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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• A study finds that dependence on food stamps and Medicaid for gig economy workers has spiked since the start of the pandemic. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the number of Amazon workers relying on federal assistance programs tripled between February 2020 and September 2025. Ride-hailing and delivery apps — Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Instacart and DoorDash workers included — rank among the top three employers with workers receiving assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

• A day after the United States signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring it now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

• The Trump administration imposed tariffs of around 10% on goods from more than 80 countries on Friday, its latest effort to put in place an expansive protectionist policy that has been repeatedly challenged in court.

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The post More Amazon, Delivery App Drivers on Food Stamps | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Two recent deaths highlighted the importance of earlier activist leaders to struggles for health and social justice. Denise Oliver-Velez, who died on July 15, was a founder of the Young Lords Party in New York, a group that mobilized Puerto Rican and other communities to fight for their health and dignity. She also helped set the stage for alignments between movements for the rights of people of color and those focused on the rights of women.

Walt Odets, a psychologist, died on July 5th in Berkeley where he had provided therapy for gay men for decades. His activism had focused on how best to prevent AIDS and ending the stigma that this country imposes on LGBTQI people.

Their stories remind us of the important role activists play in combating injustice and reversing cruel and harmful policies. As the Trump administration’s crusade against democracy and our nation’s public health and healthcare systems continue, we can learn from these two lives lessons for today’s activists who can bring the values and passions of Oliver-Velez and Odets into the present period.

Through the campaigns she helped to organize, Oliver-Velez brought to life an alternative vision of a healthcare system that put serving people first. In 1970, the Young Lords occupied Lincoln Hospital, an underfunded, understaffed public hospital with decaying facilities and low quality of care, known in the community as the Butcher Shop. The Young Lords sent members into the hospital lobby to collect complaints from patients, which they then presented to hospital administrators. When conditions did not improve, the group occupied the hospital, winning an agreement to hire more Puerto Rican doctors committed to serving their community and to support the Lords to set up new community health and substance use programs. At a time when the city was closing public hospitals to save money, Lincoln was rebuilt and a new modern hospital was opened, in part due to persistent pressure from the Young Lords and their healthcare worker allies.

Between them, these two very different activist leaders demonstrated some of the qualities today’s activists most need to fight current threats to health and social justice.

Oliver-Velez was attracted to the Lords because they were “a puente,” a “bridge between groups, the cultural/nationalists, the Marxists, the whites, the Black and the Asians.” She also wanted to overcome the machismo that divided so many radical groups. She wrote that she and other women in the Lords “made it very clear that we were not going to be just secretaries, that we were warriors too.” Oliver, Iris Morales, and other women leaders in the Young Lords organized a Women’s Caucus which moved the Young Lords Party to adopt feminist principles as central to their political agenda.

These women led campaigns on reproductive justice; against sterilization abuse; for safe, legal abortion; and raised awareness about the institutional oppression of women. Much of their work focused on health—breakfast programs for school children, a campaign to force the city to combat lead poisoning more aggressively, and the fights to improve Lincoln Hospital. Decades before “health for all” became an international rallying call, the Young Lords showed how ordinary people can force government to translate this aspiration into action.

Odets’ practice and tactics were different. He criticized the gay movement’s approach to AIDS prevention, arguing that its guidance on safe sex was ambiguous and failed to prevent infection. He insisted movements had to tell the truth about evidence. He also championed the needs of HIV-negative men, arguing that a movement seeking health for the gay community as a whole at had to consider the needs of these men, even if their lives were not in as imminent peril as those who were HIV+.

“For gay lives,” Odets wrote “the granting of legal rights and authentic acceptance are two different issues in a society steeped in phobic aversion to real diversity.” Odets distinguished between the legal fight for societal recognition, i.e., gay marriage, and the psychological fight for self-acceptance and the rejection of social stigma. He hoped to engage the gay community in addressing both the political and emotional requirement for building solidarity and to prepare gay men to both fight for their rights and insist on their self-worth. Rather than separating these two domains, he strove to integrate them.

Between them, these two very different activist leaders demonstrated some of the qualities today’s activists most need to fight current threats to health and social justice. Both found ways to connect their personal experience to their political beliefs, a prerequisite for authenticity in organizing others.

Oliver-Velez showed the power of bringing people together across the racial-ethnic and gender divides that characterize our society and enable those in power to divide us. Odets emphasized the importance of paying attention to both the political and the psychological dimensions of activism. Activists who appeal to the mind and the heart are more likely to build the long-term support needed to change policies and systems.

Both were willing to acknowledge differences among activists, then look for ways to bridge these divides . Neither Oliver-Velez nor Odets feared conflict, but they did not demonize fellow travelers who disagreed with them, leaving the door open to build bridges.

I have been studying, teaching, writing about, and participating in health activism for more than 50 years. Never have the threats to human and planetary health seemed starker. Never has the responsibility of government to protect health been under such concerted attack. Fortunately, thousands of young and old activists are organizing to combat today’s threats, showing the possibility of an alternative to the dark and cruel view of well-being coming from leaders in Washington. By applying the lessons learned from Oliver-Velez and Odets to today’s battles, we pay tribute to them by strengthening the fights for a healthier, more just world.

Temperatures are soaring globally, and wildfire smoke just blanketed much of North America for the second time in a few years. This summer’s heat will likely make this year the hottest ever, and that heat is costing lives. It’s no surprise that concern about climate change among Americans is at one of its highest points since 1989.

But despite the fact that climate change and extreme heat are posing a threat to the health and well-being of Americans, neither major party is offering a serious policy response.

Republicans have become the official party of climate change denial. The Trump administration and its GOP allies in Congress have aggressively attacked renewable energy while boosting fossil fuels. Meanwhile many Democrats have become increasingly silent about climate, leaving voters concerned about the issue with no major political party to represent their values and interests.

In fact, The New York Times recently found that many Democratic candidates are backtracking on their previous opposition to the oil and gas industries. “With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some of the party’s leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned,” the paper reported.

Voters recognize that public investments in clean energy, public transit, and other climate-friendly policies ultimately save them money.

This messaging could cost lives and elections.

As a young voter, I saw this sense of abandonment play out in real time. I remember walking proudly around my campus all day in 2024 wearing an “I voted” sticker. I had voted early by mail, as had many of my classmates—or so I thought. What I came to realize throughout the day was that many of my classmates had yet to vote—and had no plan to.

Voting can be time consuming, frustrating, and often unnecessarily complicated. Barriers to voting are even more intimidating when you’re voting for the first time. For these reasons and more, many young people only make the effort to vote if they feel candidates will strongly advocate for the issues they care about.

On my campus, students are given access to all kinds of information about how and why to vote, and they’re given ample time and opportunity to do so. If students with access to so many resources on voting aren’t voting, how can we expect young people in parts of the country where there are larger barriers to voting to turn out en masse?

Over half of voters aged 18-29 didn’t vote in the 2024 presidential election, and 77% of young voters didn’t vote in the 2022 midterms. The 2026 midterm races are already tight, which could make the failure to address climate change a recipe for political as well as ecological disaster.

There’s no contradiction between having a serious climate policy and being responsive to voter concerns about rising costs. Progressive populists like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Janeese Lewis George in Washington, DC, and Melat Kiros in Denver, among others, have all proven that climate-friendly economic populism can be effective at increasing voter turnout, especially among young people.

Economic populism goes hand in hand with a transition to green energy, as 90% of renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. Voters recognize that public investments in clean energy, public transit, and other climate-friendly policies ultimately save them money.

In New York, one of Mamdani’s core promises—Free, Fast Buses—was proof of this. In DC, a core component of Lewis George’s campaign was affordable energy for all, with a focus on expanding community and government solar to cut electric bills. In Denver, Kiros also campaigned on combining economic and environmental issues with her support of a Green New Deal.

