I grew up believing that fidelity to language is fidelity to truth. Scripture taught me that truth is a form of prayer and that naming is part of justice. Then I learned how language is trained to look away. In the American conversation about the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and Palestine, words are rinsed until they shine with neutrality, while the bodies they describe grow dim. The result is a strange theology of news, where grief must pass an examination before it is shared, and where power writes the glossary.

In the weeks after October 7, anchors found an ease of speech they rarely grant Palestinians. Faces from southern Israel filled our screens—named and mourned. By mid-October, Israel had killed thousands in Gaza, many of them children. The camera kept its distance. The word that leapt to the teleprompter was caution. Images blurred and numbers hedged, context was treated as suspicion rather than care.

The grief of one people became a national ceremony; the grief of another, a footnote.

I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

If language is a vessel for conscience, these choices matter. A hospital becomes a “compound,” bombardment becomes an “operation,” a family under rubble becomes “collateral.” Such phrasing allows atrocity to appear as policy, and policy to pass as inevitability. We are told this is balance, when in reality it scolds both the arsonist and the burning house.

As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once observed, “In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim.” The stakes of language decide whose grief is recognized and whose life is made expendable.

What we call balance often conceals allegiance. The United States supplies weapons, funding, diplomatic cover, and ideological shelter to Israel. Washington fast-tracks munitions while vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, demanding the press describe the result as a “cycle.” Institutions obey through habits as much as manufactured consent because the script is already written.

Editors learn which nouns invite trouble. Reporters learn which verbs are preferred. Freelancers learn the cost of clarity.

The money is not incidental. Contracts enrich the usual firms as careers rise in their shadow. The casualties are an afterthought. The ledger sits backstage, while the performance onstage goes by the name of neutrality. The empire supplies language and weapons, while it is language that returns the favor by laundering intent.

Every culture keeps a book of sorrows. In ours, some sorrows earn public sympathy more readily than others. When a Palestinian journalist is killed, headlines bend into the passive voice, and the subject disappears. When a Palestinian American is beaten at a checkpoint or murdered, procedure replaces justice. Families who bury their children must clear a test of civility, then defend the right to weep without a preface.

To mourn openly is treated as a provocation. To ask for equal mourning is to be accused of provocation.

This is how imperial culture works. If Palestinian grief is marginalized, policy can proceed. The audience is soothed by the idea that tragedy has no author, that rubble is a natural event, and that history began yesterday. In such a world, the right dead receive sympathy, while the living must demonstrate moderation.

If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

We were told that social media would democratize speech. Instead, many Palestinians and their allies discovered another border regime. Posts vanish without explanation and archives dissolve, as certain words trigger shadow bans. Meanwhile, coordinated networks flood platforms with talking points until the algorithm mistakes noise for truth.

People adapt. They speak in code. They smuggle testimony through poetry. They post with patience. The work continues because memory continues. Forgetting is the most dangerous technology.

Before my essays, I wrote sanctioned paragraphs inside large institutions. I learned how official speech is constructed, and how clarity is stripped from a sentence . . . One is encouraged to prefer symmetry over accuracy.

The effect is spiritual and does violence to one’s soul. Conscience is taught to whisper. The room obeys, when it should sound an alarm.

Our grief must first earn a hearing; our dead are assigned numbers rather than names. Empires hold territory and vocabulary alike. As such, recovering our speech is part of recovering our dignity.

The phrase “U.S. imperialism” may sound antique, but the reality is current. It lives in supply chains, military aid, diplomatic vetoes, and the expectation that our media will avoid language that might complicate partnership. It governs which deaths are described and which are rendered abstract. It shapes curriculum, philanthropy, and the scope of respectable debate. Above all, it trains the public to treat Palestinian life as a question, not a fact.

Imperial culture does not announce its arrival with banners. It moves through careful renaming. It borrows the aura of reason while pruning history. It requests deference in the name of complexity, and it rewards those who provide it with access.

Say occupation where there is an occupation. Say siege where there is a siege. If a journalist is killed, name the bullet and the chain of command. If a neighborhood is erased, name the policy that permits erasure. Then listen to survivors.

Such speech is an act of repair. It gives words back to the people who have lived under them. It restores trust between the public and the page.

There are journalists in the United States who begin from testimony rather than performance; who respect context over an alibi; who resist the symmetry that mistakes management for justice. Chris Hedges and Moustafa Bayoumi are among them. Their work does not flatter power. It honors the living by telling the truth about the dead. It remembers that language can also be occupied, and that freeing it is part of the same struggle.

To name is a civic and spiritual duty. Will you reflect? Will you testify? Will you remember the stranger? These are disciplines of attention. When we choose the word compound for a hospital, or incident for a massacre, we are answering those questions in the negative. When we choose accurate names, we widen the circle of humanity.

I do not write to police the language of others. I write to examine mine. I want a Western vocabulary that does not reduce Palestinians to a problem or political question in need of management. I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

Empire teaches us to treat reality as talking points. Faith teaches the opposite. If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

I offer these lines in the name of tenderness and law, memory and justice, which belong together when language is healthy. Violence is asymmetrical, just like truth. The world deserves words that admit as much.

Support journalists who center Palestinian testimony with patience and respect. Hold editors to their standards. Share stories that restore names and faces. Each act strengthens the possibility of a public language that does not betray the people who must live under it.

This is the work of citizens and of writers. It is the work of the heart.

Excerpted from If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness by Yahia Lababidi. Copyright © 2026 by Yahia Lababidi. All Rights Reserved.

In almost every interview I have conducted in recent weeks, and in nearly every conversation with Palestinian citizens of Israel on the streets of our towns, I have heard the same fear.

People are no longer talking primarily about civil rights, equality or better living conditions. They are talking about survival, and about whether they will be able to remain on their land.

