Progressive candidates should be winning landslide victories over corporatist Republicans and replacing corporate Democrats on the merits of an authentic people-first agenda and legislation that makes big corporations and their government toadies our servants, not our masters. If progressive candidates fail to deliver, they, too, should be replaced.

Voters, have a civic duty beyond casting a ballot or staying home in despair to impress upon the candidates what must be done—and how to meet the long-neglected necessities of the citizenry, especially the families and children and workers, so long deprived of overdue changes and reforms. For example, a majority or supermajority view the following as immediate “kitchen-table” needs.

1. “Affordability” is about more than high prices and interest rates. It is also about too many people having too little income and government doing too little to crack down on corporate crooks who drain consumers’ hard-earned dollars and savings in both Red and Blue States.

Passage of legislation to raise the minimum wage from a frozen federal $7.25 per hour to a living wage, will give tens of millions of workers a long-overdue raise.

2. Cracking down on the fleecing, cheating, and outright theft from consumers and workers can come from “law and order” criminal law enforcement and civil actions by the wrongfully injured plaintiffs. This enforcement has the backing of over 85% of the people who despise the double standard of justice, which they see every day.

3. Reverse the huge tax cuts, escapes, and evasions by large corporations and the super-wealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (see the October 2026 Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy report: After Two Rounds of Trump Tax Cuts, Corporate America Paid Less Than Ever in 2025) to the levels of the prosperous Nineteen Sixties. End huge corporate welfare outlays for the giant corporate freeloaders paid for by taxpayers and the massive billing fraud paid by patients and shoppers.

These restorations and prosecutions, supported by huge majorities of left-right voters, will more than pay for full Medicare for all, everybody in, nobody out, a real child tax credit, child care, maternal and family sick leave, and lots of public infrastructure projects, which will create good jobs in communities everywhere.

Don’t we need more of the money already extracted from taxpayers sent back home? How about the runaway, bloated, unaudited military budget and its giant corporate monopolistic military contractors like Lockheed Martin and its F-22 budget buster, or General Dynamics, the sole endless builder of the doomsday Trident submarines? Multiple nuclear warheads from only one of these subs can destroy 200 cities in the world within an hour. How many have Trump, Biden, and Obama, commissioned?

Read President Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech to newspaper editors in April 1953 to see how many schools, hospitals, bridges, etc. can be built by reducing gigantic military waste and corporate/Empire extravaganzas. (See speech.)

How about this? Who’s talking about raising Social Security benefits, unchanged since 1971, by raising the individual income cap, now $184,000 for Social Security taxes? Trillionaire Musk, the bosses of the subsidized oil and gas giants, the big bankers and health insurance giants, and the executives of the giant hospital chains, who make at least two million a month, paid Social Security taxes on only the first $184,000 of their income. In 2022, two hundred Democrats supported Congressman John Larson’s bill, the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519), which would expand benefits and strengthen the program’s finances by requiring higher-income Americans to contribute more.

Unfortunately, corporatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the House floor on a measure overwhelmingly supported by about 60 million retirees. The Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 election to the Republicans in part due to Pelosi’s terrible obstruction.

Working people don’t recognize that each one of them who sends tax dollars to Washington every year sends more dollars than half the giant companies who have made enormous untaxed profits in the US and pay zero federal income taxes! The average taxes paid by corporations are just barely above 10%. Compare that to working people’s tax payments. (See, the ITEP report mentioned above.)

There are so many ways to landslide the corporatist candidates from both Parties. See my recent column: Winning Strategies for Progressive Candidates in the Final Stretch, the online report Crushing the GOP, or my later book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People,” pages 219-232.

There are simple, clearly reasoned and just changes and transformations in these works. You can add public funding of public elections, which will stop corporate lobbyists from raiding Congress and the US Treasury with their cash registers politics. Other ideas and strategies can be found in my column at Nader.org, radio/podcasts (ralphnaderradiohour.com), interviews with the media, public letters, and many tweets. Other authors have put forward similar advances.

Although there has been very little disagreement with how justice, fairness, economic production and life-saving proposals can save and improve lives, almost none of them have been adopted by these campaigners.

WHY?

Here’s my take:

1. Campaigns get into routines and ruts that impede new thinking, readjustments, or re-directions by the candidates, regardless of Party.
2. Campaign staffers become possessive and turf-minded and reject the truism that “none of us are as smart as all of us.”
3. Candidates contract out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who take over campaigns, become control freaks, and exclude outside inputs, such as from progressive civic groups and labor unions. (See my column: Midterm Elections Too Close: Dems Need to Fire Their Corporate-Conflicted Political Consultants)
4. Candidates are indentured to the strings-attached commercial campaign donors and corporate PACs. This is a big inhibition, even though it may cost candidates votes as the price of these corrupting dollars register with the electorate.
5. Frenzied campaigning, especially in the last few weeks before election day, freezes thinking. An accelerating schedule of repetitive meetings and events exhaust the candidate, while stale messaging bores the media—just when that messaging most needs reworking.
6. Gross inaccessibility. Try getting through to any campaigns. Many have no telephone numbers or street-level campaign headquarters. Just email addresses, P.O. boxes, or websites for receiving donations. Even worse—try getting through to either Parties’ campaign committees, such as the Democratic or Republican National Committee, to discuss policies, programs, strategies, and ways to clean up elections and empower the people.

Alas, the days are dwindling to November 3, 2026, as are many opportunities to elect enough determined lawmakers who will stop the lawless, lying, corrupt, cruel, violent, war-making, people-exploiting, corporatist Tyrant Trump and his worsening dictatorship over our Constitution and Republic for which it stands.

It is only going to get much worse and war-like with Trump in the next two years unless he is impeached and removed from office (“You’re Fired!”) or induced to resign and install a Trump rubber stamp J.D. Vance presidency, letting Trump play golf at his Mar-a-Lago retirement compound. See my October 2, 2026 column titled: What Could Persuade Trump to Resign Should Democrats Win Congress?).

With soaring health care costs and a plunge in coverage rates, there is growing interest in Medicare for All. Polls show that a large majority of the public now favors a universal Medicare system, with even a substantial share of Republicans now backing it.

A universal Medicare system has a huge amount to recommend it. Of course, the main point is to ensure that people can get the health care that they need, but it also eliminates a vast amount of waste in the national health care system.

In addition to the $300 billion a year that we spend directly on operating the nation’s health insurance system, another $1.6 trillion is spent on administrative costs running our health care system by providers like hospitals and doctors’ offices, according to analysis by David Himmelstein, Terry Campbell, and Steffie Woolhandler. These additional costs are all the office personnel and various navigators involved in assisting patients in dealing with insurers. They found that in the United States we spend roughly 31 percent of each dollar in health care spending on administrative costs, whereas under Canada’s universal Medicare system, the cost is just 16 percent of spending.

The difference would come to around $900 billion a year, or $6,700 per household. Even that may be an understatement. Even if the United States spent the same share of health care costs on insurers as Canada, it would still be spending far more per person on these costs, because our expenditures on drugs, medical equipment, and doctors are close to twice as high. In short, there is a huge amount to be saved by having a universal Medicare system.

But the other part of this picture is also enormously important. Much, perhaps most, of the insurance system is designed to keep people from getting care. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s just how insurers work. They make money by not paying claims.

Sometimes this takes the form of nickel-and-diming people on claims, adding deductibles that may not be appropriate, or raising co-pays as high as possible. But it often means making it difficult for people to get access to expensive drugs or medical equipment or high-priced medical tests. Given the current structure of these industries, that may actually be desirable.

To be specific, suppose a doctor recommends a new cancer drug with a price tag of $100,000 a year, when it’s possible that an older generic drug, available at 1-2 percent of this price, could be just as good. Wouldn’t we want someone to be asking questions before making such a large commitment of public money?

The same story applies to tests like an MRI. Hospitals can charge several thousand dollars for an MRI. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask if an X-Ray for a couple hundred dollars is just as good?

But drugs, medical equipment, and medical tests don’t actually have to cost huge amounts of money. They are expensive because the government grants the pharmaceutical industry and the medical equipment industry patent monopolies.

Without these government-granted monopolies, both drugs and medical equipment would be cheap. It’s rare that a drug is expensive to manufacture and distribute. In a free market, the vast majority of drugs would sell for $20 or $30 a prescription, and many for less. We currently are spending around $750 billion a year on prescription drugs and other pharmaceutical products. That would likely fall to around $150 billion in a free market, for savings of close to $600 billion, or $4,500 per household.

The cost of medical tests and medical equipment would have a similar plunge. In that world, there would be little reason to keep a doctor from prescribing the drug they considered best for their patient, or the tests likely to produce the most accurate diagnosis. The difference in price between newly developed drugs and old generics would usually be negligible, as would the savings from using an X-Ray as opposed to the latest MRI.

This is just the Econ 101 principle that we maximize economic efficiency when items are available at their marginal cost. As the econ textbook tells us, the government-granted patent monopoly both raises prices and creates an enormous incentive for corruption (see “opioid crisis”).

It is necessary to pay for the research and development process that leads to new drugs and medical equipment, but this is not an impossible lift. We just pay for the research upfront. We already do this to the tune of more than $50 billion a year through the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies.

This sum would have to be tripled or quadrupled to make up for the loss of patent-supported research, but there is no reason to think that paying for research with direct public funding would be any less effective than with government-granted patent monopolies. In addition to eliminating much spending on pointless me-too drugs, there would also be the advantage that all research can be fully open. That means that instead of squirreling results away to be the first to secure a patent monopoly, researchers would be promptly sharing results (that would be a condition of funding) so that others could quickly benefit from successes and be warned away from dead ends.

I recently reviewed analyses of the work behind the development of four breakthrough drugs or treatments. In all four cases, all the key breakthroughs were the results of research funded by either the government or private charities. The pharmaceutical industry only came in to secure patent monopolies and do late-stage testing. The government can pick up the tab for the late-stage testing, which is not high science. And we don’t need the patent monopolies when the research is already paid for.

Replacing the system of patent-supported research with public funding will be a big undertaking and will face massive political opposition. The pharmaceutical industry would be prepared to spend billions to defeat a change to a system that has earned it trillions of dollars over the last decade. But this is a change that is a necessary part of moving to a healthcare system that provides quality healthcare to all at a reasonable price.

There will be other issues in moving to Medicare for All. We need to get out doctors’ pay (primarily specialists) more in line with the rest of the world. They currently get more than twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. And we will have to pace the transition; doing it overnight is likely to be a disaster. But it is long past time we start to go down this road.

I’m the Mayor of Lochbuie, Colorado, and my residents are worried about our water supply. So we passed a five-year moratorium on AI data centers. Your town can, too.

Like many other parts of the country, our state is facing a serious water-supply problem. Colorado’s water supply depends heavily on mountain snowpack, and our Colorado River system has been overburdened for years. This problem is exacerbated by reduced reservoir levels, population growth, and irrigation-intensive agriculture.

At the same time, climate change has led to record heat and droughts.

Our small town reflects communities across the country. According to a recent Gallup poll, over 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their local areas.

A single large-scale data center, depending on location and available resources, can use as much water as our entire town uses. Meanwhile data center energy use makes climate change worse, further endangering our shared future. Data center emissions are projected to skyrocket by 2035.

Water is a finite resource and can’t always replenish fast enough to meet growing demand. We don’t want hyperscale data centers coming into our town and overburdening our already stressed water resources—and polluting our air and groundwater while they’re at it.

Big data centers claim they bring jobs to communities. A closer look shows how flimsy these claims are. In reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Most data center jobs are temporary construction jobs, and most of those don’t go to local community members.

“I do want to see businesses in our community that create jobs, but I don’t see how a data center does that when it takes up so much land and produces so few jobs,” Shannon Donnelly, one of my constituents, told me. “We need a clear, evidence-based understanding of the costs and benefits before we make such big decisions that impact people’s lives.”

Shannon is not alone. I heard many comments like these at our town board meetings about water use, noise, and other pollution from data centers.

So I wrote up a proposal for a moratorium on AI data centers in Lochbuie. The ensuing public meeting drew more attendees than I had ever seen. They overwhelmingly supported a moratorium, and it passed easily.

What happened next reflects another troubling reality about how data centers are encroaching on unwilling communities: Brighton, which borders Lochbuie, announced a proposal for a data center there. A town boundary would not protect our water, air, animals, or residents.