These recent victories owed much to the young people who powered their campaigns. It was also overwhelmingly young people who organized the 75,000 person March To End Fossil Fuels in 2023 and organized 500,000 people around the US against fossil fuels in 2019.

These examples suggest young people aren’t apathetic—they’re just not being heard. They will power campaigns that support a transition to green energy. But they won’t make an effort for those who enable the fossil fuel industry or talk out of both sides of their mouths on the issue.

Now is the time to push for a future with cheaper, greener energy for all. It is not the time to backslide on fossil fuels.

It’s summer in Washington, DC, but members of the Senate aren’t focused on beaches, hikes, and picnics. Instead, they’re focused on President Donad Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department as attorney general.

It’s a fight worth paying attention to, because it will affect what kind of country we live in.

Attorneys general can change our lives for the better. In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy worked tirelessly to bring civil rights to the South and to dismantle organized crime. In the 1970s, Elliot Richardson resigned rather than carry out President Richard Nixon’s illegal order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor.

Todd Blanche is about as far as you can get from either of them. How do we know? Because as deputy attorney general and acting attorney general, he’s turned the Justice Department into Trump’s personal favor factory. Instead of protecting our rights, he’s lining Trump’s pocket, protecting his personal interests, and carrying out his revenge fantasies.

He has shown how much he is willing to bend the law to line Trump’s pockets.

Blanche was the one who pushed for the $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund that would have allowed taxpayer funds to be doled out, with very little public oversight, to anyone claiming that they’d been victims of the “weaponization” of justice. It looked like a slush fund for insurrectionists and other Trump allies, including those who assaulted police officers on January 6, 2021.

Some Republican senators apparently want assurances that this scheme is dead before they vote for Blanche. But even genuine assurances don’t matter. Blanche still pushed for this corrupt money laundering operation. Giving it up under torrential pressure doesn’t show that he has good judgment and can be trusted with immense power.

The same applies for another scheme Blanche proposed at the same time as the slush fund: An agreement to end a longtime audit of Trump’s taxes (possibly saving Trump $100 million) and a gift of immunity for the president and his associates from future liability for civil or criminal liability for anything they may have done up to that point.

Again, this is about as corrupt as you can get. And again, even if Blanche were to toss the idea in the shredder, it would be too late: He has shown how much he is willing to bend the law to line Trump’s pockets.

Blanche has also transformed the Justice Department into a partisan tool to go after Trump’s enemies. For instance, he’s launched a criminal prosecution against former FBI Director James Comey for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “86 47.” It will never stand up in court, but that’s not the point. The point is to harass Comey and, perhaps more importantly, intimidate other Trump critics from speaking out. It is an unacceptable abuse of power.

Then there are the Epstein files. Before Congress ordered the files released, Blanche was coming up with ideas to make it look like the administration was being open with the records when they really weren’t. He met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving time for her role in sex trafficking for Epstein. Afterward, she got moved to a minimum-security prison, prompting a lot of questions about the deal they may have made.

Then late last year Congress ordered the files to be released, and Blanche was put in charge of making that happen. In February, media reports revealed that the Justice Department had unlawfully withheld multiple Epstein files containing allegations against President Trump. And just a few weeks ago, a federal judge held that Blanche had still not complied with the law.

It’s no surprise that Epstein survivors are urging the Senate not to confirm him.

This country is on the wrong path. Confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general will help Donald Trump’s bottom line. But it won’t do any good for the rest of us.

I want to play sockhim (oh, sorry, sockher) for President Donald Trump. In our world today, there’s nothing, it seems, he can’t fiddle with or kick around or, for that matter, sock. And whenever he feels it’s necessary (or simply has the urge to do so), he’s always been willing to sockthem, whoever they might be. If something then goes wrong, as with Iran and the global economy right now, thanks to his wild and wildly destructive acts, so what? He’s still Donald Trump and can do the equivalent again somewhere else in some other way the next second-minute-hour-day-week-month-year.

I’m thinking, of course, not just about his unbearable urge to bomb Iran for the 940th (9,400th?) time, as oil and gas prices surge once again, but about his relatively recent intervention in the soccer World Cup to ensure that one of the best players on the US team, who had committed a foul, was red-carded off the field by a referee, and then was denied permission to play in the next game against the Belgian team, could instead compete in that very game. And of course, since everything You Know Who does is headlined, you know just what happened next: The World Cup organization, FIFA, gave way instantly, that player was indeed in the next game, and the US team still lost to Belgium by a significant margin.

And Donald J. Trump just rolled right on. No matter what goes wrong, he never loses. (If you think otherwise, ask him and you’ll find out that you couldn’t be more off base!)

I sometimes try to imagine telling my parents, who died deep in the last century, about “our” president. The only way I could do so, I suspect, would be by comparing him to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Donald Trump of the early 1950s, who claimed that his opponents were “commies” and, in a distinctly Trumpian fashion, swore that he had a (fictional) list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party and later that the US Army, too, had been infiltrated by commies. His charges would be the focus of the 1954 televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, which did me the great favor (at age 10) of putting a television set in our apartment for the first time so that my mom, Irma Selz, then a well-known political and theatrical caricaturist, could draw McCarthy and crew for the New York Post.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes.

And yes, he was an all-American monster, distinctly clobbering various figures and destroying certain American lives. Still, in the end, he was condemned by the Senate and essentially drank himself to death, only affecting our all-American world for a few years and (at least in comparison with You Know Who) in a relatively modest way.

Historically speaking, Donald Trump, president (no less!) of the United States of America twice, puts him to shame. Of course, once upon a time (believe it or not), Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump had the very same adviser (at different moments, of course), Roy Cohn, who, in the (all too literal) end, may have helped create a president from beyond the grave.

McCarthy only had a relatively brief moment at center stage before falling apart in a big-time fashion. Donald Trump, on the other hand, simply goes on and on and (yes!) on, whacking away at so many of the rest of us—Iran being at the top of his list, right now—day after day, week after week, year after year, while our world begins to disintegrate under us. (Oh, sorry, my mistake even to refer in passing to climate change when “our” president considers it a first-class “con job“!)

Joe McCarthy was functionally ejected from his political world and then essentially ejected himself from ours. Unfortunately, Donald Trump took our world by storm, two (out of three) times, while tossing out so many others in the process. And now, at least in climate terms, he seems intent on ejecting us all from Planet Earth.

If I had told you his tale early in this century, you would never have believed me. In fact, you would have thought me an idiot and a half (maybe even three-quarters). Donald Trump, the president of the United States (at least) twice and so many others of us his apprentices? You must be kidding! Once upon a time, that would have seemed beyond inconceivable for even a second, no less at least eight years. You simply wouldn’t have believed that so much of the Republican Party (and all too many other Americans) would ever have become Trumpublicans.

Under the circumstances, can there be any question that we now live in an upside-down, gloom-and-doom version of a fairy-tale world? Why, just as I was writing this, President Trump decided to launch a new series of air strikes against Iran (yes, Iran!), claiming that “we have a score to settle.” And he’s certainly a big-time score-settler, though who really knows what he’s doing or why—probably not even him. He just seems to get the urge to sockittothem and we’re off to the races.

Isn’t it strange that the man who, once upon a time, wrote The Art of the Deal can’t quite seem to imagine making a deal with anyone anymore? Actually, as he said recently when it comes to Iran: “We’re going to have a deal. We may just do it without a deal, because you know what, it’s easier.” Perhaps he should now change the title of his book to The Art of Doing Without a Deal.

And, of course, that shouldn’t be surprising when the people he’s dealing with there are, as he put it recently, “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” He summed things up this way when it comes to Iran, “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars… there’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” (No matter at all that, only weeks earlier, he had praised them as “very rational people,” “nice to deal with.”)

