The ruthlessness of the Israeli genocide machine in Palestine, and the direct complicity of the U.S., UK, and other Western governments are two key pillars in the horrors being perpetrated against the Palestinian people (and in the attacks on human rights defenders around the globe).

But there is an essential third pillar: the role of complicit Western media corporations knowingly disseminating Israeli disinformation and propaganda, justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity, dehumanizing Palestinians, and blacking out information on the genocide in the West. From the perspective of international human rights law, such actions could and should be subject to sanctions. And there are historical precedents.

Seventy-six years ago, when delegates gathered at the newly established United Nations to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the importance of protecting freedom of expression was front and center. They would declare that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

But, in the wake of a half-century of horrific atrocities, driven in significant part by the dehumanization of millions on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, or other status, they were all too well aware that speech could also be used as a powerful weapon to destroy the rights of others, including the right to life itself. Thus, in the same document, the UN made clear that freedom of expression does not grant media corporations or anyone else a right “to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the other rights and freedoms.”

At the same time, in another UN conference room, delegates were gathered to create a new Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. There too, the drafters were aware of the danger of speech that dehumanizes and incites. The final convention would criminalize not just genocide, but also incitement to genocide and complicity in genocide- prohibitions that apply not only to states but to private actors as well.

The drafters of both instruments were aware of the conviction in the Nuremburg Tribunal just two years earlier of publisher Julius Streicher for incitement and “persecution on political and racial grounds.” The court found that Streicher’s media publication Der Sturmer continued to publish articles that included “incitement to murder and extermination” even while he was aware of the horrors that were being perpetrated against European Jews by Nazi Germany.

Fifty years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) would convict three media personalities for their role in inciting the Rwanda genocide. Two worked for the Mille Collines television and radio company and one for the Kangura newspaper. All three were found guilty of incitement to genocide (among other crimes). During sentencing, ICTR Judge Navi Pillay (now a commissioner on the UN’s international commission of enquiry investigating Israel’s crimes) admonished the perpetrators: “You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the…medium of communication with the widest public reach to disseminate hatred and violence…Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.”

"If your only source of information is mainstream Western media, you may have no idea that Israel is on trial for genocide in the World Court or that Israel’s leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests for crimes against humanity."

Der Sturmer knew what they were doing. Mille Collines knew what they were doing. And, today, CNN, Fox, BBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal know what they are doing. This is not to say that these Western outlets are in every sense the modern equivalents Der Sturmer and Milles Collines (they are not). But, like these historic examples, they have recklessly crossed the boundaries of ethical journalism and, in some cases, may find themselves legally exposed as well.

In the face of the first live-streamed genocide in history unfolding on the screens of people from Boston to Botswana, it is simply not credible to suggest that Western media companies are not aware of the realities on the ground and of what they are doing to obscure them. They have indisputably made conscious choices to hide the genocide from their audiences, to systematically dehumanize the Palestinian victims, and to insulate the Israeli perpetrators from accountability.

In the wake of the findings of the World Court that charges of genocide are plausible, its ordering of provisional measures, the request of the ICC Prosecutor for arrest warrants, and the issuance of successive damning reports on Israel’s conduct by independent international human rights mechanisms, rather than reporting fully on these developments, Western media companies have suppressed information on them and doubled down on running cover for Israel.

Equally importantly, the target audience of these media companies is not limited to uninvolved bystanders. It includes as well Western government officials and policymakers directly complicit in the genocide, through the provision of military, economic, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israel, as well as the voting public that enables this support. And it includes a significant number of dual Israeli nationals who shuttle back and forth to participate in the killing. The nexus between media incitement and harmful actions is more direct than these media companies might like to admit.

Indeed, if your only source of information is mainstream Western media, you may have no idea that Israel is on trial for genocide in the World Court or that Israel’s leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. It is likely that you have never heard the numerous statements of genocidal intent by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, and military commanders.

You will likely still believe the stories of beheaded Israeli babies (long proven to be fabricated) and be unaware of the many Palestinian babies who actually have been beheaded. You will almost certainly not know of the systematic killing of Palestinian civilians, children, infants, women, older persons, persons with disabilities, and others. You will be unaware of the torture camps, the systematic rape of detainees, and the Israeli snipers targeting small children in Gaza. And you may not even know that Israel now holds the world records for the murder of journalists, of aid workers, of UN officials, and of healthcare workers.

Instead, transparently false Israeli disinformation and propaganda are regularly and uncritically published in Western media to justify war crimes, dehumanize Palestinians, and distract the public from the daily atrocities committed in Israel’s campaign of extermination. Stories covering the genocide are censored. The voices of Palestinians and human rights defenders are suppressed.

Reporters are instructed not to mention “occupied territory”, “Palestinians”, or “refugee camps.” Those Palestinian civilian victims who are not erased entirely are reduced to “collateral damage” or “human shields” at best, or “terrorists” at worst. In massacre after massacre, Palestinians in headlines are not killed by Israel, they simply “die.”

In the rule book of Western corporate media, there is no genocide, only a war of self-defense. And history started on October 7. Absent is any coverage of the context of 76 years of ethnic cleansing, persecution, mass imprisonment, gross violations of human rights and apartheid.

In sum, western media companies have made themselves a part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine. Absent real accountability, these influential actors will continue to abuse their power, thereby trampling on the human rights of any people who fall on the wrong side of the line between those supported by these companies, and those who they choose to denigrate and dehumanize.

Of course, defenders of Palestinian human rights in the West who oppose Israeli genocide and apartheid know better than anyone how important it is to preserve the right to free speech. No group in modern history has faced more official and corporate silencing or had its speech more criminalized by Western governments. Speech restrictions are never imposed on those with the most power, but always target those most despised by power. This is the time to buttress free speech protections, not to erode them.

But free speech guarantees do not protect incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Those acts can and must be subject to criminal accountability. Both defamation and incitement can also bring accountability in civil courts. Action in international tribunals for Israel’s crimes against humanity and genocide in Palestine has already begun, and more is certain to follow. It is not inconceivable that, just as in the cases of the Nuremburg and Rwanda tribunals, some media companies or individuals might face real legal accountability in the months and years to come.

Regardless of what happens in the halls of justice, it is certain that these media outlets will eventually be held accountable in the court of public opinion. For defenders of human rights and people everywhere who care about holding power to account, this process is urgent. And, in fact, it has already begun. The cresting wave of public criticism of the blatant bias demonstrated by Western media during this genocide has forced some companies to begin to adjust their reporting, however slightly. This proves that change can happen if agents of change are mobilized. There is strength in speaking out, in supporting independent media, and in the boycott. As a first step, all those who care should unsubscribe from these outlets, both print and broadcast, switch to independent media sources, and encourage other to do the same.

To again quote Judge Pillay in the Rwanda decision: “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences”. The task of ensuring that accountability falls, ultimately, on all of us.

Protests over the last week at the Democratic National Convention, which saw thousands of antiwar demonstrators take to the streets (lined with scores of Chicago police) in and around the United Center, pose a critical question to the Harris/Waltz ticket: Can they bridge the yawning gulf that divides the street and the establishment on the matter of Israel’s war on Palestine?

The answer is, probably not.

On Thursday night during her own showcase speech in which she formally accepted her party's nomination, Harris appeared full-throated in favor of ending the war in Gaza. Here are her full (brief) remarks on the issue:

“With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done. And let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the war that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating so many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self determination."

But are words more important than deeds and were the few words issued on the subject this week persuasive to Democrats who want to actually see an end to the war, and at the very least, the American contribution to it?

Up until Thursday night, Vermont’s serial-presidential-also-ran Senator Bernie Sanders was the only other progressive on the DNC stage to give this issue some of the attention protesters believed it deserved (though he didn't go so far to call for an arms embargo). Earlier in the week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) threw out one line about Harris "working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home,” and was quickly admonished for it, even by her own squad members. "Working tirelessly for a ceasefire is really not a thing and they should be ashamed of themselves,” charged Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

As antiwar activist and author Norman Solomon has noted, Harris “has toed President Biden’s war line, while at times voicing sympathy for the victims of the Gaza war that’s made possible by policies that she supports. Her words of compassion have yet to translate into opposing the pipeline of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military as it keeps slaughtering Palestinian civilians.”

Despite their best efforts, the protestors didn’t get much traction this week. For proof of this, look no further than the fact that they couldn't even get a Palestinian-American speaker on stage because, as the Washington Post reported, "many Democratic leaders were concerned that such a speech from the podium would threaten the unity that has been on vivid display at the convention."

Then there's the DNC platform, which recognizes America's “ironclad” commitment to Israel. The Harris/Walz ticket, reads the platform, is dedicated “to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself.”

A press conference outside the DNC Wednesday morning featuring Reps. Omar, Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and two rather heroic members of Doctors Without Borders who witnessed firsthand the horror in Gaza, was sparsely attended. Generally speaking, the mood among the antiwar activists outside the United Center was resigned.

Irene, who travel from Long Island, New York, with Jewish Voices for Peace, told Responsible Statecraft (she did not want to use her last name) that in her view they had to do everything in their power to end the war but Biden was making it impossible given the billions in American money and weapons flowing to Israel today. “So, am I optimistic? I'm not optimistic. But silence is complicity.”

Despite the smears directed at them (guests on Fox News openly call demonstrators terrorists, Hamas sympathizers, and extremists) they are not giving up. And why should they? Their position is a popular one. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll in June showed 61 percent of Americans oppose sending “weapons and supplies to Israel.”

Asked about the accusation made last month by Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, that Iran is encouraging the protests, a union organizer from Chicago responded thusly to RS: “The drone strike pioneer Avril Haines? She’s speaking out against protestors calling for an end to the slaughter of innocent civilians? At least she’s consistent.”

Ann, another member of Jewish Voices for Peace, told RS that Harris’s argument to the antiwar faction of the party that basically “it’s me or Donald Trump” isn’t going to fly. “I think it's a false argument and it's intentional and it's used to instill fear and uncertainty and to make progressives and people with a conscience to feel bad that we are going to put Trump in office,” she said.

The contrast with the mood among the delegates couldn’t be more stark. The Democrats in the convention hall this week were ebullient. At a DNC event Tuesday night, one came away with the impression that the election had already been won. Among the rank and file, Gaza is a mere afterthought. They might cheer on the idea of “ceasefire” as applause lines, and even support the policy, but are quick to move on, and certainly did not have patience for chanting or theater outside or inside.

The attitude, expressed to RS by numerous delegates over the course of the week is: win first, sort out the details later.

But meantime, the carnage in Gaza continues.

Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order.

The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given (1) the current size of the human population (there are eight times as many of us alive today as there were in 1820, when the fossil fuel energy transition was getting underway), (2) the vast scale of the global economy, and (3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made in order to avert catastrophic climate change, a rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.

As we’ll see, the evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe in which an unimaginable number of people will either die or be forced to migrate, with most ecosystems transformed beyond recognition.

Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.

We’ll unpack the reasons why the transition is currently such an uphill slog. Then, crucially, we’ll explore what a real energy transition would look like, and how to make it happen.

Why This Is (So Far) Not a Real Transition

Despite trillions of dollars having been spent on renewable energy infrastructure, carbon emissions are still increasing, not decreasing, and the share of world energy coming from fossil fuels is only slightly less today than it was 20 years ago. In 2024, the world is using more oil, coal, and natural gas than it did in 2023.

While the U.S. and many European nations have seen a declining share of their electricity production coming from coal, the continuing global growth in fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions overshadows any cause for celebration.

Why is the rapid deployment of renewable energy not resulting in declining fossil fuel usage? The main culprit is economic growth, which consumes more energy and materials. So far, the amount of annual growth in the world’s energy usage has exceeded the amount of energy added each year from new solar panels and wind turbines. Fossil fuels have supplied the difference.

So, for the time being at least, we are not experiencing a real energy transition. All that humanity is doing is adding energy from renewable sources to the growing amount of energy it derives from fossil fuels. The much-touted energy transition could, if somewhat cynically, be described as just an aspirational grail.

How long would it take for humanity to fully replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, accounting for both the current growth trajectory of solar and wind power, and also the continued expansion of the global economy at the recent rate of 3 percent per year? Economic models suggest the world could obtain most of its electricity from renewables by 2060 (though many nations are not on a path to reach even this modest marker). However, electricity represents only about 20 percent of the world’s final energy usage; transitioning the other 80 percent of energy usage would take longer—likely many decades.

However, to avert catastrophic climate change, the global scientific community says we need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—i.e., in just 25 years. Since it seems physically impossible to get all of our energy from renewables that soon while still growing the economy at recent rates, the IPCC (the international agency tasked with studying climate change and its possible remedies) assumes that humanity will somehow adopt carbon capture and sequestration technologies at scale—including technologies that have been shown not to work—even though there is no existing way of paying for this vast industrial build-out. This wishful thinking on the part of the IPCC is surely proof that the energy transition is not happening at sufficient speed.

Why isn’t it? One reason is that governments, businesses, and an awful lot of regular folks are clinging to an unrealistic goal for the transition. Another reason is that there is insufficient tactical and strategic global management of the overall effort. We’ll address these problems separately, and in the process uncover what it would take to nurture a true energy transition.

The Core of the Transition is Using Less Energy

At the heart of most discussions about the energy transition lie two enormous assumptions: that the transition will leave us with a global industrial economy similar to today’s in terms of its scale and services, and that this future renewable-energy economy will continue to grow, as the fossil-fueled economy has done in recent decades. But both of these assumptions are unrealistic. They flow from a largely unstated goal: we want the energy transition to be completely painless, with no sacrifice of profit or convenience. That goal is understandable, since it would presumably be easier to enlist the public, governments, and businesses in an enormous new task if no cost is incurred (though the history of overwhelming societal effort and sacrifice during wartime might lead us to question that presumption).