At the entrances to our towns, Israeli election billboards are everywhere. Among them are those of the Religious Zionism party, whose leaders advocate extending the land seizures and settlement building pursued in the occupied West Bank to the Galilee and the Naqab, or Negev.

These messages confront us on the roads we travel, at the entrances to the places we call home.

How are people supposed to carry on calmly amid such threats?

For many people I have spoken to, voting is not about faith in parliamentary politics or expecting an Israeli government to deliver justice. It is an attempt to protect themselves, or at least to delay what they fear is coming.

As Palestinian political activity inside Israel has faced severe restrictions since 7 October 2023, voting remains one of the few political acts that does not carry the risks associated with protest.

My father is 70 years old. He has never voted in an election to Israel's parliament, the Knesset. This time, he will.

He is the son of a displaced Palestinian family and spent his childhood under Israeli military rule. Now he fears for our future on this land, for his grandchildren, and for the possibility that his family's history could repeat itself. He does not underestimate the danger. Neither do I.

A painful reckoning

Since 2018, I have held a clear ideological position against participating in Israel's Knesset elections.

I believed, and still believe, that our presence in this framework has harmed our political discourse. Too much of our struggle has been reduced to parliamentary work, while building independent political tools and organising ourselves as a community have been pushed aside.

In fundamental ways, this framework contradicts our vision of liberation and an end to the occupation. That is why I chose to boycott.

But today I find myself questioning that decision. After a painful political and intellectual struggle, I reached a conclusion I never expected. At this stage, we are too weak to boycott.

I turned down invitations to join initiatives encouraging Palestinians to vote. How could I ask others to vote when I was unsure myself? As a journalist, I covered the election campaign without calling on anyone to vote or boycott, and I stepped away from the noise to wrestle with my thoughts. It was exhausting.

At this stage, we are too weak to boycott

I have watched Israeli society's shift further towards the far right since 7 October, alongside the weakness and paralysis of Palestinian politics. Even amid a genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the Palestinian political leadership has failed to agree on a decision that could bring us together. Well, except for postponing Palestinian elections.

We are at rock bottom. We cannot even secure the simple right to harvest our olives safely. We lack effective political tools, a unifying national project and a clear way out of this devastation. There is nothing wrong with admitting it.

For me, boycott is not a moral position that can simply hang in the air. It is a political tool. It must have meaning, impact and a place within a larger political project, or at least offer an alternative.

An individual's refusal to participate can express a principle. A collective boycott that can challenge a system requires organisation, shared objectives and a way to turn refusal into political power.

The politics of remaining

I am not questioning the legitimacy of boycott. I am questioning what it can achieve now, when that collective project is missing. If participation cannot liberate us, and boycott offers no practical alternative, what do we do with the few possibilities that remain?

I have listened to people who want to vote even if all they hope for is to delay the demolition of a single home. Yet the fear now reaches beyond demolitions to displacement from the Naqab and the Galilee. "We're next," I hear everywhere.

When people fear losing their homes and land, how can I dismiss their concerns from the comfort of political theory?

We are a frightened community, and I do not think we fully understand the political and moral meaning of simply remaining: holding on to our place, surviving and enduring in the face of war and killing. That, too, is resistance.

How many around us have considered leaving? How many already have? How many of us have quietly wondered whether we can go on living here? The right to remain is no longer something we can take for granted.

We need reasons and resources to remain. I do not believe the Knesset itself can provide them. What matters is whether people coming together around Arab electoral lists might also rebuild collective political action beyond parliament.

Our crisis will not be solved by a few more Knesset seats. We need to rebuild ourselves politically and socially, far beyond any election.

I will vote.

I know that any alternative government would be no dove of peace. Changing governments will not end the occupation, dismantle colonial structures or transform a system built on Jewish supremacy. I have no illusions about that.

But I cannot bear the thought of Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir remaining in power for another year. I want to see these blood-soaked men defeated, even if only for a moment. Anger is not a political strategy, but neither can I pretend it plays no part in my decision.

Voting without illusions

I understand the argument that Palestinian participation can help Israel present itself as a democracy while concealing structures of domination and inequality. Yet after all this bloodshed, I struggle to see how my ballot could restore the state's moral legitimacy. Participating does not mean endorsing the system; it means making a choice within the narrow space still available.

Perhaps political change will not prevent catastrophe. Perhaps it will only delay it, giving people a moment to breathe. When possibilities are so scarce, I do not want to let even one slip away.

I will vote for the slightest possibility that conditions might improve for Palestinian prisoners, even though their cause does not receive the place it deserves on Arab parties' electoral platforms.

And I cannot turn away from the pleas of Palestinians on the other side of the wall: "For God's sake, get this government off our backs. We just need to breathe, even if only for a little while."

I am not presenting voting as salvation. My reservations remain. I still believe liberation will not come through the Israeli parliament, but through our ability to build institutions, organize collectively and act as a people. Yet political convictions must remain accountable to the lives of those in whose name we hold them.

I think of my father, who lived seven decades without voting in an Israeli election and now plans to do so because he fears for his grandchildren. I cannot dismiss what that means, or the concerns of the many others who see a ballot as one remaining attempt to protect their place on this land.

I will go to the ballot box carrying all my old doubts with me. And at this rock bottom, I do not want to leave a single stone unturned.

We’re just days out from November 3, and already millions of Americans are heading to the polls or dropping off their mail-in ballots, while threats to their freedom to vote continue making front-page news.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump and members of his administration have desperately tried to take over our elections—a move that is both unconstitutional and has, thus far, failed. But these realities haven’t stopped him from indicating a willingness to have federal officers show up at polling places, something that has been illegal since the Civil War. He has continually railed against vote-by-mail, despite the US Supreme Court blocking his most damaging plans. And where he has failed to pass federal legislation or successfully move executive orders, he has repeatedly attacked our elections. In fact, he spread false or misleading claims about our elections on 70% of the days of his second term.