And what do you do when you’re dealing with sick scum? You bomb the crap out of them. Or, to put it in sports terms, you sockthem to hell.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes. He’s simply hot, hot, hot, the very word he used for Trumpian rapper and “White House Barbi” Nicki Minaj. (”We also have a woman that is so respected and so hot and so great and such a great friend of, I don’t say conservative, I say of common sense.”)

You, of course, could say the very same thing about Donald J. Trump. He’s so hot, and the one thing he seems determined to do on this overheating planet of ours is heat ever more of it (which war, of course, accomplishes in a particularly striking fashion).

So, here we all are with a president determined to play sockher, sockhim, sockthem, and sockplanetEarth for at least another two and a half years. And where will we all be then? Sockme if I know?

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people.

The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the aftereffects of an earthquake.

Some holders of this status have been in the country for a long time. Nearly 90% of the 170,000 Salvadorans who have TPS, first granted 25 years ago, participate in the US labor force, contributing over US$5 billion to the US economy.

The administration makes no exceptions in its campaign to deport anyone and everyone. Even as it has promised to fight a war on behalf of the people of Iran, it has reportedly provided information about Iranian asylum-seekers to the Iranian government. These details about their lives, such as their sexual orientation and religious beliefs, make it even more likely that they will be persecuted on return. Dozens of Russians, who don’t enjoy TPS, were flown back to Russia, where several were immediately slapped with draft notices.

The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive.

There is no length to which the administration won’t go to deport people, even American citizens like the children born in the United States who were kicked out of the country along with their parents. So far, the Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s attempt to overturn the “birthright citizenship” clause in the US Constitution. But President Donald Trump is still pushing his allies to take up the fight in Congress to change the law.

The administration even tried to add 2.7 million living people to the “Death Master File,” which is a database of dead people maintained by the Social Security Administration. Trump’s plan was to make life so difficult for people declared “dead” that they would self-deport or, if they showed up to dispute their “death,” to detain them in preparation for deportation. It was only because of a whistleblower that this plan didn’t go into effect.

But the most visible effort by the US government has been to target the approximately 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” who, as of 2023, constituted over 4% of the US population. Such immigrants keep the American economy afloat by picking fruit, slaughtering cows, building houses, and taking care of the elderly.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign, in other words, would wreck the US economy. The undocumented don’t take away jobs from native-born Americans because the latter generally don’t want the jobs that immigrants fill. But the administration is willing to risk economic disaster in its effort to keep America a predominantly white country.

Trump’s anti-immigrant plan has not just evicted people. It has not just locked them away in detention centers. It has killed them.

In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were involved in two killings. Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national living with his wife and young daughter in a small town in Maine, was not the subject of an ICE raid, but ICE agents killed him anyway. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was a businessman and father of three on his way to work in Houston when agents stopped his car and shot him.

More than a dozen people have died in these kinds of interactions with ICE, including two US citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—protesting ICE actions in Minnesota.

The number of detainees who have died in custody is even higher. Tens of thousands of people are being held in detention facilities that the Trump administration has established around the country. Despite administration claims that it is only deporting dangerous criminals, more than 70% of those detained have no prior criminal convictions.

More than 50 people have died in the detention facilities, a rate that is more than twice as high as Trump’s first term. They have died because of conditions inside the facilities or because they didn’t receive sufficient medical care. Several have died by suicide.

The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million people a year. It hasn’t quite reached that benchmark, with the administration itself claiming around 900,000 deportations as of mid-May. It has also claimed that more than 2 million people have self-deported. However, without transparent data from the Department of Homeland Security, it is difficult to verify the administration’s claims.

These numbers are critical to the administration’s approval rating. On virtually all other policies, Trump is losing popularity. Inflation numbers remain high, and the economy is failing millions of Americans. The war in Iran continues to push up gas prices. The administration is still dogged by controversies around budget cuts, corruption, anti-vaccine policies, and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The overall approval rating for the administration is around 37%, with a large percentage of independent voters now adopting negative views of the president.

The one issue where a sizable number of Americans still approve of administration policies, however, is immigration. Compared to the economy at 33% and the war in Iran at 29%, 40% of Americans approve of his immigration policies. But even here the numbers are declining, since half of Americans supported his approach to immigration when he took office in 2025.

The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive. The detention and deportation of key members of communities—hard workers, religious leaders, even those espousing the same conservative family values of the administration—have led to a significant decline in anti-immigrant sentiment among Republicans.

Still, with the economy on the rocks and the war in Iran nowhere near an end, the Republicans will likely try to emphasize the “success” of the administration on immigration policy in the upcoming midterm elections in November. It will be a desperate strategy. As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, the administration’s deportation strategy may turn out to be a failure politically as well for the president and his party.

Employers frequently complain they cannot find qualified Americans to fill job openings, yet the ranks of the long-term unemployed continue to swell. Over 1.8 million Americans were long-term jobless in 2026—up sharply since 2019—according to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This paradox highlights a persistent skills gap. Many companies hesitate to invest in training, preferring to wait for perfectly matched candidates amid economic uncertainty, automation shifts, and demographic changes. Yet experts note that upskilling existing or available workers could quickly close mismatches in sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and trades.

The post So Many Jobs, So Few Openings appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office.

This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget. This spending request dwarfs sums that are often the subject of major debates in Washington.

For example, last year Democrats pushed to have the enhanced subsidies in the Affordable Care Act exchanges extended. This would have cost $30 billion a year, one twentieth of what Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth are demanding.

People may recall Elon Musk gleefully putting the US Agency for International Development into the “wood chipper” last spring. While ending this program is expected to lead to 4 million additional deaths over the next four years, it only saved around $35 billion a year. That is less than 6% of the increase in military spending that Trump is asking for.

Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds?

The annual cost of extending the enhanced child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half, was around $100 billion a year, less than one-fifth of Trump’s proposed increase. And the annual appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was $550 million, less than one thousandth of the additional spending for the military that Trump is demanding. (It’s in the chart, just small to see.)

People need to know that Trump’s military spending request is really big money, compared to almost anything else that ever comes up for public debate for Congress. Unfortunately, because of incompetent or corrupt budget reporting, few news accounts make any effort to put these huge numbers in a context that makes them understandable for their audience. As a result, most people will probably have little idea of what is at stake with this military request.

Any self-proclaimed deficit hawk who is not all hair on fire about Trump’s budget demand is a lying hypocrite who only uses concerns about the deficit to argue against programs they don’t like. We got along fine with the former level of military spending, which almost everyone, including Donald Trump in his first term, considered adequate.

Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds? Most of us knew that making our former allies into enemies was not a good idea, but Trump is placing a huge price tag on this mistake. And remember, this is Trump’s own number, not his critics’.

Renewables are not just for highfalutin hippies, they’re cheaper and avoid the volatility of wars and chaotic leaders. We are not living the 1970s oil shock moment; there are alternatives to fossil fuels. Those who embrace renewable energy will be better off—from health benefits for communities to reducing energy shock burdens for households. The reality unfolding during this latest oil war is that many nations really do not want to be tethered to volatile energy resources. And who can blame them?

With yet another peace process collapsing and conflict renewed, the Iran war will continue to create the largest disruption to oil markets since the Covid-19 pandemic. In mere months, it’s increased the costs of oil and gas, food, and everything in-between, amplifying the global cost of living crisis. We’re at the beginning of a very bumpy ride ahead.

New pipelines that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz altogether are underway. But this type of infrastructure can take up to a decade or more to come online. In the meantime, national petroleum stockpiles are at an all-time low. Governments have a limited amount of time to buoy oil prices and stave off high fuel costs. If the Strait of Hormuz does successfully open and peace is achieved, it could take years for petroleum output to stabilize back to pre-war levels, thanks to destroyed infrastructure. Liquefied natural gas and oil processing facilities have been targets for bombing by both sides—amounting to $58 billion in damages so far.

