Artificial intelligence confronts humanity with a paradox of historic significance. Used to enhance human cooperation and shared learning in service to life, AI can be a powerful tool for creating a world that works for all. Used as a competitive weapon in the pursuit of profit, political control, and military dominance, it will almost certainly accelerate humanity’s path to self-extinction.

The threat is real and immediate. Yet it may also be our greatest source of hope. AI confronts us more clearly than any previous technology with a truth we have long resisted: humanity cannot survive as a collection of competing individuals, businesses, and nations pursuing their separate advantage without regard for the wellbeing of the whole. By making the consequences of our current path unmistakable and potentially imminent, AI may provide the most powerful incentive humanity has ever experienced to undertake the deep cultural transformation on which our common future now depends.

Public discussion commonly treats AI as an independent intelligence that may one day turn against its human creators. This directs our attention to the wrong question. AI does not possess an independent moral purpose. It is a human-created tool that serves the purposes of those who develop, own, and control it. The defining question is not whether AI will choose to control humanity. It is whether humanity can transcend its commitment to competition and domination sufficiently to govern AI—and itself—in service to life.

The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.

Within our current global culture, AI is being developed primarily as an instrument of competitive advantage. Businesses use it to eliminate jobs, monitor workers, manipulate consumers, appropriate human creativity, capture personal information, and achieve market dominance. Political actors use it to spread falsehoods, inflame fear, and discredit opponents. Governments use it to expand surveillance, while militaries use it to identify targets, guide weapons, and develop autonomous killing systems.

The justification for developing AI as quickly as possible is always essentially the same: If we do not do it, our competitors will. Corporate executives may recognize that eliminating millions of jobs could devastate society, yet fear losing to businesses that move more quickly. National leaders may understand that autonomous weapons could escape human control, yet fear defeat by nations that develop them first. Political leaders may know that AI-generated deception is destroying democracy, yet fear losing to opponents who use it more aggressively.

This is the logic of a global suicide pact. Everyone may recognize the danger, yet no participant feels free to withdraw from the competition.

AI increases the speed, scale, and reach of every competitive undertaking. It can manipulate millions of minds, monitor entire populations, eliminate vast numbers of livelihoods, and make military decisions at speeds beyond human comprehension. It can concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of the corporations and governments that control the largest data systems and computing facilities. Meanwhile, those facilities consume growing quantities of electricity, water, land, and scarce minerals, further burdening the living Earth on which all life depends.

These dangers are not intrinsic to AI. They are consequences of a civilization that defines progress as increasing consumption, treats money as humanity’s highest value, rewards the pursuit of unlimited private wealth, and organizes relationships around domination and competition. AI does not create these pathologies. It magnifies them.

We urgently need laws prohibiting the most dangerous applications of AI, including for autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, political impersonation, theft of intellectual work, and reckless uses of energy and water. We need transparency, democratic accountability, protection for workers and creators, and clear legal responsibility for harms. Such measures are essential to slow the damage and give humanity time to choose a different future.

They will not, however, be sufficient. No regulatory system can make AI safe so long as businesses and nations remain locked in struggles for dominance. Rules will continually be weakened, evaded, or abandoned by those who fear that compliance will place them at a competitive disadvantage.

Our only enduring protection is therefore a transformation of the global culture that determines how we humans use AI. This requires that we move from a civilization organized around competition for money and power to a civilization dedicated to the wellbeing of living Earth and all its humans and other living beings. What many of us choose to call an Ecological Civilization.

Such a civilization will recognize Earth as a living community, not a storehouse of commodities waiting to be claimed, extracted, and sold for profit. It will understand that human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the whole and that our distinctive capacity for conscious choice carries a responsibility to care for the life that sustains us. It will organize economies to meet the needs of all while healing Earth, distributing power, limiting extremes of wealth, restoring local self-reliance, and holding businesses accountable to the communities and ecosystems that depend on them.

For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it.

An Ecological Civilization will not eliminate competition. It will encourage competition, not to dominate and exploit others, but rather to be the most creative and excellent in advancing a culture of cooperation and mutual responsibility on behalf of the wellbeing of the whole. Essential AI capabilities will be governed as part of a global information commons. The knowledge on which they depend—created over generations by countless human beings—will be treated as a shared inheritance. Its use will be subject to democratic oversight, ecological limits, and the foundational requirement that its use serves life.

AI could then help educators, farmers, healers, scientists, public officials, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and community organizers share what they are learning. It will identify relationships beyond the reach of any individual mind, translate among languages, expose error, and support us in adapting successful approaches to the distinctive needs of each place. It could strengthen our collective capacity to restore soils and forests, conserve water, prevent disease, eliminate waste, localize production, resolve conflict, and secure a good life for all.

In this role, AI would not replace human intelligence. It would augment our ability to learn together. The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.

Climate disruption, ecological collapse, extreme inequality, and war have demonstrated the failure of our competitive civilization. Yet these threats have often seemed distant, gradual, or separable. AI brings them together and makes it increasingly apparent that no business can secure its future by destroying the society that sustains its markets; no nation can achieve security through weapons that threaten all nations; and no part of humanity can flourish on a dying Earth.

For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it. This may be AI’s greatest gift. It confronts us with a choice we can no longer postpone. Cooperate to secure the wellbeing of the whole or continue competing toward our common destruction.

The question is whether we will recognize the choice and act in time.

Author's Note: My purpose in sharing this column is to help move this essential message into the world as quickly and widely as possible through many messengers and channels. If this column speaks to you, please, without need for my permission or acknowledgement, forward our newsletter, share the link to our website, post on social media, and/or otherwise reproduce it, adapt it, share it with your friends and followers, and publicly express its message in your own words and voice. Then, I invite you to share with me how you are using it by sending the information to info@greatturning.org.

On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, the United States military struck a home in the town of Kuhestak, in Sirik County, southern Iran, where a wedding was underway, killing four people and wounding more than 50. The youngest victim was 4-year-old Amir Ali Karimi. Asked about the strike, US Vice President JD Vance told reporters: "What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that." However, he added, “Sometimes, things happen.”

It's worth remembering that the campaign the United States and Israel waged against Iran—launched without United Nations Security Council authorization—opened with a strike on the office of Iran's Supreme Leader that killed him along with his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his 14-month-old granddaughter. Roughly an hour or two later, the US struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab with Tomahawk cruise missiles, killing 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren between the ages of six and 13. That same day, an attack on the small town of Lamerd used Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM)—munitions that burst in midair and scatter thousands of tungsten fragments—killing at least 21 people, including four children, among them 2-year-old Avina Barzegar, and wounding 100 more. In the months since, the US and Israel have struck not only military sites but universities, bridges, power plants, police stations, and even desalination plants serving remote islands in southern Iran. Whatever assurances Vance offers, the record is clear that the United States has a long history of striking civilians.

Of course none of this is new. More than two years have now passed since Israel launched its full-scale assault on Gaza, backed fully by the United States and most Western governments. Over those two years the world has watched strikes on hospitals, schools, and universities, the shooting of civilians, even an assault captured on camera—and despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israel's prime minister, no action has been taken either to enforce that warrant or to halt the war. It was hardly surprising that a year-plus of unanswered war crimes in Gaza—what many now call a genocide—normalized the same conduct elsewhere. Israel applied much the same pattern in Lebanon, violating that country's sovereignty to bomb schools, apartment buildings, universities, and villages. The absence of any serious response to crimes broadcast live to the world sent every power on Earth a clear message: If you are strong enough, you can commit any crime—including the crime of crimes.

Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account?

President Donald Trump himself has, through his own public statements, documented attacks that could easily amount to war crimes. In one Truth Social post, he wrote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." In another, he shared footage of the strike that brought down Karaj's unfinished B1 bridge—a civilian structure, not yet even complete, hit on Sizdah Bedar, the 13th day of Nowruz, when most Iranians are out picnicking in nature and many families were gathered under and around the bridge. The strike was a so-called double tap: A second missile hit after rescue workers arrived to help the wounded, killing two more and injuring several others. In all, 13 people were killed and 95 wounded.

This scale of targeting civilians, met with so little response from the media or the international community, is itself a troubling kind of normalization—one we cannot afford to treat with indifference. Imagine, for a moment, that Iran had bombed the White House on a holiday morning, killing the American president along with members of his family, and then struck an elementary school in Texas, killing more than 120 American students along with their teachers. How would American society, and the West more broadly, have responded? Would the dead children be called a "necessary action" or "mistake"? Or would the entire West have mobilized to respond to such an atrocity?

This same Western indifference to the deaths of people in the Global South—particularly at American hands—is visible in the words of Afghanistan's former president, Hamid Karzai. Asked recently why he, perhaps alone among Afghan leaders, had wept in public, Karzai spoke of "our national helplessness before powers that had come in the name of helping Afghanistan," and recalled asking American officials a simple question: If their bombs killed Afghan children, was that terrorism? They told him no—terrorism, he said they told him, is when American interests are put at risk.

This becomes painfully concrete when you consider that the Sirik wedding was only the latest entry in a long, grim record of American strikes on wedding celebrations across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen going back more than two decades—a pattern trackers have documented since at least December 2001.

Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account? Don't the citizens of a country whose president launched a war on another nation without UN authorization, and whose forces have committed numerous documented war crimes in the process, bear some responsibility for holding their own leaders accountable? Would the West have stayed this indifferent if a wedding, or a school, had been hit at home—or would it have moved heaven and Earth to bring the perpetrators to justice? These are the questions that demand an answer. The world cannot continue to condemn violence selectively while treating the deaths of civilians in the Global South as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of geopolitics.

Every time a war crime is ignored, the threshold for the next one becomes lower. Every time accountability is abandoned, impunity becomes stronger. If we truly believe that all human life has equal value, then we must demand that those who order and carry out attacks on civilians face the same scrutiny and consequences, whoever they are. The first step toward ending war-crime normalization is refusing to look away.

Over the summer, the Fifth Circuit Court, in a case brought by ExxonMobil, ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, had “exceeded its statutory authority” by citing Exxon for failing to record a work-related mental illness.

This case followed an incident in Baytown, Texas where an explosion and fire occurred during repairs on a hydro-desulfurization unit, injuring multiple workers. After the explosion, a technician volunteered to lead firefighters to several valves that needed to be shut off to prevent the fire from continuing. While receiving treatment after his first excursion to assist the firefighters, he courageously agreed to lead the first responders to another valve.

Following this incident, the technician experienced anxiety and was later diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by two professionals. Despite these diagnoses, Exxon did not accept the determination that his PTSD was work-related and requested that the technician see another provider, which the technician refused. The union that represented workers at the Baytown location reported the incident to OSHA, which then issued a penalty against Exxon for failing to record the technician’s PTSD as work related.

It is also important to acknowledge that there is not a clear distinction between physical injury or illness and mental illness.

After Exxon challenged the penalty, the Fifth Circuit Court canceled the penalty based on a narrow reading of OSHA’s authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to “prescribe regulations requiring employers to maintain accurate records of, and to make periodic reports on, work-related deaths, injuries and illnesses,” concluding that the “illnesses” referred to in the act do not include mental illnesses.

While others have questioned the soundness of the legal reasoning in the decision, it is clear from occupational health research that work does impact mental health, and that this impact on mental health has consequences for the life, well-being, and indeed physical health of workers. This impact should compel politicians to explicitly legislate and develop regulations to protect workers' mental health.

Recognizing the impact of work on mental health is nothing new. In an 1844 issue of the Lowell Offering—the publication created by Lowell Mill Girls in the early days of the industrial revolution in the United States—Harriet Farley speculated on how the nature of the toil in work at the Lowell Mills could have contributed to the recent suicides of two of her comrades:

In factory labor it is sometimes an advantage, but also sometimes the contrary, that the mind is thrown back upon itself—it is forced to depend upon its own resources, for a large proportion of the time of the operative. Excepting by sight, the females hold but little companionship with each other.

Specific work-related factors associated with adverse health consequences include long work hours, shift work, bullying, harassment, workplace violence, traumatic events, low control over work, and job insecurity. These factors stem from the work environment and are not just a concern because of their impact on workers' mental health, although this connection is clear. These sources of stress in the work environment can also increase the risk of physical health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders (such as carpal tunnel syndrome and low back pain), and acute traumatic injuries. The burden of exposure to these workplace factors is not borne equally by all workers. Due to occupational segregation, exposure to these workplace stressors is often higher among Black and Hispanic workers, thereby contributing to health disparities.

A large proportion of workplace fatalities are also tied to mental health. In 2024, in the US, there were reported 410 workplace drug overdoses and 263 workplace suicides. The role of the workplace in these causes of death, both of which are among the leading causes of death in the United States, even when they occur outside of the workplace, has become clear. One recent study estimated that work-related factors, including chemical exposures, lack of social support, and long work hours, contribute to 10-13% of suicides. Similarly, research has revealed that the mental health impacts of factors like workplace stress and job insecurity contribute to the risk of drug overdoses. The role of the workplace in this risk for drug overdoses is seen in the fact that the loss of manufacturing jobs at the county level is associated with increases in drug overdose mortality.

It is also important to acknowledge that there is not a clear distinction between physical injury or illness and mental illness, as the Fifth Circuit Court Ruling suggests. Indeed, the very event that prompted the ruling was both a physical hazard, as shown by the resulting injuries, and a mental health hazard, as shown by the technician’s PTSD. Injuries at work have negative consequences for mental health. Research suggests that both physical and psychosocial hazards at work affect the risk of musculoskeletal disorders.

A variety of methods exist to protect workers’ mental health. In Australia, workplaces are required to minimize psychological hazards “so far as is reasonably practicable.” Reducing occupational psychosocial risks is an imperative under the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Denmark requires that “[a]t all stages, the work must be planned, organised and carried out in a responsible way to ensure that its impact on the psychosocial working environment is safe and healthy, individually and collectively, in both short and long term.” In the US, some states have addressed parts of the problem by including work-related PTSD in workers' compensation laws; workplace violence regulations; laws that require minimum nurse staffing levels or ban mandatory overtime for nurses; and paid sick leave, paid family leave, or coverage of domestic workers under labor laws.

Workplaces can also implement policies and programs to protect workers’ mental health. MATES in Construction is an Australian program that has since been adopted elsewhere and seeks to prevent suicide in the construction industry—an industry with the highest suicide risk in the United States—by increasing awareness of mental health challenges, reducing stigma, and connecting workers to support resources. In a similar way, Recovery Friendly Workplaces seek to create work environments that support people with substance use challenges in receiving the support and treatment they need.

While the prospect of similar regulations being applied nationally in the United States may seem bleak in the current political environment, especially following the recent Fifth Circuit Court ruling, the need to address the impact of work on mental health remains.