But the energy transition will undoubtedly entail costs. Aside from tens of trillions of dollars in required monetary investment, the energy transition will itself require energy—lots of it. It will take energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric vehicles, electric farm machinery, zero-carbon aircraft, batteries, and the rest of the vast panoply of devices that would be required to operate an electrified global industrial economy at current scale.

In the early stages of the transition, most of that energy for building new low-carbon infrastructure will have to come from fossil fuels, since those fuels still supply over 80 percent of world energy (bootstrapping the transition—using only renewable energy to build transition-related machinery—would take far too long). So, the transition itself, especially if undertaken quickly, will entail a large pulse of carbon emissions. Teams of scientists have been seeking to estimate the size of that pulse; one group suggests that transition-related emissions will be substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 billion metric tons of CO2 “with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2”—the equivalent of more than five years’ worth of global carbon CO2 emissions at current rates. The only ways to minimize these transition-related emissions would be, first, to aim to build a substantially smaller global energy system than the one we are trying to replace; and second, to significantly reduce energy usage for non-transition-related purposes—including transportation and manufacturing, cornerstones of our current economy—during the transition.

In addition to energy, the transition will require materials. While our current fossil-fuel energy regime extracts billions of tons of coal, oil, and gas, plus much smaller amounts of iron, bauxite, and other ores for making drills, pipelines, pumps, and other related equipment, the construction of renewable energy infrastructure at commensurate scale would require far larger quantities of non-fuel raw materials—including copper, iron, aluminum, lithium, iridium, gallium, sand, and rare earth elements.

While some estimates suggest that global reserves of these elements are sufficient for the initial build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure at scale, there are still two big challenges. First: obtaining these materials will require greatly expanding extractive industries along with their supply chains. These industries are inherently polluting, and they inevitably degrade land. For example, to produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. The rock-to-metal ratio is even worse for some other ores. Mining operations often take place on Indigenous peoples’ lands and the tailings from those operations often pollute rivers and streams. Non-human species and communities in the global South are already traumatized by land degradation and toxification; greatly expanding resource extraction—including deep-sea mining—would only deepen and multiply the wounds.

The second materials challenge: renewable energy infrastructure will have to be replaced periodically—every 25 to 50 years. Even if Earth’s minerals are sufficient for the first full-scale build-out of panels, turbines, and batteries, will limited mineral abundance permit continual replacements? Transition advocates say that we can avoid depleting the planet’s ores by recycling minerals and metals after constructing the first iteration of solar-and-wind technology. However, recycling is never complete, with some materials degraded in the process. One analysis suggests recycling would only buy a couple of centuries’ worth of time before depletion would bring an end to the regime of replaceable renewable-energy machines—and that’s assuming a widespread, coordinated implementation of recycling on an unprecedented scale. Again, the only real long-term solution is to aim for a much smaller global energy system.

The transition of society from fossil fuel dependency to reliance on low-carbon energy sources will be impossible to achieve without also reducing overall energy usage substantially and maintaining this lower rate of energy usage indefinitely. This transition isn’t just about building lots of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It is about organizing society differently so that is uses much less energy and gets whatever energy it uses from sources that can be sustained over the long run.

How We Could Actually Do It, In Seven Concurrent Steps

Step one: Cap global fossil fuel extraction through global treaty, and annually lower the cap. We will not reduce carbon emissions until we reduce fossil fuel usage—it’s just that simple. Rather than trying to do this by adding renewable energy (which so far hasn’t resulted in a lessening of emissions), it makes far more sense simply to limit fossil fuel extraction. I wrote up the basics of a treaty along these lines several years ago in my book, The Oil Depletion Protocol.

Step two: Manage energy demand fairly. Reducing fossil fuel extraction presents a problem. Where will we get the energy required for transition purposes? Realistically, it can only be obtained by repurposing energy we’re currently using for non-transition purposes. That means most people, especially in highly industrialized countries, would have to use significantly less energy, both directly and also indirectly (in terms of energy embedded in products, and in services provided by society, such as road building). To accomplish this with the minimum of societal stress will require a social means of managing energy demand.

The fairest and most direct way to manage energy demand is via quota rationing. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) is a system designed two decades ago by British economist David Fleming; it rewards energy savers and gently punishes energy guzzlers while ensuring that everyone gets energy they actually need. Every adult would be given an equal free entitlement of TEQs units each week. If you use less than your entitlement of units, you can sell your surplus. If you need more, you can buy them. All trading takes place at a single national price, which will rise and fall in line with demand.

Step three: Manage the public’s material expectations. Persuading people to accept using less energy will be hard, if everyone still wants to use more. Therefore, it will be necessary to manage the public’s expectations. This may sound technocratic and scary, but in fact society has already been managing the public’s expectations for over a century via advertising—which constantly delivers messages encouraging everyone to consume as much as they can. Now we need different messages to set different expectations.

What’s our objective in life? Is it to have as much stuff as possible, or to be happy and secure? Our current economic system assumes the former, and we have instituted an economic goal (constant growth) and an indicator (gross domestic product, or GDP) to help us achieve that goal. But ever-more people using ever-more stuff and energy leads to increased rates of depletion, pollution, and degradation, thereby imperiling the survival of humanity and the rest of the biosphere. In addition, the goal of happiness and security is more in line with cultural traditions and human psychology. If happiness and security are to be our goals, we should adopt indicators that help us achieve them. Instead of GDP, which simply measures the amount of money changing hands in a country annually, we should measure societal success by monitoring human well-being. The tiny country of Bhutan has been doing this for decades with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) indicator, which it has offered as a model for the rest of the world.

Step four: Aim for population decline. If population is always growing while available energy is capped, that means ever-less energy will be available per capita. Even if societies ditch GDP and adopt GNH, the prospect of continually declining energy availability will present adaptive challenges. How can energy scarcity impacts be minimized? The obvious solution: welcome population decline and plan accordingly.

Global population will start to decline sometime during this century. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, and China, Japan, Germany, and many other nations are already seeing population shrinkage. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we should see it as an opportunity. With fewer people, energy decline will be less of a burden on a per capita basis. There are also side benefits: a smaller population puts less pressure on wild nature, and often results in rising wages. We should stop pushing a pro-natalist agenda; ensure that women have the educational opportunities, social standing, security, and access to birth control to make their own childbearing choices; incentivize small families, and aim for the long-term goal of a stable global population closer to the number of people who were alive at the start of the fossil-fuel revolution (even though voluntary population shrinkage will be too slow to help us much in reaching immediate emissions reduction targets).

Step five: Target technological research and development to the transition. Today the main test of any new technology is simply its profitability. However, the transition will require new technologies to meet an entirely different set of criteria, including low-energy operation and minimization of exotic and toxic materials. Fortunately, there is already a subculture of engineers developing low-energy and intermediate technologies that could help run a right-sized circular economy.

Step six: Institute technological triage. Many of our existing technologies don’t meet these new criteria. So, during the transition, we will be letting go of familiar but ultimately destructive and unsustainable machines.

Some energy-guzzling machines—such as gasoline-powered leaf blowers—will be easy to say goodbye to. Commercial aircraft will be harder. Artificial intelligence is an energy guzzler we managed to live without until very recently; perhaps it’s best if we bid it a quick farewell. Cruise ships? Easy: downsize them, replace their engines with sails, and expect to take just one grand voyage during your lifetime. Weapons industries offer plenty of examples of machines we could live without. Of course, giving up some of our labor-saving devices will require us to learn useful skills—which could end up providing us with more exercise. For guidance along these lines, consult the rich literature of technology criticism.

Step seven: Help nature absorb excess carbon. The IPCC is right: if we’re to avert catastrophic climate change we need to capture carbon from the air and sequester it for a long time. But not with machines. Nature already removes and stores enormous amounts of carbon; we just need to help it do more (rather than reducing its carbon-capturing capabilities, which is what humanity is doing now). Reform agriculture to build soil rather than destroy it. Restore ecosystems, including grasslands, wetlands, forests, and coral reefs.

Implementing these seven steps will change everything. The result will be a world that’s less crowded, one where nature is recovering rather than retreating, and one in which people are healthier (because they’re not soaked in pollution) and happier.

Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today. But that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed, and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas available for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.

Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning what a real energy transition requires and then educating the people you know; by advocating for degrowth or related policies; and by reducing your own energy and materials consumption. Calculate your ecological footprint and shrink it over time, using goals and strategies, and tell your family and friends what you are doing and why.

Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand: this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifice are required, just as in total war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition, and little prospect for a desirable human future.

If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:

In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.

Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.

1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.

MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.

2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have starkly different views on taxes and how the tax code can support families.

Harris voices strong support for families through investments in the care economy. She’s vowed to advance paid family leave, affordable childcare, care for disabled or aging family members, and healthcare. This could be funded with a better tax code.

These policies would help all of us care for our families and strengthen our communities. Investing public dollars in care could also narrow racial and gender pay gaps by boosting the pay of care workers—who are mostly women, and many of them women of color.

Strengthening care infrastructure would help us all thrive and make the economy stronger. But we need to collect sufficient revenue to support those transformational policies.

The Trump campaign has been largely silent on care investments. But his campaign has signaled support for more tax cuts at the top. Such cuts would increase inequality and reduce the availability of federal funding to strengthen the care economy.

We saw this in the 2017 tax law that former President Trump signed. It cut taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations, including cutting the effective tax rate for our largest corporations from an average 22% to an average 12.8%. It also preserved loopholes that allow some of the wealthiest corporations to avoid taxes on most—if not all—of their profits.

These tax cuts for the ultra wealthy led to huge losses in federal tax revenue and spiked the national debt, making it harder for the government to fund new investments in priorities that are important to families.

If reelected, Trump has said he wants to slash corporate taxes further—even though some billionaires pay a lower share of their income in taxes than nurses and teachers do.

By contrast, the Biden-Harris administration created a minimum corporate tax so the wealthiest corporations could no longer pay nothing, added a modest tax on stock buybacks, and funded the IRS to better collect taxes from corporations. These policies raised revenue for care investments and other priorities.

Going forward, Harris has signaled support for raising corporate tax rates, which are at historic lows, and closing loopholes.

Harris and Trump also have different priorities on taxes for families. As a senator, Harris championed a tax credit of $6,000 for married couples and $3,000 for single people in her Lift the Middle Class Act. This would have delivered 88% of its benefits to earners under $119,000.

Harris might not promote this specific plan going forward, but it suggests she’d aim to direct benefits to moderate earners instead of the wealthiest. More recently, she’s proposed expanding the Child Tax Credit and adding a $6,000 credit for families with newborns.

By contrast, the tax bill that Trump signed delivered more than half its benefits to the top 5% of households—those with incomes over $263,000. (Like Harris, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, has suggested a bigger Child Tax Credit. But Vance has also floated making people without children pay more taxes.)

Taxing the wealthiest and big corporations would support care investments and make our tax code more fair. Strengthening care infrastructure would help us all thrive and make the economy stronger. But we need to collect sufficient revenue to support those transformational policies.

There is strong public support for better care and for fairer taxes. Tax justice advocates should call on both the Harris and Trump campaigns to commit to a fairer tax system—and to use the money it would raise to invest in the childcare, elder care, and healthcare our families need.

Julian Borger at The Guardian reports that the first verified case of type 2 poliovirus in 25 years in Gaza, in a baby, has resulted in the paralysis of the infant. It is only the first of many if the UN is not allowed to administer vaccines to 650,000 children in the Strip, which will definitely require a cease-fire. The Israeli authorities are refusing to consider this step.

There is no cure for polio once it is contracted. Its victims can be paralyzed or can die.

Without a cease-fire, UNICEF points out, you cannot get the families to line up their children to receive the vaccine by mouth. Some 95% of the infants in Gaza need to have the vaccine administered to prevent an outbreak, and they need two doses. Without a cease-fire, the aid workers cannot even safely move around to make arrangements for giving out the doses. The aid organizations want to use Deir al-Balah to store and distribute the vaccines, but the Israeli army has just once again ordered everyone out of it and has invaded it, risking destroying the remaining medical infrastructure there. Some 250,000 Palestinians have once again been expelled from their shelters since the beginning of August.

UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini warned regarding Gaza, “Delaying a humanitarian pause will increase the risk of spread among children.” He suggested that some Israeli children could suffer from an epidemic, as well, but of course Israeli children have largely been vaccinated continually. Palestinian children had also been almost entirely vaccinated up until the Israeli total war on Gaza was implemented last fall.

UNICEF wrote of another war, Ukraine, “UNICEF helps vaccinate over 400 million children globally against polio every year, to eradicate polio worldwide. In Ukraine, UNICEF works to secure uninterrupted availability of life-saving vaccines for children and adults and to maintain high routine immunization coverage. As the war and subsequent displacement continues, gaps in immunization coverage put children’s health at risk.”

Although children in Ukraine are also at risk from polio outbreaks, the human toll of that war pales in comparison to Gaza. Some 2,000 children have been killed as a result of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s total war on the Gaza population has blown over 15,000 children to smithereens.

Whereas Putin’s Russia has been massively sanctioned for its illegal occupation and warfare in Ukraine by the US and most NATO countries, Israel’s government, which illegally occupied Gaza in 1967 and which has shown a reckless disregard for civilian life that may amount to genocide, has been given tens of billions of dollars by the Biden administration.