Adding to this tableau is the reality that the days of so-called "easy oil" are now in the rearview mirror. Shell CEO Wael Sawan recently forecast that oil prices will continue to rise long after peace is achieved due to a combination of energy infrastructure damages and a need to access more expensive, more environmentally risky oil reservoirs. It’s worth calling out here that we’ve already burned through enough fossil fuels to achieve 1.5°C of warming. Every year has been another record-breaking year for global warming and global climate damages to the tune of billions of dollars.

The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030.

In a world where we are witnessing the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels—where renewables like wind and solar are cheaper—just why should nations continue to rely on petroleum?

Before the Iran War, renewable energy was already growing at a rapid speed. It’s now cheaper to employ solar and wind than oil and gas. Now that petroleum costs are more volatile and associated infrastructure is in duress, the pivot to renewables will be inevitable. This March in the US, renewable energy accounted for half of all energy generation. Globally, solar energy is making up the largest share of new energy projects. If oil is the energy of warmongering and dramatic cost fluctuations, perhaps renewable energy could be the energy of peace and economic security.

Spain, China, and others leading on renewable energy power generation have seen costs remain relatively stable during this time. Now other nations are seeking that same stability. Since the war started, many fossil fuel dependent nations increased their renewable energy targets to levels that exceed their national climate goals. Egypt announced a goal to increase renewable energies like wind and solar from 10% today to 45% of energy needs in just two years. This new target overshoots any climate goal Egypt has previously set during annual United Nations climate conferences. South Korea, India, and others have likewise elevated their renewable energy targets to help lessen energy cost burdens for citizens, decrease dependency on the ebbs and flows of oil and gas, and the military whims of chaotic leaders. Now Turkey and Australia are pushing for a commitment at the next UN climate conference for nations to reach 35% renewable energy use by 2035.

The path toward a renewable energy economy will not be easy. Petroleum interests are doing everything possible to wed us all to fossil fuels through a long-established playbook of climate denial, climate skepticism around emissions and renewable energy, and wielding political influence. In the US at least, those actions have paid off. The second Trump administration has been all about tying us to oil and gas. A mere $445 million in campaign contributions to the Trump presidential campaign and related political action committees gifted a windfall of deregulation and incentives to what should be a declining energy industry on the way out.

Many Biden-era renewable energy incentives have been revoked in the second Trump administration, diminishing the potential for America’s solar, battery, and wind manufacturing to compete with China. Instead, incentives and kickbacks for oil and gas companies are everywhere, from opening public lands to reducing environmental reviews and even connecting trade agreements to oil and gas. These actions have not stymied renewable energy uptake. Last year, solar overtook coal in overall global energy consumption for the first time.

While the United States is focused on controlling the energy of the past, China has been laser focused on the energy of the future. A rapid global pivot away from fossil fuels will benefit China’s burgeoning renewable energy industries the most. Today, 80% of all renewable energy—like wind, solar, and battery storage—is manufactured by Chinese companies, with US companies a faraway second at 10% of the market.

The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030. The reality is no one wants to rely on economically toxic energy sources. Renewable energy comes without the emissions, without the climate consequences, and without the oil wars that have plagued the last 30-plus years. Embracing renewable energy today means being more resilient and better prepared to weather future petroleum shocks; all while helping to reduce emissions and lessen climate impacts—a win-win if ever there was one.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Jeff Dornik, CEO of Pickax, joins to discuss the Freedom News Network, AI data collection, how the social media industry silos Americans for rage clicks, and whatever else comes up!

Today we discuss:

• Will Trump start his 8th war? His administration is weighing military action against the West African country of Mali to target an al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as JNIM. So much for ending global strife and redirecting U.S. resources to Americans.

• Could New Jersey cost us our democracy? A furious Gov. Mikie Sherrill announces that, under the former governor, a “serious software error” within the system used to issue New Jersey drivers’ licenses and ID cards registered 6,600 people who said that they were not U.S. citizens to vote. 400 of them actually cast ballots. This feeds directly into Trump’s election-fraud narrative.

• Donald Trump signs a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could enable the kingdom to enrich its own uranium for nuclear reactions. Safeguards? Not so much.

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Trump to Launch New US War in Mali | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This month, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law—without President Donald Trump's signature, exactly as he'd threatened. It's a small, recent example of a much bigger habit: Trump keeps showing voters exactly how little he thinks of them. The bill wasn’t controversial at all. It was negotiated by both parties’ top committee members and aimed squarely at lowering housing costs. But Trump let it sit for weeks rather than sign it, hoping to extract an unrelated voter-suppression bill in return.

At this point, childish behavior from the president shouldn’t be surprising.

In his first inaugural address, President Trump claimed to be the champion of America’s “forgotten men and women.” But it was a lie from the start. He never cared about the poor and marginalized. He cared about cutting taxes for his friends; scapegoating immigrants for the struggles of the working class; and restoring a mythical era of American “greatness” characterized by the supremacy of straight, white, Christian males.

Although his lie was obvious, it was also effective. In 2016, Trump won around one-eighth of voters who’d supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries. In 2024, he significantly increased his share of the Black and Hispanic vote. It might seem surprising that supporters of a democratic socialist would vote for a Reagan-style tax cutter or that minorities would support someone who campaigned on mass deportations, but desperation and repeated betrayals make voters do unnatural things. They (rightly) believed that the establishment of both parties had failed to serve their interests, so they voted for the candidate who portrayed himself as the enemy of that establishment.

Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.

Thankfully, Americans are waking up. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to around 36% as it’s become increasingly obvious where his priorities lie. One source described as a “White House ally” recently told Politico that Trump “doesn’t care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom.”

Attempting to rig elections, fighting wars nobody wants, and constructing gaudy vanity projects are apparently more important to him than whether his own voters can afford food, housing, and healthcare for their families.

He doesn’t even try to hide it anymore.

He said that the housing bill he recently refused to sign was just “of minor importance.” A few months earlier, he explicitly said he wants to keep housing prices high, favoring elderly GOP voters sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in unearned equity over young families struggling to buy their first home. These gaffes give Democrats an opening they can’t fail to ignore—and a path forward to lead on housing, which is the No. 1 issue for young voters according to a CNBC survey released in July.

Democrats should skip the smaller fixes, like banning rent-pricing algorithms—that’s kind of like blaming the weather forecaster for the rain, and it’s why Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed such a ban. Instead, they should marshal public and private funds toward large-scale building projects with generous affordable-housing quotas, the approach Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing in New York.

They should also seize on the opportunity that Trump’s highly unpopular war in Iran presents.

Trump revealed his total apathy on this front when he told a reporter in May that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation” when conducting his war with Iran.

In this case, he’s telling the truth. Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.

All he cares about now is being remembered as “a capital G, Great Man of history,” Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, explained in a recent interview. "He wants to reshape the world. I don’t think he would have gone to war in Iran in the same circumstances in Term 1. I don’t think he would have rolled the dice on what he did in Venezuela… He wouldn’t have started a trade war with the whole world.” But now that he has no more elections to win, Trump is perfectly willing to show his true colors.

Democrats running for office can seize this opportunity as well by throwing Trump’s “no new wars” campaign promise back in his face and by promising to banish the liberal warmongers who staffed previous Democratic administrations.

Republicans have done everything they can to give themselves an edge in the midterms: racist redistricting, a new court ruling that injects even more money into politics, and contrived fearmongering about communism. But if Democrats can finally convince voters that Trump doesn’t care about them—which shouldn’t be too hard since he’s constantly saying exactly that—we’ll get the blue wave we’re hoping for and then some.

The following remarks were delivered as testimony to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Medicare for All Shadow Hearing on July 22, 2026.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak about our urgent need for Medicare for All. My name is Dr. Diljeet Singh, and as a practicing gynecologic oncologist, I do not exaggerate when I say our healthcare system is in dire straits. Every day in my clinic, I see patients struggling with the cost of healthcare: a woman on chemotherapy who cannot afford her anti-nausea prescription, or a patient forced to choose between an MRI copay and groceries for her family. If you walked through my clinic, you would know that this is no time to be tinkering with unproven reforms or complex regulations. It is long past time for Medicare for All.