On September 21, Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate nominee, called for a “successful and immediate end” to the Iran war. In Washington, the conflict still appears primarily to be a question of presidential power. In Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, however, it has become a question of Republican candidates’ ability to win or retain office. As the midterms approach, the White House continues to define the war through its own authorities and objectives, while Republicans facing voters increasingly have to explain how it should end. Their cautious distancing suggests less a change in foreign policy than a belated confrontation with political accountability.

Republican appeals to party loyalty rest on a familiar premise: On national security, the party should stand behind its own president. But a war without a clear end in sight raises a difficult question: Can party loyalty substitute for an explanation of where a military conflict is heading? Or do elected representatives, even when they support their own administration, have a duty to ask why the war continues and under what conditions it can end? The recent positions of some Republicans suggest that these questions are no longer confined to debate among analysts; they have entered the governing party itself.

Alongside Hinson, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Michigan Rep. John James, and Ohio Sen. Jon Husted have called for an end to the war, while others continue to support it. Retiring Sens. Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis have also questioned its duration or the lack of a clear path to its conclusion. Yet on September 22, Senate Majority Leader John Thune appealed for Republican unity. The next day, he encouraged candidates to run their own campaigns, even when they disagreed with President Donald Trump. These positions suggest a party in which alignment with the president carries growing political costs.

Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public.

The significance lies not simply in the number of Republicans calling for an end to the war, but in their changing political language. The issue is no longer merely whether to support or oppose the president. It is also how representatives explain a prolonged war to voters who may demand answers about its necessity, purpose, and prospects. Calling for an end to the war becomes a way of redefining the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents—a relationship that cannot remain indefinitely obscured by party discipline or loyalty to the White House.

This shift does not necessarily indicate a principled reassessment of Republican foreign policy. Distancing from the war may stem from electoral calculations, concern about voters’ reactions, or an effort to reduce the political costs of a protracted conflict. Even if some lawmakers have concluded that continuing the war conflicts with the preferences of some voters, their positions cannot yet be treated as a strategic break with Trump’s approach. What is emerging is cautious distancing: an attempt to avoid the war’s political costs while preserving ties with the party leadership.

Nevertheless, that caution reveals an important reality: The war can no longer be treated solely as a matter of executive decisions and geopolitical calculations. Responsibility extends beyond the White House to lawmakers who have supported its continuation, remained silent, or used party unity as a substitute for public debate. Accountability is no longer simply an external demand imposed on the party; it has become an internal issue affecting its credibility and cohesion.

Thune’s appeal for unity matters in this context. Party unity during wartime can be presented as a sign of strength and political stability. Yet as disagreements over the war grow, that unity risks becoming organized silence. The party may ask lawmakers to stand with the president, but loyalty must not render the ballot powerless or erase constituents’ questions. Unity that cannot articulate a clear objective or a conceivable endpoint for the war may turn from a political asset into a liability.

The midterm elections are thus becoming a mechanism of political accountability. Lawmakers who once explained the war primarily through party loyalty must now demonstrate whether they accept responsibility for limiting it, defining the conditions for its conclusion, and responding to public concerns. This demand does not necessarily imply opposition to every aspect of the war. Voters may support the administration’s security objectives while demanding explanations for the conflict’s prolonged duration, the absence of an exit strategy, and its uncertain costs. Republican politicians are increasingly being forced to take that distinction seriously.

From this perspective, some lawmakers’ distancing from the Iran war is less evidence of an abrupt transformation within the party than a sign that accountability has entered Republican political calculations belatedly. Calls to end the war are growing louder because the conflict is no longer merely a presidential decision; it can affect politicians’ relationships with voters. Yet that delay leaves a fundamental question: Why has explaining how the war should end gained such urgency as the elections approach?

Political accountability has meaning when it begins before a crisis becomes an electoral threat, not when politicians conclude that continued silence may cost them votes. If Republicans are calling for an end to the war, they must pursue that position beyond campaign statements through clear demands concerning the conflict’s objectives, limits, and exit strategy. Otherwise, their recent distancing may amount less to accountability than to managing the consequences of a policy that previously escaped scrutiny.

The Iran war is not merely a test of Republican foreign policy; it is a test of when responsibility is assumed. Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public. The question is not who distances themselves from the war first, but why calls to end it have grown louder as the elections draw closer. If that question remains unanswered, these positions will signal not a change of course, but only that the cost of silence has finally become greater than the cost of dissent.

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

Today we discuss:

• A theft by the criminal hacking group ShinyHunters of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau scrambling as an uncertain deadline loomed.

• Counterterrorism police in Britain say that 5 men arrested Sunday near an air base were being released on bail, in what officials originally said was a major incident involving a possible terrorist act. “Deprogram” called it yesterday.

• A person who said they had spoken with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told The New York Times that the Emirati leader had reported to Netanyahu that Hamas was preparing a major attack. The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment.

• Soon after returning to office, Trump signed an executive order directing that imprisoned trans women be housed in men’s facilities. It also barred transgender inmates from receiving gender transition medical treatments for gender dysphoria. Lower courts blocked the policy. Now Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let it move forward.

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I had the first call with my lawyers four days after my arrest. The guards escorted me to a room across the detention center, a multipurpose hall with scattered chairs and a small table and a phone next to the reinforced window overlooking the inner yard. Several people were already on the call, attorneys whose names and faces I would see on the screen over the next hundred days. They asked me to confirm that I was alone. I did. “Do a visual sweep,” one of them suggested. I scanned the room and checked the corners, beneath the air-conditioning vents, along the ceiling lights, searching for something I couldn’t name. It felt performative. If they wanted to listen, they would listen.

The lawyers filled me in on the court proceedings so far. I had so many questions. They tumbled out of me, one after another, the accumulation of four days of confusion and dread. How could they do this? What are the charges? How is any of this legal? When will I be out? When will I be returned to New York?

They had no conclusive answers, only mostly legal terminology that obscured as much as it revealed. The lawyers were careful with their words, precise in ways that frustrated me. I wanted certainty. They could only offer procedure.

The king wanted to send a message, and I was the messenger, sent to everyone who might consider speaking out.

They explained that they had filed something called a habeas corpus petition on my behalf. It sounded ancient, almost biblical. Baher, one of the lawyers, was generous enough to explain that the Latin phrase dated back to the Magna Carta, to the thirteenth century, when kings could make people disappear and the barons had to invent a mechanism to find them. Habeas corpus was a demand: Produce the body. Show us the prisoner. Justify his detention, or let him go.

I was the body in question, shipped over thirteen hundred miles from New York to Jena, Louisiana.

The habeas corpus petition had been filed in federal court in New York, along with two requests or motions, one for release on bail while the case continued and another to compel my return to New York. Federal court was different from immigration court, I learned. The separate immigration process would start in two weeks, which was indicated in the papers they had handed me in New York. I didn’t understand. It’s all the same country, the same system. What difference does it make which court hears my case, and where?

A huge difference, it turned out—one that would decide the fate of my case in the days to come. “Immigration court is not a real court,” one of the lawyers said. Immigration courts are the president’s courts, where arguments challenging presidential illegality are swallowed by the urgency of an executive campaign of mass deportation. Immigration judges are government employees, appointed by the attorney general, who is appointed by the president—the same president who had tweeted about me. In immigration court, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury or real independence. The process is designed for efficiency, not justice. Federal courts were different. The federal court is a constitutional court, which can hear constitutional claims against the executive branch. The judges are appointed for life. They don’t answer to the administration. They must follow the Constitution and case law. The government wanted my case in immigration court because the outcome was easier to control. In federal court, they would actually have to justify what they had done. In federal court, I might win.