And while Trump’s efforts continue to fail to pass legal muster, there are two intertwined threats built into his continued public flirtation with election interference: anti-voter actions themselves, and the confusion and chaos created by floating these plans in public.

The job of the media ecosystem—whether print journalists, TV pundits, or content creators on TikTok—is to make sure the American people know the truth.

The media ecosystem has a big role to play in mitigating that second threat.

Even if Trump and his allies know they will lose in court if they try these illegal moves to subvert the election, they can still successfully control our elections if they cause enough noise to overwhelm voters and discourage turnout.

The confusion is the point. Clarity is the cure.

Consider the rumors about the federal government deploying its agents in connection with voting.

Surely, the Trump administration knows that sending ICE to polling places is illegal and unpopular. And the administration is already backtracking on earlier statements. But as voting gets underway, the media and anyone with a platform must avoid sensationalizing, verify any reports before sharing, and make clear that the presence of ICE or other federal agents at voting sites would be straightforwardly illegal. That doesn’t mean dismissing the tangible fears Black and Brown voters may have. Instead, we can reassure voters by highlighting election workers' preparations, encouraging voters to cast their ballots with their neighbors (as millions of Americans have already done), and emphasizing the steps voting rights advocates are taking to protect access to the ballot.

While the fears of ICE feel unique to 2026, we have been down a similar road in the past. In 2022, there was extensive media coverage of a handful of armed people in tactical gear who showed up at voting drop boxes in Maricopa County, AZ. As courts later confirmed, this was undoubtedly an illegal situation that should never have happened. Although it was isolated to two drop boxes in a county larger than Connecticut, the incident received widespread coverage throughout Arizona and nationwide, and spread quickly on social media. Coverage of important incidents like this should include the key context that lets voters know they can still vote safely.

The media is powerful, and its job is so important. In 1965, the media coverage of Selma’s Bloody Sunday allowed the whole country to see the reality of voter suppression, generating outrage in communities beyond those directly affected by it. Eight days after images from Selma aired on live broadcasts and appeared on the front pages of newspapers, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress, urging them to pass the Voting Rights Act.

The job of the media ecosystem—whether print journalists, TV pundits, or content creators on TikTok—is to make sure the American people know the truth. As we approach Election Day, that includes the reality that threats of election interference are desperate moves doomed to fail.

We cannot treat threats to deploy federal officers at polling places, efforts to restrict mail-in voting, or refusals to certify lawful election results as ordinary legal debates. We must call them out as attempts to control our elections that we, the American people, will not tolerate. This is how we instill confidence in the election and in our democracy.

After all the rhetoric undermining elections from the White House, it’s understandable that voters may fear the worst-case scenarios. Those steering the public conversation should remember the power of their work to dispel those fears with the truth.

The framers of the Constitution considered the role of the press important enough to list it explicitly in the First Amendment. Two hundred and fifty years after our founding, the media is as critical as ever in safeguarding our democracy.

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• Catholic bishops accuse the White House of conning them and then secretly filming them praying over Trump in the Oval Office and turning a private meeting into a political stunt.

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

Today we also discuss:

• Protests work in France! The nation scraps its controversial Parcoursup university admissions platform after weeks of violent student protests over school conditions and living costs. Officials promise more spots, higher grants, and funding renovations, yet students demand far bigger concessions and keep protesting.

• Middle East Crisis: Netanyahu presses Israel’s military for strike on Iran before today’s election, but the chief of staff resists. Egypt’s parliament green-lights President Sisi to send defensive military aid—air defenses and aircraft—to Saudi Arabia against Houthis.

• Thieves hack freight systems, spoof GPS trackers, and even ram security escorts to steal over $100 million in servers, chips, and copper destined for data centers. Experts call the gear “pure gold bars” and warn the digital heists are only growing.

• The Justice Department files a third case against ex-FBI director James Comey, accusing him of leaking classified information in 2016 and using a rare “criminal information” to beat the statute of limitations. And a federal judge rules the Trump administration unlawfully fired Maurene Comey, his daughter, and orders her reinstatement with back pay.

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In times of crisis—and who can doubt that we are living in one now?—political people ask themselves whether they are about to witness a dramatic ideological realignment and, if so, whether the reconfiguration of the left-to-right spectrum of U.S. electoral contests opens up new possibilities for themselves and the issues that motivate them.

We are currently undergoing a major realignment, perhaps as significant as the one that began in World War I and culminated with the 1932 election of FDR and the status quo that Americans have lived with all their lives. In that earlier shift, Democrats abandoned their conservativism and became a liberal coalition of working-class people, labor unions, ethnic minorities, and marginalized identity groups, while Republicans embraced big business, libertarianism, and an aggressive, militaristic, materialistic posture toward foreign policy.

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, who could have imagined that—at least in their rhetoric and campaigning, if not in actual governance—Republicans would identify themselves as isolationists and even protectionists supporting late-19th-century-style tariffs, while Democrats, epitomized by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, articulated a hawkish Russophobia marked by the leveraging of Ukraine into radical NATO expansion, and were even willing to lose the 2024 presidential election over their unwillingness to stop arming Israel as it committed genocide in Gaza? Yet here we are.

This has populists of the left and right wondering if it is time to leave their respective big-tent major parties—both of which barely tolerated them in exchange for their votes—and form a unified populist front organized around a simple proposition: America and Americans first?

We’ve seen intriguing hints that a united populist front may be possible. 12% those who voted for Bernie in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. Trump appointed RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard—figures to the left of the Democratic mainstream—to his administration. Young men in particular shifted from Bernie in 2020 to Trump in 2024.