“We’ll see the lights and hear the noise,” constituent Desirae Zima told me. “We’ll have to live with the traffic, the infrastructure demands, the industrial equipment, and the potential impacts to water and electricity resources. We will be the neighbors dealing with the impacts to our quality of life.”

Fortunately, opposition from Brighton residents was strong enough that the developer withdrew its application for the proposed data center and the city council voted to advance a one-year moratorium on any such construction. It awaits final approval.

Our small town reflects communities across the country. According to a recent Gallup poll, over 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their local areas. Nearly 500 cities, towns, and counties nationwide have enacted or are considering moratoria on data centers.

Congress and the federal government have so far refused to meaningfully regulate the data centers cropping up across the country. So for now, state and local measures like these represent the best tool to protect our communities.

Artificial Intelligence has not yet surpassed good old-fashioned human common sense.

Wars and riots, autocracies and teetering democracies, extreme poverty and rapacious wealth, environmental collapse—that's us. But do we have to be that way?

A grassroots movement thinks not. And its core vision has reached the top levels of academia and international governance. Various proposals have been put forward on how to get there but all agree on one thing: We have to stop growing.

In fact, the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't make sense to most people. Yet that's precisely the basis of most national economies today. It has been since the modern concept of the gross domestic product (GDP) was introduced as a measure of economic and, by extension, social well-being over 90 years ago. Since then, legions of economists, politicians, and their patrons in the world's leading capitalist countries have championed constant growth to justify the continuous extraction of resource wealth from predominantly impoverished countries and transforming it, with cheap labor, into products and services that make a tiny fraction of humanity obscenely rich, while leaving nearly half in poverty.

As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."

Picture kids in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now picture Elon Musk. That's essentially it. Of course, there's also the fraction of us who live mostly in the Global North—not just the billionaires—who live in relative comfort for now: kids in school, roofs over our heads, food on the table, health insurance.

But none of us is going to escape the failed logic of infinite growth. The global resources-to-products conveyor belt also spews more and more carbon into the air, as the planet gets warmer and warmer and the future of our food and water supplies becomes less and less certain. With climate change raging down the pike at us and coastal sea levels rising, the neoliberal metaphor "a rising tide lifts all boats" has taken on new meaning.

The alternative?

Don't grow, at least not by building more things we don't really need. Grow socially, instead. With everyone in on it, from the kids in Congo to New England prep schoolers. That's what the degrowth movement is all about.

At a recent citizens' assembly on degrowth here in Gijón, an industrial town in northern Spain, a participant raised the issue of the regional government's support for building a giant data center in the community. His concerns are the same as those of most citizens in the US, according to recent polls, or in any other country in Europe: the enormous demands of such centers on local water and energy resources, the potential pollution associated with these, and the lack of public input in the decision-making.

On par with these worries was the question of the purpose for the data center itself: Who would actually benefit from it?

No one at the meeting bought the government's pitch that it will be the local workforce or economy as opposed to, overwhelmingly, transnational investors in digital commerce, social network companies, and the burgeoning AI and surveillance industries. Think Google, Amazon, and Meta. Think OpenAI and Palantir.

And think governments. Whether the democratic socialists in Spain or the plutocrats in the US, the playbook is remarkably similar: Make huge data centers seem essential to our modern lives, to our economic competitiveness—don't let the Chinese or Russians get a leg up!—and simultaneously cloak them in obscurity. Twist regulations to allow them to dodge normal public scrutiny, as is being done in at least one community in Spain and is being attempted by the Trump Environmental Protection Agency.

As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."

The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages.

Since its social and intellectual rejuvenation in France earlier this century, the degrowth movement—to break the world's addiction to GDP growth, along with the environmental ruin and deepening wealth gap it engenders—has been growing, particularly in Europe. There have been fits and starts,and the debate over exactly how to pull it off has been discursive. But momentum continues to build and, to date, thousands of academic papers and several books have been published on the topic, international conferences have been held, and grassroots organizations, like the one in Gijón, have sprung up.

Drawing on two decades of these debates—along with new research on poverty, climate, and capital—two landmark reports have been published this year, based on the consensuses of hundreds of economists, political and social scientists, and environmental experts, on not only the "what" and "why" of the degrowth imperative but the "how."

The Global Justice Report was published in June by the World Inequality Lab of the Paris School of Economics with over 40 contributors, including economist Thomas Piketty, author of the seminal Capital in the 21st Century (2014). It outlines a strategy of global transformations in labor, healthcare, education, taxation, and trade and investment institutions that are aimed at promoting pro-social global growth rather than material growth for "a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth, and power."

The United Nation's Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, released in July, proposes similar targets, and the general strategies of the reports largely overlap. But The Roadmap, spearheaded by UN poverty expert Olivier de Shutter and hundreds of collaborators, is much more detailed on how it could be done. Their plan is to build on existing institutions and past regional successes in reducing poverty and improving labor conditions in various countries.

How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich.

Among other measures, the reports propose substantially reduced work hours and a seismic shift away from certain manufacturing jobs to those with livable wages in education, healthcare, child and elderly care, and other social support infrastructure. Workers would be paid fairly and have a major role in company governance, on par with stockholders. Essentially, less things would be made and patterns of overconsumption—driven today by intensive marketing of intentionally short-lifetime products—would be reduced, but to the benefit of the consumer rather than stockholders.

To further address poverty, family care workers who are unpaid in today's economies would be fairly compensated. A livable allowance would be available for the unemployed, essentially eradicating poverty. Local and more sustainable agriculture would be fostered to promote food security and self-sufficiency in all countries rather than the socially and environmentally costly exportation of monocultures.

The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages. At the same time, they would lead to huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and rein in humanity from further exceeding the ecological boundaries for sustaining life on our finite planet.

How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich. New global institutions or repurposed ones, like the existing World Bank or International Monetary Fund, would lend money for the various transition projects but with mandates for pro-social investments as opposed to pro-GDP-growth ones with austerity programs and permanent indebtedness. In the Global Justice Report plan, the new funding institutions would eventually be self-sustaining on their own bonds and investment portfolio and not require further input from wealth and income taxes.

Why would self-serving billionaires or the plutocracies they have strangleholds on get on board with this? They probably wouldn't. In fact, maybe even China, currently out-capitalizing the capitalists, wouldn't either.

The authors of the Global Justice Report anticipated this, so they modeled scenarios in which the countries that stand to benefit the most participate while others don't. It turns out that those poorer countries represent the great majority of humans on the planet, and their rich neighbors absolutely depend on their cheap natural resources and labor to be so rich. That's how neocolonialism works. So the authors predict that even if the transformations got off the ground without the rich, soon the latter would have no choice but to join the club.

Utopian? Sure. In fact, most people at the citizen's assembly here were pragmatic about their chances of moving the needle, but they were there to try. They're aware that utopias have a very practical, aspirational function if they move us in the right direction—that is, away from the precipice of dystopian alternatives.

One hundred nine years ago, on the evening of October 25, 1917, the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today’s St Petersburg) was stormed. This event marked the beginning of the Great October Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century that shaped the course of history for decades ahead.

Leading up to the events of October 25 was another revolution in late February 1917, which brought to power a group of leaders from bourgeois political parties that formed a provisional government headed initially by Georgy Lvov, a liberal reformer, and then by Aleksander Kerensky, a socialist. In early March of that year, Czar Nicholas II, who had ruled imperial Russia since 1894, abdicated. Five months later, Russia was pronounced a republic.

Although the provisional government did introduce some reforms on the political front, prompting even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to declare Russia in April 1917 “the freest country in the world,” it was the Red October Revolution that turned the old order completely upside down by inaugurating a socialist regime and making Soviet-style communism a global ideological and political force that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

Still, one hundred nine years later, the rise of the Bolsheviks to power continues to divide scholars, the chattering classes, and even the educated public. There are several issues that are particularly divisive, such as whether the October Revolution was a popular insurgency or essentially a coup, and whether Stalinism evolved naturally from the basic principles and political strategies of Lenin or was an unexpected development.

Likewise, there is still a great deal of ambiguity, disagreement and confusion over the nature of the regime that flourished in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. For example, did the Soviet Union represent an “actual socialist society,” a “degenerated workers’ state,” or simply a “totalitarian state economy” in which the communist ideology functioned as a mere instrument of political legitimization and imperial rule?

When it happened, the Great October Revolution produced global hysteria, untamed enthusiasm and hope about the possibility of creating heaven on earth (a new utopia) in equal measure. For the bourgeois classes everywhere, the inauguration of the Soviet regime was anathema to core values of the “western civilization”, while for radicals and communists it signified a natural culmination of the inevitable march of history towards human freedom and a social order devoid of exploitation.

Given how things turned out, an objective evaluation on socialism and the legacy of Soviet communism gives no room for mourning or celebration. The Great October Revolution was essentially the epic story of an impossible dream that turned in due time into a political and historical nightmare because of the interplay of a vast array of factors that included “backward” socioeconomic conditions, outside intervention, an absence of democratic traditions, and misconceived notions about socialism and democracy. Hence, while you can easily romanticize about the October Revolution, the cold reality of history smacks you in the face.

For starters, the Great October Revolution was unlike the February Revolution which erupted as a result of spontaneous action by hundreds of thousands of hungry and angry men and women workers and militant troops. What happened in October 1917 was the outcome of a well-designed strategy on the part of the leader (Lenin) of a minority party (the Bolsheviks) to wrest control from the provisional government because of a strong ideological aversion to “bourgeois democracy” and desire for power. Unsurprisingly Lenin’s call for “all power to the Soviets” ended up being something entirely different: all power went to the party and its politburo. The October Revolution was not a coup in itself, but neither was it a popular uprising that enjoyed the kind of mass support that the February Revolution had. In fact, it was not until the autumn of 1917 that Lenin’s “land, peace, bread” slogan had been embraced by some workers in St Petersburg and Moscow.

Yet even this does not mean that the Bolshevik program and Lenin’s ideas of rule were accepted by the majority of the Russian people: In the November 1917 elections, the first truly free election in Russian history, Lenin’s party received only one quarter of the vote, while the Social Revolutionaries managed to receive over 60 percent.

Lenin had stomach neither for parliamentary democracy nor for sharing power with any other political organization. His unwavering intent to establish socialism in Russia, regardless of the ripeness of the social and economic conditions, and his firm conviction that only the Bolsheviks represented the true interests of the workers, would compel him to adopt strategies and policies that would soon deprive the Revolution of whatever potential it had originally had for the establishment of a new social order based on workers’ control of the means of production and democracy (which Lenin, sadly enough, associated with the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).

Indeed, not long after the November elections, Lenin would ban several opposition newspapers and unleash a campaign of “Red Terror” against all class enemies (with the Social Revolutionaries being the first victims following their uprising in Moscow in early July 1918). The orchestration of the “Red Terror,” which lasted until the end of the Russian civil war, was assigned to Cheka (a Bolshevik police organization that reported to Lenin himself on all anti-communist activities), thereby laying the foundations for the emergence of a full-fledged police state under Stalinism.

The clearest illustration of how far to the “right” the Bolsheviks had moved following the outbreak of the October Revolution is the brutal repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 by Red Army troops. Disheartened by the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial tendencies, a garrison of the key fortress of Kronstadt revolted in March 1921 against the communist government and the ideas of “war communism” – even though the Kronstadt sailors had been, back in 1917, among the strongest supporters of the October Revolution and the idea of “Soviet power”. To be sure, they were, until then, in Lev Trotsky’s own words, “the pride and joy of the revolution”.

With the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, it became clear that Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard party” and his understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not permit dissent of any kind and that a socialist political order was to be based on one-party rule.

As for the policy of “war communism,” it ended in complete disaster. Lenin himself admitted as much in a speech on October 17, 1921, when he said, “we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution”.

But this did not mean that all Bolsheviks shared Lenin’s views on “war communism” or that they embraced the policy that was followed in the 1920s by a partial return to the market system of production and distribution. The soon-to-be “new Czar” Joseph Visarionovich Stalin regarded the New Economic Policy as the betrayal of the October Revolution. His “revolution from above,” launched in 1928 with the policy of collectivization and dekulakization (a campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the more “well-to-do” peasants) reopened the gates of hell and converted Soviet socialism once and for all into a brutal and murderous regime.