The government had concealed my whereabouts in those first crucial hours, the lawyers said. They hadn’t known where I was. New York? Elsewhere? They had even tried tracking flights to Guantánamo. They had filed an emergency petition at 4:38 in the morning to prevent my deportation, but I had already been moved to New Jersey at that point. By the time everyone figured out I was in Louisiana, the government was arguing that any legal challenge should be heard there, not in New York.

Louisiana’s courts, heavily Republican, would be more favorable to the Trump administration. By moving me here, the government had shifted the fight to terrain they controlled, using geography as a weapon.

But there was another reason. They wanted to isolate me. In New York, I had my wife, friends, community, and the press. In Louisiana, I had nothing. I was alone in a facility in the middle of the woods, cut off from everyone who knew me.

The battle, then, was over two things: Which court system would hear my case, immigration or federal? And which venue, New York or Louisiana? Our argument was simple: I resided and was arrested in New York. This wasn’t really an immigration case. I wasn’t detained for violating immigration law. I was detained for what I said. For protesting and speaking out about Palestine. That made it a constitutional case, one where the First Amendment was crucial, and constitutional questions belong in federal court.

The government’s argument was equally simple: You’re an immigrant, now detained in Louisiana. This is an immigration matter. Stay in your lane.

It all sounded technical. Procedural. The kind of thing that puts people to sleep. But the venue and jurisdiction would determine everything. The government knew it. That’s why they had moved so fast to get me out of New York. That’s why they hid where they were taking me.

My case was the blueprint they wanted to set, and the one we had to tear up.

As the lawyers talked, I began to understand the scope of what I was facing. This was not a mistake. It was not overzealous enforcement. This was deliberate and planned at the highest levels of government. The president had tweeted my picture. The secretary of state had invoked obscure powers. Multiple agencies had worked together to snatch me from my home and transport me across the country in less than a day.

By the end of the call, one thing was clear: The lawyers were as shocked as I was. These were experienced attorneys: Some had worked on landmark Guantánamo cases. They had seen government abuse and overreach. But this was different: the speed, the secrecy, the coordination. The invocation of powers they had never seen used before. They compared it to the Red Scare.

“This provision the secretary of state used,” or the Rubio Determination, as it was called, “we’re not aware of it ever being applied in a case like this,” one of the lawyers said. “It’s unprecedented.” So I was not just a case; I was an experiment, I realized. The government was testing what it could get away with, using me as the test subject or “blueprint,” as the White House would boast. If they succeeded with me, a permanent resident with no criminal history, imagine what they could do to others. To the men sleeping in bunks around me, who had no lawyers, no press, no one watching. We would later learn, from the government’s own court filings, that this law had never before been used against anyone with my status.

My case was the blueprint they wanted to set, and the one we had to tear up.

This was the turning point, the moment when I grasped that this was bigger than me. It was bigger than my case, my green card, my deportation. I had not been detained for a crime I committed. They knew I never committed a crime. I was detained for what I represent, for saying something the king and his courtiers didn’t like.

The king wanted to send a message, and I was the messenger, sent to everyone who might consider speaking out. Every student who might join a protest would get the message, every person who might dare to criticize Israel or question American policy, domestic or foreign. The message was simple: This could be you. Your rights will not protect you. Your innocence will not protect you. We can take you in the night, and there is nothing you can do about it.

If I chose not to fight the case, I could “self-deport,” the lawyers explained, and leave “voluntarily.” But the Rubio Determination came with a lifetime ban against returning to the United States. We ended the call. I made no response to this offer. Maybe I should have.

Lying on my bunk that night, my eyes wrapped in a makeshift blindfold of socks, I knew I couldn’t walk away. If I left, they would call it a victory. They would say I must have been guilty of something. My departure would confirm their accusations without them having to prove anything. Every lie they told about me would be validated by my departure. The smear campaign would become the official record. And it wouldn’t end with me.

If I self-deported, I would be handing them the road map for silencing dissent. Immigrants joining a protest would remember that green cards offer no protection, that years of building a life in this country can be erased if the government doesn’t like their speech. Everyone would understand the new rules: Speak up, and we will find a way to make you disappear.

The Palestine solidarity movement in America was already under siege when I was abducted. Students had been doxxed, smeared, suspended, expelled. Others had lost their jobs for signing letters or joining a protest. During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to donors who were furious at the student uprising that he would crush the pro-Palestine protests and “set that movement back twenty-five or thirty years.” My case was meant to be the capstone, proof that they could go further than suspensions and firings.

I thought about the students I had met at Columbia, the ones who had risked their careers to pitch tents on the lawn, to demand that the university divest from companies profiting from occupation. If I ran, what message would that send to them? That the fight wasn’t worth it? That when the pressure got real, even the people who told them to speak up would flee?

I thought about the Palestinians who had been waging this struggle for decades, long before it was fashionable, before celebrities posted about it on Instagram or walked red carpets with pins on their lapels. They had faced worse than arbitrary detention. They had faced ethnic cleansing, daily humiliation, dehumanization, imprisonment, the loss of everything. Who was I to give up at the first serious test? I thought of the people in Gaza buried beneath rubble while the world debated the justifications for their deaths. About farmers in the West Bank facing Israeli settlers burning their villages with impunity. About the millions of refugees, scattered across the world, still holding keys to the homes to which they could not return. They couldn’t self-deport out of their suffering. They couldn’t sign a paper to make it stop.

I was the test case. And I refused to comply.

Excerpted from NO LAND TO STAND ON: Notes from Detention by Mahmoud Khalil. Published by Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2026 by Mahmoud Khalil. All rights reserved.

There are many ways in which the swinging pendulum could lower onto the neck of the human.

The human could come to represent something wholly different than themself in relying on advanced artificial intelligence. More drastically, the human could become subservient to AI at some point in the future. And, in the worst-case scenario, the human could be physically wiped out by AI-launched nuclear weapons. AI is already embedded in command-and-control systems surrounding American nuclear weapons. If given greater allowance in the future, it would be unlikely to have the same reservations about using them that humans do.

Then, there is danger with the human themself, as we see with End of Times-bent leaders, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. They could continue to further escalate wars and international criminal behavior to the point that would push the world into a wider conflict in which nuclear weapons may be used. Even if these destructive weapons were not used in a future global conflict, conventional weapons have the ability to decimate cities as we’ve seen with Dresden, London, and Gaza.

The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Lastly, there is climate change. While unlikely to cause the pendulum to drop on the human’s neck in one fell swoop, continuous massive fires, heat, flooding, and violent storms will cause further mass migration and xenophobic backlash. The countries where climate migrants go to—wealthy Western ones—will have their own weather-related disasters and will be depleted of relief funds. With no relief from “natural” devastation, the human is unlikely to see any use for government and likely to live in increasingly gated communities with tribalistic mindsets.

Already there are 450,000 projected heat-related deaths mostly in the Global South over the next half year from climate change and Super El Niño. This seems to have hardly caused most Westerners to bat an eyelash, as they have already heightened their walls against migration either by letting people drown in the Mediterranean or by voting for someone who promised mass deportations. The fascists we’ve elected or who are growing in power, like AfD in Germany, reflect the current lack of empathy for the Global South other, and we’re only seeing the beginning of human-caused climate change’s wrath.