Type 2 polio vaccinations are substantially down over the past ten months, since the population and the aid workers have been constantly expelled from a succession of supposed safe zones by the Israeli military, medical facilities have been destroyed, and medicine deliveries have been made difficult or impossible by the bombings, artillery barrages, machine gun fire, drone strikes, lack of fuel and general chaos deliberately inflicted on the entire population by monstrously permissive Israeli rules of engagement — which entirely disregard the value of civilian, noncombatant life.

“Gaza Polio,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Although Israeli authorities are allowing the delivery of the refrigerated trucks necessary for the vaccines, as well as the vaccine doses themselves, through the Kerem Shalom crossing, the aid workers are pointing out that these steps do no good at all unless there is a cease-fire that allows the aid workers to move around and give the vaccines to the children. Borger quotes Lazzarini as saying, “It is not enough to bring the vaccines into Gaza and protect the cold chain. To have an impact, the vaccines must end up in the mouths of every child under the age of 10.”

UNICEF points out that “The world has made tremendous progress against polio in the past three decades, vaccinating over 2.5 billion children and reducing cases by 99 percent. But this progress is fragile, and we cannot afford to lose focus. Millions of children are still missing out on routine vaccinations because of pandemic disruptions, conflict, climate disasters, and displacement.”

It quotes Yuliia Dovjanych, Head Doctor at the ‘Dbayu’ medical centre “Infectious diseases do not disappear during the war. The fight against them is our ‘medical front’ where we must remain resilient. Therefore, we must continue to get vaccinated, take care of our health and the health of our children!” Some 11,520 civilians have been killed in the Ukraine war, whereas over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, a majority of them women and children.

At the medical front in Gaza, the war to save the children is going very badly. It will be lost without a cease-fire.

Since U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris took the reins from President Joe Biden, the presidential race has tightened in key battle states as the momentum has shifted in Democrats’ favor. Why do so many people say that the 2024 presidential race is pivotal for the future of democracy? And what would a Kamala Harris foreign policy look like with regard to the transatlantic relationship, Ukraine’s war effort, China, and Gaza?

Political scientist and political economist C. J Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek independent journalist Alexandra Boutri. Unlike many radicals who won’t support the Democratic ticket if Harris does not change her policy on Israel, Polychroniou thinks that the 2024 presidential election has great implications beyond Gaza.

Alexandra Boutri: For the next couple of months or so, U.S. elections will be under the spotlight. It has been argued that because of Trump’s embrace of authoritarianism, the 2024 presidential election is pivotal for the future of U.S. democracy, critically consequential to Washington’s European allies, and potentially transformative for today’s geopolitical realities. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris also differ radically when it comes to climate change, immigration, and the economy. They are also quite apart across a broad range of issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation. Do you agree then with the view of many people who say 2024 is the most important election of their lives?

There is now such a huge gap between Democrats and Republicans over political and social values that each side fears that the other side will destroy the nation if they are allowed to dictate policy.

C. J. Polychroniou: The 2024 U.S. presidential election is enormously important for many of the reasons you cited, although we shouldn’t be oblivious of the fact that parochialism is what drives most American voters. That said, this election is indeed unlike any other in modern history also because American voters are so polarized that the threat of civil breakdown is real. In fact, I believe that Trump is already laying the groundwork for rejecting the election result if he loses. This is why he calls Democrats’ replacement of Biden a “coup” and even “a violent overthrow” of a president. And back in March, he said that there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses the November election. Obviously, there is something very wrong with the contemporary political culture in the U.S. I mean, compare what is happening in the U.S. to Britain’s political culture where civility is still the name of the game. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak not only conceded defeat and congratulated Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, for his party’s victory, but took responsibility for the Tory party’s worst defeat in history.

Alexandra Boutri: Why does polarization run so deep in today’s United States?

C. J. Polychroniou: Political polarization among Americans has deep societal roots, with religion and race playing pivotal roles, but has been steadily intensifying in the last 40 or 50 years. There is now such a huge gap between Democrats and Republicans over political and social values that each side fears that the other side will destroy the nation if they are allowed to dictate policy. Democrats tend to be quite liberal when it comes to social issues, but most Republicans identify themselves as social conservatives. However, it is interesting to note that an annual poll on values and beliefs conducted last year by Gallup found that more Americans identify themselves as socially conservative than at any time in about a decade, although the largest increase was among Republicans. The role of guns in society, abortion, race, immigration, gender identity, and sexual orientation are among the issues that sharply divide supporters of the two parties, according to the latest findings from a Pew Research Center survey. Republicans and Democrats are also very much divided over the role of government power and global warming. In sum, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Democrats and Republicans live in different worlds.

Alexandra Boutri: How would you describe today’s GOP?

C. J. Polychroniou: Today’s GOP is the creation of one man alone—namely Donald J. Trump. What I mean by that is Trump can shift the party in any direction he chooses because he exerts a cult of personality over his followers. He can deliver fiery anti-abortion messages at some juncture during his political life, like he did when he first ran for president because he needed the support of evangelical Christians, but then decline to endorse a national abortion ban at another juncture because he fears that it would cost him votes if he did so.

Trump is not about ideology, values, or beliefs. Trump is the penultimate political opportunist who will say and do anything that might help him to achieve his goals. He is a clown, but a dangerous one who poses a real threat to democracy and the rule of law. The Republican Party has always been a reactionary political party but has now become an extreme political organization that fires up its base with lies and conspiracies. Trump employs the rhetoric of conservative populism, mocks the elite class, and pretends to be pro-worker. Never mind that Trump has no ideological convictions of his own and spent four years in office weakening unions and catering to the interests of the superrich. Most GOP voters have become blind followers of Trump and have neither the critical thinking skills nor the will to face the truth. They live in the political bubble that Trump has created for them. They would gladly take part in any political scheme conceived by Trump and even allow him to govern by dictatorial means. Moreover, virtually no Republican dares to stand up to Trump. He mocked and humiliated all his Republican rivals, but in the end they all fell in line and kissed his ring. I have a hard time coming up with politicians anywhere else on the planet who are so cowardly and obsequious as the Republicans are in the “land of the free.”

Alexandra Boutri: By the same token, the Democratic Party also went from being the “party of the people” to the party of the financial elite. Would you say then that it is the Democrats who paved the path for the rise of someone like Donald Trump?

C. J. Polychroniou: The Democratic Party has always been a pro-business party. Until recently, the differences between Democrats and Republicans were not that great. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky used to say, “The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.” So, it was largely a myth to say that the Democratic Party was the “party of the people.” Nonetheless, Bill Clinton remade the Democratic Party (after Jimmy Carter had already laid the groundwork for the shift to neoliberalism) to such an extent that it abandoned all pretext of being a party representing the working class. Clinton had revealed his anti-union credentials long before he made it to the White House. He had been working ceaselessly toward undermining the labor movement in Arkansas since the mid-1970s.

The U.S. is a global superpower, an imperial state, so it would be naïve to think that foreign policy can change dramatically from one administration to the next.

The working class ditched Hillary Clinton in 2016. Working-class voters, feeling betrayed by the Democratic Party and its economic policies, were a key demographic element behind Trump’s rise. Of course, it wasn’t just economics that drove white working-class voters to Trump’s camp. An equally important factor was racial and cultural resentment. Anyone who thinks that racism and xenophobia were not important factors in Trump’s rise or that they don’t figure prominently in the support he has been receiving since from the millions of his followers needs a reality check.

But something rather exciting has been happening over the past few years inside the Democratic Party. The progressive wing has moved the party to its left on key economic issues. Subsequently, Joe Biden has been very outspoken about supporting organized labor and his administration may be the most progressive in U.S. history.

If Trump returns to the White House, we should all brace ourselves for major shocks. We should expect to see mass deportations, systematic efforts to undermine democracy and rights in the U.S. and even abroad, the sacking of thousands of civil servants, the dismantling of the Department of Education, the expansion of presidential power (and bear in mind that an ultra-conservative Supreme Court gave presidents total immunity from prosecution for all official acts), major tax cuts for the rich, the end of policies to tackle the climate crisis, and even a rollback of policies that have aided minorities economically and socially. This is what’s behind Project 2025, a blueprint of over 900 pages for a second Trump term developed by the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation.

That said, I do not wish to create the impression that the Democratic Party has somehow become a democratic party of the alternative and progressive left. The irony is that the Democratic Party not only remains pro-capitalist, and with deep ties to Wall Street, but is even far more militaristic and pro-war than the Republican Party. And its leadership remains profoundly hypocritical. At the Democratic National Convention (DNC), one speaker after another, including Kamala Harris, spoke about justice and equality for all. But Democrats refused to give airtime to Palestinians who wanted to highlight the ongoing tragedy in Gaza. They also spoke about “joy,” “compassion,” and “safety” and then paraded a host of speakers who spread the message of militarism. As the brilliant Jon Stewart aptly summarized this amazing contradiction in his Daily Show following the conclusion of the DNC, “These are the new Democrats, man. They lead with joy and compassion and acceptance. And, oh yeah, we will fuck you up.”

Alexandra Boutri: What would a Kamala Harris foreign policy look like with regard to the transatlantic relationship and Ukraine’s war effort?

C. J. Polychroniou: I don’t think U.S. foreign policy under a Kamala Harris presidency will by any different from the Biden administration when it comes to engagement with European allies and support for Ukraine. In fact, she made that abundantly clear during her acceptance speech at the DNC. After all, continuity is one of the main characteristics in U.S. foreign policy. Transatlantic relations experienced an initial shock when Trump entered the White House in early 2017 but returned to stability shortly thereafter. And Biden’s foreign policy hasn’t been very different from that of Donald Trump. The U.S. is a global superpower, an imperial state, so it would be naïve to think that foreign policy can change dramatically from one administration to the next. Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 with the intent of bringing about a fundamental shift in the direction of U.S. foreign policy. He offered the promise of renewed idealism and a return to the rule of law. He fell way short of achieving even the slightest transformation. His U.S. drone program was far deadlier than what had taken place under the Bush administration. Obama carried out more strikes in his first year as part of a covert drone war strategy than Bush carried out in his entire presidency.

Alexandra Boutri: What about China?

C. J. Polychroniou: There is a looming superpower clash between the United States and China that I would place at the top of geopolitical risks for the years ahead. An incident in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea could easily trigger conflict escalation. The U.S. is obsessed with how to respond to China’s involvement in the South China Sea. And this is not merely a question of prestige and power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the South China Sea holds about 11 billion of barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. We remain a highly violent species. Trump won’t solve the U.S.-China conflict, and I doubt that Kamala Harris will become the next Richard Nixon on U.S.-China relations.

Alexandra Boutri: I suppose then that you also don’t expect a shift in U.S.-Israeli relations under a Kamala Harris presidency. Will she at least handle Gaza differently?

C. J. Polycroniou: I think the answer is negative on both counts. Israel is the most important strategic ally that the U.S. has in the Middle East. What this means is that the U.S. will continue to look the other way to whatever Israel pleases to do and will confine itself to the use of diplomatic language in connection to any Israeli violations of international law and human rights simply for PR purposes. But Israel’s total dependence on the U.S. is something that should worry future generations in Israel. What will happen if Israel happens to lose its strategic value in a future world order?

Alexandra Boutri: The Hamas October 7 attack continues to divide the world and in particular the left. Didn’t the Hamas leadership anticipate a massive Israeli response? Or it is that they didn’t care?

C. J. Polychroniou: What’s been happening in Gaza for more than 10 months now is one of the greatest crimes in the postwar era, a totally disproportionate response to the October 7 terror attack inside Israeli territory. But, at the same time, it is inconceivable that you have people, leftists and radicals, who refuse to condemn Hamas for those horrific actions against innocent Israelis, many of whom were in fact peace activists. Also, and putting aside the question of who a terrorist is actually, I find rather absurd the comparisons between the Hamas organization and the anti-fascist resistance movements against Nazism. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government is beyond extreme. But Hamas is not some sort of a progressive “liberation movement.”

The October 7 attack is a war crime. Plain and simple. I am baffled by those (and, as you know, I’ve had some unpleasant exchanges over this matter with certain people) who try to argue that the October 7 attack is justified on moral grounds and strategic considerations. Attacking civilians is never moral. Both Hamas and Israel are guilty of the same crime. Hamas and Israeli leaders are indeed war criminals. And what exactly are those strategic objectives on the part of Hamas that can justify the October 7 terror attack against innocent Israeli civilians? Israel has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure; killed more than 40,000 Gazans, mostly women and children; and Hamas has been severely weakened. Perhaps Hamas did not anticipate such a brutal response on the part of the Israeli military. Perhaps its leadership did not think that their operation would be as vast as it turned out to be given the state of Israeli military intelligence. But I am sure that they also did not care if innocent civilians in Gaza were going to be killed because of their actions. They would probably call that “collateral damage,” just like the Israelis do. And this war has also made the two-state solution a virtual impossibility, although there was never any real chance of that happening anyway. In fact, I am of the opinion (and hope that I am wrong) that the goal of Palestinian self-determination has been made far more difficult now on account of the October 7 attack despite of the fact that support for the Palestinian cause continues to grow among civil society organization across the globe.

Alexandra Boutri: One final question, and it has to do with third-party and independent candidates running for president. Could they affect the 2024 vote?

C. J. Polychroniou: One could and should be in support of third-party candidates for all sorts of reasons. The problem however with the U.S. political system is that they have no chance of winning a presidential race. I doubt that they can even shake up the two-party system. You need some form of proportional representation, like the system that exists in many European democracies, for third parties in the U.S. to make a real impact on national politics. But third-party candidates can easily end up having the opposite-than-desired effect, which is to help the candidate they least want in the White House emerge victorious. And this may very well happen if voters in swing states who are opposed to the Democrats on account of the war in Gaza end up casting their ballots for third-party candidates.