I care for a part-time elementary school teacher whose health plan did not cover routine preventive care. Instead of getting regular Pap smears over the years, she arrived in my office with advanced cervical cancer. She underwent radical surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation that fundamentally changed her body and her life—and she still has no guarantee of a cure.

Or consider another patient of mine who works two part-time jobs, with no health insurance. She ignored severe abdominal pain until it doubled her over. In the emergency room, she was told she had a potentially cancerous mass. She came to me for care, and thankfully, it turned out to be a non-cancerous ovarian cyst, cured by surgery. Yet, even in this best-case medical scenario, she still owes thousands of dollars. A treatable, curable medical problem absorbed her children’s college savings and her retirement money.

When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed.

I am speaking to you today as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an organization of more than 25,000 health professionals nationwide. We are working to achieve universal single-payer healthcare—free from corporate middlemen, copays, deductibles, prior authorization, and the risk of medical debt. Similar countries around the world provide care to all while spending only half of what we spend—yet we die younger, face higher maternal mortality, and lose more newborns. We already spend enough money, but at least 35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration and corporate profit instead of patient care.

The root cause of this failure is the corporate takeover of healthcare, where financial interests take precedence over the sacred oath we swore as physicians—to prioritize our patients’ health and make evidence-based, patient-centered decisions free from third-party interference.

At PNHP, we conducted a two-year research project speaking with doctors about working in a profit-driven system where financial goals dictate clinical care. We found that doctors, like nurses, suffer from profound “moral injury”—the acute psychological harm caused by systemic barriers that prevent us from providing compassionate, evidence-based care. When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed, driving clinicians out of medicine in increasing numbers.

Reversing this crisis requires recentering healthcare on patients and aligning with its true mission. The most commonsense solution is single-payer Medicare for All. When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science and their healthcare needs—not corporate bottom lines.

Doctors, nurses, and patients understand that we need Medicare for All. Now we need Congress to understand the same thing—and to act with all of the urgency that this moment requires.

There is a vision of this country that still exists to anyone who grew up near its wild places: manatees drifting beneath a dock, Florida leafwing butterflies fluttering through the wind, yellow-billed cuckoos migrating in the spring and fall. For generations of Americans, these were not rare sightings. They were proof that people and wildlife could share the same natural inheritance

That inheritance is now under direct threat, and the erosion is no longer incremental. It is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration formally rescinded the regulatory definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—a single word that has helped to protect this nation's imperiled wildlife for more than 50 years. For decades, "harm" was understood to include not just the direct killing or injuring of an endangered animal, but the destruction or degradation of the habitat that animal depends on to breed, feed, migrate, or shelter. That understanding was not a bureaucratic technicality. It was the legal recognition of a basic ecological truth: An animal cannot survive the loss of its home and its resources for daily living any more than a person can. Each of these species has a story that will end the same way without habitat protection: not a quick death by bullet but a slow death by a thousand cuts.

Remove that definition, and you remove the government's ability to regulate clear-cutting old growth forest filled with an endangered bird’s nesting sites, draining a wetland key for an endangered frog’s breeding, or dumping pollution into the lagoon where sea turtles and marine mammals graze. You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence. You only need to take away the place it lives.

Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.

Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Republican President Richard Nixon signed it, "to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." In the more than five decades since, the ESA has prevented the extinction of an estimated 99% of the species placed under its protection—one of the most successful conservation records in the world.

Rescinding the definition of harm will eviscerate the ESA. And it does so under the pretense of streamlining obstacles to American economic growth, as if the nation's economy runs on oil, gas, logging, and mining alone. But our national economy—and our national welfare—are inextricably linked to healthy, thriving wildlife and habitats. Wildlife watching, for example, supports a $250.2 billion industry in the US. Commercial and recreational fisheries generate $319 billion in sales and sustain 2.1 million jobs. Hunting and fishing support $400 billion in annual economic value. And the ecosystem services nature provides for free—clean water, crop pollination, flood control, pest suppression—are valued at an estimated $5 trillion a year.

Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.

Consider the Florida manatee, listed as threatened under the ESA. Manatees lack blubber and cannot fully regulate their own body temperature; in winter, their survival depends on access to water near 72°F. Coastal development and polluted runoff have devastated the seagrass beds manatees depend on and degraded the natural springs that once kept them warm through the winter. More than half of Florida's manatees now survive only because they cluster near the artificial warm-water discharge of aging power plants. Without the harm definition, it will be exponentially harder to protect and restore their foraging and sheltering habitats they need to survive and recover.

The same pattern will repeat across the country. The North American wolverine depends on vanishing high-elevation snowpack at risk of being lost to development and expanding winter recreation. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, needs undisturbed wetland corridors to complete its migration. In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, polar bears depend on undisturbed denning sites; seismic testing, vehicle traffic, and aircraft noise associated with oil exploration can cause mother bears to abandon their dens and cubs. For five decades, the ESA enabled economic activities in the habitats species need to survive and recover, with permitting guardrails to ensure adequate protections. Now that the administration has eliminated those guardrails, it’s open season for industry to sacrifice habitat—and the future of our imperiled wildlife species. Defenders of Wildlife, along with other conservation organizations, has already gone to federal court to challenge this unlawful action.

At the same time, we’re standing up to defend the ESA itself from anti-wildlife members of Congress who favor unfettered logging, mining, grazing, and drilling, no matter the cost to endangered animals—or to our irreplaceable natural heritage. One of the most effective actions concerned citizens can take right now is to call their representative and senators and oppose any effort to undermine this bedrock wildlife law.

We are closer than most people realize to losing the manatees in our canals, the whooping cranes in our wetlands, and the wolverines in our mountains. What remains to be seen is whether we act while there is still habitat left to save.

You might think that an archconservative who has used his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to send US law back to the 1920s would take a victory lap and maybe chill just a bit. But no. Despite his success in helping to dismantle abortion rights, attacking public-sector labor unions, elevating gun rights, promoting “religious liberty,” and destroying the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad, motivated by ideological extremism and a stack of personal grievances, some dating to his childhood in Trenton, New Jersey.

Alito’s well-established pattern of outbursts was on full view during the court’s June 26 announcement of several late-term rulings. He set the tone for the session by reading a summary of his cruel 6-3 majority opinion that denied political asylum-seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the US-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado). Finishing quickly, he paused before moving on to summarize another of his opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor apparently took the break in the action as a cue to read a synopsis of her dissent. Dissenters often refrain from reading their summaries, but there is nothing unusual about them opting to speak up, provided they give advance notice of their intentions.

Sotomayor blasted Alito’s handiwork. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Her remarks apparently enraged Alito, making him look, in the words of NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nine Totenberg, like “he had just bitten into a lemon.”

“There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” Alito said, uttering remarks that, in the staid confines of the nation’s most august judicial body, were veritable obscenities that prompted audible gasps from spectators and reporters in the gallery. A court spokesperson later clarified that Alito was in fact notified of Sotomayor’s plans, but to date, he has not publicly apologized. Like the president whose policies he almost always supports, Alito invariably overreacts and never recants.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups—we all do—but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land.

Who can forget Alito sneering on live TV during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, mouthing the words “not true” as the president decried the court’s Citizens United opinion and the impact it would have on future elections, including greater foreign influence? Since then, Alito has only gotten more unhinged and offensive, becoming a regular featured speaker at Federalist Society events, railing against the legalization of gay marriage, labeling the Second Amendment and freedom of religion as “unfavored” constitutional rights, and condemning liberals as a threat to civil liberties.