Let’s set aside, for the next few hundred words, the question of whether left-wing populists, primarily motivated by economic inequality, can not only make common cause with but actually work on an ongoing basis—perhaps even in a new major political party—with right-wing populists who are, in large part, more worried about losing what they perceive as the country’s cultural and ethnic identity to immigration.

When you’re in a lousy marriage, as populists of both stripes are with the Democrats and Republicans, the first step should not be to search for a new boyfriend or girlfriend, but rather to consider whether you’re willing to go through the pain of a divorce to the extent that anything—even being alone—would probably be better. By that standard, populists really should consider ditching the big two, because they are not understood and never will be.

In a recently published conversation, “the economist Natasha Sarin and the Bulwark editor Catherine Rampell examine the strange disconnect between how the economy is doing and how Americans feel about it,” as the New York Times put it. First, they note that consumer confidence is in the toilet. Then they wonder aloud about the fact that public opinion of the economy worse than during the Great Recession of 2008–2009, even though, by most conventional measures, it has improved significantly since then. “Why do people say this economy is so terrible? Why do they hate it so much?” Rampell muses.

She doesn’t really know. “I don’t think that the economy is actually in the trash, despite those consumer sentiment numbers we were talking about,” Rampell continues. “People say that they hate this economy, that it sucks, that it’s worse than the financial crisis and the Great Recession. I do not—again, I do not think any of that is true.”

Allow me to introduce you to the Rall Economic Indicators (REI).

First REI metric:

Can I find a job?

72% currently say this is a bad time to look for work.

Answer: No.

Second REI metric:

Can I pay my bills?

27% currently fall short.

Answer: No.

Third REI metric:

Can I save money for the future?

62% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

If two out of three REIs exceed 50%, the economy officially sucks.

The first step toward never solving a problem is refusing to admit that it exists—or never seeing it in the first place.

The great mushy moderate middle blob that controls economic thinking in Washington and mainstream media can’t address populism because they don’t understand where populists are coming from.

Economic populists are individuals. Unlike a business with high access to credit at reasonable interest rates, American consumers who lose their job and/or suffer through years of watching their wages eaten away by inflation can’t write off a bad quarter or easily pay off their accumulated debts if and when things turn around. Millions of Americans still haven’t financially recovered from the Great Recession and never will.

For most of the people who have come around to the idea of putting America first, the U.S. economy is not an infinitely growing postwar machine that will generate wealth for everybody, but rather a finite set of resources and a zero-sum game in which every job that goes to an H-1B visa holder from another country is one that won’t go to them, their child, or someone they know or care about. This scarcity mentality—whether fair or not (I happen to believe that it is fair)—is inherently incompatible with the worldview of the two major parties, for whom your individual problems are your concern, not theirs.

Which brings us to the question, as promised, of a left-right alliance among populists. There is plenty of common ground; most Americans readily agree that we shouldn’t be sending billions of dollars to other countries when so many Americans are suffering here at home and the nation’s infrastructure is in such woeful condition.

As in any alliance, the concern is about the differences that might tear apart a Populist Front down the line. Could left-wing populists make peace with their right-wing counterparts who openly espouse nativist and even xenophobic views? Could the right embrace the social-welfare spending and retraining expenses that would help displaced American workers, rather than focus on debt repayment or deficit reduction?

Significant parts of the American electorate are starting to consider not whether it’s time to get divorced, but who their new partner will be and whether they will be able to make their new marriage better than the last.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post Can Left and Right Create a Populist Front? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

At 80, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pulled off an extraordinary political victory. After losing the first round to Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, by 47 percent to 45 percent, Lula defied the odds to secure a stunning second-round victory, with 51.8 percent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent.

His triumph confounded every pre-election poll and crowned a dramatic campaign revival that few had anticipated.

Lula’s victory in Latin America’s largest country does more than halt the far right’s return to power in Brazil. It breaks a succession of right-wing electoral victories across the region and deals a major blow to United States President Donald Trump’s increasingly interventionist agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

When Bolsonaro unexpectedly defeated Lula in the first round, the result sent shockwaves across Brazil and beyond. For the government, the defeat was particularly startling given its strong socioeconomic record. What followed was an extraordinary three-week political mobilisation that transformed the sluggish first-round campaign of Lula’s Workers’ Party into an existential confrontation over the future of democracy and sovereignty in Brazil.

The economic record was hardly that of a government heading for defeat. Brazil’s economy grew by a cumulative 9.2 percent between 2023 and 2025, compared with an average of just 5.6 percent among its South American neighbours. Unemployment fell from 9.3 percent in 2022 to a historic low of 5.4 percent in 2026.

Brazil also exited the United Nations Hunger Map in 2025, after having returned to it under the Bolsonaro senior administration. In the Amazon, deforestation fell to its lowest level in decades, a sharp reversal of the trend under his predecessor.

Not everything has been rosy under the Lula administration. Millions of Brazilians have remained trapped in credit-card debt, struggling with extremely high interest rates, while an explosion of online gambling has devastated the livelihoods of families. The run-off result sent a clear signal that there was social discontent.

Lula responded with unusually bold measures: a sweeping debt-relief initiative and restrictions on online betting, as well as expanded social benefits, fuel subsidies, and the transition from a six-day to a five-day working week. These policies sought to reconnect the government’s macroeconomic achievements with the everyday economic anxieties of Brazilian voters.

Bolsonaro offered a radically different vision for Brazil: sweeping spending cuts, privatisations, lower taxes and, above all, an iron-fisted response to crime and insecurity. His proposals included building five maximum-security prisons modelled on El Salvador’s notorious penitentiary system and authorising lethal force against heavily armed criminals.

