a new world order: 144 countries voted in favor of extending High Commissioner Türk’s mandate.

So, how can we lead internationalism into its next era with conflicts multiplying, the Sustainable Development Goalss off track, and AI reshaping global governance? How can we protect human dignity and human rights for all people? By getting more creative in shaping our shared future—without wholesale retreat from the institutions that bring us together. Just this week, Canada invited the United Kingdom to join the economic alliance it is negotiating with the European Union, days after the commission floated a first-ever associate status. This year, countries committed to moving us away from fossil fuels came together despite China, Russia, and the US to implement just transitions. The Global Alliance for Human Rights is a perfect example of adaptation—convened by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the alliance is a multi-stakeholder, cross-regional mobilization that connects people across sectors and generations, without any single person, organization, or country that is responsible for the lion’s share.

As many of us gather this week—itself a signal—from UNGA to Climate Week, the Clinton Global Initiative to the Devex Impact House, it is time to reimagine what kind of leadership can carry internationalism through its most consequential transition in decades. At Human Rights Funders Network, we believe that better preparedness means building infrastructure for coordination, improving funding flows, and connecting diverse sectors, so movements can survive today’s crises and thrive tomorrow. And we plan to make the case for development and multilateralism to a new United States and policymakers worldwide. We are two years away from the 80th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. What we do, say, and create in the next two years will determine whether we are celebrating a new era of our shared humanity or if we have ceded to the divisions some would have us believe are inevitable.

The US war on Iran has shown how quickly one region's crisis becomes everyone's. Leaders who treat their constituencies as separate are ignoring what the past seven months have made plain. Trump may have usurped the podium at UNGA to malign multilateralism, but we're doing the work beyond the podium—at coffeetables, halls, and on the streets—to ensure the very best of the internationalism system is protected.

In 1993, Minnesota became the first state in the country to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in its Human Rights Act, with explicit trans-inclusive language built into the law from the start. In 2014, the Minnesota State High School League clarified that student athletes can participate on teams that align with their gender identity. And just last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting that it’s illegal discrimination for sports organizations to ban trans women from participating.

Throughout these 30-plus years of trans inclusion, girls' and women's sports in Minnesota have thrived—the state ranks No. 1 in the nation on Action Network's Girls' Sports Opportunity Index, which measures participation, access, and gender parity across all 50 states. Minnesota is also home to the winningest coach in Women's National Basketball Association history.

As a cisgender woman, I believe it's past time for more women like me to stand in loud, public solidarity with trans people, rather than let this manufactured fight be waged in our name. The people most invested in “protecting” women's sports have rarely shown up for women's sports at all. And as the executive director of Gender Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in the Upper Midwest, I’d love to know where all the urgency around fairness in women’s sports has been.

This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there.

I've spent years talking with women athletes across Minnesota. They talk about the sexual harassment. The state of their locker rooms. Subpar training facilities. Uneven access to fields and courts. Unequal pay and unequal media coverage. They talk about the coaches and administrators who still don't take their teams seriously. What they don’t talk about is the urgent need for the government to ban trans women from participating in sports.

So why does the noise persist? Republicans and their allies spent nearly $215 million on network television ads vilifying transgender people during the last presidential election cycle alone—more money than has ever been spent championing the women and girls they claim to want to protect.

Because sports was never the destination—they were the entry point. This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there. Across the country, courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. The very law, passed in 1972, that guarantees equal access to education and athletics, protection from harassment, and freedom from discrimination based on sex, is being weaponized as a tool for exclusion. Executive orders now redefining "sex" across federal law and agencies don't stop at locker rooms either; they reach into schools, healthcare, and workplaces—into the fabric of American life. Title IX has never required schools to exclude trans students. It has long protected them.

What we are witnessing is not about fairness in athletics. It's political theater, and transgender youth are the ones paying the price—subjected to fear, harassment, and public scrutiny that lawmakers should be ashamed to have invited. What's happening now isn't a return to what the law always meant—it's a rewrite, carving an exception into a civil rights statute so that protections can be revoked for whichever group is politically convenient to sacrifice.

Attacks on trans rights, attacks on abortion rights, and persistent pay inequity are not separate fights; they are one fight against gender inequality, taking on different forms depending on the news cycle. Minnesota already answered the question of whether trans girls and women should have the right to play, with 30 years of evidence and a unanimous state supreme court ruling showcasing that trans inclusion works. The question still on the table is much more dangerous: Do we accept a government empowered to decide who gets rights, and who doesn't? When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.