All it took for Olympian Ariana Ramsey to call herself a “universal free healthcare advocate” was—unsurprisingly—a taste of free health care.

The bronze-medalist rugby player, who represented the U.S. at the 2024 Paris games, posted Tik Tok videos of herself getting care at the Olympic Village.

“The fact that I’m actually so excited to be getting free dental…!” she said incredulously, unable to finish her sentence. “This is going to be my new fight for action—free healthcare in America—period.” While in Paris, Ramsey got a pap smear, eye exam, and eyeglasses all free of charge—and said she was “truly amazed” that such a thing was possible.

Ramsey went viral for her endearing enthusiasm over a right that a majority of people in wealthy nations take for granted.

Ramsey was so impressed she asked the people of France if she could be adopted into their nation so she could continue getting free care. Such a request, even if tongue-in-cheek, by a person representing the U.S. ought to embarrass politicians.

A majority of Americans report feeling dissatisfied with their access to healthcare. Millions turn to crowdfunding campaigns to ask family, friends, and random strangers to help them pay for unexpected care.

But ahead of the 2024 presidential race, neither of the two major party nominees has offered a pathway for a universal, publicly funded healthcare system.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has offered little detail on his current health plan, although he’s linked to a group seeking to gut Medicare. His first presidential term was marked by a failed attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a desire to cut Medicaid, and the appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned the federal right to an abortion.

Needless to say, these changes only make a deeply flawed system worse.

On the other hand, Vice President Kamala Harris, who previously co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) single payer bill in 2019, will reportedly avoid promoting the plan this year. Nor has Harris adopted the more modest idea she endorsed in 2019: a publicly funded health plan that people could opt into, known as the “public option.”

Instead, Harris has chosen to campaign on tinkering around the edges of our complicated patchwork system by lowering a handful of prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients.

While it is an incredible achievement on the part of the Biden-Harris administration to regulate drug prices for the first time in decades, the changes are modest. They’re limited to only 10 drugs this year (with more drugs to be regulated each year) and only apply to people already enrolled in Medicare.

A better step forward would be to expand on the government-provided healthcare we already have for certain populations: veterans (through the Veterans Affairs system), people over the age of 65 (though Medicare), and very low-income people making poverty-level wages (through Medicaid).

Simply expanding Medicare to all would cover everyone else—and save taxpayers trillions relative to buying for-profit insurance.

Harris still has time to back healthcare for all, but it will take a massive public push from below. In spite of the enormous amount of pro-corporate propaganda against universal healthcare, a majority of Americans have historically supported single-payer healthcare. A May 2024 Data for Progress poll found that two-thirds of Americans support expanding Medicare to all.

Ramsey went viral for her endearing enthusiasm over a right that a majority of people in wealthy nations take for granted. “America needs to do better with their healthcare system,” she rightly said. “There’s no reason why an American girl should be so amazed by free healthcare.”

On July 21, the world experienced the hottest global temperature on record, only to surpass that record the next day. However, not everyone experiences the impacts of this heat and other climate-exacerbated disasters equally. As summer intensifies, the impacts of climate change—especially extreme heat—are becoming more severe, disproportionately affecting low-income and minority populations.

In the U.S., a history of racial discrimination in finance and housing policies has left Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities more susceptible to the impacts of climate change and less equipped to recover from extreme weather disasters. Today, home insurers are pulling out of areas they perceive as risky to climate hazards, once again leaving BIPOC communities behind.

From Redlining to Bluelining

The disparate impact of climate change on property and infrastructure in U.S. minority communities is the result of nearly a century of discriminatory home lending and insurance policies.

In the 1930s, the U.S. federal government used a rating system in its low-cost home loan program to assess lending risk. Assessors created maps ranking the perceived risk of lending in certain neighborhoods, with race often used as the determining factor in assessing a community’s risk level. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were typically rated as ‘hazardous’ and outlined in red, warning lenders that the area was a perilous place to lend money. This practice became known as redlining, and the term is often used today to refer to racial discrimination in any government or corporate financial policies.

In many U.S. cities, maps from the 1930s showing redlined neighborhoods could be used as modern flood risk maps.

Redlining and other discriminatory practices, such as racial profiling in the provision of home insurance, led to a lack of investment in minority and vulnerable communities. This lack of financial access resulted in shoddy construction and poor infrastructure that has made minority neighborhoods less resilient to climate change.

Though redlining is now illegal, its legacy endures. These neighborhoods’ growing exposure to climate-related damage has left them vulnerable to other financial risks. Not only are homes in these areas more likely to be damaged by climate hazards, but insurers are more likely to increase insurance rates if they determine that properties are more likely to suffer environmental damage. This new financial practice is known as bluelining, and it occurs when insurers raise their prices or pull out of areas that they perceive to be at greater environmental risk.

While not illegal, bluelining disproportionately impacts minority and lower-income residents. Bluelining—the ‘new’ redlining—is now placing both the physical and financial burden of climate change on those least equipped to deal with its impacts.

How Past Redlining Created Climate Vulnerable Communities

In many U.S. cities, maps from the 1930s showing redlined neighborhoods could be used as modern flood risk maps. A Redfin study reveals that $107 billion worth of homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods face high flood risks—25% more than in non-redlined, predominantly white neighborhoods. Other studies have found that formerly redlined neighborhoods are more vulnerable to extreme heat and more likely to experience prolonged power outages during a storm. These disparities are a direct result of nearly a century of divestment and restricted access to capital, which deprived these neighborhoods of critical climate resilience infrastructure such as sewers and levees to capture flood waters and green spaces to absorb rising heat.

As a result of this lack of infrastructure, minority and vulnerable communities in the U.S. face the most severe and direct effects of climate change. In a 2021 study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed that “racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly vulnerable to the greatest impacts of climate change.”

As climate change exacerbates natural hazards like hurricanes and wildfires, widespread access to insurance will be necessary to help vulnerable communities survive.

This vulnerability and racial disparities are evident when climate disasters strike. For example, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, 4 out of 7 zip codes that faced the costliest flood damage were at least 75% Black. Similarly, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 hit historically Black neighborhoods in Houston the hardest, and many residents there lacked a safety net to recover. Winter Storm Uri, in February 2021, brought persistent subfreezing temperatures to the southeastern U.S., resulting in electricity and water outages, substantial personal property damage, and increased mortality rates. The impact of the winter storm was likewise “disproportionately concentrated among low-income communities and communities of color.” Communities that are mostly Black, Latino, or Native American also experience 50% greater vulnerability to wildfires compared with other communities.

Despite these patterns, many cities have done little to bolster climate resilience in minority-dominated neighborhoods. For instance, Black communities from “Texas through Florida to Virginia” are projected to see at least a 20% increase in flood risk over the next 30 years.

This increased vulnerability not only exposes minority communities to damage from climate hazards, but also to bluelining from insurers. When a disaster strikes in a neighborhood, rates are likely to go up the following year. This affects both homeowners and renters, who often bear the costs of a landlord’s rising insurance costs.

Access to Insurance Is a Key Factor in Climate Change Resilience

Discrimination in the insurance sector extends beyond bluelining. Studies suggest that insurance claims following a disaster in areas with a higher Black population are less likely to be paid and, if they are paid, are likely to settle for less than other claims. A New York Times article supports these findings, presenting evidence of race discrimination in insurance company payout decisions for homeowners following disasters.

This racial discrimination, combined with bluelining, limits access to property insurance for vulnerable communities—a critical tool for climate resilience. Studies show that households with insurance are more likely to rebuild, face less financial hardship, and recover more quickly than households without insurance. As climate change exacerbates natural hazards like hurricanes and wildfires, widespread access to insurance will be necessary to help vulnerable communities survive.

Insurers must end their hypocritical and unconscionable conduct of investing large portions of their increasing premium income in fossil fuel companies, the undisputed drivers of climate change.

The climate change-induced insurance crisis and bluelining seriously undermine the ability of minority and vulnerable communities to access affordable insurance. Without insurance, minority communities are less able to adapt to climate change and less resilient when confronting these climate change-induced severe weather events. More importantly, minorities are hindered in their efforts to rebuild, particularly in rebuilding climate-resilient structures.

The compounded effects of the insurance crisis, rooted in past discriminatory insurance practices, perpetuate systemic inequities. The cycle of divestment from redlining to bluelining will increase systemic inequities and embed the disproportionate impact of climate change on minority and vulnerable communities for generations.

A Call to Action

Insurers should financially support and actively engage in community efforts addressing climate risk, community impact, and creating equitable solutions. Simultaneously, insurers must end their hypocritical and unconscionable conduct of investing large portions of their increasing premium income in fossil fuel companies, the undisputed drivers of climate change, and underwriting new oil and gas projects while turning away homeowners in high-risk climate zones. Public funding or support from local, state, or national government for the insurance industry must be contingent on the industry reducing investments and insurance commitments in carbon emissions causing climate change.

Linda McMahon has been, and seemingly will always be, one of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s closest allies. McMahon is the wife of WWE billionaire Vince McMahon (who has paid hush money to at least four women to quell allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity), a failed Senate candidate, and a former Small Business Administration (SBA) chief under Trump. She has spent the last eight years staunchly in the corner of the former president turned 34-time convict. Recently, it was reported that McMahon will be leading the transition should Trump retake the White House in November.

Other than the obvious indication that Trump is continuing to reward loyalists (shocker), this also is another example of McMahon being deeply entrenched in Trump’s movement. After all, she:

• Serves as chair for the T Rowe Price and Morgan Stanley funded America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a “nonpartisan” think tank, along with fellow Trump alums Larry Kudlow, Chad Wolf, and Mark Lotter;

• Left the Trump Administration to immediately start a Trump Super PAC, which toward the end of the cycle raised almost $83 million, for the 2020 election;

• Co-chaired a fundraiser that almost certainly helped pay Trump’s legal bills;

• As of August 19, 2024, donated a total of $10,000,000 to the Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc; and

• Spoke uring the 2024 RNC.

Ludicrously, McMahon has been described as a moderate (even having Republican darlings Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) stumping for her in 2012). AFPI alone really calls into question that moderate title. The think tank has promoted, in congruence with Russel Vought’s Schedule F, “relocating” federal jobs out of Washington to places with lower costs of living… which we all know to understand to be an effort to replace skilled technocrats with new people hired for loyalty to MAGAism. Similarly, AFPI has pushed voter ID laws widely and properly understood to be barely cloaked efforts to suppress voter turnout from voters MAGA doesn’t like.

So, what to make of the claims that McMahon is a moderate? Her associations with the Trump movement, both in terms of policy execution and fundraising, quite literally prove the opposite: she’s a dangerous extremist vying to cement right-wing authoritarianism.

America’s commitment to arm Israel and Ukraine while attempting to stockpile large quantities of weapons for a potential war with China is putting strains on America’s weapons manufacturing base, leading many influential policy makers and corporate officials to suggest measures that would supersize this nation’s already enormous military-industrial complex.

This argument is taken to the extreme in a new piece in The National Interest by Arthur Herman of the arms contractor-funded Hudson Institute, entitled “Three Cheers for the Military-Industrial Complex.” The article repeats many of the stock arguments of current advocates of higher Pentagon spending while throwing around misleading statistics and dubious assumptions along the way.

Advocates like Herman need to step back and question the basic assumptions underpinning their calls for a new military buildup.

Myth number one routinely put forward by today’s proponents of throwing more money at the Pentagon is that the U.S. military has somehow been neglected over the past few decades, and that therefore we need to inject hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending into the arms sector to restore our defenses to an acceptable level. This argument has appeared in a recent report by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on the need for a renewed policy of “peace through strength,” as well as in an analysis from a congressional commission charged with assessing the state of America’s defenses.

Both reports—as well as Herman’s article—are based on a false premise.

The Pentagon budget is rapidly spiraling toward $1 trillion per year, one of the highest levels since World War II. And once other military-related items are taken into account—from military aid and veterans’ affairs to the nation’s vast intelligence gathering network—the figure for total national security spending is more like $1.5 trillion. This comes after a decade in which the Pentagon received well over $6 trillion, roughly the same as was spent during the 10 years that included the peaks of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The above-mentioned numbers are mind-boggling, but the main point is that recent and proposed spending is far more than enough to defend the United States and its allies, if it is spent more wisely and managed more effectively.

The bottom line is that the Pentagon needs more spending discipline, not more spending. For example, it is the only federal agency that is unable to pass an audit, a sad state of affairs that means that the department doesn’t even have an accurate count of how much equipment or spare parts it possesses, or in some cases even where these items are being stored.

Nor, according to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, does the Pentagon know how many private contractors it employs, although rough estimates suggest that the number is well over half a million people. These management failures waste untold billions of dollars, year in and year out.

source of waste is the Pentagon’s penchant for building dysfunctional weapons systems at exorbitant prices. Cases in point are the F-35 combat aircraft and the Littoral Combat Ship, systems that are so riddled with flaws that they frequently can’t carry out basic functions. Both systems have required billions of dollars in expensive retrofits and have spent large chunks of time out of commission due to needed downtime for repairs and maintenance. The two systems are the poster children for what is wrong with the Pentagon’s system for developing and buying new weapons, from seeking extreme and overly complex performance characteristics to giving away the store to contractors in negotiations over price and performance.

In the meantime, the most expensive element of the Pentagon’s $2 trillion, three decades-long nuclear modernization plan, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, has undergone cost growth of 81% in the past few years alone.