Stalinism did not merely formalize the worst aspects of Leninism but became, in reality, an actual stumbling block for the transition into socialism both inside the Soviet Union and throughout the rest of the world where the ideas of social justice and equality continued to move the minds and hearts of millions of decent people.

Hence, the end of Stalinism and the collapse of Soviet communism (which in the course of its 74 years did manage to turn a “backward” country into an industrialized nation that was able to defeat Nazism and make major advances on several economic, cultural, scientific, and social fronts) mark simply the end of a utopian vision that quickly turned into a dystopian nightmare.

In this context, the legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, one hundred nine years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is waiting to be born, but the possibilities available to create an egalitarian, socially just, ecologically friendly, and decent society in the 21st century lie outside the ideas, practices, and policies of the October Revolution.

Author's note: This is a slightly revised version of an essay that originally appeared in Al Jazeera on October 25, 2017, under a different title.

Fresh off its expensive World Cup advertisement spend, which included covering the referee time board with its deodorant name, Unilever recently announced more stock buybacks. At a time when Unilever, one of the world’s largest packaged goods companies, has billions at its disposal to reinvest in its supply chain and animal welfare commitments, the company chose to pour the money into self-enriching stock buybacks. The result is a widening gap between what Unilever says it values and where it is actually putting its resources.

Recently, in June 2026, Unilever’s €1.5 billion share buyback program announced in February 2026 was completed. Unilever plans to support a total of €6 billion of share buybacks between 2026 and 2029.

Once considered a stock manipulation practice that was banned in the US until the mid 1980s, these corporate buybacks benefit those who hold the stock—primarily C-suite executives and shareholders. In fact, Unilever’s own board members purchased substantial sums of stock in May and June 2026, just before the formal announcement of a four-year six billion euro stock buyback program in its recent quarterly report.

This continuous caging is one of the worst forms of animal cruelty, yet by enriching itself through corporate buybacks, Unilever is choosing to profit from caged hens.

Unilever ought to tread lightly. In a special report, Reuters showcased Hewlett-Packard as one of the clearest cases where massive buybacks enriched shareholders in the short term but arguably undermined the company's long-term competitiveness, leading to massive layoffs and reduced innovation.

Moreover, this buyback program hurts the rank-and-file employees who keep Unilever, and its army of subsidiaries, running. Share buybacks can also reduce expenditure on research and development, skill development for jobs of the future, decent pay for staff and suppliers, and lower energy and consumer prices, which would reduce inflation and increase citizens’ purchasing power.

In fact, in 2024, Unilever announced they were eliminating 7,500 jobs. Coincidentally, in Unilever’s most recent quarterly results presentation, Srinivas Phatak celebrated the “€800-million-euro productivity programme" that improved overheads "together with continued simplification and cost discipline."

By choosing to reward shareholders, the company is neglecting to reinvest in its workforce. The consequences also extend to the animals who remain in cages, consumers who are fed empty promises and given less ethical choices, and the company itself, which becomes weakened when it chooses short-term gains over long-term responsibility.

Earlier in 2026, the Open Wing Alliance (OWA), a global coalition of nearly 90 organizations across more than 70 countries, united by a shared mission: to end the abuse of hens worldwide, launched a campaign against Unilever for its broken cage-free promise. Despite earning praise and positive media coverage for its voluntary commitment to free hens in their supply chain from cages by 2025, the company has euphemistically claimed to “end its commitment” along with eliminating its corporate sustainability officer position.

Unilever once committed to sourcing 100% cage-free eggs globally—and achieved this in Europe and North America. But the company abandoned the global aspect of its policy, breaking the promise it made to hens and consumers worldwide, as well as its own “responsible marketing” guidelines (page 30).

This rollback has created a two-tiered animal welfare system: one for Western markets, and another where extreme cruelty remains acceptable. By walking away from its original commitment and spending lavishly on marketing, Unilever is sending a troubling message—that animal welfare and their word matter in some regions, but not in others.

In its code of conduct, Unilever proclaims: to “demonstrate ethical business conduct” and “lead with integrity.” Even in its Sustainable Agriculture Principles 2026, Unilever proclaims to “ensure good animal welfare and promote the health of livestock.” The continued confinement of egg-laying hens in cages directly contradicts its purported business values and agricultural principles. The hens in cages in Unilever’s supply chain have about the space of an iPad to move. In this intense confinement, they are unable to flap their wings or dust bathe, all while standing on cage wires. This continuous caging is one of the worst forms of animal cruelty, yet by enriching itself through corporate buybacks, Unilever is choosing to profit from caged hens.

The world is moving past cages. Ninety-two percent of corporate cage-free commitments due by 2024 have already been fulfilled. Additionally, many countries, including the UK, where Unilever is headquartered, have banned cages entirely or are advancing bans currently, leading to hundreds of millions of hens no longer suffering in cages and eroding the legitimacy of Unilever’s supply excuse. In select geographic locations where cage-free supply is limited, Unilever is not without responsible options aligned with their global commitment. More responsible businesses opt to purchase cage-free credits to fulfill their global cage-free promises. A company that can pay 50,000 influencers around a sporting event yet claims to not be able to navigate supply chain challenges is not being entirely truthful.

Unilever’s spending on buybacks is out of alignment with its stated values and longstanding promises, prioritizing short-term financial gains over long-term economic resilience, worker and consumer trust, and basic animal welfare.

While executives and shareholders may benefit in the near term, the long-term costs are clear: weakened credibility, lost talent and customers, and years of unnecessary suffering for millions of hens. True leadership means investing in people, ethical supply chains, and lasting value, not financial engineering that comes at a profound moral and social cost.

Billionaires in California are pushing to sink the wealth tax proposition on this fall’s ballot in California, which would levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on those California billionaires, with the scary—and empty—threat that they’ll leave the state and ruin the economy.

Appeals to appease the wealthiest—lest they take their money and bolt—are a common plea in California, even when society’s least wealthy are the ones most afflicted. Consider, for example, the ongoing resistance of wealthy developers to Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” and the ability of their grievances to dominate a sympathetic news media.

In 2022, Los Angeles voters approved Measure ULA to create a dedicated, long-term funding source for solutions to homelessness in LA, including funding the construction of affordable homes and preventing homelessness by helping low-income tenants stay in their homes. The funding comes from a new tax on the most expensive real estate transactions in LA, affecting fewer than 4% of property transactions, and is one of the most ambitious measures ever taken by a US city to address the problem of homelessness and the related housing crisis.

The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.

But, by the end of three years of local news coverage about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist, two of LA’s largest news organizations, the news about Measure ULA had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that “ULA reduced housing development” and “ULA needs to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.

At the same time, local stories about what Measure ULA was doing to reduce homelessness and support affordable housing, and the people who were aided by its programs, were exceedingly rare. For example, of the 97 reports about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist over three years, only 7 stories included any sourcing of people who were homeless or who were helped by a tenant program to stay in their home. And, over 30% of the stories didn’t even mention the words “homeless” or “homelessness.” This is based on my research in a study of news stories of Measure ULA in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com from April 2023 (when the law went into effect) to March 2026.

The news coverage of Measure ULA has wide political impact. Today, those negative news frames about Measure ULA have informed the positions of local politicians (including the mayoral battle between incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman), have helped to put a statewide measure on the ballot to make approving local taxes more difficult, and have been adopted unproblematically by the national news media as the official story of the shortcomings of LA’s so-called mansion tax. A May 20, 2026 story in The Wall Street Journal, for example, completely encapsulated the dominant narrative set by the Los Angeles news media. The WSJ headline read: “Los Angeles Tried to Tax Mansions. Apartment Construction Tanked.”

Yet, the LA news media got it wrong, and it has warped how Southern California and the nation think about homelessness and the housing crisis.

The LA news media of this study unquestionably accepted the commercial building industry’s idea of “filtering,” which posits that building more market-rate housing will ultimately increase low-cost affordable housing by increasing overall supply. The news media popularized the trickle-down notion of filtering (without using the term) in the Los Angeles housing environment despite the existence of ample expert counterevidence.

For example, researchers at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California wrote in 2020 that “filtering can no longer be taken for granted as a ‘naturally occurring’ source of affordable housing. For one thing, the shortage crisis has caused all housing to be unaffordable, consuming a larger share of occupants’ incomes—even in the middle class—than deemed acceptable.” Similarly, a Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality study in 2026 concluded that the “market” alone doesn’t solve the problem for affordable housing, and that “public investments are necessary for the production of income-restricted, affordable housing.”

The news media’s commonsense acceptance of this business-oriented filtering mindset to housing development ends up undermining the ability of Los Angeles—and other cities across the country—to adequately respond to the need for public investment in affordable housing. The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.

Meanwhile, after getting delayed by lawsuits and resistance from the real estate industry, Measure ULA has started to work: Homelessness dropped significantly in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related stories from the Los Angeles Times or LAist noted this. Although homelessness increased slightly in a 2026 report, it is still down 5.6% overall in LA since 2023. Moreover, by May 2026, the city reported that a round of $360 million in ULA funding supported 80 projects for “5,241 affordable housing units—1,528 newly constructed units and 3,713 units preserved or stabilized.”

The news media—and all of us—need to better understand the relationship of affordable housing and homelessness, and not let powerful developers and real estate interests insist that less taxation and more market-rate development will solve the problem. It won’t.

On October 19, a Miami judge signed an arrest warrant for Raúl Castro. The Florida attorney general announced the charge, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, at the UIF. On May 20, Cuba’s Independence Day, at the “Miami Freedom Tower,” an acting prosecutor had already made public a federal indictment against Castro and five others: four counts of murder and destruction of aircraft. The prosecutor said he expected the defendant to appear in the United States “of his own free will or otherwise.” In January, the “other way” had already been put to the test in Caracas with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro—an invasion that left 57 forgotten dead.

On February 24, 1996, the Cuban Air Force shot down two planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, killing four crew members. Since May 1994, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Havana had been reporting airspace violations to Washington. On July 13, 1995, a Brothers to the Rescue plane flew over Havana, dropping leaflets. In early 1996, the group did it again: half a million leaflets, according to the pilot. Cuba warned that it would defend its airspace. Washington knew this. A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official warned the group’s leader, José Basulto, that if they persisted, the Cubans would shoot them down. Declassified documents show that the FAA asked Basulto to stop provoking Cuba.

The ICAO concluded that the planes were shot down approximately 10 nautical miles from Cuba’s territorial boundary. Havana insisted that they were within its jurisdiction. Three weeks later, Bill Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act, which made the embargo against Cuba federal law.

The one with the gun is always the good guy. The terrorist is always the other guy.

The accusation against Raúl Castro should sound familiar to many in Washington. And in Miami, too. The record of what the FBI called terrorism is extensive, and I believe I explained it in 1976: The Exile of Terror. I will summarize a few cases, all of which went unpunished.

On October 6, 1976, two bombs brought down Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 in Barbados. Seventy-three people died, most of them young athletes from Cuba. An FBI report dated November 5 and addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger indicated that the attack had been planned by Cuban exiles in Caracas, during meetings attended by Ricardo “El Mono” Morales, Luis Posada Carriles, and Frank Castro, “all members of CORU, an anti-Castro terrorist group.” Kissinger knew this and did nothing. Two weeks earlier, on September 21, a bomb prepared by Michael Townley and planted by Cuban exiles had killed Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old assistant, Ronni Moffitt, just blocks from the White House. Moffitt was a US citizen murdered on US soil, later accused of being a Marxist.

CORU was founded in the Dominican Republic in 1976, with Orlando Bosch at its helm, and was responsible for more than 50 attacks that year alone, from Bogotá to Mérida. Between 1974 and 1976, Miami suffered some 200 bombings, from the airport to the FBI offices. “In this war, there are no civilians,” said Miami’s hero, Posada Carriles. “There are no civilians or innocents,” Bosch repeated. Morales echoed this sentiment: “If I had to kill 273 instead of 73, I would do it again.” Not to mention the napalm bombs dropped on Cuba in the 1960s and the introduction of hemorrhagic dengue on the island in the 1980s. Later, Washington denied Cuba access to the larvicide temephos due to the blockade. One hundred fifty-eight people died—101 of them children—not to mention the economic losses. Although Eduardo Arocena confessed before a federal jury to having participated in this act of biological terrorism, the incident was consigned to oblivion.