But the human, beneath the lowering pendulum, is not trapped. There are no ropes around their torso or arms tying them down. The human can get up and develop national legislation and international treaties to stop the pendulum’s movement and, eventually, remove it entirely. The US, on a national level, nearly did this under former President Joe Biden. The Democrats were one vote away from passing Build Back Better, which would have created tens of thousands of green jobs and throttled the fossil fuel industry. Former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was the single holdout. Biden needed to arm-twist him to get him onboard, as we know the GOP would’ve done if they were in his shoes. Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 that makes it more difficult for Big Tech to collect individuals’ data without their consent. In 1987, nations came together and adopted the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Every country in the world has joined since, and the ozone layer is on track to recover. It is a proven template for future global climate action.

Thus, the pendulum need not fall on the human’s neck. The blind advance of AI to the detriment of workers, the environment, and what it means to be human can be stopped. The fascist wave has crested, but it can fall like in Hungary and potentially in the US after the November elections. The extent of future climate change disasters can be mitigated when the people take the power back.

The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

The time to retake control of the human condition is now.

Reporting in The New York Times describes an upcoming proposal from the Trump administration to use funds from the Child Care and Development Fund to provide “parent-based child care” in which a married parent could receive financial assistance to stay home to care for their children, while the other parent works. Providing additional income to support economically struggling families, including support for family members who want to be full-time caregivers for children, is a great idea. Pulling the funds to do so from the Child Care and Development Fund is not.

The CCDF was created in the 1990s to provide child care subsidies for low-income families, so parents, primarily mothers, could work or go to school. The program is severely underfunded, however. It serves just 16% of all eligible children and just 17% of eligible children, age 5 and younger. That leaves hundreds of thousands of eligible children sitting on waitlists. Worse, some states don’t maintain a waitlist or have simply implemented an “enrollment freeze,” turning eligible applicants away rather than adding them to a waitlist.

Who are the families that rely on subsidized childcare?

Not adequately funding the CCDF hits low-income families, families with infants and toddlers, and families headed by single parents the hardest. To even be eligible for the program, federal criteria require families to earn less than 85% of the state median income. And states can make the income requirement even more stringent. For example, in seven states, a family with an income above 150% of the poverty line—just 47% of the state median income in Florida or 41% in Ohio—would not qualify for child care assistance. In 20 states, a family with an income above 200% of the poverty line would not qualify. This is just 55% of the state median wage in Michigan.

The most recent data on the characteristics of families served by CCDF show that in 2023, 82% were headed by a single parent. In many states, an even larger share of families participating in the CCDF program are headed by single parents: 95% in Alabama, 93% in Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio, and 92% in Pennsylvania. These are families with little choice but for the head of household—mothers in 75% of cases—to engage in formal employment if the family is to survive.

Then there are parents of infants and toddlers, pre-school-age children for whom child care is the most costly. The program provides subsidies for children up to age 13, but younger children are more likely than older children to receive subsidies. This reflects the fact that infants and toddlers have the greatest need for care, but parents often face a shortage of affordable qualified providers. This is in part due to younger children requiring more qualified providers than older children require and smaller child-to-staff ratios. In a Pulse Household Survey, 15% of all parents reported not working because they were caring for children, but for parents of the youngest children aged 0 to 4, it was 35%.

Consequences of moving forward with the Trump–Vance plan

If married couple families are added to the list of eligible families without substantially increasing funding to provide subsidies to all eligible families, as is reportedly proposed, it will do significant harm to families of all types, whether they are married or not and whether they rely on subsidies or not.

With the new strain on available funds, families currently relying on the CCDF could lose the subsidies that allow them to provide even a modest living for themselves and their children. Without the subsidized care provided by the CCDF, these families could work full-time for most of the year just to pay for child care. In Alabama, for example, a minimum-wage worker working full-time would have to work 29 weeks—the equivalent of working from January to July—and use every cent of those wages to be able to cover unsubsidized child care for one infant. In North Carolina and Ohio, these workers would need to work from January to October.

These are parents who want to work to support their families but cannot afford unsubsidized child care. They also cannot afford not to work.

Reducing the availability of child care funding for working mothers and fathers will not only hurt families who rely on child care subsidies, it will hurt all families who rely on child care. Siphoning these funds away from working families—disproportionately Black single mothers—will also deprive child care providers of a key source of revenue, potentially leading them to charge other families more for care, be forced to shed staff, or even close down. With families in so many communities across the nation already experiencing a child care crisis, this would exacerbate the shortage issue.

We should fully fund the CCDF and provide needed support to all families

So many American families are already struggling to pay for the basic necessities, including rent, food, and gas. In an economy that requires dual-earner households where possible, child care subsidies provide struggling families with some basic support at a time when prices continue to rise, and safety nets, including health care subsidies, food assistance, and even heating assistance, continue to be cut.

It’s notable that instead of providing real solutions to the affordability pressures many Americans face, Vice President Vance—who has championed this policy—and Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services are proposing what is effectively an attack on single parents, working parents, and working women in an effort to center married households and to push a political and cultural agenda about supporting supposedly “traditional” values. We must invest in families, regardless of their composition—married couples, single mothers, or grandparents caring for their grandchildren. We should fully fund the CCDF to ensure all eligible families are supported.

Amidst all the talk of the need for government regulation of AI, there has been too little discussion of the simplest route: criminal liability. The basic story is that the AI companies are being irresponsible in dealing with a product they know to be dangerous. The companies and the people who run them need to know that they face serious monetary risk from letting their little models run wild, and possibly criminal prosecution and jail time.

To be clear, sensible regulation of AI would be desirable. But let’s be serious. We have Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, and RFK Jr. all running major government departments. Do we really think having someone like this overseeing AI development would be an improvement?

We do already have laws to deal with harms caused by AI; we just need to be prepared to use them. Again, no one would expect President Trump’s personal lawyer and Attorney General Todd Blanche to take criminal or civil actions against AI in the public interest. If there was a major incident, he would most likely look to initiate a prosecution in pursuit of a payoff for dropping the case. But the law does not begin and end with Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

This isn’t a question of vindictiveness. We all know, the AI boys more than anyone, that AI is potentially very dangerous. If they opt to push full speed ahead, without necessary safeguards, they have to be prepared to face the consequences.

If we can forget about the extinction events that keep our pundits busy, and focus instead on the millions of far more likely disasters that AI could cause, there will almost certainly be plenty of room for state-level prosecutions, as well as civil suits.

To take some hypothetical cases, suppose an AI system manages to hack into a city’s traffic control system, and the resulting chaos leads to a number of car crashes, causing serious injuries and death, in addition to property damage. To take another case, suppose AI falsifies clinical trial data, leading a drug to be approved even though the trials show it to be ineffective or dangerous. Or suppose AI gets inside a bank’s computers and makes a total mess of its records in a way that they cannot be reconstructed. (I know banks almost certainly have backups, but our super-intelligent AI can surely get into the backup records as well.)

I know that each of these disasters is extremely unlikely, but all of them are millions or even billions of times more likely than the extinction events we hear about in the media. And given that there are probably millions of disasters like these that AI could possibly cause, there is a pretty good chance that we will see some serious disaster in the not-too-distant future.

As I noted in an earlier piece, a mistaken report from AI led the Navy to put helicopters in the air to board a Chinese cargo ship that they wrongly believed was carrying parts for Iran’s nuclear program. Fortunately, the information was checked, and the helicopters were called back before there was an actual confrontation, but this was luck. Sooner or later we will see a mistake that is not caught.

It would, of course, be best if an AI disaster never happens, but one practice that will substantially reduce the risk is that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the rest of the boys understand that their companies will be fully liable for any harm caused and they personally may face criminal liability. In other words, they may not just lose all their money; they may have to spend much of the rest of their lives in prison.