These weapons development fiascos do absolutely nothing to promote the defense of the United States, but they still manage to enrich the major weapons contractors charged with building them, whether or not they are effective or affordable. Absent reforms in the system that produces these dismal outcomes, simply giving the Pentagon more money is no guarantee of more defensive capability.

Poor management is one thing, but the real pressure to spend more on the military-industrial complex is America’s overly ambitious, outmoded view of the global role of the U.S. military. Current U.S. strategy calls for the ability to beat Russia or China in a conflict; project decisive force against adversaries like Iran and North Korea; quietly continue a global war on terrorism that involves dozens of overseas operations by U.S. forces every year; a massive program to build a new generation of nuclear weapons; and a surge of investment in high-tech, high-speed, pilotless weapons that incorporate artificial intelligence and can operate with little or no human input.

A truly realistic defense strategy would scale back current plans to be prepared to fight wars in any corner of the globe on short notice, pursue a deterrence-only nuclear strategy that would eliminate the need for a costly nuclear modernization plan, and limit military aid to nations engaged in defending themselves or holding off aggressive neighbors.

On the aid front this would mean continuing to arm Ukraine while exploring a diplomatic resolution of the conflict there. But it would involve cutting off assistance to Israel, whose brutal war in Gaza has gone far beyond any reasonable definition of defense, killing 40,000 people in an operation that has involved the commission of numerous war crimes which, according to a growing number of independent human rights and international law experts, may amount to genocide.

It is notable that many proponents of making America a garrison state have little to say about the non-military challenges we face, from climate change to epidemics to political and economic inequality, much less how to address these problems. And if they reference diplomacy at all, it is often as an adjunct to the use or threat of force, not a tool for preventing conflict in the first place.

Advocates like Herman need to step back and question the basic assumptions underpinning their calls for a new military buildup. First, we need to craft a viable strategy. Only then can we have an intelligent discussion about what size budget is required and what sort of manufacturing base is needed to sustain it. But as long as official Washington clings to the illusion that military buildups and arms racing are the magic key to peace, stability, and global dominance, we will waste large sums of scarce resources while increasing the risks of unnecessary conflict.

One of the nation’s best-known Black Republicans is former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the 21st century (and perhaps ever), no African American woman rose higher in Republican politics than Rice, who served as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and then his secretary of state, both firsts. Like her or not, agree with her politics or not, she brought significant experience, knowledge, and professionalism to those positions.

Former President Donald Trump’s first public words about Rice date back to 2006 when he labeled her with a vile term. In a speech before 8,000 people in New York City, he said, “Condoleezza Rice, she’s a lovely woman, but I think she’s a bitch. She goes around to other countries and other nations, negotiates with their leaders, comes back, and nothing ever happens.” There was no justification for Trump using such repulsive language other than his own toxic petulance and racist misogyny against Black women.

The stunning upheaval in the 2024 presidential race has, in fact, brought into sharp focus Trump’s longstanding animosity toward and war against Black women.

His vulgarity and sexism toward Rice foreshadowed a political future of hateful attacks on women—particularly women of color—with whom he disagrees. That incident provides some context for a recent New York Times report that, in private, Trump has referred repeatedly to Vice President Kamala Harris, his most formidable challenger for the 2024 presidential race, as a “bitch.” His campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung shamelessly and unbelievably stated that, when it comes to the person many would view as the most profane president ever, “That is not language President Trump has used to describe Kamala.” In fact, Trump’s longstanding and fixed sense of patriarchy and the cruel slurs against women that go with it are well documented.

The stunning upheaval in the 2024 presidential race has, in fact, brought into sharp focus Trump’s longstanding animosity toward and war against Black women. President Joe Biden’s June 21st decision to drop out of that race propelled Harris to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, which means Trump now faces the one opponent who not only threatens his return to office, but also triggers his worse racist and sexist behavior.

Trump Goes After Harris and Other Black Women

In her first weeks running for president, he has publicly called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” “nasty,” a “bum,” and “real garbage.” In front of thousands of his followers, he has deliberately and repeatedly mispronounced her name, claiming, “I don’t care” when called out on it. At his rallies, some of his supporters can be seen wearing and selling T-shirts that say, “Joe and the Ho Must Go,” or some variation on that, deplorable mantras that date back to 2020. Neither Trump nor his campaign have ever denounced such unacceptable activities. His effort and that of many MAGA adherents to “other” Harris is not just meant to humiliate her but degrade and dehumanize her as well.

Nor is this one-off focused on Harris. Trump has done the same to other Black women and women of color for decades. Before, during, and after his presidency, he specifically targeted Black women with a kind of venom he rarely aimed at white women or men.

He’s gone after Black women, whether elected and appointed officials (Republican or Democrat), journalists, athletes, prosecutors, or celebrities. Here are just a few examples of his loathing:

• Former Representative Mia Love (R-Utah): “Mia Love gave me no love and she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that Mia.”

• Former Apprentice contestant and then Trump’s White House director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault Newman: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

• Four congressional women of color—Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.): “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?”

• CNN journalist Abby Phillips: “What a stupid question that is. What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot—you ask a lot of stupid questions.”

• CNN reporter April Ryan: “April Ryan… You talk about somebody that’s a loser. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing… She’s very nasty.”

• Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.): “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

• MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid: “Who the hell is Joy-Ann Reid? Never met her, she knows ZERO about me, has NO talent, and truly doesn’t have the ‘it’ factor needed for success in showbiz.”

The examples of Trump’s enraged responses to Black women who criticize or call out his lies, ineptitude, insecurities, and ignorance are endless. He is also fully aware that his attacks put targets on the backs of those women. In fact, that may be exactly the point.

While the journalists and celebrities that he goes after are part of his bullying approach to life, with some added racist and sexist spice, he clearly feels most threatened by Black people and Black women in particular who could send him to prison. Georgia Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and Washington, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan have all felt the pressure of Trump’s inflammatory wrath as they oversaw legal cases attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior. They have all experienced countless death threats since taking on his cases. In addition to referring to them as “racists,” “animal,” “rabid,” “liars,” and worse, he also called Willis and James “Peekaboo,” a nickname he has yet to explain but that seems awfully close to the racist slur “jigaboo.” It’s an obvious dog whistle similar to his calling them and others prosecuting him “riggers,” which, of course, rhymes with the “N-word” and which he normally spells out in caps in social posts to make sure it gets attention.

His attacks on Judge Chutkan led to the arrest of a woman in Texas who threatened to murder her and a swatting attack on her home, bringing the police to her house in response to a false report of a shooting there. Chutkan is attempting to move forward with the case against Trump in Washington, D.C., although there will clearly not be a trial before the November election. If Trump loses the election, the case will likely go forward with the strong possibility that he’ll be convicted and punished. If he wins, he’ll undoubtedly order the Justice Department to drop it.

While Black leaders in politics, the media, women’s groups, and community organizations consistently denounced Trump for his chauvinist attacks, there was dead silence from his best-known Black women supporters. MAGA devotees like far-right commentator Candace Owens, social media celebrities like (the late) Diamond and Silk, conservative abortion extremist Reverend Alveda King, and others said nary a word as he raged and ranted.

A Record of Exclusive Hiring

Notably, in his businesses and during his presidency, very, very few Black individuals were either in Trump’s employ or in his inner circle. In his White House, only three Black women held high political or staff positions: the briefly tenured Manigault Newman, the briefly acting Surgeon General Sylvia Trent-Adams (from April 2017 to September 2017), and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Lynne Patton.

Only Patton worked for Trump for any period of time. Prior to 2016, she worked for the Trump Organization and the Eric Trump Foundation for at least a decade, eventually becoming a “Trump family senior aide.” After taking office, Trump appointed her administrator of HUD Region II under Secretary Ben Carson. Like Carson, she had no background or expertise in housing policy, yet was put in charge of hundreds of thousands of public housing units in New York and New Jersey. She made excuses for Trump’s unsuccessful effort to cut millions of dollars from the New York Housing Authority budget that could have led to a potential 40% rent increase for public housing residents.

She was scandal-ridden throughout his tenure, caught, for instance, misrepresenting her education background on her government résumé, implying that she had attended and graduated from Quinnipiac University School of Law and Yale University when she hadn’t. She dropped out of Quinnipiac and only took summer classes at Yale. When caught, she responded: “Lots of people list schools they didn’t finish.”

It’s not just Trump’s hateful words but the policies and initiatives he pushed while in office that harmed Black women as well as millions of other Americans.

Her most notorious scandal occurred on February 27, 2019, when she volunteered to be a political prop for then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) at a congressional hearing. To repudiate the testimony of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was accusing him of being racist, among other charges, Meadows had Patton stand silently behind him while he ludicrously stated that Trump couldn’t be racist because Patton had worked for him and she was a descendant of slaves.

Like other White House staff under Trump, Patton repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, which doesn’t allow federal employees in the executive branch to engage in political partisanship. She was first warned by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) in September 2019 but continued her transgressions. She and other Trump staffers broke the law, but the Trump administration did little to enforce it. However, when Biden came into office, the OSC did apply the rule of law. In response, Patton was forced to admit her violations and reached a settlement. She was fined $1,000 and banned from holding any federal government position for four years. And yet she still remains loyal to Trump.

Following his recent disastrous interview appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump’s campaign issued a statement claiming that Trump, who slung insults, spewed endless lies, refused to answer questions, and hurried off early, was the victim of “unhinged and unprofessional commentary.” His most noted unbalanced remark—and there were plenty of them—was his contention that Kamala Harris had only in recent years “happened to turn Black.”

At the Republican National Convention, where African Americans were only 3% of the attendees, eight speakers were Black, seven of them men. The only Black woman given a prime speaking spot was rapper and model Amber Rose, whose Trump-loving father converted her to support him. Rather than include an elected official, state party leader, or conservative scholar, Trump selected someone who fulfilled his gendered view of Black women as either spectacles or subservient.

Trump’s Gendered and Racist Policies

It’s not just Trump’s hateful words but the policies and initiatives he pushed while in office that harmed Black women as well as millions of other Americans. Much of what he’s done and is planning to do is laid out in policy proposals detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s racially discriminating Project 2025 report, written by many of Trump’s former officials and those aligned with him. These include policies relating to abortion rights, education, criminal justice, civil rights, and healthcare access, among many other concerns.

In addition, Black women have been disproportionately suffering from the abortion bans implemented since the significantly Trump-built conservative Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade in 2022. According to the Democratic National Committee, “More than half of Black women of reproductive age now live in states with abortion bans in effect or with threats to abortion access.” Close to 7 million Black women, ages 15 to 49, reside in those states. Worse yet, Project 2025 advocates a nationwide ban on abortion for a future Trump administration. He himself has become increasingly coy in addressing such an electorally damaging issue by deferring to whatever states want to do, fearing otherwise that he might lose a majority of women voters, but not wanting to anger the Christian nationalist extremists in his base.

That same Trumpified Supreme Court also ended affirmative action at colleges and universities. In 2023, it ruled that colleges and universities can no longer consider race in admissions. As yet, it’s not clear whether acceptance rates have fallen, particularly at elite schools. What is clear, thanks to the ruling, is that many colleges and universities have cut or dramatically redefined hundreds of scholarships worth millions of dollars that were previously targeted for Black and Latino students. This particularly hurts Black women students (who attend college in disproportionate numbers compared to young Black men).

Black women voters have responded in kind to Trump. In 2016, he won about 6% of the Black vote overall, but there was a stunning gender gap. While he gained about 14% of Black male votes, 98% of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton. Four years later, in 2020, Trump garnered about 8% of the overall Black vote, but only 5% of Black women.

Black Support for Harris Swells Despite Trump

Given those numbers (and his sexism), it’s clear why Trump has focused his “Black outreach” on Black men. However, the wedge he seeks to build may not be as stable as he imagines. Not only have Black women rallied behind the Harris-Walz ticket, but it appears that Black male voters are shifting as well. In a poll conducted in late July by the Howard University polling service, the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion (HIPO), of which I’m a member, we found 96% of Black women and 93% of Black men expressing their intention to vote for Harris. Meanwhile, a Zoom gathering of 40,000 Black men voicing their support and suggestions only days after Harris was rising to become the nominee suggested that the Trump campaign’s hope for an irreversible gender split among Black voters wasn’t on target.

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted, Trump is the “totem” of contemporary patriarchy. He is also the embodiment of what Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey terms “misogynoir,” the marriage of misogyny and racism.

Certainly, he dreads with every fiber in his body the rise of Harris and the intensity of her support, and also the organizing might of Black women voters. In Georgia, in 2021, it was the on-the-ground mobilization of Black women that led to the defeat of Trump’s preferred Senate candidates and the victories of Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Count on one thing: Donald Trump is now running scared. What he assumed barely a month ago would be an essentially uncontested victory has been transformed into his worst nightmare: facing a smart, confident, younger Black woman who has stolen his momentum and whose possible victory in November would be a defeat from which he could never recover.

By Ralph Nader August 23, 2024 It was 1967 when the national media was covering our auto safety initiatives. A call came on the hallway phone outside my $90-a-month boarding room. “Hello, I’m Phil Donahue. I want to invite you on my new syndicated television talk show in Dayton, Ohio. You’ve come a long way…

During the 1950s, Republicans were the party that promoted labor unions, Social Security, and a top 91% income tax bracket and 70% estate tax on the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower successfully campaigned on what we’d call a progressive agenda for re-election in 1956.

During the Reagan years, Republicans embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism with its free trade, opposition to unions, ending free college, and tax cuts for the fat cats. They called themselves “the party of new ideas.” They may have done more harm than good, but for most Republicans it was a good-faith effort.