According to Bosch: “If we had the resources, Cuba would burn from one end to the other.” Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called him a “patriotic hero.” Miami Mayor Maurice Ferré endorsed the celebration of “Orlando Bosch Day” every March 25, while Posada Carriles escaped from a Venezuelan prison, thanks to money sent by Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the National Cuban-American Foundation lobby. In 1997, his bombs exploded again in hotels in Havana, killing an Italian tourist. Posada said the young man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama with 15 kilograms of explosives intended for Fidel Castro and an auditorium full of students. President Mireya Moscoso pardoned him, and Posada entered the United States illegally. A Texas jury acquitted him of lying to Immigration. He lived freely for many years in the land of freedom alongside other Latin American criminals who had committed crimes against humanity.

An FBI agent described Bosch as “the number one terrorist.” George H. Bush released him and granted him residency in 1990, despite objections from the Department of Justice, following a campaign led by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and her campaign manager, Jeb Bush. When a Miami police officer reported that Bosch was raising funds for new terrorist attacks, his superior shrugged: “Jeb will call his dad, and Bosch will be back on the streets,” he said. None of them were charged in court for the 73 fatalities on Flight 455. When Cuba and Venezuela requested their extradition, US judges refused, arguing that the men might not receive a fair trial—a principle that was never applied to the hundreds of prisoners tortured at Guantánamo and declared innocent by Washington.

A more recent dose of hypocrisy. Since September 2, 2025, Washington has blown up more than 70 vessels and killed at least 236 people in the Caribbean, off the coasts of Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, and Colombia. Many were executed in the Pacific, off the coasts of Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. To date, Washington has failed to identify most of its victims. Not a single one was in US waters. Not a single one was convicted following an arrest, trial, or formal indictment. Among the identified deceased are fishermen of various nationalities. In the first attack, survivors clinging to the wreckage were killed by a second missile. United Nations experts classify these incidents as extrajudicial executions.

On September 6, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the doctrine with admirable clarity: “Instead of intercepting them, we blow them up. We’ll do it again.” They did it again. About 70 times.

Following a decades-long history of harassment and sabotage, Cuba issued warnings for two years before firing on aircraft that violated or skirted its airspace. Washington warned no one before firing on vessels far from its own shores. If killing four civilians outside territorial waters is murder, what is executing 236 people with missiles?

No judge in Miami will sign that warrant. Rubio will not be charged, nor will Florida—not even in The Hague, a court that Washington does not recognize. The one with the gun is always the good guy. The terrorist is always the other guy.

Only the powerful can afford the luxury of hypocrisy.

President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of nearly 100 environmental protections during his first term, as tracked by The New York Times, prompted 10 national environmental groups to label him the worst environmental president of all time. Trump’s “unprecedented assault on our environment and the health of our communities,” they said in a joint statement, will force “our children [to] pay the costs of this president’s recklessness.”

Trump’s attack on the regulations that protect our air, water, and land during his second term is even more reckless. The Natural Resources Defense Council has documented at least 570 actions the current Trump administration has taken so far that “directly threaten” human health, the environment and climate. If they remain in place beyond his presidency, the pollutants and poisons they release will bedevil our children with everything from asthma to brain damage and shorten the lives of tens of thousands of adults.

There are signs that Americans across the political spectrum have had enough of this degradation, notably the growing opposition across the country to artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, a development that we have not seen since the environmental movement of the 1960s. We will know very soon how much voters care in the upcoming midterm elections if they put Democrats back in charge of at least one chamber of Congress to stand up against this administration. Otherwise, it could take years if not decades to recover from Trump’s onslaught.

No More Benefit in Cost-benefit

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now such a shell of its former self that it is no longer worthy of its name. Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has slashed the agency’s ranks to fewer than 12,500 people, roughly 30% less than when Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were in office. The combined number of scientists, engineers, data crunchers, lawyers, investigators, emergency responders, and administrative staffers generally ran between 17,000 and 18,000 from 1992 to 2012 before Republican-led budget cuts in Congress during Obama’s second term began eroding the agency.

At the same time Zeldin has cut his staff, he has continued where the first Trump administration left off, reversing President Joe Biden’s efforts to address climate change, boost renewable energy, and include environmental justice in federal policy. Zeldin’s most consequential disruption so far, however, was when he changed how the agency determines the costs and benefits of regulations. Instead of conducting standard cost-benefit analyses, which historically considered the benefits of avoiding illnesses and premature deaths, the agency now only calculates the cost to industrial polluters to cut emissions. This callous approach upends the 1997 decision by the EPA, after a long process that began during the George H. W. Bush administration, to compare the “health, welfare, ecological, and economic benefits” of Clean Air Act regulations with the cost of industry compliance and public sector implementation.

The EPA found that the cost of Clean Air Act compliance from 1970 to 1990 was $523 billion in 1990 dollars. Its median estimate of health benefits over the same two decades was $22 trillion. “First and foremost,” the report concluded, “these results indicate that the benefits of the Clean Air Act and associated control programs substantially exceeded costs.”

Since then, every administration, regardless of how hard it tried to rein in pollution, enacted regulations based on how many lives would be saved and the economic value of avoiding sickness, death, and lost productivity. Not anymore.

Pushing Fossil Fuels

The two most recent examples of Trump EPA backsliding are its repeal of the Biden administration’s limits on power plant carbon emissions and its weakening of the Biden vehicle fuel-efficiency standards.

By eliminating the power plant rule, Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright boasted that they would save the nation $310 billion by “unleashing” coal production they expect to increase by more than 10 times. Nary a word was uttered about electric power plants being the second leading source of global warming emissions, nor about the harm to public health unleashing all that coal would cause.

Any alleged savings from buying a slightly cheaper fossil-fuel vehicle would be small change compared to how much an electric vehicle owner would save in gas and maintenance costs, especially with Trump’s Iran war driving the price of gasoline to more than $4 a gallon and diesel to more than $6 a gallon.

The Biden EPA calculated that its carbon pollution standard for fossil-fuel power plants would result in $390 billion in climate and public health benefits compared with just $19 billion in compliance costs. The benefits would include avoiding as many as 1,200 premature deaths, 360,000 asthma cases, 48,000 school absences, and 57,000 lost workdays in the year 2035 alone.

Similarly, the rollback of Biden’s 50.4-miles-per-gallon standard to 34.9 mpg came with all kinds of wild claims of cost savings by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and a rare Trump administration claim of health benefits. Duffy maintained that newer gas-powered vehicles with driver-assist technology would avoid 300,000 serious injuries and save 1,900 lives.

Economists and health experts dismissed Duffy’s claims out of hand. They pointed out that the EPA itself states on its website that electric cars “must meet the same safety standards as conventional vehicles” and there is no reason why they can’t have driver-assisted technology. Moreover, any alleged savings from buying a slightly cheaper fossil-fuel vehicle would be small change compared to how much an electric vehicle owner would save in gas and maintenance costs, especially with Trump’s Iran war driving the price of gasoline to more than $4 a gallon and diesel to more than $6 a gallon.

The transportation sector is the country’s main source for carbon pollution and fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot. The Biden administration estimated that its 50.4 mpg standard, scheduled to be phased in from 2027 to 2031, would cut gasoline consumption by nearly 70 billion gallons through 2050, saving Americans more than $23 billion at the pump and preventing more than 710 million metric tons of carbon emissions. It also projected it would provide $13 billion in annual public health benefits due to improved air quality, preventing asthma and heart attacks and as many as 2,500 premature deaths in the year 2055.

Soot Standard Still Stands (For Now)

Soot, one of the nation’s leading killers, is largely out of sight and mind. While polls show Americans think the biggest health threats are guns, opioids, obesity, cancer, and heart disease, soot prematurely kills 91,000 people a year according to an August 2025 study in the journal Science Advances—more than guns and motor vehicle accidents combined.

The Biden administration finalized a rule tightening the soot standard for the transportation sector, power plants, oil and gas operations, factories, and ports that it calculated would avoid an estimated 4,500 premature deaths, 800,000 cases of asthma, and 290,000 lost workdays in 2032. That standard would have provided many other benefits for children. Studies show that soot has a demonstrable impact on children’s cognitive development, tying particulate exposure to lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and school test scores.

Amid the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Clean Air Act piece by piece, lower federal courts have thus far upheld the Biden national soot standard. But that victory may not last long. In August, lobbyists for polluting industries, including the American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Manufacturers, and the US Chamber of Commerce, petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn those rulings. And earlier this month, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and other anti-regulation, polluter-friendly think tanks filed an amicus brief in support of that effort.

Open Season on Wildlife

When it comes to water, wildlife, and wetlands, the Trump administration has turned back the clock to 1962, when Rachel Carson opened the eyes of the nation to the biological threat posed by the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in her seminal book Silent Spring. Carson, a marine biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote, “To destroy the homes and food of wildlife is perhaps worse in the long run than direct killing.”

Destroying wildlife habitat is exactly what the Trump administration is encouraging.

For decades, federal law made it illegal to directly and deliberately harass, harm, or kill protected wildlife. Likewise, it has been illegal for individuals, industries, developers, loggers, and farmers to indirectly decimate species through “significant habitat modification or degradation.” The Trump administration wants to remove those prohibitions so killing an endangered species in its habitat would essentially have to be premeditated to be illegal, notwithstanding the fact that the federal government has acknowledged that the current rate of wildlife extinction “is much higher” today than in the past mainly due to habitat loss.

With two years left in Trump’s term, there is plenty of time for his administration to follow through on its scorched-earth campaign against environmental safeguards.

The administration is tearing the very concept of habitat to shreds. The latest example is the EPA proposal to protect water bodies under the Clean Water Act only if they have “surface water flowing continuously year-round,” eliminating nearly all wetlands and intermittent and ephemeral streams from federal protection. Such an ill-advised move would defy all federal water science research, particularly studies conducted during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

Wetlands sequester carbon and provide a fundamental nursery for biodiversity, a filter for pollution, and a barrier for major storms and floods. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), more than a third of threatened and endangered species live only in wetlands, and nearly half use wetlands at some point during their life cycle.

In many cases, the water feeding wetlands flows underground, invisible to the naked eye. Likewise, intermittent streams, which are mainly in the arid Southwest, run only when it rains, but they are still biologically connected to downstream rivers. According to a 2015 EPA report, “All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.”

Regardless, the Trump-packed Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that a wetland must have a continuous surface connection to a larger body of water to qualify for protection. That decision was both scientifically and economically indefensible. Healthy wetlands, which amount to less than 6% of the land in the contiguous United States, helped support 1.7 million jobs and $319 billion in sales for the commercial and recreational fishing industry in 2023, according to a NOAA report. A 2022 Resources for the Future study estimated that wetlands are worth as much as $2.9 trillion in flood mitigation alone.

Will Data-Center Opponents Lead the Charge?

With two years left in Trump’s term, there is plenty of time for his administration to follow through on its scorched-earth campaign against environmental safeguards. But the pushback against AI data centers, which increase local electricity rates, deplete water supplies, and drive residents mad with noise and dirty air, may be a sign of things to come.

According to the International Energy Agency, a typical AI data center currently uses enough electricity to light up 100,000 homes, but it says newer, bigger ones will require 20 times more. As for water use, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) estimates that a large data center can consume as much water for cooling as a town with 10,000 to 50,000 residents.

EESI also found that noise is a major problem. It reported earlier this year that high noise levels from a data center’s construction as well as its continuous operation can raise blood pressure, increase stress levels, and cause sleep deprivation.

Finally, a February study by a Harvard School of Public Health researcher found that just one gas-powered data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, was responsible for $53-$99 million in annual health damages. Echoing the findings of that study, an April study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the economic value of shortened life expectancy, primarily from being exposed to fine particulates from data center sites, costs the economy $25 billion annually.

Instead of reining in data centers, EPA Administrator Zeldin has proposed to allow them to begin construction before obtaining pollution permits and exempt data centers that generate their own electricity from acid rain emissions rules. Zeldin even wants to go so far as to release states from the Clean Air Act mandate to notify the public about data center proposals in their communities and provide a public comment period.