If trans inclusion were the threat opponents claim, then three decades of it in Minnesota would have proven it. Instead, it's proven the opposite.

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

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

Today we discuss:

• In an epic display of nerve, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insulted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—head of the host city of the UN—in a wild address to the United Nations General Assembly that saw many delegates walk out before it even began. Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

• Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, is responsible for more of the carbon emissions driving the escalating climate crisis than any other company in history, and the kingdom has long been a major blocker of climate action. Yet at least a dozen of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead authors are employed by or linked to Saudi Aramco, Saudi institutions and other oil and gas interests. One IPCC vice-chair, part of the body’s leadership group, also represents the kingdom at global climate negotiations as a government employee.

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposes reopening the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz and resuming nuclear talks with the U.S. within seven days if the Trump administration abides by the Memorandum of Understanding.

• ICE and other agencies have wasted tens of millions of dollars pursuing ill-conceived plans to rapidly increase detention capacity, and the total will likely rise due to ongoing mismanagement, congressional investigators warn. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) documented costly problems, including nearly $3 million to erect tents at Guantanamo Bay that were never used, $20 million to maintain purchased warehouses that are now being sold without having housed a single detainee, and excessive rates paid to hold detainees at a deficient and now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz.

• The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) says that there is a “low but growing risk” Russia could launch a “limited” military attack against a NATO member in the coming months, saying the Kremlin appears more willing to take risks after more than four-and-a-half years of war against Ukraine.

• In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s cabinet adopts a decree-law, rendering the wearing of burqas and niqabs in schools illegal and introducing a 30% cap on non-Italian speakers in classrooms starting next year.

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The post I’m Not the War Criminal, You Are! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Creepy. That’s the word for the rising right-wing interest in family policy, exemplified by a recent administration proposal to pay $9,000 each year per child for women to stay at home with their children. The money would come from, and deplete, an existing federal program that helps working parents pay for childcare.

Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.

MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.

MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.

Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”

In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”

But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.

Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz warns that “1 in 3 Americans are under-babied.” Declining teen pregnancy is part of the problem: Fox medical analyst Marc Siegel laments that teen pregnancies (15-to-19-year-old girls) are “down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people who are young not to have babies.” To remedy that problem, President Donald Trump is actually defunding federal programs designed to reduce teen pregnancies.

This despite the well-documented medical and developmental risks of teen pregnancies for both mother and child: high blood pressure, preeclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, systemic infections, mental health difficulties, life-long health issues, premature births, neonatal fatalities and stillbirths, low birth weight. And the teen mom’s interruption in schooling commonly means a life of poverty and instability.

MAGA family policy bears striking similarities to that of Nazi Germany, which linked national greatness to more babies—of the correct race. In the interest of higher birth rates, German mothers could not terminate pregnancies if the child would be “of good blood.” The Nazi state also offered “marriage loans” and child financial incentives, and—in a society that treated single mothers as pariahs—they even tried to destigmatize unmarried motherhood.

Medals for motherhood were a Nazi honor Trump might consider offering. Hitler awarded the Mother Cross for large families. (In bronze for mothers of four children, silver for six, gold for eight or more babies.)

The American fertility rate is indeed substantially below the 2.1 required to maintain the American population level. But if a declining population is a problem, the answer is obvious: Welcome immigrants.

America is already suffering from Trump’s mass deportation efforts, as the agricultural workforce is decimated, and workers in home healthcare, food packing, restaurants, home construction, and building services are in desperately short supply, exacerbating inflation. We plainly need more immigrants, not fewer, to sustain our nation.

Immigration is not an acceptable solution for MAGA because they demand a whiter America, and more immigrants come from what the president has called “shithole countries” than from “Aryan” nations like Norway. But non-whites are not “replacing” supposed “real” Americans because America is and always has been a multiracial, multinational society.

MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing (white) women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.

A 2025 survey of Americans showed that two children was the most desired family size, and only 20% wanted to three or more. Similarly, an international survey conducted by the United Nations showed most respondents wanted just two children.

In the US survey, cost and the state of the world were high among the reasons Americans gave for not wanting more children.