Today, they’ve pretty much given up on all of that. All they have left is cruelty.

When Governor Tim Walz gave his heartwarming acceptance speech Wednesday night here at the DNC in Chicago, his son Gus was caught on camera proudly proclaiming, through tear-streaked eyes, “That’s my dad!”

The response from Trumpy Republicans was immediate: Ann Coulter wrote, “Talk about weird.” Rightwing hate jock Jay Weber posted, “Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Trumpy podcaster Mike Crispi ridiculed Walz’s “stupid crying son,” adding, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.” Another well-known podcaster on the right, Alec Lace, said, “Get that kid a tampon already.”

Compassion for a learning-disabled child is dead on the right: all they have left is cruelty.

Ronald Reagan helped shepherd through Congress the most consequential border bill in American history, and when it needed updating Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Lankford worked with Democrats to update it in a meaningful way. Trump demanded Republicans kill the legislation, invoking the memory of his tearing over 5,500 babies away from their mothers and trafficking them into fly-by-night “adoption” schemes (around 1000 are still missing) and his demand that the border patrol shoot immigrants in the legs.

Trump’s acolytes in Congress don’t even pretend any more to have a border policy: all they have left is cruelty.

President George HW Bush worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to unwind the USSR in the hope of creating a democratic Russia. Neither expected Vladimir Putin to turn that nation into a virtual concentration camp where gays are routinely murdered, child pornography is legal (and they’ve kidnapped over 700,000 Ukrainian children), and dissenters are tortured, poisoned, and sent to brutal Siberian gulags. Donald Trump celebrates Putin, calling his invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy,” handing Putin’s ambassador a western spy and top-secret information in his first month in office, and trying to abandon America’s traditional role as a moral leader in the world.

Trump’s GOP has abandoned our founding principles: all they have left is cruelty.

During the 2020 election, Trump followers tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, threatening to kill the occupants (which they believed included Kamala Harris). A crazed Trump supporter broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Trump tweeted a picture of the bus being attacked, writing below it, “I LOVE TEXAS!” and repeatedly makes jokes about the attack on Pelosi, as if to encourage future attacks on the families of other Democratic politicians.

Not a single elected Republican (as best as I can find with a pretty thorough web search) has condemned either: all they have left is cruelty.

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis turned down federal money that would have fed 2.1 million low-income children in his state; he was one of 13 Republican governors to do the same, in a nation where one in seven children — over 11 million every year — go to bed hungry.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with a massive child hunger problem because all Republicans have left is cruelty.

When President Obama succeeded in passing and signing the Affordable Care Act, it offered every state funds to expand Medicaid to give healthcare coverage to all their low-income citizens with the federal government covering 90% of the cost. To this day, ten states under Republican control have refused to accept the money, leading to millions of preventable illnesses and early deaths.

Republican states could have joined all the Blue states and every other developed country in the world by providing universal healthcare, but refuse to because all they have left is cruelty.

When a 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated, Republicans like Congressman Jim Jordan, Governor Kristi Noem, Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Jesse Waters, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost ridiculed the claim. When the rape and pregnancy were proven and the girl fled Ohio to a state where abortion was legal to terminate the pregnancy, Indiana's Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita promised to launch an “investigation.”

Rokita didn’t investigate the rape, however: he instead went after the physician who performed the abortion. Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, he sent a violent mob against the US Capitol. As they tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the house, covered the walls of the building with feces and defaced priceless paintings, Trump gleefully watched on live television for over three hours while refusing to call in the national guard or take any other meaningful action.

Five civilians and three police officers died as the result of his sending that murderous mob because all he and his GOP have left is cruelty.

This week Americans saw Democrats display compassion, care, respect, and reverence for our democracy. We saw the best of this country, hope for the future, and actual plans to improve the lives of Americans.

Last month, in sharp contrast, we watched the Republican convention and saw, instead, a cavalcade of anger, bile, grievance, hate, and, of course, cruelty.

Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

I reviewed the Democratic Party platform for 2024 and found something interesting: When it comes to economic policy, this year’s platform is less progressive and less ambitious than it was four years ago. Democrats have tacked right or retreated on health insurance reform, drug prices, Medicare and Social Security expansion, poverty, labor, taxes, Wall Street, and the minimum wage.

(I didn’t review military policy, since David Swanson has done that, as have Stephen Zunes and Matthew Petti. Schuyler Mitchell has reviewed its handling of immigration and policing.)

Why become less ambitious on economic issues, especially when public confidence in the economy remains low? Is it the influence of big donors? Is it the willingness of the party’s internal left to back its candidates without first demanding policy concessions? Is it both?

Democrats are less likely to win it with a platform that reflects the politics of caution—which, for voters, means the soft despair of the status quo.

Lobbying certainly played a part. 2024’s scaled-back health proposals, for example, are a big win for the for-profit health sector and its massive lobbying investment. Health corporations spent $751,540,000 (more than three-quarters of a billion dollars) on lobbying in 2023 alone. They employed 3,344 lobbyists, which is more than six lobbyists for every member of Congress. (Source: Open Secrets, using Senate records.)

My economic views are well to the left of the Democratic Party’s, even in its best years. But these changes don’t just repudiate the left. They defy public opinion on one issue after another, driving the party backward even as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris runs as the candidate of change.

Party platforms aren’t exactly binding contracts, of course, and this one was written while President Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee. Vice President Harris has already proposed several changes, including a $6,000 tax credit for the first year of a child’s life and a first-time homebuyer’s credit of $25,000 instead of the platform’s $10,000. But her changes have not been substantial, at least so far.

The platform still matters. It represents the consensus view of the party’s leadership and, despite the references to reelecting Biden, was adopted just this week at the convention.

This year’s platform also undercuts a favored argument from the Democratic Party’s left wing: that Biden has been “the most progressive president since FDR.” That’s always been debatable. Biden has been anything but progressive on military issues (including the Gaza genocide). By contrast, Lyndon Johnson’s domestic achievements included Medicare and Medicaid, major anti-poverty legislation, and the Voting Rights Act.

Biden did notch some progressive achievements, however, and would have had more had he not been hamstrung by Congress. A party in this situation wouldn’t normally lower its ambitions. It would raise them, pledging to do more if given full control of Congress.

Again, why? Democrats may be operating under the misguided notion that these proposals are “too far left” for voters, which polling tells us is wrong. It may also feel that it no longer needs to appease its own left flank, which is probably true. But even if the party’s internal left has fallen in line behind its leaders, key voting blocs still need and want more than this platform offers.

The race is still close. Democrats are less likely to win it with a platform that reflects the politics of caution—which, for voters, means the soft despair of the status quo.

That’s the end of commentary. What follows is a list of policy differences between the 2020 and 2024 platforms, together with public opinion polling on each policy area.

Health Insurance: The “Public Option”

The 2020 document offered a proposal for the so-called “public option.” While it fell short of full health reform, it was ambitious in today’s political context. The section, entitled “Securing Universal Healthcare Through a Public Option,” included the following text:

Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. To achieve that objective, we will give all Americans the choice to select a high-quality, affordable public option through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. (Emphasis mine.)

It goes on to say:

The public option will provide at least one plan choice without deductibles; will be administered by CMS, not private companies; and will cover all primary care without any co-payments and control costs for other treatments by negotiating prices with doctors and hospitals, just like Medicare does on behalf of older people. Everyone will be eligible to choose the public option or another Affordable Care Act marketplace plan...

That’s not Medicare For All, but it’s genuinely progressive. This public option plan also provided coverage for low-income Americans in states whose Republican governors had refused to expand Medicaid. Significantly, it would also have allowed people to enroll in Medicare (rather than employer-provided plans or other coverage) at age 60, rather than waiting until they reach the current eligibility age of 65.

What does the 2024 platform say about the public option? Nothing. The phrase doesn’t appear anywhere, and neither do these proposals. (According to a quote-tracking service, President Biden stopped using the phrase “public option” the month after he was elected.)

Public Opinion

Healthcare costs were the third-highest concern of American voters, according to recent polling, with 57% of those polled saying these costs are “a very big problem” and only 2% saying they were not a problem at all. The 2020 proposal would have helped address those concerns.

Drug Prices

Democrats included a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allowing Medicare to negotiate prices on a limited list of medications. While that provision was cut back significantly during congressional negotiations, it was a step forward. The IRA also permits Medicare to demand reimbursement when pharmaceutical corporations raise prices faster than overall inflation. It will also cap out-of-pocket costs for seniors, beginning next year, albeit at a level that’s still onerous for some.

These are all positive, if incremental, steps. But activists disappointed by the final bill’s limitations were told that this was only the beginning and that more action was coming. Not so, according to the 2024 platform.

The 2020 platform proposed empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices “for all public and private purchasers—for families and businesses, as well as older Americans—no matter where they get their coverage.” It pledged to “prevent the price of (all) brand-name and outlier generic drugs from rising faster than the inflation rate,” and to ensure that treatment for chronic health conditions would be available “at little or no cost.”

All these 2020 proposals would have expanded the IRA’s cost provisions and extended them to everyone, including people on private insurance. All of them—enabling Medicare negotiate drug prices for everyone, limiting price hikes on brand-name and some generic drugs for everyone, and low- or no-cost access to chronic health treatments for everyone—are missing from the 2024 platform.

Public Opinion

Again, this runs against public opinion. A June poll found that expanding the IRA’s prescriptions drug provisions—negotiating lower prices, applying the $2,000 out-of-pocket cost cap to people with private insurance, and capping the cost of insulin and inhalers for all Americans—was supported by a staggering 84% of voters.

Labor Rights

The 2020 platform called for strengthening whistleblower and anti-retaliation protections for workers, and for reining in non-compete clauses, mandatory arbitration, and no-poaching agreements. The 2024 platform cites the administration’s work on non-competes and mandatory arbitration, but doesn’t mention whistleblowers or anti-retaliation protections.

The 2020 platform also supported the right to organize through majority sign-up (“card checks”) and advocated a ban on “captive audience” employee meetings. Neither is mentioned in the 2024 platform.

The 2020 platform said, “We will hold executives personally accountable if they interfere in workers’ efforts to organize, including issuing criminal penalties for intentional obstruction.” This language is missing from 2024’s platform.

In 2020, Democrats called for changing labor law “so that it is easier for unions and employers to enter into multi-employer agreements establishing minimum workplace standards related to wages, benefits, and working conditions.” This language is also absent in 2020.

Public Opinion

Roughly 7 out of 10 Americans approve of labor unions.

Social Security

The 2020 platform said this about Social Security:

We will enact policies to make Social Security more progressive, including increasing benefits for all beneficiaries, meaningfully increasing minimum benefit payments, increasing benefits for long-duration beneficiaries, and protecting surviving spouses from benefit cuts.

The 2020 document also noted an important and under-recognized aspect of the retirement crisis: the struggle of unpaid caregivers, most of whom are women, to survive in their senior years. It correctly noted that these family members “sacrifice not only wages but Social Security benefits when they swap paid labor for unpaid care work,” and called for changes that would recognize this disparity and correct it.

By contrast, the 2024 document only says this about benefits: “We’ll strengthen the program and expand benefits by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.”

No specifics are provided and unpaid caregivers are not mentioned.

Public Opinion

Polling shows that majorities in key voting blocs—Black, Hispanic, lower-income, and under-30—support expanding Social Security benefits.

Poverty

The 2020 platform included a section called “Ending Poverty”; in 2024, it’s called “Fighting Poverty.” That seems like a subtle downsizing of expectations.

The 2020 document made this important observation:

We recognize that the official poverty rate, as measured and communicated by the federal government, fails to capture critical needs like housing, education, healthcare, transportation, energy, and other necessities, and therefore understates the true share of Americans living in poverty.

The 2024 platform leaves that language out and says instead, “Some 40 million Americans still live in poverty.” That’s the official rate—the one that, as the 2020 platform correctly observed, undercounts the “the true number of Americans living in poverty.”

But undercounting the poor isn’t the new platform’s only step backward. The 2020 platform proposed using the “10-20-30” funding approach, which would direct “at least 10% of federal funding to communities where 20% or more of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years or longer.”

The new document doesn’t include any specific funding proposal. (Wisely, it does propose restoring the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit.)

Public Opinion

While support for anti-poverty efforts has declined, a plurality of voters thinks government “should provide more assistance to people in need.” That includes majorities of younger, Black, and Democratic voters.

Taxes

Like its predecessor, the 2024 platform proposes raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations while closing loopholes. Unfortunately, it also uses this unfortunate yet popular political catchphrase: “A hedge fund manager or CEO should never pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or firefighter.”

While that’s self-evidently true, each repetition of this so-called “Buffett rule” subtly lowers public expectations about progressive taxation. It sounds reasonable until you think about it for a second: In a just world, would teachers and billionaires really pay the same percentage of their income in taxes? Of course not. Most people would agree that billionaires should contribute a higher percentage; this rhetoric lowers expectations.

And speaking of billionaires: The 2020 platform pledged to restore the estate tax “back to the historical norm,” before Trump and the Republicans reduced the burden on multimillionaire heirs. “Historial norm” presumably means a return to something like the levels in 2007-2008, when the minimum taxable inheritance was $2 million and the maximum tax rate was 45%.

The 2020 platform, however, says nothing about the estate tax.

Public Opinion

Polling shows that 69% of swing-state voters support raising taxes on people earning $400,000 and above, while 77% of swing-state voters support raising taxes on billionaires to support Social Security.