Meanwhile, data centers are tanking in public opinion polls, even among Republicans. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that half of US adults believe data centers are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and quality of life. The percentage of Republicans who say data centers are bad for their quality of life nearly doubled from 24% in January to 42% in September, Pew found, and 54% now say they would be uncomfortable with a new local data center. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats feel the same way.

As a result, moratoriums on new data center construction have been enacted or proposed in more than 480 municipalities across 46 states, according to the US Data Center Moratorium Tracker. Heatmap News, a climate news site, recently reported that $260 billion worth of data center projects have been cancelled so far in 2026 in response to local opposition.

Many political analysts see data centers as a top issue in the midterms. If the opposition to them helps Democrats regain control of at least one chamber of Congress, could this not-in-my-backyard movement morph into a new national crusade to protect the environment? In the 1960s, Rachel Carson’s warning—along with smog-filled cities, filthy waterways, a burning river in Cleveland, and a massive oil spill off the California coast—galvanized the public to pressure Congress and a reluctant Richard Nixon to create the EPA and enact a string of environmental laws. The midterms may provide a further indication that the public wants an end to Trump’s unparalleled assault on the environment and a government that truly protects public health.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

As always, the Trump administration is setting ever stranger records for public “entertainment,” and yes, I certainly do have to put that word in quotation marks.

Only recently, Secretary of—you choose—War or Defense (I certainly know which I’d choose) Pete Hegseth made it clear that Nidal Hassan, a former US Army psychiatrist and American-born Muslim, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009 (claiming to be waging jihad “for what he called the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”), would be executed by a military firing squad on December 3 and that the killing would—a first—be “live-streamed” for—obviously!—public entertainment. (The last time a member of the US military was even executed by firing squad was for desertion in France on January 31, 1945, only months before World War II ended in Europe.)

And just to put such a plan in perspective, these days, on this planet of ours, the only other two countries that regularly carry out public executions of capital sentences are Afghanistan and Iran. Even Saudi Arabia has stopped doing so (which should tell you something about the company the United States is now keeping).

Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same.

In this country, nothing quite like this has happened since the public hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black confessed rapist and killer, in Owensburg, Kentucky, in 1936, witnessed by an estimated 20,000 onlookers. Ever since then, execution as a public spectacle has been forbidden. But evidently, in the age of Donald Trump, nothing, however grim, is truly forbidden anymore, though, of course, the president did finally have to break down and, while not stopping the firing-squad execution, cancel its public screening.

In fact, in some strange sense, that public firing-squad execution, had it actually happened (and there certainly was opposition to it, even among congressional Republicans, though not, of course, from the president of the United States), would have been all too symbolic of the age of Trump and of a country that is distinctly going down, down, down on a planet that is, in fact, doing the same.

This may simply no longer be a Trumpian planet in any sense of the term. Give him full credit, of course. He’s been nothing short of amazing (or rather amazingly bizarre) during one and a half presidencies (so far), especially since, once upon a time, the very idea of him as president of the United States would have been the most ridiculous joke imaginable—or do I mean unimaginable? He should, in fact, be all too literally considered the living definition of imperial decline.

And yes, it’s true that Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same. Don’t doubt for a second, for instance, that his party is likely to get clobbered in the upcoming November congressional elections, even though American billionaires are spending a fortune to help Republican candidates. After all, it looks like all too many of his potential voters might simply stay home, a phenomenon already labeled “the red undertow.”

Decline at Sea?

Globally, once upon a time, who would have even believed this version of the United States? Admittedly, there was that disastrous Vietnam War in the previous century, but still, this country remained a power beyond compare as its competitor, the Soviet Union, collapsed. These days, however, in the age (or do I mean the aging?) of Donald Trump, it’s down, down, down, and down again.

In fact, retreat now seems to be distinctly the name of the game. As a recent New York Times headline bluntly summed it up: “Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back.” That, of course, was in relation to the war he launched against Iran which, if you happen to remember, was going to be victoriously ended within weeks. Seven months later, he’s talking about pursuing it yet again in a big-time fashion after the November congressional elections. Here’s how he explains it: “I stated, numerous times, that it would take 4-6 weeks to get rid of THE IRAN NUCLEAR THREAT, and I did it in one night!... the rest of the time is just to make sure it stays that way.”

It all makes sense now, right? And give him credit: Seven months later, there indeed is no Iranian nuclear threat (not that there ever was). In that sense he couldn’t have been more successful or, as he put it, “I am ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. We had no choice because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

His very existence (twice!) as president of the United States suggests that decline has new meaning on a planet that itself may be going down in a big-time fashion.

Oh, now I understand, of course. (Who wouldn’t?) And under the circumstances, what a success his war has been!

Success and yet... once upon a time, “our” president certainly never would have guessed that, so many months after he launched his war, for fear of an Iranian attack, his administration would actually have pulled back a set of B-1 bombers from... no, not Saudi Arabia or Jordan (not faintly!), but Great Britain. Yes, those bombers were withdrawn from a base in England to bases in the United States, which couldn’t have been more victorious of him, could it? It fits perfectly with that TV show he (and I) once watched as kids about the US Navy in World War II, Victory at Sea.

And that tells you all too much about this increasingly strange planet (and president) of ours and just how Donald Trump and crew are taking down possibly the greatest imperial power ever in a big-time fashion.

It should also give you a sense of just how disastrous Trump’s war on Iran, which he claimed last spring would end “I think within maybe two weeks, maybe a couple of days longer, to do the job,” —and (it goes without saying) in victory, of course—has proven to be. These days, in fact, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are both suggesting that the war might last all the way through his second presidency.

Yes, Donald Trump is finally being pummeled on this planet of—well, is it ours or his?—and he’s undoubtedly soon going to be pummeled again, right here in the United States, a country with staggering numbers of nuclear weapons, in the upcoming November congressional races, where it will be beyond surprising if he and his party don’t go down, down, down.

Yes, whether he even knows it or not, he is now in retreat in a big-time fashion, including on that public execution. That includes, of course, his retreat from his recent comments about Los Angeles and San Diego being potentially lost to (assumedly) an Iranian nuclear weapon (that, of course, doesn’t exist) and that, were such a thing to happen, really wouldn’t matter to him. Yes, who among us would truly care if two West Coast, pro-Democratic cities were lost to Iranian nukes? Not “our” president, that’s for sure!

And let me just suggest that, after this November 3, President Trump is likely to find himself in retreat big time in American politics, too.

Here’s the truth of the matter: When the president of the United States (and some of his top officials like Pete Hegseth) are in retreat mode, whether we know it or not, we’re in a different world.

Honestly, the coming of Donald Trump as president of (not so long ago) the most powerful and dominant country on the planet gives imperial decline new meaning. Honestly (yet again!), once upon a time, it would have been hard to imagine any great imperial power, no less the United States of America, having someone like Donald Trump as president even in its era of decline.

His very existence (twice!) as president of the United States suggests that decline has new meaning on a planet that itself may be going down in a big-time fashion. Perhaps a future TV series about the US military in his presidency will be called “Decline at Sea.”

Retreat, ho!

The war between the United States and Iran persists in a dangerous strategic stalemate. As Washington maintains a punishing economic and maritime blockade, Tehran continues to restrict passage through the Strait of Hormuz, imposing mounting costs on the United States, its allies, and the global economy. Neither side appears prepared to concede.

The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier strike group to the region, while the Trump administration is reportedly considering strikes against Iranian nuclear and energy infrastructure, potentially using the GBU-43/B bomb, known as the “mother of all bombs.” Both moves support the possibility of the United States attempting to break this stalemate through force. Iran, meanwhile, has in recent weeks intensified attacks on commercial vessels attempting to transit Hormuz outside its designated route, with strikes becoming more frequent and destructive.

Washington appears to be continuing to misread the Iran it is confronting. The wars of 2025 and 2026 accelerated a fundamental shift in Tehran’s strategic thinking, away from years of relative restraint and toward a determination to impose sustained costs on the United States and its allies. Iranian leaders increasingly believe that their earlier restraint invited further attacks rather than deterring them, and that absorbing more punishment without retaliating forcefully would only encourage additional aggression.

Tehran is still willing to negotiate, but it is far less prepared to give up its leverage based on American assurances that it has little reason to trust.

A failure to understand this changed posture makes another round of American or Israeli strikes particularly dangerous: Rather than compelling Iran to surrender, it would likely provoke an even more damaging Iranian response. Tehran’s growing willingness to escalate does not mean it has abandoned diplomacy. The challenge for President Donald Trump is that the Iran emerging from this war is one less willing to yield to coercion, which remains open to a settlement based on meaningful reciprocal concessions.

Washington’s Options—and Their Limits

The central question is whether Washington is preparing to break the stalemate militarily. But as Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Whether Trump chooses to escalate therefore depends on his assessment of the political objectives at stake and whether further military force can advance them. The buildup of American forces alone tells us little about that calculation, particularly after months of warfare and economic coercion have failed to compel Tehran to yield.

How Washington perceives the war will determine what it believes it can do to break the current stalemate. If Washington sees continued economic hardship as eventually forcing Tehran to accept its demands, it can maintain the blockade and continue the war of attrition. But if the United States and Israel launch another major attack, it would suggest at least one of them no longer believes the current balance of pressure is working in their favor, or that they can afford to wait for Iran to buckle. Such an escalation would presumably seek to shift that balance by inflicting enough additional damage to compel Iranian concessions, particularly on the nuclear issue, where Tehran has resisted demands to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium upfront, and over the future of the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is seeking a new arrangement that preserves its leverage over maritime traffic.

Further attacks are likely to backfire, particularly given Tehran’s growing conviction that restraint has only invited further aggression. Iran has considerable scope to intensify its own pressure through Hormuz and strikes on regional energy infrastructure, driving up oil prices more, further disrupting global markets, and making the war even more costly for Washington to sustain. Tehran may also escalate on its own if it concludes that the existing level of disruption is insufficient to force American concessions. In either case, a new round of escalation could shift the balance of pressure further against Washington, leaving Trump in an even more difficult position despite inflicting greater destruction on Iran.

For Tehran, the experience of the war has reinforced the belief that surrendering its leverage before securing concrete American concessions would leave it vulnerable to renewed pressure and attacks.

A failure to understand Tehran’s own political calculus is a persistent problem in Washington, and one often at the root of maximalist attempts to compel changed behavior by coercion or force. Should the Trump administration pursue force despite Tehran’s changed posture, it will be repeating the failure of many presidencies before it.

The remaining options are political. Trump could unilaterally ease or end the blockade and effectively abandon the effort to compel Iran’s surrender, though that appears unlikely under present circumstances. Another similar possibility, according to CNN, is a final, spectacular military strike, potentially involving the “mother of all bombs,” designed to give Trump a symbolic “victory” he can declare before withdrawing. Some military planners have reportedly discussed what amounts to a “fireworks show,” even if the strikes fail to achieve Washington’s stated objectives. But such an exit would depend on Iran’s response, and Tehran could instead retaliate with further attacks on shipping and regional energy infrastructure, making it harder for Trump to declare the war over.

More realistically, Washington could negotiate a compromise to end the confrontation, accepting that any durable settlement will require meaningful concessions from both sides, including reciprocal steps on sanctions, Hormuz, and the nuclear issue.

The two sides remain far apart, however, on what a negotiated settlement would entail. Tehran continues to insist on seven conditions for ending the war, including lifting the blockade and sanctions, and presented mediators with a proposal during the United Nations General Assembly in September. The proposal reportedly builds on the June Islamabad memorandum of understanding (MOU), but changes the sequencing of concessions: Washington would first have to fulfill Iran’s conditions, including lifting the blockade and releasing frozen Iranian assets, before Tehran eases its restrictions on Hormuz and enters substantive nuclear negotiations.

This reflects Tehran’s deep distrust of Washington, rooted in what Iran sees as the United States’ failure to honor its commitments under the June MOU and by the subsequent resumption of major hostilities for 13 days in July. Washington, by contrast, is pressing for immediate nuclear concessions, including renewed inspections and removal of enriched uranium, while offering more limited economic relief and the release of frozen Iranian assets.

The central impasse is therefore not simply over the terms of a possible agreement, but over who must deliver first. For Tehran, the experience of the war has reinforced the belief that surrendering its leverage before securing concrete American concessions would leave it vulnerable to renewed pressure and attacks.