Bolsonaro also pledged to pardon his father, sentenced to 27 years for plotting to overturn the 2022 election, and to grant clemency to those convicted over the January 8, 2023 assault on Brazil’s democratic institutions. For his supporters, this represented an opportunity to reverse what they considered judicial persecution. For his opponents, it threatened to rehabilitate the attempted coup and undermine judicial independence.

Lula’s campaign came back re-energised, with many young Brazilians mobilising at the grassroots level. The campaign was able to overcome even algorithmic bias by social media giants like Meta, which favoured Bolsonaro.

Ultimately, the election became a battle not only over Brazil’s democracy but also its sovereignty. Trump’s administration has intervened conspicuously in Brazilian politics throughout Lula’s term, imposing punitive tariffs, sanctioning a Supreme Court justice involved in Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution and openly embracing his son’s candidacy.

In May, Trump received Flavio Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Brazil’s two largest crime organisations as foreign terrorist organisations, a measure Flavio had publicly requested.

These designations carry implications extending far beyond electoral politics. They potentially open the door to US military operations on Brazilian territory under Washington’s expanding war on so-called “narcoterrorism”. The world saw how one such foreign terrorist designation enabled the US to intervene militarily in Venezuela and abduct its sitting president.

Whereas Trump seeks to draw Latin America’s largest country into Washington’s expanding system of hemispheric military dominance, Lula has defended Brazil’s strategic autonomy, insisting that cooperation against organised crime must respect national sovereignty.

He framed the election as a choice between a sovereign Brazil charting its own course and one subordinated to Washington’s geopolitical agenda. Sunday’s election result shows that the Brazilian people have made their choice.

Importantly, Lula’s victory may mark a turning point in Latin America’s rightward shift. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the right has scored a string of electoral victories in Honduras, Chile, and Bolivia, among others. But Lula’s re-election suggests that its momentum may be faltering.

The result comes just ahead of the US midterms and could deliver a significant setback to the strength of Trump’s leadership in the Americas. In Argentina, President Javier Milei — who regularly attacks Lula and threw all his weight behind Bolsonaro — has been sliding in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. In Chile, President Jose Antonio Kast has suffered an even more precipitous collapse in public support.

Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, has likely breathed a sigh of relief. A Lula defeat would have left her increasingly isolated in a region gravitating towards Mexico’s northern neighbour. Instead, Latin America’s two most populous countries and largest economies will remain firmly on the left for the foreseeable future.

It is too early to declare the region’s rightward turn over. But Lula’s victory raises the possibility that the wave has already crested. Brazil will not be joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and while the “Donroe Doctrine” remains a threat, its moment of greatest ascendancy may already be behind it.

Lula’s victory is a vindication of a lifetime spent fighting for society’s most marginalized and disenfranchised. And its significance extends far beyond Brazil’s borders. For defenders of democracy, multilateralism, international law, environmental protection and the sovereignty of the Global South, it sends a powerful message: the far right’s advance is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Not in Brazil. Not anywhere.

The Michigan Senate race between the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, is this year’s most important election.

It’s significant, on a number of levels, not the least of which is that El-Sayed is an Arab American Muslim of Egyptian descent. Prior to this, we’ve had four Arab Americans elected to the US Senate—former Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME), James Abourezk (D-SD), James Abdnor (R-SD), and John Sununu (R-NH)—none of them Muslim.

If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim in the Senate. This is a breakthrough that hasn’t been lost on Republicans and President Trump, who have made a determined effort to exploit it at every turn. They’ve done TV ads alleging that El-Sayed’s mother was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s. The problem with this charge is that El-Sayed’s parents separated when he was three; she moved back to Egypt and he grew up with his father in Michigan. But when using slanderous attacks to tarnish a candidate is the goal, facts don’t matter. And so, the GOP has persisted in spreading the Muslim Brotherhood lie on social media and by sending paid hecklers to El-Sayed’s campaign events pestering him with questions and comments like: “Will you denounce the Muslim Brotherhood?” A recent exchange of this sort backfired on the Republican instigators.

At a town hall when a young man asked whether El-Sayed would denounce the group, El-Sayed shot back, “Yes, absolutely,” and then pivoted by asking the questioner, “Why are you asking me this?” wanting to know whether it was because of his name and how he prayed. He then made clear that the document to which he would take an oath was the US Constitution and smartly compared the attacks against his religion with those leveled against President Kennedy—that Kennedy would be more loyal to the Catholic Pope than to the Constitution. El-Sayed concluded noting that he wasn’t running to be a Muslim senator, but a senator who happened to be a Muslim.

That exchange went viral on social media, drawing more than 50 million viewers the first night. The next day it was revealed that the heckler was a former staffer for a very conservative anti-Muslim Senator. He had been hired by a group that had received a very substantial contract to hire hecklers to disrupt El-Sayed events.

This brings into focus another reason why this election is so important: the role of dark money in American politics. Dark money refers to money raised by “super PACs” and independent expenditure funds that are not required to report donors before elections. This has allowed billionaires and special interest groups to amass large sums and spend them to defame candidates who oppose their agendas. Increasingly, these dark money sources are raising and spending more on campaigns than the candidates raise for themselves.

In the primary, El-Sayed was confronted by dark money expenditures of $70 million ($31 million from pro-Israel groups), much of it on negative attacks against him. Despite being outspent by a margin of 11 to 1, El-Sayed won. In the general election, it is estimated that another $100 million in dark money will be spent against him. If he wins, it will demonstrate the limits of dark money and help advance the argument that dark money should be banned because of its corrosive role in our democracy.

From the beginning of his campaign, El-Sayed has been a clear and consistent critic of US support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. This was the main reason why so much pro-Israel super PAC money was spent to defeat him. His Democratic primary opponent made support for Israel central to her campaign, at one point emotionally noting how much she loved and would always stand by Israel. Pro-Israel Jewish organizations denounced El-Sayed and did their best to tarnish him, labeling him antisemitic. This succeeded in costing El-Sayed some support from Jewish American Democratic voters. In spite of this attrition, he won the primary, with one pre-election survey saying he had nevertheless retained the support of a bloc of progressive Jewish voters.