Wall Street

The 2024 document includes a section on “Corporate Greed” but is light on new proposals. That’s odd, since the Biden administration’s work on monopolization is one of its strongest achievements. 2024’s platform does call for an updated version of the Glass-Steagall Act, as the 2020 document did. But the 2020 document included an entire section called “Curbing Wall Street Abuses,” which declared:

Financial institutions should never be “too big to fail.”

... when justified by the law, we will back criminal penalties for reckless executives who illegally gamble with the savings and economic security of their clients and American communities.

...creat(e) a public credit reporting agency to provide a non-discriminatory credit reporting alternative to the private agencies, and... require its use by all federal lending programs, including home lending and student loans.

We will also give bankruptcy judges the authority to “cram down,” or modify, mortgages for primary residences during bankruptcy proceedings, so working families can benefit from the same debt relief tools currently available to those who own assets like vacation homes and yachts.

None of these ideas appears in the 2024 platform.

Public Opinion

A scant 10% of Americans in a 2023 poll expressed a great deal of confidence in U.S. banks, while nearly two-thirds said the government is doing an “inadequate” job of regulating them.

Minimum Wage

Both the 2020 and 2024 platforms call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. It should be noted, however, that inflation has seriously eroded the value of a $15 wage. If they want to be consistent, Democrats should propose between $17.75 and $18 an hour.

As it is, they’ve already lowered their proposed minimum wage by 16-18% in real-dollar terms.

Public Opinion

An April 2024 poll found that 64% of voters supported raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour, including 85% of Democrats, 65% of Independents and 45% of Republicans.

The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights.

The one positive to emerge from the DNC was that the first panel ever officially sanctioned by the DNC on the subject of Palestinian rights marked a major step forward politically, and was the result of a powerful grassroots movement to get Palestine mentioned in some official capacity at the Convention.

But aside from that small but still significant victory, the Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Protesters outside clashed occasionally with police, and some protesters inside the convention and some associated events caused brief disruptions, but little attention was paid to Gaza on the whole, either from the stage or in the media.

That doesn’t mean the political situation remained stagnant, however, even while Israel was continuing its merciless slaughter, targeting schools and other places of refuge. Unfortunately, the politics have taken an even grimmer turn, leaving little hope that the killing will end any time soon.

Taken together, the recent developments are a recipe for a genocide that will continue for months and ongoing regional escalation.

“Gaza Cease-fire Talks” are the new “Peace Process”

Despite the false optimism peddled by U.S. President Joe Biden and his flunkies, the latest round of cease-fire talks, though ongoing, have already failed. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken collaborated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to essentially destroy any chance of a cease-fire in the near term.

Blinken announced what he termed “bridging proposals,” to fill the gaps between Hamas and Israel based on the cease-fire proposal Biden presented at the end of May. Blinken did not address the question of why such proposals were necessary when Biden claimed that the plan he presented back then was actually an Israeli one, and that, after that falsehood became too threadbare, repeatedly claimed that Israel had accepted it.

Hamas, in fact, had long since stated it would accept the Biden proposal, as endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. Clearly this was an unexpected turn for Netanyahu, who quickly set about creating new conditions that Hamas couldn’t possibly accept.

With the latest failure of cease-fire talks, the threat of an attack on Israel from Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance rises again.

On Thursday, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel that Blinken’s bridging proposals “meet Israeli security demands,” which include continuing the genocide, after a brief pause, until Israel “reaches all of its war aims,” and a continued Israeli presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt, the so-called Philadelphi Corridor.

One hardly needs a degree in international affairs to recognize that these are not “bridging proposals,” but are conditions Hamas couldn’t possibly accept. Neither, it should be noted, would anyone else, whether a government or a militant group.

Indeed, these conditions have even quietly undermined the triumvirate of the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt by directly challenging Egypt’s stance, backed by two treaties, that Israel may not remain on the southern border. While neither country has loudly objected to the proposal, neither have they backed it. And Egypt has made it clear they will not accept it.

The idea that Israel would remain in the Philadelphi Corridor is an explicit violation of a 2005 agreement governing that strip of land which forbids Israeli deployment there. Israel has called for scrapping that agreement entirely and revising the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Egypt has categorically refused these requests and warned that continued attempts to implement them could endanger the treaty entirely.

With the latest failure of cease-fire talks, the threat of an attack on Israel from Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance rises again. But with the passage of time since the assassination of Hamas’ lead negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran has given the United States the time it needed to redeploy forces to bolster its naval and air defenses of Israel. This has the potential to render an attack on Israel, which remains highly likely, largely symbolic, like the one in April. But should the Axis decide that is insufficient, it also increases the risk that a more significant attack could spark a regional conflagration that the U.S. could also be drawn into.

Diminishing Hope for Harris

The refusal by the Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign to have a Palestinian-American speaker address the DNC was just the latest misstep by a party that, even when it recognizes its need for progressive, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian voters, cannot bring itself to confront its own devaluation of Palestinian lives, especially in Gaza.

This wasn’t complicated. The Uncommitted Movement and other Palestinians and Palestine advocates in the party just wanted someone to speak to the audience about the suffering in Gaza and the need for a cease-fire. It could easily have been a moderate voice, one which aimed at the hearts of the audience, crafting a speech calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter that even the pro-Israel wing of the party couldn’t have overtly attacked.

Instead, they froze Palestinians out while giving the space to the parents of an Israeli-American hostage, who, while both-sidesing the conflict (quite understandable given the situation of their son) and very clearly focusing on the Israeli hostages, showed more empathy for Palestinians in Gaza in their speech than just about anyone else at the convention. That is a shameful comment on the Democrats, on the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket, and on the party as a whole, including many of its so-called progressive members.

Harris isn’t giving us any reason to hold out hope for a better Middle East policy than her current boss has.

The decision to silence Palestinian voices while centering the awful suffering of an American Jewish hostage and his family sends a strong message to the Democratic base that the lives of Israeli Jews matter just as much as they should while the lives of Palestinians matter not at all.

There was no political necessity for this. AIPAC and donors might have been unhappy about a Palestinian speaker, but they wouldn’t have just dumped Democrats because there was concern expressed for civilians in Gaza. And that wasn’t the only concerning signal from Harris at the DNC.

Haile Sofer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Harris’ former national security adviser, declared with confidence that Harris will never halt or condition military aid to Israel. She made the statement at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee on the sidelines of the DNC.

Sofer is a significant figure in both the Democratic Party and the Jewish community, and she does not have a reputation for making policy statements without any basis in fact. Her proximity to Harris lends this statement a good deal of credibility, even though she was not specifically speaking on Harris’ behalf but merely giving her own estimation of Harris’ views. She knows those views well since she helped shape them.

Somewhat less credible, but still very concerning, was Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider who told the same audience that Ilan Goldenberg, who was hired just last week by Harris as her liaison to the U.S. Jewish community, told him that Harris will not try to re-enter the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.

Schneider is a somewhat less reliable source. He is more given to bombastic statements, misunderstandings, and poor judgment than Sofer. He also has a reputation here in Washington for not always thinking much before he speaks. Moreover, the statement itself is widely open to interpretation, both in terms of what Goldenberg might have meant (he may well have been merely trying to assuage fanatical pro-Israel concerns over his own stance on Iran, for example) and in terms of how Schneider himself is reading it. In other words, it’s a bit concerning, but it’s far from certain that this reflects Harris’ actual thinking on policy.

The trouble is, Harris isn’t giving us any reason to hold out hope for a better Middle East policy than her current boss has. All the early signals are negative. The much-touted “empathetic tone” that Harris has tried to adopt is not only wearing thin and fading as time goes on, but it also reflects little more than a greater ability than Joe Biden has shown to deceive the American public with sweet-sounding words that thinly veil a genocidal policy in Palestine, a militaristic approach to Iran and the broader region, and pure indulgence of our criminal and brutal allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It is disappointing and dangerous that, in the face of progressives, Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and a whole lot of anti-genocide Jews and allies almost begging the Democrats to stop taking their votes for granted and just give them some reason to vote for Harris rather than just voting against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is failing to even get over even that remarkably low bar.

           The United States is one of the most politically polarized countries in the world. Because effective lawmaking requires bipartisanship and members of Congress are, like their constituents, at their most ideologically divided point in a half century, cooperation is in increasingly short supply. As a result or, more precisely non-result, the U.S. Congress passes fewer bills every year.

            There is, however, one consistent area of agreement on Capitol Hill: defense spending. Each year for the past six decades, the massive National Defense Authorization Act—Washington-speak for the federal defense spending bill has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Defense appropriations are so sacrosanct that the press often describes the NDAA as “must pass”; it is routine for Congress to add in hundreds of millions of dollars of extraneous spending that the Pentagon does not want or request.

            In the U.S. Congress, even “antiwar” voices support the military. Obama’s 2008 campaign was primarily predicated on his opposition to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yet even his GOP opponent John McCain didn’t care call out Obama on the fact that when he had six chances to vote on the Iraq War—he wasn’t in the Senate yet when it voted on the measure authorizing President George W. Bush to attack the government of Saddam Hussein—he voted to send the cash each time. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly voted to fund the military and sending weapons for wars being waged by U.S. proxies like Israel and Ukraine.

            Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Republicans describe as Marxist, socialist and communist, is thoroughly committed to the cult of American militarism. “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said in Thursday’s nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

            The idea that military expenditures are “must pass” relies on the assumption that the U.S. faces existential threats to its safety and/or sovereignty. This is crap.

            As Statfor’s classic 2011 assessment of the United States and its geopolitical position noted: “The American geography is an impressive one.”

Consider Russia. It has thousands of miles of land borders, most of it without significant natural barriers like mountain ranges or large bodies of water to deter a potential invader, millions of square miles of fairly flat lands that can quickly and easily be traversed, with numerous neighbors that are hostile and have posed a historical threat. Given its situation, Russia’s rulers have traditionally relied on friendly buffer and vassal states around its perimeter.

“The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined,” Stratfor observed. “Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin.” Canada and Mexico are friendly vassal states.

            “Red Dawn” was just a movie. Gun nuts who think they’ll need AR-15s to arm a Resistance against alien invaders are deluded. No one wants to invade us. No one wants to take away our freedoms.

No one can.

We are acting like the hippopotamus. Hippos are the most dangerous land animal on the planet, killing 500 human beings every year. They’re nervous and high-strung because they rapidly evolved from a much smaller creature that made easy prey. Poor things! They don’t realize that they’ve become huge, grown fearsome teeth and no longer need to be aggressive and territorial. Like the hippo, the U.S. started out small and vulnerable to aggressors like England, which re-invaded in 1812. But things have changed for both the hippo and us. Can’t we be smarter than a hippo?

The U.S. has, like other countries, faced raids like the Pearl Harbor attack and cross-border incursions from Mexico in the 19th century. In a now largely-forgotten episode, two of the Aleutian islands were occupied by Japan during World War II, before Alaska became a state. Non-state terrorists have struck the contiguous 48 states, as on 9/11. But none of those incidents, though violent and disturbing, represented anything close to an existential threat. Most other countries, faced with attacks on such a small scale, would not feel traumatized as much as merely annoyed.

We have not faced a substantial risk of territorial invasion by an enemy army or navy since the War of 1812.

            In the 21st century, the U.S. faces two main threats to national security: terrorism and cyber attacks. These are addressed by, respectively, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. We don’t need a fleet of ships lining our coastlines or a perimeter of military bases to fend off the Germans or the Japanese or the Chinese or the Russians. And we don’t have them. The “Defense” Department doesn’t defend the U.S.; it attacks and disrupts other countries and non-state entities abroad and, far less frequently, defends U.S. allies against internal uprisings, rival factions and hostile neighbors.

            Given our remarkably enviable security situation, it is entirely conceivable that the U.S. could get by eliminating its military budget entirely, as have countries like Costa Rica, Panama and Iceland, all of which have abolished their army, navy and air force and yet have not been invaded since. Could it be that, much as you are likelier to be shot by a gun if you own one, an unarmed nation is less likely to be attacked because its neighbors no longer view it as a potential threat?

Alternatively, we could decide not to continue the current practice of constantly adding new and fancier technology to our existing arsenal. We could make do with the equipment and materiel we have now, while spending enough to maintain it.

Defense should be about defense, i.e. defending our own borders. Brazil, bigger than the contiguous 48 U.S. states, and by far the dominant military power on the South American continent, has a military budget of $20 billion. That’s equivalent to 2.5% of the U.S., which currently wastes $1.6 trillion a year—more than half of discretionary federal spending.

Let’s start there.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post Cut the Defense Budget by 97.5% first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Breaking Through Power, Mass Media Blacks Out the Super Bowl of Citizen Action essay from CENSORED 2018.

The Democratic National Convention was happening here in Chicago—my city—and I sat frozen at my desk, staring at my computer. Earlier in my life, yeah, I’d have gone down to the United Center, linked arms with the sane and outraged, joined the cry: Stop funding genocide!

Instead, here I was, gawking at the event’s opening ceremony of day two: A pastor delivers a public prayer, at one point saying we should treat all humans “as sacred creations of the Almighty.” Huh? Is he serious? Does he really mean this? The word “sacredness” has been let loose; joined by “God.” Someone sings the National Anthem. The delegates recite the good ol’ Pledge of Allegiance, their hands ceremoniously pressed against their hearts. Then “God bless America” fills the hall.

The message I hear, quietly hovering behind the words, is this: Democrats are as patriotic as Republicans! Democrats are as religious as Republicans! We can put on a good show too—our clichés are fantastic.

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we call upon you to remember the people of Gaza! Our country has the power to be a leader of peace. We want to vote for candidates that are pro-peace. Please give us that choice.”