Against this backdrop, the battle over Hormuz has become an increasingly costly contest of adaptation and counter-adaptation, illustrating Tehran’s determination to impose economic costs rather than simply absorb American pressure. The United States and its Persian Gulf partners have developed an elaborate ship-to-ship transfer system in which smaller shuttle tankers carry oil through the strait, hugging the Omani coast, often under US military protection and with their tracking systems switched off, before transferring their cargoes to larger vessels in the Gulf of Oman. Many of these crossings take place at night while still under Iranian fire. Nevertheless, alongside Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, this has helped restore substantial volume of oil exports despite Iran’s restrictions, and at a price premium. Tehran has responded by sharply escalating attacks on vessels using these routes, including tankers involved in ship-to-ship transfers. The conflict has also expanded to the Red Sea, where Iran-aligned Houthis have attacked Saudi shipping and energy infrastructure and curtailed the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint, while a separate drone strike launched from Iraq temporarily shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline. These workarounds and countermeasures have kept both sides in the fight, but at mounting economic cost. The ship-to-ship transfer system is being pushed to its limits, freight and insurance costs have soared, Brent oil remains well above $100 a barrel, US gasoline and diesel prices have surged to record levels, and the resulting inflationary pressures are driving up borrowing costs across the American economy.

Realistic Paths to End the War

Iran’s increasingly aggressive campaign around Hormuz illustrates how profoundly the war changed Tehran’s approach to deterrence. As I argued in a recent Quincy Institute report, the wars of 2025 and 2026 have accelerated Tehran’s shift from strategic patience toward a doctrine of persistent counter-escalation. Tehran’s leaders now operate from an assumption that earlier restraint invited further attacks rather than deterring them, a changed posture revealed in a willingness to weaponize Hormuz and threaten the wider regional economy despite the enormous damage Iran itself has suffered. Another major American or Israeli attack is therefore unlikely to restore the old pattern of Iranian restraint. Instead, it could strengthen Tehran’s conviction that only sustained pressure on American and allied interests can deter further attacks and compel Washington to compromise.

Yet a more confrontational Iran is not necessarily an Iran unwilling to negotiate. As I argued in a separate Center for International Policy report, American policy has repeatedly underestimated Tehran’s capacity for pragmatism while overestimating the likelihood that mounting pressure will produce capitulation. Iran has a long history of pursuing diplomatic openings when its leaders perceive a credible opportunity to advance national interests, from the Rafsanjani and Khatami presidencies to the negotiations that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement. Even amid the present war, Tehran continues to put forward proposals for a negotiated settlement. What changed is its assessment of the risks of making concessions without reliable guarantees of American reciprocity. Tehran is still willing to negotiate, but it is far less prepared to give up its leverage based on American assurances that it has little reason to trust.

Washington retains overwhelming conventional military superiority, but months of warfare have shown the limits of pursuing maximalist objectives, whether Iran’s unconditional surrender or the collapse of its government.

Trump would be wise to recognize both realities. The June Islamabad MOU, together with Iran’s subsequent proposal at the UN General Assembly, offers a starting point for renewed diplomacy. The June understanding envisaged reciprocal steps, with Washington easing its blockade and economic restrictions and Tehran loosening its grip on Hormuz and eventually addressing its stockpile of highly enriched uranium through new nuclear negotiations. Reviving that framework would require the two sides to agree on a credible sequence of verifiable concessions, particularly given the latest collapse of trust following July’s renewed fighting.

Neither side would get everything it wants, but an agreement along these lines would offer Trump something that months of military escalation have failed to deliver: a way to end the war without inviting another round of potentially catastrophic Iranian retaliation in the region. Washington retains overwhelming conventional military superiority, but months of warfare have shown the limits of pursuing maximalist objectives, whether Iran’s unconditional surrender or the collapse of its government.

The question now is whether Trump will continue seeking capitulation through military pressure, or recognize that the war has made Tehran more determined to resist coercion while remaining open to a negotiated compromise.

Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all?

The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible. A recent Forbes headline declared, “MIT Says AI Is Forcing a Rethink of College Itself.” AI is not forcing universities to purchase licenses, revise courses, shift budgets, or surrender influence over educational infrastructure to private vendors. People make those decisions. They should have to explain and defend them. Who was consulted? What alternatives were considered? And whose interests are being served? California State University signed a $16.9 million OpenAI agreement in 2025. A statewide student leader said her association wasn't consulted; officials cited an advisory committee with student and faculty members.

A university exists to cultivate independent thought, critical judgment, curiosity, and the ability to work through difficult questions. Reading closely, developing an argument, recognizing errors, and revising one's thinking are not incidental steps on the way to an answer. They are part of what education is for. What happens when students are encouraged to rely on systems that can perform much of this work for them?

Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public.

The available research offers no warrant for treating adoption as an educational obligation. A 2026 meta-analysis of 35 studies reported moderate gains across varied educational settings. A review of 67 higher-education studies found better outcomes when AI was used within carefully structured, inquiry-based teaching. Those findings deserve consideration, but they do not settle whether AI belongs in the learning process. In the latter review, stronger results depended on deliberate human instruction, and neither review establishes that AI reliably develops lasting, independent learning or provides benefits that effective teaching without it cannot achieve.

Better assignments are not necessarily evidence of better learning. A polished paper produced with ChatGPT does not show that its author has become a better writer. Short-term performance measures tell us little about what students may be losing when they outsource reading, writing, and reasoning. Assisted performance is not intellectual development, and making learning easier does not necessarily make education better. Nor can learning-outcome studies settle the questions that institutions routinely sidestep: Who should own educational infrastructure, what student work may be collected, whose labor may be automated, and whether students and faculty can refuse participation. Those are ethical and political decisions, not matters of test scores alone.

Yet narrowly demonstrated benefits are being used to support sweeping institutional ambitions. Universities must consider training, faculty workload, verification, privacy, dependence on proprietary systems, and what happens when a vendor changes its prices or rules. Once courses depend on a platform, leaving can become disruptive and expensive. Public money finances the infrastructure, faculty labor makes it part of everyday teaching, and the resulting dependence can give vendors greater leverage over academic decisions. Public institutions should disclose the full costs, contractual obligations, data protections, and exit plans before committing resources and educational authority. These are questions of public accountability, not merely technical procurement.

For faculty, promised efficiency can mean additional labor. Professors redesign assignments, check unreliable citations, devise oral defenses, interpret shifting policies, and struggle to determine whether students have done the intellectual work being assessed. That verification work consumes time that could otherwise go toward mentoring, substantive feedback, and sustained classroom discussion—costs rarely visible in claims of efficiency. At the same time, AI is promoted to automate feedback, lesson planning, and other forms of professional judgment. Faculty are asked to help install the very systems that may eventually diminish their autonomy.

Students face another danger in the language of “personalized learning.” Systems built around continuous assessment, behavioral prediction, and linked records can turn intellectual development into an expanding data profile. Students should be free to misunderstand, hesitate, write badly, and change their minds without every misstep becoming a permanent record. These are conditions for learning, not inefficiencies to be recorded and corrected. And when students' writing, questions, and personal circumstances pass through commercial systems, privacy cannot be an afterthought. Students deserve to know what is collected, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether they can decline without jeopardizing their education.

Universities normalize tools that make it harder to determine whether students worked independently, then turn to monitoring technologies to establish whether they did. Instead of asking whether the original technology undermines assessment, institutions risk treating surveillance as the solution.

Beyond the classroom, students face demands to “upskill” for an AI-driven economy. Employers may promote AI proficiency while using automation to cut labor costs, reduce professional discretion, and concentrate control. The political question of who controls automation and receives its benefits is being recast as an individual problem of employability. Universities should not simply prepare students to accommodate those decisions. They should equip students to ask whose knowledge AI absorbs, who benefits, and what protections workers need—including collective bargaining and enforceable rights.

Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public. They should teach about AI: its ownership, limitations, social consequences, and deployment in mass surveillance, violent and repressive policing, and warfare, as well as the environmental costs of its infrastructure. But understanding a technology is not the same as making students dependent on it. Faculty and students deserve a meaningful voice in whether it enters their classrooms, including the right to refuse. A right to refuse means little if opting out carries academic penalties or leaves students without an equivalent route through a course.

Before committing another dollar to AI platforms, universities should weigh those investments against smaller classes, tutoring, disability services, libraries, and the time and resources faculty need to teach. The burden of proof belongs to those proposing to change the conditions of learning. At stake is more than control over software: It is the university's authority over the purposes and human relationships that give education its meaning. Universities should not surrender that authority merely because a technology has become widely available.

Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.

The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.

To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.

Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.

Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.

We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.

Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.

Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.

This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.

Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.

Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.

One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.

The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.

It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.

In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.

The Pentagon’s self-described “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth recently announced a plan to live stream the execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, a wheelchair-bound veteran convicted of a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.

President Donald Trump eventually backed away from the live-stream plan. But not before Americans across the political spectrum agreed that—whatever Hasan’s crime—live streaming an execution crossed a line. In one poll, 80% opposed it.

That’s not surprising. Live streaming the slaughter of a human being, especially when the spectacle is cheered on by a defense secretary who claims to worship his troops’ killing power, their “lethality,” above all else—including their loyalty to the Constitution—falls outside any definition of morality.

The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

The thought of kids pulling out their phones on the playground, or adults glued to their tablets at work, to witness an execution is uniquely horrifying. But much of the official criticism of Hegseth’s proposal to make the execution public also had a particularly chauvinistic quality to it.

Some argued that it would lower the integrity of the US to the level of “other” countries. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said: “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Yet beyond the issue of live streaming, the underlying act of state-sanctioned homicide itself sounds a lot like what “they” do. The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

Last year, only 17 countries recorded official executions, according to Amnesty International. China led the list with the most executions, followed by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yemen (with 51) and the United States (with 47) rounded out the top five. During that same year, no executions at all occurred in Europe or Central Asia. And for the last 17 years, the United States has been the only country in the Americas to officially execute anyone.

The US embrace of the death penalty as other countries abandon it is disturbing enough. Equally disturbing is the fact that executions here historically have often been quite public.

The US has a long legacy of lynching, whether carried out by a wartime firing squad or hanging people from a makeshift noose on a tree. During racist lynchings carried out from the Civil War era well into the 1960s, crowds of people—including well-dressed women, men with children on their shoulders to make sure the little ones could see, poor and rich but all white—gathered near the tree with picnic baskets and post cards for sale to commemorate the slaughter of Black men, women, and children.

Yet this isn’t only about our past. It’s about this administration’s effort to normalize a level of deliberate bloody slaughter being carried out today—whether in the Gaza genocide, the US bombing of school children in Iran, or Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) brutal treatment of immigrants and protesters. All based on the idea that some people simply have no right to live.

These decisions made here have international impacts.

The Israeli government is openly borrowing from the cruelties of the US prison system. Earlier this year, the Israeli parliament legalized capital punishment. From its founding in 1948, Israel had not allowed an execution—with only two exceptions, one of whom was Adolf Eichmann, the main organizer of the Holocaust.

But in March 2026, the Knesset passed a law requiring death by hanging for Palestinians convicted in military courts of any lethal action Israel deems terrorism. (Jewish Israelis, including illegal settlers in the West Bank, remain completely immune from the threat of capital punishment.)

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s extremist national security minister, made a video showing off the gallows under construction—gloating that the new site would have an open viewing area, “just like in the US.”

Still, it’s encouraging that Americans’ outrage forced Trump to back off from Hegseth’s brutal spectacle. And with the percentage of Americans opposing capital punishment climbing year after year—alongside public opposition to war, genocide, and ICE’s violence—perhaps one day the White House will similarly abandon those horrors as well.

Greetings from Michigan—I last wrote one of these dispatches on Sunday, from Kansas; since then I’ve been in Texas, where the remarkable James Talarico is apparently locked in a dead-heat race with the execrable Ken Paxton; now I’m headed to greater Lansing with my Third Act colleagues to try and boost the Senate fortunes of Abdul el-Sayed and the House race of Will Lawrence, once a founder of the Sunrise Movement. (If you want to join us, here’s the info). So you might say I’m taking this election seriously.

More seriously than I wish we had to. In democratic societies elections should always be important. But they shouldn’t, ideally, be the deciding factor between continued stability and whatever kind of creeping fascism we’re playing with. And they certainly shouldn’t be determining questions of planetary survival. But they are.