Here is what the Trump regime is doing to address those concerns: defunding healthcare; slashing food assistance for families and children; weakening education and child welfare systems; imposing eligibility requirements for government rental assistance; denying climate change; ignoring the challenge of AI; deregulating polluting industries; and fueling inflation through deportation, tariffs, and an unending war.

Why are women in the workforce and not staying home with the children? The determination to lead full lives is a driving force. But, in all likelihood, the number of stay-at-home moms has plummeted since the 1970s because rising income inequality has made it impossible for a working class or middle class family to survive on one income. Before right-wing “traditionalists” utter any more demands that women give up their jobs, ambitions, independence, and self-respect, perhaps they can start by confronting the unbearable greed of the billionaire class that has rendered the supposed MAGA aim beyond reach.

For years, the people organizing against extreme inequality have made a simple argument that the world’s institutions preferred not to hear: The gap between the very rich and everyone else is not an accident, not a law of nature, and not something we have to accept. It is a choice, made by people with the power to choose differently.

For a long time that was a fringe position. It isn’t any more.

You can see the shift in the news that South Africa is pushing to create an International Panel on Inequality, like an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the wealth gap, to pull the evidence together in one authoritative place and put it in front of governments. Joseph Stiglitz backs it. More than 500 economists have signed on.

Nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.

This is a good thing, and we welcome it. When the establishment builds an institution to take your issue seriously, it means the argument is being won. The people who got this far deserve credit.

But I want to be honest about where the real momentum is coming from, because it matters for what happens next. The panel is a sign of progress. It is not the engine of it. The engine is the movement that dragged inequality up the agenda in the first place, and that movement is where the story of actual change has been written.

Look at what the IPCC has actually done so far. For 30 years it has produced the best climate science anyone had ever assembled. It won a Nobel Prize. It leaves no room for honest denial. And for a long time, governments read it and carried on much as before. The science mattered enormously.

However, it moved politics fastest when people forced it to: kids walking out of school on Fridays for the Future, communities blocking fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline. The movement was decisive. Change came when the two worked together, and not a moment before.

Inequality is in the same place as the climate crisis now—the evidence is not the thing we are short of. We already know the shape of it. The richest 1% took 41% of all the new wealth created between 2000 and 2024. Around 2.3 billion people, nearly 1 in 4 of us, now skip meals because they can’t afford to eat. South Africa, which is carrying this panel forward, is the most unequal country the World Bank has ever recorded.

A panel will sharpen that picture, and sharper is better. But nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.

Here is the encouraging part: That pressure is already working.

When Brazil used its G20 presidency to put a global tax on billionaires on the table, it did not come from nowhere. Movements, campaigners, and economists had pushed the idea for years, and the Fight Inequality Alliance was part of that.

The economist Gabriel Zucman drew up a plan: a 2% minimum tax on the world’s roughly 3,000 billionaires, enough to raise around $250 billion a year. In November 2024, for the first time, G20 leaders agreed to cooperate on taxing the ultra rich. An idea dismissed as impossible a few years earlier was suddenly the position of the world’s largest economies.

That is what movements do. They move the line of what is politically possible, and they do it faster than any institution.

This is why the movement matters, and why its role in this next chapter should be front and center. We are the ones knocking on the doors, running the campaigns, and keeping the pressure on long after the summit is over and the experts have gone home.

We have been doing it without a panel, and we have already moved things many said could not be moved. Give that movement the authoritative evidence a body like this can provide, and you do not only get a better report. You get a sharper weapon in the hands of the people already fighting.

The tax has not been won yet. The United States and Germany refused to back a binding version, and it was watered down to a promise to cooperate. But notice why.

It did not stall for lack of evidence. Zucman had done the numbers, and nobody serious disputed them. It stalled because the people who would pay still had the power to slow it down. That is the real contest, and it is not a contest of data. It is a contest of power, and power is shifted by organized people, not by publications.

I say all this as someone who spends more time with campaigners than with economists, and I will be honest about our own side too.

Movements do not win every time. We are sometimes better at naming a problem than at holding the ground we take. But the lesson of the last decade is not that we need fewer people in the fight and more in the seminar room. It is the opposite. The evidence has been overwhelming for years. What has changed the weather is people refusing to accept it.