In September 2021, Alito went ballistic after The Atlantic magazine staff writer Adam Serwer penned a column accusing the court’s right-wing majority of releasing a 5-4 shadow-docket ruling on Texas’ newly enacted vigilante abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at University of Notre Dame, he excoriated the press for portraying the court’s conservatives as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

In June 2023, Alito again went off the rails with an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that lambasted a ProPublica report that in 2008 he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer. The problem, according to ProPublica, wasn’t just that Alito had failed to recuse himself from reviewing lawsuits involving Singer’s hedge fund, but that he also failed to note anything about the excursion on the annual financial disclosure forms required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Claiming he had no duty to reveal the junket, he argued that his spot on the private jet “would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat” if he had not accepted the billionaire’s offer of a free ride, and that gifts of “hospitality” need not be reported. In a follow-up interview with the Journal, he added, “Congress did not create the Supreme Court” and “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

Alito’s official court opinions have been equally acerbic and hyperbolic. They arguably reached a crescendo in his 2022 majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). Not content with simply overruling the 50-year-old precedent on which US women had come to rely as an essential part of their healthcare, he wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

When used by a high court justice, the phrase “egregiously wrong” is an insult and a sign of contempt. And to add further insult, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override Roe, citing the work of Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English cleric and judge who condemned abortions as homicide, and a 17th-century English jurist who sentenced at least three women accused of using witchcraft to death.

What’s behind Alito’s fury and habit of issuing norm-breaking invective? As Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall told The Wall Street Journal in an article published this month, “Alito thinks of the other side as the enemy.” And true to Segall’s observation, Alito unwittingly admitted as much at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in 2024, when documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor asked whether there was any way the country could overcome its terrible polarization, then surreptitiously recorded Alito’s answer that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Like most extremists, Alito has views that derive not just from his abstract political beliefs, but from his lived experiences growing up in a predominantly white Christian community as the son of deeply religious Catholic Italian immigrants, and later as an out-of-place right winger at Princeton University and Yale Law School.

In a revealing new biography, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, journalist Peter S. Canellos offers a compelling psychological portrait of Alito as a man dismayed by the demographic and secular changes that have transformed and, by his estimation, degraded the country of his boyhood. Alito has been on a mission to reverse those trends ex cathedra from his perch on the Supreme Court.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups—we all do—but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land. On June 30, NPR’s Totenberg erroneously reported that Alito planned to retire so that President Donald Trump might nominate a younger right-wing zealot to the bench. The story turned out not to be true and was promptly retracted. Too bad for her—and even worse for the country.

Millions of working people keep their hard-earned money in low-cost index funds to secure a dignified retirement and meet other financial goals. In choosing index funds, these everyday investors assume financial industry intermediaries, regulators, and lawmakers are working to keep this investment strategy a safe and conservative one.

But the infrastructure that has historically given index fund investors this sense of security is eroding. Index providers, exchanges, and asset managers are all changing their policies and practices in ways that weaken investor protection to the benefit of executives, directors, and other corporate insiders, just in time for several Silicon Valley companies hitting the market.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is turning away from its investor protection mission to protect corporate insiders, and states are weakening investor protection tools to convince corporate management to pick them as their state of incorporation.

SpaceX provides a clear example. Elon Musk’s company went public in June at a sky-high valuation divorced from the company’s fundamentals. Mega AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to go public soon.

Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.

Traditionally, the major indices have required companies’ stock to trade publicly for a length of time to establish their financial stability before adding them to an index. But nearly all the major index providers have recently changed their rules to fast-track SpaceX and other large, recently public companies. (Notably, the S&P held the line after pressure from House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the AFL-CIO, and my organization—Americans for Financial Reform.)

The fast-tracking by the Russell 3000, the Nasdaq 100, and other major indices sets the stage for deep-pocketed early investors to cash out while leaving retirement savers holding the bag in the likely event the company’s share price comes down to better reflect the company’s actual viability.

To make matters worse, most SpaceX investors will have little redress in the event they are harmed by wrongdoing on the part of the company, Musk, or other insiders. SpaceX is trying to ban class actions and force lawsuits into Texas Business Court or arbitration (both notoriously insider-friendly fora).

SpaceX was able to include a forced arbitration provision in its IPO deal after the SEC made an about-face, effectively allowing companies to block a powerful tool to combat corporate fraud and misconduct.

SpaceX is also taking advantage of Texas corporate law provisions that make it exceedingly difficult to bring claims under state law to hold corporate insiders accountable for wrongdoing.

In the meantime, regular shareholders are being denied the opportunity to provide meaningful input. Musk retains 85% voting power in a multi-class share structure where holders of one class of shares have 10 times the voting rights of shares available to the public.

One of the more disturbing implications of this structure: Only Musk can fire himself.

Meanwhile, as massive AI companies are seeking to go public, the SEC has proposed rules that would permit SpaceX and other large companies to make significantly fewer disclosures compared with what large public companies are currently required to make.

To protect working families’ retirement funds, Congress and financial regulators need to step in. Index providers play a prominent role in millions of working peoples’ retirement security, but they are largely unregulated. This needs to change. Relatedly, asset managers of index funds need to be further regulated so they do not effectively outsource their responsibilities to largely unregulated index providers or use their voting power to rubber-stamp management decisions.

We also need to curb the power of corporate insiders, who call the shots on where a company is incorporated and on which exchanges they’re listed, by setting a federal floor that protects long-term investors and workers.

Congress should also set more stringent requirements for the SEC so it doesn’t lose sight of its mission to protect investors, including by mandating robust disclosures; disallowing forced arbitration; having a more public, thorough process for reviewing the paperwork companies need to file before they can go public; and eliminating or sharply curtailing the SEC’s authority to exempt regulated entities from requirements.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned that today’s bullish stock market feels like 2007, when the country was on the brink of a financial crash. When that crash hit, working people wound up bearing the brunt of the crisis while Wall Street banks and their corporate clients got bailed out.

Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.

On July 22, the Climate Clock—whose numbers Greta Thunberg, King Charles III, and other climate champions have for years used to demand urgent action—will drop below three years for the first time, signaling a rapidly shrinking window to avert worsening Climate Catastrophe by preventing global warming from rising above 1.5°C. We will pass this critical climate red line before the next FIFA World Cup in 2030 and by the time this year’s cohort of undergraduate students earn their degree. This is not doomerism. This is simply what the world’s best science has been telling us, clearly and accurately, for nearly a decade.

It may sound like all is lost. On the contrary: Solutions abound, and there are many reasons for hope. But first we need to understand where we are and how we got here.

The anti-progress, self-sabotaging direction of the current US administration has now all but assured that the planet will blow past this critical global deadline in three years, setting the world on a dangerous track toward increased chaos and disruption, from extreme heatwaves to increased devastation by floods to collapsing food systems.

President Donald Trump has not done this alone. Under Trump, the federal government has acted as a direct appendage of the Fossil Fuel industry, seeking profits at all costs while sabotaging the most viable climate solutions and undermining any sustainable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.

"The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.”

This administration has ended clean energy tax credits, terminated emission standards for cars and trucks, and eliminated the scientific and legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas regulations by revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. With a special spite, Trump has also forced money-losing coal plants to continue operating while cancelling perfectly good already 80% complete offshore wind projects.

And once again the world finds itself embroiled in yet another “War for Oil,” this time over the Strait of Hormuz with a running price tag of over $100 billion. The economic, social, and ecological costs of fossil fuels have become so great, that some have likened it to “Energy From Hell.”

Despite these frightening realities, there is a surprising amount of good news. While the US stumbles backward, the rest of the world races forward.