Now in the general, El-Sayed is still being confronted by the same attacks and an organized effort among these same pro-Israel groups who are pledging to vote for his opponent. El-Sayed has made it clear that instead of spending billions to buy bombs to kill Palestinians, America’s wealth ought to go to build better schools, provide health care, and provide for people’s needs here at home. While this was once a taboo topic, it has resonated with Democrats and independent voters. This, in itself, is a breakthrough.

Finally, an El-Sayed victory will succeed in advancing a progressive agenda. Despite being attacked as a socialist, he maintains that he is a supporter of capitalism who wants to see it work to meet the needs of people. He makes this point with a mantra he uses to begin his rallies: “Money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for all.” His arguments are simple: It shouldn’t be easier for a billionaire to make another billion than it is for a family to be lifted out of poverty. Health care should be seen as a human right for all, not a privilege that can only be afforded by some. And instead of spending billions for wars, we need to invest in schools and the quality of life here at home.

These are the challenges El-Sayed presents to our politics. If he wins, he will have succeeded in shattering taboos and raising issues that will have a lasting impact. And even if, God forbid, he loses, our politics will never be the same. On so many levels, this is a historic, transformative campaign.

For almost two months, an Air Force officer has been sitting alone in a cell, 24 hours a day. When they let him out to eat or exercise, he’s still alone, according to his attorney.

His name is Major Jason Watson. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. Under military law he is presumed innocent, yet he’s still in that cell.

I know something about solitary confinement. I also know what it feels like when a government would rather silence you than answer for its transgressions. That’s why I can’t stay quiet about Major Watson. And it’s why I think we need to talk about the kind of courage this country says it admires, right up until someone actually shows it.

What Major Watson Did

On July 1, Major Watson walked up the House steps of the US Capitol in uniform and stood there holding a sign that read “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” He was calling for the removal of President Trump and Vice President Vance. Capitol Police arrested him. The D.C. charges were dropped, but he was taken from the courthouse straight into Air Force custody and restricted to base. In August he went on CNN and said it again. The next day, the Air Force ordered him into pretrial confinement.

He now faces ten charges under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ): three under Article 88 for allegedly using “contemptuous words” against the president, five under Article 92 for failing to obey orders or regulations, and two under Article 133 for “conduct unbecoming an officer,” as his lawyers confirmed in a public statement.

I’m not here to argue about uniform regulations. What bothers me, and what should bother anyone paying attention, is what the Article 88 charges and that solitary cell tell us about how power handles real dissent.

Major Watson has shown a steady, stubborn courage that’s rare anywhere, and rarer still when your career and freedom are on the line.

Watson didn’t hide behind a fake name. He didn’t retain or leak anything classified. He put his own name and face on what he believed, in public, knowing what it would cost.

Before he took that stand, he asked himself, “What’s the highest price that I’m willing to pay?” His answer was, more or less, whatever it takes. That’s what bravery looks like. You’re still afraid. You go anyway, knowing hell is coming.

Punished Before He Is Tried

Here is what troubles me most. The military is punishing Major Watson while claiming to follow the very rules that forbid it. Article 13 of the UCMJ says no one being held for trial may be punished, and that pretrial confinement may be no “more rigorous than the circumstances require to insure his presence.” The idea is straight-forward. Someone waiting for a court-martial is presumed innocent, and the military isn’t allowed to treat him as guilty.

Locking a person alone in a cell for months is punishment by any ordinary meaning of the word. Watson’s attorney has said solitary is usually reserved for people who are violent or disobedient, and even then only for a few days or a week. At Watson’s Article 32 hearing, the hearing officer said the isolation was required because he can’t be housed with civilian inmates.

Even if you accept that explanation, it doesn’t undo what isolation does to a person’s mind. And it doesn’t answer the bigger question: why is a peaceful man whose only “offense” was speaking locked up at all? You can’t even argue that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, because officially it isn’t punishment. When the people offended by your words also get to decide what counts as a crime, and what counts as punishment, the law stops being fair or predictable.

I can tell you from experience that solitary is built to grind you down. I was thrown into solitary in prison because I wouldn’t let a guard on a power trip treat me as anything less than a human being. My punishment for standing up for my dignity was a cell less than half the size of my usual cage. No window. No sunlight. Nothing to remind me there was a world outside. No contact with anyone, including my family, who went days without hearing from me and had no idea what was happening.

That kind of isolation isn’t about safety or order or paperwork. It’s about breaking someone, and about sending a message to everyone else. Major Watson stood up against an administration he believes is trampling the Constitution. For that act of conscience, they’re trying to make him disappear.

Article 88 and the Espionage Act

Article 88 makes it a crime for a commissioned officer to use “contemptuous words” against the president, the vice president, Congress, and certain other officials. It is almost never used. A CNN review found only two convictions under it since the modern military code took effect in 1950.

The military’s own Manual for Courts-Martial, as one legal analysis explains, says that criticism of an official in the course of political discussion, even strongly worded criticism, shouldn’t be charged under this article unless it is personally contemptuous. Watson put it simply at his hearing: “discomfort is not contempt.”

For that act of conscience, they’re trying to make him disappear.

How the article gets used is concerning. In 2021, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller posted videos in uniform demanding accountability from senior leaders over the Afghanistan withdrawal, at one point saying he felt “contempt” for them. He was charged under Article 88 too. With prominent supporters cheering him on, his case went to a special court-martial, the lower-level forum. He spent nine days in the brig, pleaded guilty, and walked away with a letter of reprimand and a $5,000 forfeiture of pay. Watson’s lawyers summed up the problem: “The law will not make the same word a virtue in one officer’s mouth and a felony in another’s.”