The chart above shows the rate of deforestation in the Amazon; it comes ahead of Sunday’s contest between the next Bolsonaro (think chainsaw) and the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (think standing tree). As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian Thursday morning:

Physically and politically, Flávio Bolsonaro is the spitting image of his father, the jailed coup-plotter, Jair. When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he appeared to see ecological destruction as a kind of a holy duty. The deforestation rate rose by 59% in his four years, and attacks on Indigenous people and other forest defenders, as well as invasions by illegal ranchers, loggers, and goldminers rocketed. The crudest forms of extractivism—regardless of their costs, or how they might hold back all kinds of progress—were a matter of policy.

The ideology of the far-right in Brazil has been described as “beef, Bible, and bullets”: violence against those who resist the seizure of their resources, an ultra-conservative evangelism, and the expansion of cattle ranching, which is both a potent symbol of far-right machismo and the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon.

If you combine this with the knowledge that we’re very very near a tipping point in the Amazon, you start to get worried. The Amazon rainforest is almost an organism itself—it in essence generates half its own rainfall, recycling rainwater five to six times as air moves east to west across it. As early as 2018, my old friend, the dearly missed Tom Lovejoy, and his collaborator Carlos Nobre had a paper in Science that concluded:

We believe that negative synergies between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire indicate a tipping point for the Amazon system to flip to non-forest ecosystems in eastern, southern, and central Amazonia at 20-25% deforestation.

The severity of the droughts of 2005, 2010, and 2015-16 could well represent the first flickers of this ecological tipping point. These events, together with the severe floods of 2009, 2012, (and 2014 over SW Amazonia), suggest that the whole system is oscillating. For the last two decades the dry season over the southern and eastern Amazon has been increasing. Large scale factors such as warmer sea surface temperatures over the tropical North Atlantic also seem to be associated with the changes on land.

Here’s what Nobre told the Times this week:

Legal deforestation, he said, put the Amazon at “total risk” and could sharply reduce rainfall throughout much of South America, threatening Brazilian agriculture and global food prices. Brazil is the world’s second-largest food exporter and could surpass the United States this year. “We are going to lose all of this,” Mr. Nobre said.

We may lose even more. It’s not at all clear that the Earth’s climate system can function if the Amazon begins to break down—along with the poles, it’s one of the planet’s handful of truly keystone physical systems. That its fate depends on an election is terrifying. Needless to say, the usual cast of characters like Elon Musk are allied with the chainsaw in this one. But of course Musk, fresh off his breathtaking betrayal of the Ukrainian people, is playing an even more critical role in America’s elections. As Laurent Belsie pointed out this week, the reason that Talarico may lose is largely down to this one man:

Mr. Musk’s biggest donation was $158 million to the GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund, which put that same amount into the Senate race in Texas—where Mr. Musk’s companies are based. On X, Mr. Musk has been urging people to vote for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying, “The fate of Texas and America is at stake.”

But more’s at stake even than that. Here’s this week’s United Nations Environment Programme report (titled, with more wit than usual for these things, The Point of Return) about just how far we’re overshooting the Paris climate accords. What it demonstrates is that the election of President Donald Trump plays an outsized role in keeping us from having a fighting chance. The venerable Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press headlined his story (a lesson for other headline writers) “US Is a Big Reason for the World Losing Ground in the Fight Against Climate Change, UN Report Says.”

In just a year, the projections for how much temperatures will rise even if governments keep their pledges has risen by two tenths of a degree Celsius—on a world where every tenth of a degree pushes another 140 million human souls into a dangerously hot zone. Here’s how Borenstein described it:

If all the countries do what they promise to reduce heat-trapping emissions, Earth will likely still warm another 2.2°F (1.2°C) above current temperatures, according to Wednesday’s update of climate calculations by the United Nations Environment Programme. That’s about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit (0.1°Ce) more than last year’s projections by the same science team.

“This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions,” the report said. The report also blames the United States for increased emissions last year, saying all the other top 20 major economies reduced their carbon pollution or at least slowed the growth in how much carbon dioxide was spewed from the burning of coal, oil, and gas.

“In terms of magnitude, the increase in the United States of America (133 megatons of CO2 equivalent) far exceeded that of all other countries and was driven by increased electricity demand and a rebound of coal power generation,” the report said. The 124 countries that increased emissions—not counting the 63 that decreased like most European nations—added 189 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2025, and 70% of that increase came from the US, according to the report.

Almost nobody who voted for Trump in 2024 thought (or, to be frank) cared that this would be the outcome. But that’s what happens on a world that is far too finely balanced. So we fight as hard as we can.

And we do it with some real champions in contention.

Brad Lander, for instance—Ayana Johnson just released the excellent conversation the two of us had with the soon-to-be New York representative, who will enter Congress as probably its most knowledgeable member about the connection between climate and finance. (Lander, to his immense credit, was detained by Israeli Defense Forces Wednesday for helping protect Palestinians who wanted to harvest their olives in the face of violence from West Bank settlers. He’s now safely out).

Or Justin Pearson. The Tennessee state rep, who led opposition to the Byhalia Pipeline and to Elon Musk’s Memphis AI pollution factory, seemed to have an inside track for a congressional seat until the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this summer—Tennessee immediately redistricted to try and turn its congressional delegation lily-white. But Pearson is putting up a creditable fight in his Trump +20 district. As Katherine Burgess reports, analysts say:

Pearson’s longstanding opposition to data centers and other industrial polluters gives him credibility as he challenges [Brent] Taylor, who was an early supporter of Colossus 1 and received $10,000 in campaign funding from a political action committee associated with SpaceXAI.

Or in New York’s Hudson Valley, where embattled GOP incumbent Mike Lawler has been trying to save his seat with an attack on New York City’s congestion pricing law. As Charles Komanoff points out, he’s not very good at math:

Since Trump launched his war on Iran, the 260,000 households in NY-17 have coughed up $102 million more for gasoline—$390 per household—than they would have paid in the absence of the war. That collective toll, if you will, exceeds by 75% the $58 million they’ve paid in New York congestion charges (including surcharges on cab rides) since congestion pricing commenced in early 2025 (again, see the methodology below).

I’m hopeful Lawler’s opponent, Cait Conley, can beat him—she’s a West Point grad with three Bronze Stars.

Indeed I’m hopeful in lots of places—but I’m afraid to hope too. At this point our job is just to run through the tape, doing our level best wherever we are to win the last possible votes. (And then defend the election). If you have some money to spare, find a race to help. (The Environmental Voter Project is a good place to start). If you have some hours to spare, spend them phone banking. Work as if the planet depends on it, because sadly it does.

One of us previously wrote on the tax treatment of stock buybacks. Prior to a rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982, publicly traded corporations faced strict limits in the number of shares they could buy back. The 1982 rule change effectively gave corporations a choice: They could use their profits to buy shares on the open market, with no meaningful limit, or they could distribute their profits as dividends to their shareholders, taxable at the same rate as ordinary income.

The rule the Securities and Exchange Commission changed was related to insider trading; the SEC might not care about the tax consequences of share buybacks, but everyone else involved surely does. As noted in the post, the shareholders who don’t sell when a corporation buys back shares are the beneficiaries of the rule change:

To understand the impact of the SEC rule change, focus on the shareholders who don’t sell any shares in connection with a buyback. They’re the ones who reap the tax benefit. The selling shareholders were going to sell anyhow. We’re talking about publicly traded stock here. The decision to sell has nothing to do with the corporation’s decision to buy, and a selling shareholder has no idea who buys their publicly traded shares. The corporation doesn’t benefit either. It’s just shedding cash either way.

The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been.

But not all non-selling shareholders benefit from stock buybacks. If you own stock inside an IRA, the corporation’s decision whether to buy shares or issue dividends is not critical to you. You avoid an immediate income tax consequence either way. And if you don’t want a stock buyback to cause an increase in your ownership interest in the corporation, you can sell a few shares off, also without tax consequence, and create an economic result identical to that of a dividend.

The same applies to shares held by other retirement accounts, pension plans, university endowment funds, and other tax-exempt entities.

That leaves the ultra-rich—and especially the billionaires—as the main beneficiaries of stock buybacks. The benefits are enormous, and become ever larger as we move up the wealth scale.

The situation of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin exemplifies the wealth concentrating impact of the SEC rule change. Alphabet, which became the publicly traded parent of Google in a 2015 reorganization, has bought back a lot of shares over the past 11 years. Page and Brin, the third and fourth wealthiest Americans, respectively, have a combined wealth totaling over half a trillion dollars. As of October 16, the two held a combined total of 14,960,019,745 shares of Alphabet stock—778,102,320 for Page and 717,917,425 for Brin—which they’d held at least since Google’s IPO in 2004 (adjusted for stock splits over that period).

Brin is leading the opposition to California’s Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time wealth tax of 5% on all residents of California as of January 1, 2026 with personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. Brin claims to have changed his state of residence to Nevada prior to that date, although it’s not clear whether the steps he took to accomplish that change were sufficient to avoid California residence for purposes of Proposition 40. To date, Brin has contributed over $100 million to groups opposing Proposition or supporting Propositions 41 and 42, which effectively would nullify Proposition 40.

Page, similarly, has moved to Florida, although it’s not clear if he has avoided being a California resident as of January 1, 2026.

If Proposition 40 passed and if Brin’s attempt to avoid California residency were unsuccessful, his tax liability would be in the $12 billion to $14 billion range. His co-founder Page would face a slightly higher tax liability under Proposition 40. Their total liability would be around $28 billion, give or take a few billion.

I was curious how Page and Brin’s prospective Proposition 40 tax liability compares with the wealth they now hold that’s attributable to the 1982 SEC rule change. Would the one-time tax recoup the windfall bestowed on them by the SEC rule change?

To determine that windfall, we figured that without the rule change the profits used by Alphabet to buyback shares would instead have been distributed as dividends and that the dividends would have been taxable as ordinary income. Yes, the federal tax rate applicable to dividends was reduced in 2003 to equal the long-term capital gains rate, but analyzing the counterfactual of “if there were no SEC rule change” points to the assumption the tax rate applicable to dividends would not have been reduced. Because of the SEC rule change, there was not much point for anyone to oppose lowering the tax rate applicable to dividends in 2003. Corporations could protect their shareholders from the higher rate by buying back stock instead of issuing dividends.

Absent the SEC rule change, then, the revenue cost of a reduction in the tax rate applicable to dividends would have posed a much larger obstacle to enactment. Would the rate nonetheless have been reduced? We’ll never know. But since we’re exploring the potential windfall to Page and Brin attributable to the SEC rule change, the higher of the two possible tax rates on dividends was the logical choice.

To determine the savings to Brin and Page, we calculated the change in their percentage ownership of Alphabet that would have resulted from each stock buyback, beginning with the first stock buyback in 2015, had the amount used in the buyback instead been distributed as a dividend, followed by Page and Brin paying federal and state income tax on the dividend, then purchasing additional Alphabet shares with the after-tax proceeds of the dividend. For simplicity, we assumed a total 50% US and California rate for each year during the period. The actual annual rate during the period, factoring in the full federal deductibility of state income tax prior to 2018, would have been slightly higher.

Under this alternative scenario, Page and Brin would now hold 10.9% of the outstanding shares of Alphabet, some 1.3 percentage points less than the percentage they currently hold.

When you do the math, Page and Brin are $55 billion wealthier today than they would be had the limitation on stock buybacks that existed prior to 1982 not been modified and had dividends continued to be considered ordinary income for federal income tax purposes. [And if you assume the federal rate would have been reduced to the capital gains rate in 2003, they’re still $41 billion wealthier today by virtue of the 1982 SEC rule change.]

Put another way, about 10% of their obscene combined wealth of over half a trillion dollars has been derived from one tax giveaway. And—it’s important to note—that tax giveaway wasn’t even delivered by duly elected members of Congress. Rather, it was ordained by unelected regulators (or, really, anti-regulators) at the SEC.

If Proposition 40 passes and Page and Brin are required to pay the one-time tax, they’ll still be $25 billion ahead. Don’t feel too bad for them.