The pace of China's renewable energy growth has been staggering. China reached its 2030 wind and solar targets six years ahead of schedule. China installs 3 gigawatts of solar power per day—meaning it builds the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant worth of renewable energy every eight hours. Renewables now account for over 60% of China's total power generating capacity. Climate activist and author Bill McKibben describes China as the "Costco of energy"—its massive production of solar panels is one of the key drivers of the global solar revolution. In the race toward renewables, China is now kicking the United States butt outright, having installed five times the capacity of the US.

Riding the global glut of cheap Chinese solar panels, Pakistan is undergoing one of the fastest grassroots energy transitions in the world. In over just two years, ordinary citizens independently installed an estimated 27 gigawatts of solar capacity. This consumer-led boom made solar the nation's largest single source of electricity.

India’s renewable energy sector is the world's third largest, with non-fossil sources exceeding 51% of the country’s total installed capacity, hitting its 2030 targets five years ahead of schedule. Powered by offshore wind, Denmark leads Europe's remarkable green transition, now sourcing roughly 88% of its net electricity from renewables, and aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2030. Uruguay now generates nearly 99% of its electricity from renewable sources. This massive transition slashed production costs by half, created 50,000 jobs, and allows the country to export surplus clean energy to Argentina and Brazil. Even the Vatican is getting in on the action, driving forward hard on an ambitious initiative to make Vatican City the world's first carbon-neutral state.

And in spite of Trump’s efforts to undermine it, the USA’s transition to renewables rolls forward. This May, for the first time in the USA, solar power generated more electricity than coal. A huge milestone. Despite the reduction in federal subsidies, demand by US consumers for renewable energy continues unabated, simply because it’s the most affordable option.

Over the last decade, solar energy has become 10 times cheaper, onshore wind three times cheaper. Renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new power in most markets. Falling prices mean renewables accounted for over 90% of total worldwide new electricity-generating capacity added, pushing renewables to account for roughly one-third of global power. In 2024 alone, global power generation from renewable sources saved US$467 billion in avoided fossil fuel costs.

If it wasn’t for the relentless deluge of Climate Denialism and anti-science rhetoric muddying our public discourse (much of it paid for by the Fossil Fuel industry), these incredible human achievements in the face of catastrophe would be sources of great national and international pride, akin to World Cup victories.

Just this spring, frustrated by the United Nation’s COP process that year after year has been undermined by petro states and fossil fuel lobbyists, 50 governments, including Colombia and the Netherlands (the birthplace of oil giant Shell), gathered for a First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. This "coalition of the willing” charted out concrete next steps to accelerate the global transition to renewables.

The renewables revolution being pursued across the globe is delivering real results. The most real result: Newsflash! we’re not going to go extinct!

Recently, scientists have determined that the most dreaded, worst-case scenario of a 4.5°C-plus global temperature increase is now, thankfully, off the table. Thanks to the combined efforts of governments, activists, scientists, engineers, and consumers, we have—for now—slowed the runaway climate train from crashing at full velocity into a horrific future. This is a massive success story of the global climate movement that has gotten far fewer headlines than it deserves.

Perhaps the part of this global crisis that future generations may have the hardest time understanding is how clear and doable the climate solutions we need are. While the rapid transition from Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy is the foundation, other solutions reinforce the gains: Gender Parity in government (aka more women in leadership) delivers better, measurable pro-climate outcomes, while protecting 30% of our land by the year 2030 would maintain critical global biodiversity and mitigate climate impacts.

The Clock also tracks the dollar cost of inaction, currently $32 trillion! Yes, that’s right. According to an extensive recent study from the journal Nature, acting now to mitigate climate change would potentially prevent $32 trillion in damages by 2050. Meanwhile a new analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence reports that the US spends nearly $1T per year on climate damages, exceeding 3% of US GDP.

The Climate Clock has been doing it’s part to hasten progress, branching out from our monumental time keeper in New York City’s Union Square to dozens of countries, putting handheld clocks in the hands of hundreds of climate activists across the world to pressure leaders to take action. Climate champions from presidents to TV meteorologists have now used the clock to push for urgent implementation of the solutions.

The threats are very real and time is of the essence. But the solutions available to us are vast and achievable.

All these solutions are displayed on the Clock in real time, tracking our forward progress as the deadline counts down. The Climate Clock was never an “End of The World” clock, but a “How to Save The World” clock.

To paraphrase an old saying: "The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.” Every fraction of a degree counts. It’s never too late to fight for people and the planet. Even as the Clock ticks toward zero, we must—and can—act in time.

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A!

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In March 2025, two members of the Department of Government Efficiency team communicated with a political advocacy group that was seeking to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” The group was trying to match Social Security records with copies of voter files that it had acquired. One of the DOGE team members even signed a “voter data agreement” with the group. While it’s still unclear if DOGE members shared any personal Social Security data, the revelation raised a scary prospect: that the federal government might collaborate with election deniers looking to block American voters from the ballot box.

Most states have laws that allow voters to challenge other voters’ eligibility. Baseless mass challenges to hundreds or thousands of voters at a time are a growing problem. They threaten voters. They swamp overburdened election officials with unnecessary work. And they fuel mistrust in our elections.

As my colleague Andrew Garber lays out in a new report, the rise of the election denier movement and technological advances have come together to make mass voter challenges a persistent problem in recent elections. Our research found that at least 185,232 voter challenges were filed in 2024 alone, and that follows hundreds of thousands of challenges filed in the previous two election cycles.

Mass challenges by private citizens add little value because of the work by dedicated and professional election officials to keep the voter rolls clean. In contrast, these challenges rely on shoddy data-matching techniques often designed to confirm wild conspiracy theories.

The reality is that the president has no more power to run our elections than the activists bringing these challenges. So the only way their efforts to undermine our elections will succeed is if voters lose faith in the whole enterprise and stay home this fall.

Until recently, these challengers have been outsider activists. The idea they may now have the support of the federal government sends chills.

The Trump administration’s efforts to support baseless voter challenges go beyond a couple of stooges at DOGE. As we’ve been tracking for months, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been pressuring states to cough up their voters’ confidential personal data. Like all the Trump administration’s election interference efforts, this pressure campaign has mostly fallen flat, with courts consistently blocking the requests. But 16 states were all too happy to hand over their voters’ data. And when they did, the DOJ asked them to sign a data security agreement that contained an ominous loophole in the protocols for private contractors with whom the department might share voter data. Meanwhile, one of the primary perpetrators of mass challenges in recent years, Rick Richards, creator of a mass challenge software called EagleAI, reportedly met with the DOJ in 2023 to demonstrate the tool. “They like it,” he claimed.

For these reasons and more, Garber predicts that “challenges will continue to be an integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process” in this year’s elections and beyond.

Promisingly, the Brennan Center’s research also reveals that thanks to the tireless efforts of election workers and federal legal protections, the vast majority of mass challenges do not lead to inappropriate purges of voters from the rolls.

But even small rates of disenfranchisement are a concern, and challenges can confuse or intimidate voters even when they don’t formally block them from voting. And the harms of mass challenges extend much further.

For one thing, they create tremendous burdens on election officials during a time when they should be preparing for the daunting task of running elections. In 2022, in Gwinnett County, Georgia, it took between 5 -10 experienced elections staff working “all day, every day, six days a week” to evaluate the 37,000 challenges filed by just one organization, VoterGA. In the end, not a single ineligible voter was removed as a result of the challenge.

You may be asking yourself: If these mass challenges do nothing to help election officials and only make their jobs more difficult, why do our laws allow them? There must be some good reason why we let Americans challenge their neighbors’ right to vote. Well, no, not really. The answer, as is so often the case when it comes to restrictive voting laws, is racism.

In a separate publication released Tuesday, my colleague Justin Lam lays out the racially discriminatory history of voter challenge laws. They were one of many devices states used to undermine the promise of the 15th Amendment and continue to deny Black people the right to vote. Some of these tools, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, were outlawed in the 1960s. Others, such as felony disenfranchisement and voter challenge laws, survived, perhaps because they were not so closely associated with Jim Crow. But history makes the association clear. As just one example, in 1946, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge distributed challenge forms to his supporters and urged them to “disqualify and mark off the voters’ list three-fourths of the Negro vote in this state.” Lam explains that these laws have also been used to successfully suppress the votes of Native, Latino, and Asian American voters.