I recognize this double standard because I’ve lived it. The Espionage Act of 1917 was written to catch spies. Today it’s regularly used against whistleblowers who tell the public what the government would rather keep quiet, and defendants usually aren’t allowed to argue that their disclosures served the public interest. Groups like PEN America, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch have warned for years that laws this broad invite selective prosecution. The cases of John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Thomas Drake show those warnings were right.

Look at Courtney Williams, who worked in a support role for Delta Force at Fort Bragg from 2010 to 2016. She talked to an investigative reporter about sexual harassment and discrimination inside the unit. In April, the FBI arrested her, and she now faces four Espionage Act counts, each carrying up to ten years. Prosecutors say some of what she shared was classified. The reporter she spoke with calls the case retaliation against a whistleblower. Either way, plenty of former special operators talk openly about their units on popular podcasts without ending up in handcuffs.

Article 88 and the Espionage Act are different laws, but they end up doing the same job. They’re old, broad nets that can be thrown over anyone who speaks uncomfortable truths about those in power. Whether the target is a whistleblower or an outspoken officer, the result is silence. And every time we let these tools get dusted off, we make it easier to use them on the next person.

The Oath Wasn’t to a Person

Every public servant, civilian or military, swears to support and defend the Constitution. None of them swears loyalty to a president, a party, or a movement.

There’s a difference between the enlisted and officer oaths worth knowing. Enlisted members promise to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Officers don’t make that promise. Under the officer’s oath, they swear to support and defend the Constitution and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of their office. That difference, as the Marine Corps itself explains, is deliberate. An officer’s final loyalty belongs to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to whoever is sitting in the Oval Office.

Watson has said his oath is exactly why he went to those Capitol steps, and that he acted out of duty, not partisanship. His point is that no leader is above the law. Yet “support and defend the Constitution” keeps getting bent into a demand for personal loyalty. People who stand on principle end up in solitary. People who look the other way get promoted.

Service and Speech

I have deep respect for the military and its traditions. The military can’t be anyone’s political tool, and service members have to follow lawful orders. The rules that keep uniforms out of partisan politics exist for good reason: they keep the military under civilian control and out of the hands of any one side. Those rules matter.

But this is about proportion. Joining the military doesn’t mean giving up your basic rights. Courts have long held that service members keep some free-speech protection, even if it is narrower than a civilian’s, as long as their speech doesn’t seriously threaten discipline or the mission.

So it’s fair to ask where the line really is. Does one peaceful protest justify criminal charges and months in solitary? A military confident enough to handle criticism from within its own ranks is stronger than one that keeps people in line through fear.

“I Was Only Following Orders”

We settled the question of blind obedience after World War II. At Nuremberg, the world rejected “just following orders” as an excuse. The principle that came out of those trials says acting on orders doesn’t relieve you of responsibility “provided a moral choice was in fact possible.” Our own military law requires service members to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones.

We rightly honor people like Hugh Thompson, the Army helicopter pilot who landed his aircraft between American soldiers and fleeing Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. He was treated as an outcast for years. The Army didn’t award him the Soldier’s Medal until 1998, thirty years later. We can’t keep telling every generation of service members that they have a duty to refuse wrongdoing, then crush the ones who actually say so out loud.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this from a Birmingham jail cell. We have a duty to obey just laws, he said, and an equal duty to disobey unjust ones. But “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

That’s the tradition Major Watson acted in. He didn’t hide. He stood in the open, told his superiors where he stood, and accepted the consequences. If the right of conscience doesn’t belong to every citizen, it doesn’t really belong to anyone. And a country where no one can tell the powerful the truth isn’t a free country.

What We Owe Him

Major Watson has shown a steady, stubborn courage that’s rare anywhere, and rarer still when your career and freedom are on the line. He didn’t hide behind technicalities or double-talk. He put everything on the line for the principles he swore to uphold.

We owe him our voices, for his sake and for our own. When the government turns its full weight against someone who takes his oath seriously, we can’t just wait for politicians or courts to fix it. It takes ordinary people, standing together, to demand fairness, shine a light into those cells, and make sure the people who tell the truth don’t have to stand alone.

I encourage everyone to show support for Major Watson by spreading the word about his courage and how he is being persecuted for standing up for truth. You can also help by sending letters of support to Major Watson while he is being confined to the following address:

Jason P. Watson
Calvert County Detention Center
P.O. Box 9
Barstow, MD 20610

The US Senate is considering a bill to ease the environmental permitting of infrastructure projects. It’s a blatant giveaway to the fossil fuel and data center industries that would stifle input from the communities most impacted by their expansion.

Bill proponents claim it will ease the buildout of renewable energy. However, peer reviewed studies have shown that most renewable energy projects do not face significant permitting delays, and that permitting delays under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are mostly attributable to staff shortages and communication delays between project developers and permitting agencies—not the stringency of the permitting process itself.

If bill proponents really wanted to expand renewable energy, they would focus on reversing the disastrous repeal of wind and solar tax credits in last year’s budget bill, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” Under that law, there are no remaining federal tax credits for households to put solar panels on their homes, stifling the growth of distributed solar energy. And most utility-scale solar or wind projects that commenced construction after July 4, 2026 will also be ineligible for tax credits.

This bill strips the public of their right to have a say in what gets built in their communities, in whose interest, and at what cost to human rights, air and water quality, public health, and culturally important places.

Instead, the permitting bill limits the power of communities and state, local, and tribal governments to challenge fossil fuel and data center projects, stacking the deck in favor of project developers.