Page and Brin likely are the most extreme examples of how the 1982 SEC rule change conferred massive additional wealth on the wealthiest Americans. But they’re far from the only examples. Meta, Oracle, Nvidia, and Dell all have distributed tens of billions of dollars in buybacks. Apple has bought back nearly half its shares through stock buybacks over the past decade. In total, stock buybacks have been running in the $1 trillion per year range and may hit $1.5 trillion this year. Today’s billionaires undoubtedly are sitting on several hundred billion dollars of additional wealth courtesy of stock buybacks.

The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been. We can’t do much about the damage that’s already been done. But we could avoid further damage.

This piece was first published on Substack.

On July 4, 2025, catastrophic flooding swept through the Texas Hill Country, killing 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. Families who sent their children to summer camp would never see them alive again. The floods caused an estimated $22 billion in damage and economic losses.

Now, Texans face two US Senate candidates with dramatically different records on climate change.

Republican Ken Paxton earns just 21.25% on Vote Climate U.S. PAC's 2026 National Climate Change Voter's Guide. As Texas attorney general, Paxton repeatedly challenged climate regulations, fought efforts to make fossil fuel polluters pay for climate damages, and opposed federal fees on methane emissions.

The question this November is whether we will continue electing politicians who compound the climate crisis or choose leaders prepared to confront it.

His Democratic opponent, James Talarico, earns 71.25%. Talarico acknowledges climate change and supports investments in renewable energy and emerging technologies. However, he has moderated his climate positions, defended Texas's fossil fuel industry, and has no clear position on requiring carbon polluters to pay for their emissions.

Neither candidate earns a perfect score. But the difference is substantial—50 points.

North Carolina: $59.6 Billion in Devastation

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, killing at least 107 people and damaging or destroying more than 73,000 homes. The storm caused an estimated $59.6 billion in statewide damage, economic losses, and recovery needs.

In this year's US Senate race, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, compared with just 28.75% for Republican Michael Whatley.

Cooper has made climate action a governing priority, advocating climate resilience, opposing offshore drilling, and protecting North Carolina's air and water.

Whatley criticized President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, accusing the administration of siding with "climate alarmists." He has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus that climate change is human caused.

Michigan: Tornadoes and a Stark Political Divide

On May 7, 2024, a tornado packing 135-mile-per-hour winds tore through Portage, Michigan, causing approximately $50 million in damage. It was part of a multistate outbreak producing more than 165 tornadoes, killing three people, and causing approximately $6.6 billion in damage.

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, while Republican Mike Rogers receives just 21.25%.

El-Sayed calls climate change an immediate crisis and advocates a pathway to 100% renewable energy through investments in solar, wind, battery storage, and modernization of the electric grid.

Rogers has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. He has attacked Democratic energy policies and voted for a congressional measure declaring that a carbon tax would harm the US economy.

Georgia: Hurricane Helene's Deadly Toll

When Hurricane Helene struck Georgia in September 2024, it killed 37 people and caused an estimated $6.46 billion in agricultural and forestry losses alone.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, compared with 28.75% for Republican Rick Jackson.

As Atlanta's mayor, Lance Bottoms testified before Congress about climate threats, including flooding, extreme heat, and tree canopy loss. Her administration also worked to reduce fuel consumption and pollution.

Jackson has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. His energy proposals emphasize lowering gasoline and utility costs rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Florida: A $109.5 Billion Hurricane and a Climate Zero Candidate

On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated southwest Florida, killing 150 people in Florida and causing an estimated $109.5 billion in damage. In Fort Myers Beach alone, 900 structures were destroyed.

Yet Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds earns an extraordinary 0% Climate Calculation.

Donalds has questioned the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and co-sponsored a congressional resolution opposing a carbon tax.

His Democratic opponent, David Jolly, earns 92.5%.

Jolly acknowledges climate science and advocates expanding renewable energy, strengthening rooftop solar policies, and investing in climate resilience to protect Florida's vulnerable coastlines.

In a state facing rising seas, coastal flooding, and increasingly costly hurricanes, the contrast could scarcely be more consequential.

Climate Change Is on the Ballot

These comparisons come from Vote Climate US PAC's 2026 National Climate Change Voter's Guide, which evaluates incumbents and challengers for the US House, US Senate, and governorships.

Unlike traditional congressional scorecards, our guide evaluates incumbents and challengers, candidates without congressional voting records. Our Climate Calculations examine incumbents' positions, votes, and leadership where applicable, and support for requiring carbon polluters to pay for their emissions. Scores range from Climate Hero to Climate Zero. Detailed research and sources are available by clicking the green plus button beside each candidate's name.

The guide also identifies candidates' positions on Roe v. Wade. In all five races examined here, the Democratic candidates support Roe, while their Republican opponents oppose it.

No single hurricane, flood, or tornado can be attributed solely to climate change. But scientists have established that human-caused warming intensifies many forms of extreme weather, particularly heavy rainfall, extreme heat, and coastal flooding associated with rising seas.

Americans are already paying an enormous price for climate disasters. They deserve to know which candidates are prepared to confront the crisis and which continue to obstruct meaningful action.

Visit VoteClimatePAC.com to examine candidates' Climate Calculations and the research behind them.

The question this November is whether we will continue electing politicians who compound the climate crisis or choose leaders prepared to confront it.

The climate crisis will not wait for political convenience. Neither should public accountability.

The Trump administration’s health care policy has a clear pattern: Distract attention from massive, permanent cuts to health coverage and care by handing a small sliver back to a fraction of the people harmed with a letter, a press release, and the president’s name attached. American families are struggling every day and every month to pay their health care bills. Whether they get coverage through Medicaid, Medicare, or the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, Americans are demanding more than one-time checks that don’t cover the massive increases they’ve been experiencing.

Premiums Jumped by Over $1,000. One in 20 Enrollees Got a One-Time $500 Back.

People who buy coverage through marketplaces like Healthcare.gov saw their premiums more than double, an increase of over $1,000 in 2026. That was a direct result of the deliberate decisions of this Republican Congress and the Trump administration to let the enhanced tax credits that help Americans afford coverage expire. Even people who never received that help saw premiums jump 24% on average this year, and will see another 17% in 2027, often adding up to thousands of dollars. These jumps were the direct results of policy decisions, after years of stability, when annual increases stayed in the single digits for the previous five years.

Now, one month before the election, the administration has mailed one-time $500 checks, paired with what amounts to a campaign letter, to about 1 million of the nearly 20 million people in the marketplaces. That’s one in 20. For the fraction who got the check, $500 doesn’t cover this year’s higher premiums, which are now baked in for years to come, let alone the increases in future years. The other 19 million people just got a higher bill. And some 3-4 million people couldn’t afford a higher bill and didn’t enroll at all for 2026. Many of these individuals are now likely uninsured.

To be clear, this rebate was money available in part from the sudden defunding of navigator assistance that helps consumers get on and stay on coverage. In previous years under past administrations, extra dollars like these would have lowered next year’s fees. Instead, they paid for an election-season mailer. For more on the administration’s actions to make marketplace coverage more expensive, and harder to get and keep, see this recent blog posting, One Battle After Another Heading into Marketplace Open Enrollment for 2027.

The Biggest Cuts in Medicaid History, and a One-Time Fund with Strings Attached

Millions of people are losing Medicaid coverage and services because of the budget cuts made by the current Congress and Trump Administration. The biggest cut to Medicaid in history, over $900 billion dollars, is projected to leave over 10 million more Americans uninsured, and strip key health care services and providers from communities, including over $130 billion in cuts in rural areas.

In contrast to those permanent cuts, the same law created a one-time $50 billion rural health fund—with strings that bar those dollars from backfilling the cuts. The Trump administration has rolled out a steady stream of press releases and announcements distributing these funds before the election, while many of the much bigger, permanent cuts are set to hit right after it. Rural communities face very real health care challenges, but this program was never designed to solve them. And no amount of spin can make $50 billion fill a $900 billion dollar hole. To learn more about how states are navigating these massive cuts and implementing rural health fund dollars, please read, Don’t be Fooled by the Rural Health Transformation Grants.

$90 for Some Seniors with Medicare While Other Costs Spike

This month, about 20 million people with traditional Medicare began receiving a $90 “premium rebate” from Social Security, announced by the White House on October 2, just one month before Election Day.

That’s less than half of a single month’s standard Part B premium, which is about $202 this year. The money comes from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress created to strengthen Medicare, not to bankroll a one-time payment timed to an election. And many seniors are left out entirely. Everyone in the Medicare Advantage program is excluded, a group with higher shares of Black, Hispanic, and Asian enrollees compared to traditional Medicare. So are the lowest income seniors who get help paying their premiums through Medicaid, the same program facing more than $900 trillion in cuts. The seniors most likely to need help with health care costs are the least likely to see a check.

The Bait and Switch Context — Cuts to Care and Coverage for All, Smaller Checks for a Few

Consumer and patient advocates support funding for rural health care, and financial help for families. Every dollar helps. But a one-time check doesn’t undo a permanent cut, and a press release doesn’t replace lost coverage. These payouts are designed to paper over much bigger cuts to exactly the same people hurt by this administration’s policies. We expect most Americans will see them for what they are: a small check meant to distract from a much bigger bill.

One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.

I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.

To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.

Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.

I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech

The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.

Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.

Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.

One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.

In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.

Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.

Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.

In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.

In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.

II. The Billionaire Barons and AI

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)

The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.

The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.

Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.

Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.

Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.

III. Will History Rhyme?

By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.

Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.

Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?

Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.

The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.

Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.

About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).

A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.

It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.

But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.

I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.

In South Padre Island, sea turtle experts deemed this summer a record-breaking hatchling season with nearly 150 nests. I left Texas in 2015, but each year, the annual sea turtle hatchling releases call to my Texan heart and draw me back to my roots.

Those roots are disappearing.

Last month, the Trump administration formally cut back protections for endangered species. For 50 years, it has been illegal under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to degrade or destroy the habitat of an endangered species. Now, a new rule removes protection for habitat that these species need to breed, feed, or shelter.

We are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico.

The motive is clear: The Trump administration recently held its third oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, opening up deeper and riskier Gulf waters to habitat destruction and degradation from offshore drilling.

The administration is choosing profit over the planet.

This spring, federal officials convened a special panel and granted an extremely rare exemption allowing industry to ignore longstanding rules that protect sea turtles, the endangered Rice’s whale, manatees, and other marine life in the Gulf. The administration asserted that protecting our species is less important than feeding the wallets of the oil and gas executives. Meanwhile, while the administration blames our precious wildlife for jeopardizing national security, using defunct logic and irrational argument, it continues its war of choice in Iran. The hypocrisy is intentional, and even more importantly, fatal.

My family gathered on South Padre Island when I was a child, and the highlight of our visits was learning how local conservationists helped the sea turtle hatchlings. The turtles would come ashore to lay nests, and experts would monitor the nests and move them off the beach to keep them secure. Sometimes, if the babies hadn’t hatched yet, we would stay an extra day just to watch.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make a kid a lifelong conservationist, someone dedicated to caring for our planet. And that couldn’t be more important these days. Sea turtles and other endangered species in the Gulf can be easily killed by oil and gas exploration and other fossil fuel industry activity. And even when not deadly, vessel strikes can cause a condition in sea turtles that makes it hard for them to swim. That’s why the Endangered Species Act was created to ensure that industry would take reasonable measures to mitigate harm, including using quieter technologies, lower vessel speeds, and more.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that in the next four or more decades, the oil and gas industry will kill more than 38,000 endangered and threatened sea turtles in the Gulf. And that doesn’t even account for harm from expanding offshore leasing—something the administration signed into law and has continued to push for in its proposed offshore leasing plan.

We are faced with diminishing populations of some of our ocean’s most important species, but in the last few years, some of these species have been spotted in unexpected places, giving us hope for growth. In the last few years alone, Rice’s whales have been spotted on the Texas side of the Gulf, and manatees showed up in Houston. This would normally be cause to redouble conservation efforts and take pride in the work Texas is doing to save wildlife and protect our ocean.

Instead, we are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico. A bipartisan group of former administration officials recently called for the Trump administration to repeal these harmful actions and restore habitat protections for endangered species.

Now more than ever, it is time for other policymakers across the Gulf to join this chorus and oppose the Trump administration’s attempts to circumvent the protections of the Endangered Species Act. The reward for our actions will be nothing insignificant—a healthy ocean and thriving species for generations to come, in Texas and across the globe.