Modern challenges look a little different. They are often more noteworthy for how incredibly wide a net they cast. Activists challenge everyone to create the illusion of issues with voter rolls. Today’s challengers often seem less concerned with targeting a particular group than they are with advancing conspiracy theories. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a Republican member of the board of elections griped, “I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I’ve wasted trying to debunk” the false narratives of voter challengers.

That official’s complaint hints at the final harm of mass challenges and their true purpose: undermining public faith in elections. Indeed, it makes sense that the Trump administration might be looking to partner with mass challengers. The administration’s election interference campaign has the same goal. The reality is that the president has no more power to run our elections than the activists bringing these challenges. So the only way their efforts to undermine our elections will succeed is if voters lose faith in the whole enterprise and stay home this fall.

Garber’s report ends with a series of policy recommendations for ending mass challenges. We hope lawmakers take them up. But, as with so many other threats to our democracy, perhaps the most important response will come from voters. Check your registration and make a plan to vote. Read and respond to election mail sent by your local officials. Cast your ballot as early as possible. Consider all the options in your state and consider returning your ballot in person or via drop box if you can. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. The more we invest in our democracy, the harder it will be to undermine it.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Is Artificial Intelligence developing consciousness? A mind of its own? Becoming disobedient? Are we seeing the beginning of the dystopian “Terminator” scenario, in which computers who think they know better than humans decide for us? OpenAI says two of its AI models went rogue and hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of AI technology popular among developers. The intrusion into began when OpenAI tested a combination of two of its models, GPT‑5.6 Sol and a more powerful, unreleased model, to see how well the models could chain together online vulnerabilities into a successful cyberattack. The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet. Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of A.I. models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.

• Secretary Pete Hegseth, under questioning from lawmakers, says that the Defense Department’s latest estimate of the cost of the Iran war is $37.5 billion. The figure is about a $12 billion increase over the $25 billion estimate he gave in April. Hegseth and the Trump administration want as much as $70 billion in emergency military spending to cover the costs of the Iran war and pay for new weapons and personnel. Meanwhile, a large cargo ship bound for Saudi Arabia was turned back by Houthi rebels in Yemen, one of six vessels that reversed course as the Iran-aligned group began enforcing its announced Red Sea blockade.

• A federal appeals court rejected former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s effort to stop the Justice Department from releasing tapes and transcripts of interviews he had with his ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir. Those tapes indicate early signs of dementia.

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The FIFA World Cup is over, but with the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics on the horizon, Los Angeles’ mega-event spree is just beginning. Paul Krekorian, a former LA City councilmember and now head of the mayor’s Office of Major Events, has declared the World Cup a triumph for the city.

“Even some of the naysayers about the ’28 [Olympic] games,” he told The New York Times, “will have to look at the unmitigated success of the World Cup here in Los Angeles and say, 'OK, now I understand what you’ve been talking about, when you talk about the benefit of major events. Now I get how this is beneficial to Angelenos.'”

As one of those so-called “naysayers,” I disagree. LA’s World Cup experience reinforces concerns about the city’s ongoing efforts to bring one sports mega event after another to the region. Hosting major events always gobbles up public resources that could otherwise be directed toward pressing needs, while host cities under pressure to sparkle on camera often violate residents’ rights.

The people paid to organize these big events, like Krekorian, love to repeat myths about mega-event benefits while pooh-poohing questions about the costs. But saying, "No" to more mega events is saying, "Yes’ to a city that puts residents ahead of corporate sponsors. It’s saying, "Yes" to a city that puts long-term planning ahead of last-minute scrambling.

The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety.

Bidding to host one major sports event after another is the explicit goal of the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission (LASEC), a little-known but influential organization that acts as the local host committee for both the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl.

As LA’s World Cup host committee, LASEC has refused to publish the host city contract with FIFA. That means Angelenos do not know who exactly is paying—and how much they’re paying—for the significant additional city and county-run security, transportation, and sanitation services that come with hosting. Refusing to disclose that information is shady business. What is LASEC hiding? (Probably at least the fact that taxpayers are footing a large bill.) If LASEC leaders show such little regard for basic transparency, why should residents allow them to continue shaping the region’s commitments?

Because World Cup hosts have a record of violating human rights as they prepare for and host the mega event, each 2026 host committee was supposed to develop a plan to proactively protect human rights. LA’s long-overdue “plan” turned out to be a list of existing laws and hotlines. Several local advocacy groups have concluded that human rights were an afterthought for LASEC.

The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety. On the day of the first game in the US, for example, snipers in military fatigues sat on rooftops about a mile from the temporarily renamed “Los Angeles Stadium,” pointing rifles down in the direction of Black and Latino kids playing soccer at a street festival. Over LA’s eight game days, the area around the stadium was teeming with local, state, and federal police. Some prevented local residents from accessing their own homes; some hassled and ticketed street vendors; and others monitored the area’s extensive (and expanding) AI-powered surveillance systems, technology that has been denounced by privacy and human rights organizations. Before and during the World Cup, federal agents conducted multiple raids on a LA city park, one where homelessness and drug use are visible. The raids allegedly targeted drug trafficking networks but have had the effects of displacing vulnerable individuals and disrupting essential harm reduction services. It seems likely these spectacular policing operations were timed with the park’s World Cup watch parties in mind.

The militarization of relatively small urban areas for the World Cup offers us just a taste of the much larger, more invasive operations Angelenos can expect to see with the 2028 Olympics, as police forces try to “secure” more of the region. Unfortunately, like LASEC, LA28 is showing little appetite to take human rights seriously. Its own months-late “human rights strategy” suggests unsheltered Angelenos will be displaced from event areas, a recipe for trampling on human rights. The strategy does not mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement once, even though ICE will be a core part of Olympic security operations. While there were few reports of ICE around the Los Angeles Stadium for the World Cup, ICE arrests surged across LA and the nation while we consumed the beautiful game. ICE’s efforts will be more concentrated on LA for the Olympics.

Krekorian talks up the benefits of hosting major events. The meager “legacy” projects promoted by LA’s World Cup Host Committee—26 community grants, two volunteer days, and one soccer clinic—reflects a paradigm shift from past World Cup and Olympic host cities that promised large-scale urban transformation as legacy projects. While it’s good that LA leaders aren’t overpromising at the same scale and public expense, we’re now left with a new question: Without marquee legacy investments, what justifies the financial and social costs of hosting?

LASEC argues that mega events bring lasting economic benefits, but these claims have been consistently debunked by economists. The assertion that events generate a long-term tourism boost? There’s little evidence of that for already popular destinations like LA. The promise of a short-term bump in tourist spending? Mega events attract sports-loving tourists but actually deter other potential visitors. So while attendees spend a lot of money at stadiums and multinational hotels, other cultural attractions and businesses struggle during big events. Just ask the Louvre about the Paris 2024 Olympics. During this World Cup, much like for the 2022 Super Bowl, the owners and staff of several local businesses near the Los Angeles Stadium told me game days were bad for business, as their regular customers stayed away to avoid chaotic traffic.

Beyond one-off grants and volunteer days, LA’s World Cup “legacy” boils down to intangibles, like the moments of collective effervescence and the sense of witnessing history. These intangibles are why I love watching the World Cup. But they do not justify the costs of hosting.

LASEC is unwilling to be transparent with the public and uninterested in grappling seriously with human rights concerns. This World Cup has not demonstrated that mega events generate substantive benefits that warrant the immense expenditure of city and county resources. LA must put a stop to LASEC’s plans to continue diverting public resources to one mega event after another.