For example, Section 1202 of the bill limits the authority states and tribes currently have under the Clean Water Act to certify federally permitted projects as compliant with their own water quality standards. This would prevent states and tribes from requiring stronger standards than the federal government, allowing projects that they determine will harm water quality to go forward.

Additionally, the “project certainty” provisions in Sections 1401 through 1403 of the bill grant project developers the right to sue the government for “disparate treatment” if their project is denied a permit when similar projects have been approved in the past. This would effectively bar a future administration from denying permits for polluting infrastructure if this one greenlights them.

A Dream Bill for Data Center Developers and Fossil Fuel Companies

The proliferation of data centers is leading to a boom in fracked gas power generation, driving up greenhouse gas emissions and undoing progress in making the electric grid fossil fuel free. This is a giant step backwards happening at the worst possible time, with the Antarctic ice sheet collapsing, and drought and glacier loss threatening the world’s freshwater supply.

Backup diesel and gas turbine generators at data centers also emit toxic air pollutants such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which are responsible for cancer, asthma and other respiratory diseases, and cardiovascular disease.

While families struggle with the high cost of living, massive (and growing) energy consumption by data centers is driving up utility bills for regular people. The permitting bill purports to address this problem by requiring data center developers to pay for the added cost of transmission to meet their demand, but that’s only one of the ways in which data centers impact utility bills. Increased demand for fracked gas from data centers is also driving up natural gas prices, and consequently household electricity and gas bills.

Direct water consumption by data centers for cooling servers, and indirect water consumption for fracked gas power generation to supply data centers, pose an additional threat to water availability in already water-stressed communities.

In spite of these serious concerns, the bill makes it harder for communities to use federal law to challenge proposals for data centers or their ancillary fossil fuel infrastructure (such as fracked gas pipelines and power plants).

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that fossil fuel infrastructure should not be built today, period. Bill proponents’ assumption that the increased buildout of renewable energy and transmission lines from deregulating permitting would more than make up for the simultaneous increase in fossil fuels is at odds with peer-reviewed science.

Easing permitting of fossil fuel infrastructure is discriminatory and contrary to environmental justice. Our environmental permitting system already allows for rampant race and class discrimination in the siting of polluting facilities. This racist bill will lock in protections for polluting corporations while depriving historically marginalized communities of even the limited rights they have today.

Speeding up infrastructure permitting will not lower energy bills either, contrary to bill proponents’ claims. It might increase the cost of living instead. In addition to data centers driving up demand for natural gas, natural gas prices could also rise if more liquid natural gas (LNG) is exported. Under the bill, LNG exports will get a boost from easier permitting of LNG terminals.

Despite greenlighting more fossil fuel infrastructure, proponents claim that the bill will reduce overall emissions. But that claim is based on seriously flawed modeling.

For one example, the models use the EPA estimates for leakage of methane, a short-lived but potent climate pollutant from oil and gas production, when accounting for the emissions impact of more fossil fuel infrastructure. But a number of independent studies have shown that the EPA seriously underestimates methane leakage.

For another, the models conveniently ignore emissions from US fossil fuel exports, because the emissions from burning the fuels occur in a different country. Ignoring emissions from exports is a bad faith shell game.

Assault on Democracy

This bill strips the public of their right to have a say in what gets built in their communities, in whose interest, and at what cost to human rights, air and water quality, public health, and culturally important places.

This is an end-run around democracy. Yes, bad faith actors sometimes misuse procedural protections for the wrong reasons, delaying or blocking good projects based on frivolous objections. But using that as a pretext to limit communities’ ability to have any say in projects institutionalizes the subordination of community rights to corporate interests.

That’s exactly why powerful industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) have come out in support of this bill. Senators who claim to care about addressing climate change should recognize that if they’re on the same side as API, they’re on the wrong side of the climate fight.

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.

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• Voting has begun in the US midterm elections. With 8 days left until Nov. 3rd, Democrats are heavy favorites for the House (85–95% across models, projecting ~230 seats) and slight favorites for the Senate (55–75%). A generic-ballot lead of roughly 8–11 points and Trump’s ~37% approval create a Democratic-leaning environment. Republicans currently hold narrow majorities (House 218–214, Senate 53–47); races in Maine, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska are decisive.

Filling in for the vacationing Jamarl is Jeff Dornik. Jeff Dornik is the founder and CEO of Pickax, a free-speech social media platform, and co-founder of Freedom First Network. He hosts The Jeff Dornik Show, and has co-authored books including Church & State and Social Injustice. He focuses on free speech, politics, culture, faith, and challenging Big Tech censorship.

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

Today we also discuss:

• At a Port Huron rally for Mike Rogers, Trump intensified anti-Muslim attacks on Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “jihadist,” suggesting he wanted Sharia law, and claiming Christmas would end if Democrats won. In Detroit, Obama backed El-Sayed, declaring “change is in the air” and calling the midterms the “last best chance” to rein in Trump’s “foolishness,” corruption, and high costs.

• Brazil’s Lula won a fourth term with 51.8% of the vote, overcoming a first-round deficit—the first since 1989. His opponent Flávio Bolsonaro disputed the results and called for annulment after voting hours were extended. The win breaks a recent string of conservative victories in Latin America.

• Longtime Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in parliamentary elections to the student-led “Student List-Students Win” slate, which secured at least 135 of 250 seats. The result followed nearly two years of protests; celebrations erupted in Belgrade.

• A Young Turks video features three men claiming the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (who died in July) paid them for sex, including one who says he was 17 and was secretly filmed. The release comes amid South Carolina’s Senate race involving Graham’s sister.

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For Americans on the Left, especially Boomers and Gen Xers who remember the actual activism of the 1960s and 1970s, there’s a longing to see their children follow the example of students in France and throughout Europe, who are leading inspiring demonstrations and confronting police fearlessly in their quest to build a better society.

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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.