This isn’t a question of vindictiveness. We all know, the AI boys more than anyone, that AI is potentially very dangerous. If they opt to push full speed ahead, without necessary safeguards, they have to be prepared to face the consequences.

Drunk driving is really an appropriate analogy. Everyone should understand that if they get behind the wheel when they are intoxicated, they hugely increase the probability of an accident. That is why we throw people in jail for it. The same standard should apply to OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest. If they push ahead with testing without appropriate safeguards, they should be prepared to pay the price, including potential criminal penalties.

Remember, they are doing this for money, lots of it. They are choosing to endanger the property and lives of others for personal profit. If they mess up, they should be forced to pay a very high price. Incentives matter.

It’s not working any more, this scam Republicans have been running for 45 years, although Trump and many others are trying their best to revive it.

Their strategy has always been simple: break things here in America, create chaos and a mess, hurt working class people while making billionaires richer, and then campaign on fixing what they screwed up.

Two years ago, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers stood in a grocery store for an advertisement blaming Joe Biden for the price of eggs (without mentioning the bird flu that was jacking prices). This week he’s back in nearly the same folksy jacket telling voters that it’s time for Trump to end his illegal war against Iran so gas prices can come down.

Rogers new ad leaves out, of course, the fact that he’d cheered for the war on the day it began in February, claiming Iran was an imminent threat to the United States (it wasn’t and isn’t), and hit multiple rightwing podcasts and media opportunities to demand Americans unite behind Trump in prosecuting the war.

He’s not alone. Just last week, Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson voted to keep the war going — after voting six times previously to support Trump and his war — but a few days ago cut a desperate ad calling for a swift end to the fighting.

Iowa Republicans Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both in tight House races, suddenly discovered the War Powers Act and joined Democrats to limit the president they’d been backing. Down in Florida, Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released an ad warning that Miller’s brutal masked goons have gone too far and that Hispanic voters now feel betrayed.

Americans have noticed who lit these particular fires. A New York Times/Siena poll this month found 50 percent of registered voters trust Democrats over Republicans to handle foreign wars, and GOP whackadoodle Nancy Mace, on her way out of Congress, told reporters she’s expecting a “bloodbath” at the polls this November.

Trump himself, asked on Meet the Press how a seven-month war squares with two campaigns with hundreds of promises of no new wars, answered that he “didn’t promise anything” and stormed out of the interview like a petulant 10-year-old.

This is just the latest in a 45-year-long Republican scam where they break something in America, blame it on the Democrats, and then run for election on a promise to fix what they broke.

Probably their most successful of these scams since the Clinton years has been to invite non-citizens from south of the border to come into the US whenever a Democrat is in the White House, falsely claiming that the Democrat had “opened the border.” This lie, of course, encourages desperate people to head north and that gives the GOP and their media operations the photo-op they need.

Just google “open border” and “congressman,” “congresswoman,” or “senator” and you’ll get a list of Republican politicians too long to print. These are the quotes that coyotes — human smugglers — print out and distribute to desperate people in Central and South America as advertisements to get people to trade their lives’ savings for transportation to the Rio Grande.

Not one single Democratic president ever “opened” the border or declared it open. It’s a complete lie, top to bottom, that Republicans and billionaire-owned media repeat obsessively.

Obama, in fact, deported more people than Trump did in his first term. But Republicans still use that lie to roll out the red carpet to wannabe immigrants.

At the top of that list of Republicans lying about Democrats “opening the border,” of course, you’ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues cranking this stuff out during the last two years of Biden’s presidency so they could use the immigrant issue to get Trump back into the White House in 2024. Here’s a tiny sample from the months leading up to recent elections:

— Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the “Biden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision”;
— Rick Scott wants everybody to know that “Americans Don’t Want [Biden’s] Open Borders”;
— Marco Rubio says there’s “Nothing Compassionate About Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Rand Paul is so extreme he tells us Senator Rubio “is the one for an open border”;
— Josh Hawley says “Biden’s Open Border Policy Has Created a Moral Crisis”;
— Tom Cotton “Insists the Border is Wide Open”;
— Ron Johnson wants the world to know that “Our National Security is at Risk Because Democrats have Turned Border Security into a Partisan Issue”;
— Marjorie Taylor Greene “BLASTS Open Border Hypocrites”;
— Mo Brooks opposes “Socialist Democrats’ Open Border Policies for Helping Kill Americans”;
— Lauren Boebert says the “Root Cause” of the open border crisis “is in the White House”;
— Matt Gaetz “revealed a complex and deceitful agenda by Joe Biden’s Democrat administration to evade our Southern Border law enforcement”;
— Gym Jordan says “Biden’s Deliberate Support of Illegal Immigration Could Lead to Impeachment”;
— Kevin McCarthy says the Biden Administration has “Utterly Failed” to secure the “open border”;
— Elise Stefanik proclaims “Biden’s Open Border Policies have been a Complete Disaster.”
— Tom Cole’s website features “Biden’s Open Border America”;
— Bob Goode brags about introducing legislation named the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act”;
— John Rose “Calls Out Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Paul Gosar claims Biden is “Destroying America with His Open Border Policies”;
— Roger Williams complains about the “Democrats’ Open Border Problem”;
— Tom Cole wants the world to know that Biden’s “open border policies have given the green light to migrants and bad actors from around the world…”;
— Gus Bilirakis “Denounces Dangerous Open Border Policies on the House Floor”;

The list goes on and on, every single one from a Republican.

And these messages have spread all across Central and South America, just as Republicans hoped they would, driven by human smugglers following the profit motive.

All based on an intentional Republican campaign lie that has worked well for them since they first used it on Clinton in the 1990s.

And here we go again, although this time Marjorie Taylor Greene called bullshit on her former colleagues.

Last Thursday, around 400 Hondurans — families with kids among them — crossed a bridge from Guatemala into Chiapas, Mexico on foot. Rightwing influencers, knowing the drill, immediately began to promote this new coming “invasion.” PJ Media ran the story under a headline that literally tied the caravan to a coming Democratic Congress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was having none of it, though, writing on social media:

“We have not seen a caravan headed to the US southern border in several years, why now? Oh, yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working.”

Yep, it’s an old scam but an effective one. Essentially, what Republicans have been doing — since Reagan first told us government was our problem and he’d take care of ruining it for us — is to smash out our windows and then offer to sell us homeowners’ insurance.

It’s a hustle. Just like “trickle down.” And “small government,” “waste, fraud, and abuse,” “guns keep us safe,” “global warming is a hoax,” and “originalism.”

Greene would know. In October 2018, two weeks before the midterms the last time he was president, she cheered when Trump declared a caravan a thousand miles from Texas an “invasion,” ordered a showy force of 5,200 troops to the border, and told Republicans that it’d be a great midterm issue for them.

In the seven days before Election Day that year Fox News used the word “caravan” 1,202 times.

In an astonishing display of transparent cynicism, the Pentagon dropped the operation’s patriotic name the morning after the polls closed, and the troops were going home two weeks later. All the panic vanished the day after the election, weeks before most of the migrants got anywhere near our border.

Then in 2024, with Biden in the White House, Republicans demanded an immigration/border bill, got the most conservative one in a generation from their own senator, James Lankford, and then were forced to kill it because Trump wanted to crank up his racist base with fears of brown-skinned hordes on the march to regain the White House.