So build this panel well, and build it close to the movement that made it necessary. Let it answer the questions people are actually fighting over. Get its evidence into the hands of the people doing the pushing. Check whether it does speak to the inequalities and the solutions people are talking about and demanding change for. Treat the organizers and the communities living this every day as partners in the work, not an audience for the findings. Do that, and this panel becomes part of something genuinely powerful.

Because the gap will not be closed in a seminar room. It never has been. It will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.

The evidence is on our side. It has been for a long time. Now comes the part that actually changes lives.

When a bomb destroys a home, we see the rubble. When a factory burns, we see the smoke. When forests are set on fire, we see the devastation. But one consequence of war is almost impossible to see: the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

And that carbon does not stay where the bombs fall. Once released, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming far beyond the borders of the country at war. A war may begin in one place, but part of its climate cost is carried by the entire planet.

The smoke may clear. The carbon does not simply stay behind.

The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax. It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.

Yet when we talk about the cost of war, that climate cost is rarely part of the bill.

That gap in accountability led Saravana Kumar Nagarajan and his colleague Sean Xavier to develop the idea of a Carbon War Tax, documented in their 2021 master's thesis at Klaipėda University and the University of Bergen. The question behind it was simple: if industries are increasingly expected to measure and account for their carbon emissions, why should warfare be treated differently?

The Carbon War Tax proposes a new principle: Measure the greenhouse-gas emissions caused by war, assign responsibility, and attach a financial obligation to those emissions.

Military fuel use, weapons production and transportation, fires, destroyed factories and power plants, damaged infrastructure, and burning forests can all create emissions. Scientific models, satellite imagery, and other data could help estimate them. The goal would not be perfect accounting overnight. It would be to make an invisible cost visible.

And then make someone responsible for it.

The money generated through such a system could support carbon capture and storage, environmental restoration, ecosystem recovery, pollution cleanup, and climate-resilient rebuilding in communities affected by war.

That creates a striking possibility: The environmental cost of destruction could help pay for restoration.

The Carbon War Tax is not a proposal to put a price on human suffering. No amount of money can compensate a family for a life lost or a community destroyed. It addresses one specific consequence of war—the carbon and environmental damage that reaches far beyond the battlefield.

Today, we count the cost of weapons. We count military spending. We count destroyed buildings and economic losses. We count refugees and reconstruction.

The Carbon War Tax asks us to add another question: How much carbon did this war release—and who is responsible for paying for it?

That question could also change the economics of war.

No tax will magically end conflict. Wars are driven by power, territory, security, ideology, and politics. But economic consequences influence decisions. If military escalation carried a measurable climate liability, governments would have one more cost to consider before choosing destruction over negotiation.

And there is a deeper question of justice.

Why should a community devastated by war inherit the environmental damage? Why should people who had no role in starting a conflict bear the climate consequences of the emissions it creates? And why should future generations inherit an atmospheric debt they never chose?

The Carbon War Tax is not presented as a finished international policy. It is a starting framework that needs to be tested, challenged, and developed.

Climate-policy researchers could determine how wartime emissions should be measured. Scientists could improve methods for calculating emissions from military operations and conflict-related destruction. Economists could study how a financial mechanism could work without creating unintended consequences. International-law experts could examine questions of responsibility and enforcement. Policymakers, diplomats, and peace organizations could explore how such a system might fit within existing international climate and legal frameworks.

In other words, the idea needs a global research effort to turn a powerful concept into a credible mechanism that could one day be implemented.

That work has not yet been done. And that is precisely why the conversation should begin.

The idea began as an academic question in 2021. It now deserves to move beyond the pages of a thesis and into the hands of the researchers, policymakers, and institutions capable of testing its possibilities.

Because if the world can develop systems to make industries accountable for their carbon, perhaps it can eventually develop a system to make war accountable for its carbon.

Imagine a future in which governments considering military escalation must confront not only the human and financial costs of war, but also the environmental debt it could create.

Imagine that debt helping restore forests, ecosystems, and communities damaged by conflict.

Imagine peace having not only a moral argument, but another economic one.

The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax.

It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.

War destroys lives. War destroys communities. And war can leave behind a carbon debt carried by the entire planet.

Perhaps it is time that debt became visible.

Perhaps it is time that the world studied how to make it accountable.

And perhaps, if developed into a workable international mechanism, the Carbon War Tax could give peace one more powerful reason to prevail.