Ceremony can matter, but when it’s basically just a curtain hiding reality... God help us all. I felt squeezed by fury and frustration. Oh, the platitudes of peace. I shut off my computer and decided, I’m gonna do it. Earlier I had received an email from the American Friends Service Committee, inviting me to an interfaith “Remember Gaza” vigil, happening that night at Montrose Harbor, a few miles from where I live.

Suddenly I felt called to be there, at this “interfaith vigil to honor those who have been killed in the genocide in Gaza, to highlight the urgent need for a permanent cease-fire and an end to U.S. weapons sales to Israel.”

The speakers would be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, as well as people who had lost loved ones in Gaza. And it would be taking place in the wake of the Biden administration’s latest approval of $20 billion in arms sales to Israel—you know, the reality the DNC event was hiding behind its curtain of faith and patriotism.

I had to do something besides sit in my study and stew. Attending a vigil on Lake Michigan at least seemed doable. Would it “solve” anything? Uh... maybe not, but I had to make my opposition to my country’s policy physically apparent, or so I heard my conscience scream from some deep inner place. The tricky part about this is that I’m an old klutz, with achy legs and a disintegrating ability to retain balance. Simply heading off to a lakefront vigil ain’t what it used to be.

I brought my cane and drove to Montrose Harbor. Fortunately, I left an hour early, just in case I ran into unexpected difficulties, which happened immediately. I’d forgotten how complex the area was and would up parking... uh, nowhere near the actual site of the vigil. The park area was full of people: several volleyball games going on, families simply enjoying themselves. Music was playing. But nothing looked like a vigil in the process of organizing itself. I started fearing that the event had been canceled. I asked the hostess at a lakefront restaurant if she knew where the vigil was, and she had no idea what I was talking about. Oh oh...

By then I had been hobbling around for a mile or so, which (I hate to say it) is a lot more walking than I normally do. I felt exhausted. Grudgingly, I decided to leave—and then I saw a woman holding a Palestinian flag, directing traffic. Big wow. This was it! The vigil is about 500 yards from here, she told me, down a curving walkway. I kept hobbling. A short while later, a caring couple who were heading to the vigil stopped their car and gave me a ride the rest of the way.

Oh my God, I had made it. Things were just about to start. There may have been as many as 200 people sitting along the concrete steps facing the beach. The sun was setting, the sky was a beautiful reddish blue, the dark waves swooshed into shore.

“Our souls are tired,” a speaker lamented, and another speaker reminded us that the ground we were sitting on, this very moment, had been Hopi, Ojibway, Pottawatomie homeland... forcibly taken through genocide “Think of the many untold stories of genocide that happened right here on this land.”

That set the tone—for the poetry and grief and mourning, mixed with the sunset and the waves.

One speaker declared: “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we call upon you to remember the people of Gaza! Our country has the power to be a leader of peace. We want to vote for candidates that are pro-peace. Please give us that choice.”

In a different context, such words might seem trivial, easily shrugged off. But in that moment, they seemed not only deeply felt but real—as real as the wind that swept across the beach and stirred the waves.

A day later—what? I know that such words amount to virtually nothing by themselves. They only resonate when they are spoken in a context of commitment, plans, and action, a la the civil rights movement. For now, as the DNC continues, I hear them not simply as a cry of hope but as an emerging certainty, the struggle for which will not stop.

Much of my past month has been spent Kamaling—I don’t know if I hold the record, but along with helping organize and MC the Elders for Kamala call, I’ve made cameos on Climate Leaders for, Oudoor and Conservation Leaders for, Christians for, and Vermonters for. I’m for. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have run a sparkling campaign so far, and this week’s convention in Chicago is a reminder that Democrats look and sound like America at its best. As opposed to the monochrome and bitter gathering that nominated former President Donald Trump (“Mass Deportations Now”), it’s been one long Party party. (When Patti LaBelle kicked off Tuesday night’s proceedings, the musician gap with the GOP grew unbridgeably wide).

Which is not to say that Harris will be a sterling climate president—we’ll have to wait and see, because we had no primary to press her on it. I don’t like long campaigns any more than anyone else, but in our system they are the only place activists can actually make a forceful case—that’s how climate became a real presidential issue for the first time in the 2020 race, which led quite directly to the Inflation Reduction Act. (And now, instead of a second-term Democrat freed to act with relative abandon, we’ll have a first-termer constrained by thoughts of her re-elect). So we’ll doubtless have to push her, once we’ve helped push her into the White House.

The reminder that there’s no automatic connection between a D next to your name and some courage on climate comes from many spots around the country, including even some where lots of good work has been done. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Coach Walz have gotten high high marks—converting narrow legislative margins into big action packages.

But places where it should be easier—in the deep blue, not the purple— haven’t gone as well. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California has accomplished a lot with the move to solar power, as I’ve been writing about all spring—but he also has gutted both rooftop solar and community solar this spring. According to the Solar Rights Alliance, 22% of all solar jobs in the state have disappeared. That’s just stupid policy: Rooftop solar, among other things, has dramatically decreased the amount of electricity the grid needs to provide, which may be why the utilities hate it. (Texas Republicans, meanwhile, have made one attempt after another to gut renewables, but they may have waited too long—there’s enough money behind wind and sun now to defeat such efforts, and the state’s renewables, and just as importantly its battery fleet, are now growing like topsy.)

The closer we move to actual implementation of the big climate promises that politicians made during the Greta years, the more of this kind of backsliding we’re going to see.

And on the other side of the country, in the deep blue Northeast?

New York could and should be a renewable powerhouse. It lacks a Mojave Desert, but Long Island Sound could be the Qatar of offshore wind—the DOE estimates it could power 11 million homes, which is 4 million more homes than New York contains. With NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, it has some of the finest energy conservation minds in the country. And it has an environmentally minded populace—everyone thinks about New York City as a liberal bastion, but it was upstaters who banded together to force a ban on fracking.

And yet the state is lagging badly, in no small part thanks to Gov. Kathy Hochul. The Buffalo-area pol, who ascended more or less accidentally to her job when Andrew Cuomo couldn’t stop grabbing the women who worked for him, got perhaps her biggest moment of infamy earlier this year when, out of nowhere, she shifted 180° her position on congestion pricing in lower Manhattan and nixed the program—weeks after she’d given a long speech extolling it, and past the point where the city and state had spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying the cameras to make it work.

But that’s not her only anti-climate act. She’s also sat on her hands for months now after the state legislature passed the Climate Superfund act, which would send the bill for climate disasters to the oil companies that caused them. (You can sign a petition for the Superfund here). And now she’s “pondering” a “relaxation” of the state’s basic climate law, which promises to use renewables for 70% of the state’s power by 2030. According to Inside Climate News, she told reporters recently that “the goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of these decisions. Either mitigate them or rethink them.”

Why? Well, because she’s hearing from groups like

the Business Council of New York State ... They want to go beyond pushing back CLCPA deadlines. They hope to rewrite the law itself, targeting mandates to electrify buildings, passenger vehicles, and school buses.

“We are now at a point where implementation challenges call for a reassessment of the underlying statutory mandates,” the Business Council said July 30 while releasing a letter to Hochul signed by 60 business, fossil fuel, labor, farming, and small business groups.

This is the kind of utterly predictable pushback that confident legislators simply manage with a few well-chosen words, even as they push forward. (See, Joe Biden). But Hochul shows no sign of that kind of confidence. NYRenews, the group that has helped push much of the New York legislation, released a report yesterday showing that under Hochul’s leadership, the state’s four key implementation agencies are sitting on their hands.

Only a handful of agencies have issued specific guidance or regulations to support compliance efforts. Notably, it appears that the state’s largest and most powerful agencies have entirely failed to comply with the Climate Act and have not yet issued policies or guidance on implementation of the law.

For example:

• The New York State Department of Transportation (“NYSDOT”) has pushed forward at least 40 highway expansion projects without properly assessing their impacts on DACs and the climate;

• Empire State Development (“ESD”) has awarded at least $780 million in clean energy funding without ensuring that 40% of the benefits go to DACs;

• The New York Education Department (“NYSED”) has approved at least 25,971 construction projects at public schools across the state without properly assessing their climate and DAC impacts; and

• The New York State Department of Health (“NYSDOH”) has approved at least 223 construction projects for new and renovated healthcare facilities without assessing or mitigating their climate impacts.

This is where leadership makes a difference, one way or the other. You need some nerve—(something like, though in reverse, the chutzpah of the New York Republican legislator who last week penned an op-ed explaining that this summer’s violent storms were a reason to postpone climate action). Hochul, casting New York’s votes at the convention Tuesday night, cited the Empire State as the birthplace of the women’s rights and gay rights movement. If she were smart she’d listen to impassioned voices from the climate movement, who also know something about reality: Listen to Bob Howarth, the world-leading methane scientist who also sits on the board charged with implementing the new law.

“I am appalled at this pushback against the CLCPA by business interests pushing their short-sighted agenda,” Howarth told WaterFront. “Climate change is very real. The consequences of climate disruption (floods, droughts, fires, crop failures) are becoming increasing obvious to all.”

“The political leaders of NY understood these dangers when they drafted the CLCPA and its predecessor beginning in 2015…. Due to political delay, we may miss CLCPA targets by a few years. But the needed trajectory remains clear.”

Howarth sits on the state’s Climate Action Council, which passed a plan to implement CLCPA in December 2022 (by a vote of 19-3). The council had determined that “it was entirely possible and reasonable to meet the CLCPA goals and targets… that would benefit individual homeowners,” Howarth said.

Furthermore, the successful implementation of CLCPA would set an example to the world by showing “that a globally important economy could thrive while addressing the climate crisis and moving away from fossil fuels,” he added.

But the council hasn’t met for many months. “The state simply has not seen adequate political leadership to move ahead with the CLCPA goals and the council’s plan,” he said.

Something similar is happening in New York City where Mayor Eric Adams, in between dealing with corruption investigations, has done his best to weaken the city’s landmark Law 97. As Pete Sikora of New York Communities for Change explained to me, he’s pushed back the implementation date for the statute, which mandates efficiency improvements in big buildings. (Not surprisingly, he’s taken lots of campaign money from real estate interests).

The two year delay he's created will cost thousands of jobs and raise pollution yearly by a few hundred thousand tons per year as landlords put off energy efficiency projects (more worrying: it's a signal he'll further weaken the law if reelected and the major pollution limit starts in 2030).

But Adams—well, he’s also attempting to turn one of the city’s neighborhood landmarks, the Elizabeth Street Garden, into a housing complex. The city needs housing, which is why the garden’s friends have come up with all kinds of alternate sites in the same neighborhood, but so far he hasn’t yielded, even thought even Murdoch’s New York Post has made it clear what a bad idea the development is. Now, the Times reports, there’s been a huge letter-writing campaign from local public school students.

For the 575 or so students who attend P.S. 130, Elizabeth Street Garden serves as an extension of the classroom. The elementary school lacks green space, but it is only a 10-minute walk from the garden, allowing for frequent visits and class trips. So the garden has become a de facto playground and nature center where the children can plant seeds, learn about nature, and have Easter egg hunts.

“Tree’s also provide homes for animals like birds, squirrels, and raccoons. This is why we should save the garden!” wrote one student.

Another explained, “The garden adds color and brightness to the city.”

Many were concerned about their favorite play space disappearing: “One reason why we should keep the garden is because with all the trees, we can play hide and seek and eat lunch.”

One reason that pols like Hochul and Adams can get away with moves like this is that there’s very little coverage—the Elizabeth Street garden is the exception that proves the rule. Indeed, the Times announced last week that it would no longer endorse candidates for local office, which is odd since those were probably the only endorsements the paper made that actually moved voters. Albany, meanwhile, exists in a news vacuum—the number of voters who know that Hochul is emerging as a northern DeSantis on climate issues is minuscule.

The closer we move to actual implementation of the big climate promises that politicians made during the Greta years, the more of this kind of backsliding we’re going to see. Consider, just as a random example, Connecticut, where utility regulators have introduced an excellent system of performance-based regulation for power providers, moving away from the old system which basically just takes a utility’s costs and adds a chunk of profit on top. The Nutmeg State’s two big utilities have fought it from the start, and now they’re moving to have the regulator who introduced it, Marissa Gillett, fired. The state’s governor, Ned Lamont, said when the law was introduced that “you just don’t get paid an automatic 9% whether you do good work or bad work. You get paid for doing good work.” Now we’ll see if he has the courage to keep her at her job. Or Massachusetts, where the legislature adjourned without taking up the crucial enabling legislation for the state’s climate law—there’s some talk that governor (and climate hawk) Maura Healey might call them back for a special session, but more likely it will drag on for another year. Delay is the new denial.

Or take Delaware—the state needs to develop its offshore wind resources to meet climate goals. Indeed, given its relatively small population, it could become a linchpin for the entire Atlantic seaboard. But though polling shows strong support across the region, well-financed opponents have successfully made it appear that grassroots opposition is growing, particularly in coastal communities. I’ve watched it happen in Cape Cod, where activists are trying to block the cable necessary to bring power onshore from turbines, and in Maine where other activists want to block the construction of the terminal to support the offshore farms. There are always arguments—perfect enemy of the good—but none of them make much sense in a world where August looks like it will be even hotter than last year’s all-time record. It’s why, when real champions emerge—say, former National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara, running in the Democratic primary for Delaware governor—change gets so much easier.

The default is always to the status quo. For Republicans that means fossil fuel uber alles. For Democrats, too often, it means “don’t ruffle more feathers than you have to.” That’s why we always have to make sure that there are plenty of climate hawks with plenty of feathers.

Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed mistakenly identified Gretchen Whitmer as the governor of Wisconsin. She is the governor of Michigan.