That’s the entire Republican business model, and it’s older than Trump. Republicans manufacture the fear, or the crisis, or the deficit, and then campaign as the only people who can protect you from it. The “product” never has to work, because fear is their real product and has been since the days of Joe McCarthy.

Ronald Reagan set it up in its modern form. In 1976 Jude Wanniski, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, told Republican insiders they’d never win as the party of Scrooge and should instead become a second Santa Claus, handing out tax cuts as freely as Democrats handed out programs, then screaming about the debt the moment a Democrat took office.

Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 28, tripled the national debt, and sold it with a promise of prosperity for everybody. Republicans (and Reagan) knew it was a lie; his former budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much in The Atlantic before Reagan’s first term was half over.

And now that scam has transferred almost $80 trillion from working people into the money bins of the top 1 percent, gutting the middle class, and Republicans are still pitching billionaire tax cuts as the cure for all our ills.

Then there’s the destruction of America’s small businesses so big business fatcats would back the GOP. Reagan’s Justice Department rewrote the merger guidelines in 1982 and the share of proposed mergers the government challenged fell to seven-tenths of one percent, which is how we ended up with a small handful of companies controlling our grocery chains, hospital systems, airlines, insurance, banking, drugs, retail, and even the oil companies that Rogers is now complaining about in his bizarre new ads.

And let’s not forget freezing the wages of workers, as I mentioned here last week. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and union membership fell from about a third of our workforce when he took office to under a tenth today, and every Republican since has campaigned on pretending to be in favor of raising your pay while, with their other hand behind their back, voting in Congress to freeze the minimum wage and make it harder for people to form or join a union.

Once they’d gotten away with these scams and still gotten elected (with the help of billionaire-owned media), governing by scam became the GOP’s go-to habit.

They’ve kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009 and are running this fall on “affordability.”

They passed a “Big Beautiful” bill last summer that the Congressional Budget Office says will add $3.4 trillion to our debt, knock 10 million people off their health insurance, and cut more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid and food assistance.

And, the CBO found, the result is (predictably) that resources will decrease for households at the bottom while rising for those at the top. Four million fewer people are getting SNAP already, because of that bill. And you can bet your bottom dollar that when this really bites over the next two years Republicans will be blaming Democrats and offering to fix the problems that they themselves created.

Then Trump began throwing around tariffs, particularly against countries he wanted to give him gifts, jets, or business deals for Uday and Qusay, all while cynically pretended it’d bring manufacturing back to the US and raise wages.

Republicans have, in other words, spent the past forty-five years telling us our “big” government is the problem while expanding its reach into your doctor’s office, your ballot, and now your constitutional right to walk down the street without getting shot by ICE thugs or having to show your citizenship papers to a masked man who refuses to identify himself.

Each of these moves was sold as a rescue from a problem the Republicans themselves had created, vibrating with urgency in the last few weeks before an election.

What’s different this year is that the timing has blown up in their faces.

When a war hawk like Rogers, whose own former primary opponent Justin Amash says he’s losing badly, goes soft on a war he championed, or when a sitting president says he never promised the thing his rallies chanted for two years, people can suddenly see the scam in the plain light of day. Even the caravan, the oldest trick in the book, drew a former MAGA congresswoman outing this strategy to her own followers.

Reagan got a laugh in 1986 by saying the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Forty-five years and the DOGE gutting of FEMA on, nobody’s laughing except the Republicans who keep getting elected by low-information voters hooked on billionaire-owned media.

The simple reality — that previous generations understood well — is that government is the only institution with the power to lay a floor beneath which working people and the poor can’t fall, whether that floor is a wage, a pension, an education, a hospital bed, or a border policy that’s actually enforced instead of advertised.

Republicans have spent four decades pulling up the floorboards and then charging admission to watch people fall through. This November they’re asking to be paid again to fix the problems they themselves created. The polls, however, are telling us that even formerly Republican voters have finally figured out the con.

So check your registration at vote.org, because the caravan story will be replaced by another outrageous panic next week (trans people? Iran strikes back at us in a 9/11 style? the “caravan” arrives?) and the only thing that beats a fear campaign is turnout.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern, please share it and support the Hartmann Report so we can keep pulling these threads and exposing these cons.

How do we explain the rise and normalization of fascism in Germany and the United States? How important are the upcoming midterm elections? And what may happen if the Democrats sweep the midterm elections? Can the Democratic Party offer a vision for the future beyond a return to the pre-Trump status quo? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these questions in an interview with French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri.

Alexandra Boutri: In a recent essay on German state elections, you hinted that Germany, once considered the economic engine of Europe, is now in the midst of a systemic crisis. What’s going on there? How did fascism become normalized again in Germany?

C. J. Polychroniou: Let me start by briefly addressing the point you made about Germany’s status as the powerhouse of Europe because economics is a big part of the story behind the meteoric rise of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Germany’s second so-called Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), which kicked off in the early years of the new millennium, was aided by the creation of a currency regime that was “made in Germany.” The euro not only created stability for the German economy due to lack of exchange fluctuations but allowed it to gain huge competitiveness against other members of the eurozone. German competitiveness increased overnight by nearly 20 percent, while competitiveness in other European countries declined. Germany’s euro partners absorbed over 40 percent of its exports. In the process, huge imbalances emerged within the eurozone as Germany built an enormous trade surplus while individual countries within the EU, particularly the southern European nations, run huge deficits and saw their debt levels explode.

The situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power...

It’s important to remember that not only was Germany running a budget deficit prior to the implementation of the euro regime but was derided as the sick man of Europe because of its consistently sluggish economy. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the new currency regime that greatly contributed to Germany’s economic recovery and subsequent emergence as Europe’s powerhouse. The Social Democratic government of Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) implemented a series of major labor and welfare reforms inspired by the philosophy of austerity and fiscal conservatism in order to intensify Germany’s export-oriented growth model after reunification.

In sum, the so-called German economic miracle depended on the promotion of neoliberal policies (wage suppression and putting an end to the social market economy) and reliance on an export-led growth model. The primary beneficiaries of this “economic miracle” were German industrialists and financiers. Net real wages in Germany remained stagnant, poverty increased, and domestic investment collapsed.

Enter the AfD. It was founded in 2013 by some conservative German academics, journalists, and politicians who were concerned with the direction of their country’s economy. They were against the euro and opposed the bailout of European indebted countries such as Greece. Many years earlier, four renegade professors (Wilhelm Hankel, Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, Joachim Starbatty, and Wilhelm Nolling) had actually launched a legal challenge in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court against the adoption of the euro. I spoke to professor Joachim Starbatty at the start of the euro debt crisis. His position was clear and straightforward. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that a monetary union could survive only if economic competitiveness among all member states moved in the same direction and if the different governments implemented sustainable fiscal policies.

The AfD started out as a eurosceptic party but began campaigning on an anti-immigration platform soon after its founding, mainly in reaction to then Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders and welcome more than 1 million refugees and asylum seekers. Its leaders realized that there were a lot of disgruntled voters out there who felt that the establishment parties are incapable of addressing the country’s many interlocking crises and that scapegoating can be used to bring people together from different socioeconomic groups by creating a common enemy.

The AfD capitalizes on economic and cultural anxieties, just like Hitler did in the 1930s. As a new report by legal experts has found, the AfD is a very extreme political party, “working systematically to undermine Germany’s free democratic order.” And what should be of particular concern is that the success this party is enjoying so far is indeed comparable to the rise of the Nazis. True enough, the AfD is particularly strong in the former east Germany which still lags behind west Germany, but it has already emerged as the most popular party in the country. Hence, to continue speaking of a surge on the part of fascism in Germany is an understatement.

Now, Germany’s export-oriented growth model seems to have run its course. It’s facing mounting pressure from China’s own export power. Growth has been stagnant for the past several years. The slight increase in domestic gross product that the German economy experienced in the second quarter of 2026 cannot conceal the fact that German trade deficit with China continues to grow. To turn things around, shockingly enough, Chancellor Merz, who is the most unpopular chancellor in the country’s postwar history, has called on Germans to work longer hours, citing Greece, a country whose labor market is characterized by low wages while employers can enforce 13-hour work days, a model. As far as the small wage increases that have taken place over the last few years are concerned, they are “simply too low” to keep pace with rising costs.

The question about how fascism became normalized again is not difficult to answer. It became normalized again in Germany and throughout Europe in the same way that Trump normalized racism and fascist tendencies in the United States, namely by integrating extremist rhetoric and policies into mainstream political culture. Harsh, inhumane immigration policies have become laws while the line between security and surveillance is gone in today’s so-called democratic societies. Laws are now used not for the purpose of defending democracy and freedom of speech but in order to suppress dissent. Genocide has unfolded before our eyes, but opposition to it can result in penalties, institutional punishment, and arrests. Even universities, allegedly a bedrock for democracy, are violating “basic free speech, association, and assembly rights.”

Western capitalist polities have rolled out the red carpet for fascism. Indeed, it would seem that humanity never learns lessons from its dark past. The far right has gone from antisemitism (it supports Israel but remains antisemitic) to Islamophobia and there is a significant rise in xenophobia not just throughout Europe but all across the world. Meanwhile, the president of the most powerful nation in history threatens another country (Iran) with total annihilation. The West has entered again the age of monsters.

Alexandra Boutri: With the 2026 midterm elections in the US fast approaching, and which may be the most consequential in the history of the country, isn’t it the case that the United States is also experiencing massive systemic failures?

C. J. Polychroniou: No question about it. While there are striking differences between Germany and the United States on many levels, both countries face enormous economic challenges and real threats from domestic political forces with extreme, anti-democratic beliefs. On that note, I would say that the situation in the US is even more dramatic because the fascists are already in power, you have a mentally militarized society, and the system of checks and balances simply isn’t working. Formally, AfD’s leaders reject political violence to attain the party’s goals, while Trump has repeatedly stoked violence. But here I should add that the MAGA crowd is even more extremist than AfD’s supporters. In the meantime, wealth inequality in the United States has reached an all-time high, and the tech giants are building a dystopia.

Alexandra Boutri: What’s your own sense about the upcoming midterms? How important are they, and what will they mean?

C. J. Polychroniou: As far as midterm elections go, I think you are absolutely right when you stated earlier that they may be the most consequential in the history of the country. The president’s party usually loses House seats in midterm elections, so there is a good chance that the Democrats will control the chamber come November. There are several key races that will determine who controls the Senate, but the Democrats are clear favorites. However, it may all come down to independent voters. Also, I hope that Hispanics will turn their backs on the GOP. One of the things that Democrats and progressives in general in the US have failed to realize is how socially conservative the new immigrants that have come to the United States are. Unlike the huge waves of European immigrants that arrived in the United States between the late 1890s and 1950s and led to support for the Democratic Party because they carried with them progressive and even radical ideas about politics and society, the new immigrants that have been coming to the US since the 1980s (over 80% are from Latin America and Asia) are overwhelmingly conservative and religious.

But there is a deeper concern here about the midterm elections, which is that Trump will interfere by trying to deny people their voting rights, having federal officials seize ballots, and even declaring results void with false allegations of voter fraud. It is also conceivable that he may demand from Republicans that they refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Alexandra Boutri: As far as I can see, the problem is that the leadership of the Democratic Party lacks courage and has no vision for the future. For the establishment Democrats, the perfect outcome would be a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Am I wrong in thinking that way?

C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not wrong. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless. As was the previous one, and the one before that, and so on. And the left-wing of the party can only do so much. The Democrats need bold, courageous, visionary leadership that is willing to embrace a truly progressive socioeconomic agenda and reject militarism. What is quite disconcerting about a party that claims to fight on behalf of American workers is how shallow and inconsistent its policy agenda is when it comes to meaningful change.

The current leadership of the Democratic Party is simply hopeless.

The ruling Labour Party under the leadership of Andy Burnham has promised a “new direction” for Britain by adopting bold reforms on key areas that affect the well-being of its citizens. They range from changes to economic policy, improving public services, transferring power from Westminster to communities, and combating the threats of global warming. I don’t know if Burnham will be able to deliver and restore Labour’s fortunes, but the early signs are quite encouraging. The Democrats should move in a similar direction if Trumpism is to be defeated.

On that note, it is uplifting to see that the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has launched Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. The project is initiated and directed by PERI’s co-director Gerald Epstein and represents a bold intellectual undertaking for putting an end to the madness of free market fundamentalism by creating an alternative economic setting with “rules that first and foremost protect the well-being of American workers.”

Alexandra Boutri: You said above that this is the time of monsters. So, what is to be done?

C. J. Polychroniou: I said this is the age of monsters. “Now is the time of monsters” is a quote widely attributed to Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The problem is that Gramsci never used those words in Prison Notebooks. What he actually wrote was “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Moreover, and this is even less known, the statement had nothing to do with the rise of fascism but, rather, with developments inside the Italian Communist Party!

What is to be done in an age of monsters? I will paraphrase Albert Camus and say that “in a world of conflict, in a world of victims and executioners,” it is the moral duty of thinking and decent people everywhere, irrespective of their political preferences and ideological affiliations, race, ethnicity, and national origin, “not to be on the side of the executioners.”

LIVE: MWF 9-11 am Eastern time & 9-10 am Tues-Thurs & Streaming Anytime

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

Today we discuss:

• A growing number of Republicans scramble to disown the costly Iran war. Trump’s conflict has sent the prices of gasoline, diesel and heating oil upward, and cost increases have spilled across the economy. Mortgage rates have also climbed to 7%, squeezing the struggling housing market.

• Trump rejects Iran’s recent proposal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz because the president thinks Washington has more to gain by waiting than by accepting Tehran’s terms at this moment. Tehran, meanwhile, also is no rush to cut a deal.

• British police arrests 5 men on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism after receiving a call about 3 suspicious vehicles headed toward an air force base used by the American military, R.A.F. Fairford, to deploy some of its largest bombers.

• Protesters outraged by the eviction of an 87-year-old woman camped overnight in Madrid’s historic Puerta del Sol plaza, where more demonstrators — including multigenerational families — joined them for a second day of protests over Spain’s housing crisis. Abascal issued a video recorded from her hospital bed after the eviction. Images of the eviction spread widely across Spain, fueling outrage and criticism of public authorities and real estate investment companies accused of pricing residents out of their homes. Critics often refer to such companies as “vulture funds.”

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The post GOP Running Scared of Trump’s War | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we are again.

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

Consider the conflicts of interest already present in Congress.

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

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

And then there is the torrent of AI political money.

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

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

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

Crime in the Suites

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do We Control AI?

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

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

That brings us back to the Populists.

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

Could something analogous happen today?

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s hope it happens again—and soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tale of two couples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suncor v. Boulder and the Demand for Fossil Fuel Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s Backing the Fossil Fuel Defendants?

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

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

Betting on the Problem

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

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

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

The Real Insurability Crisis

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

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

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

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

What Are Insurers Afraid of?

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

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

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

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