The American Israel Public Affairs Committee failed on Tuesday to secure wins in the two Illinois US House primaries it invested the most money in, the latest electoral flop for the pro-Israel lobbying organization whose brand has become increasingly noxious to Democratic voters amid Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

In Illinois’ 7th and 9th Congressional Districts, AIPAC spent millions backing Chicago treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, who finished second, and Democratic State Sen. Laura Fine, who finished third. In the latter race, AIPAC pivoted from initially attacking Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss—who ultimately won—to concentrate on defeating Justice Democrats-backed Kat Abughazaleh.

AIPAC, which faced backlash for trying to conceal its spending in the Illinois contests using shell organizations, tried to spin the 9th Congressional District results as a win, despite spending more against Biss than against Abughazaleh.

“Though Kat narrowly lost this race, we are proud to have backed this campaign that helped ensure the people of IL-09 would not be represented by another AIPAC shill,” Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, said in a statement. “This outcome is a massive loss for AIPAC as they lose more and more influence within the Democratic Party. No amount of shell PACs or covert funding can hide their toxicity from Democratic voters, their monopoly over this party’s agenda is coming to an end.”

Two AIPAC-backed candidates did prevail Tuesday: Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller in the 2nd Congressional District and former Rep. Melissa Bean in the 8th Congressional District.

AIPAC’s mixed results came amid broad alarm over outside spending that flooded Tuesday’s midterm primary elections in Illinois, driven by pro-Israel, crypto, and AI special interest groups. Overall, more than $92 million was spent on campaign ads in Tuesday’s contests in Illinois, a state record.

“I think we can safely say that almost $100 million spent in a handful of primaries is a full-spectrum disaster for democracy,” wrote David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, which called the torrent of spending “a corruption of democracy that is relatively unprecedented in modern elections.”

The National Journal reported Tuesday that when the national midterm cycle is over, “the price tag for the Illinois primary will be an important footnote in what’s projected to be the most expensive midterm election ever.”

“The nonpartisan research firm AdImpact estimates that more than $10.8 billion will be spent on ads alone this cycle,” the Journal observed. “Even as the competitive map gets smaller, the price tag keeps increasing as more outside deep-pocketed groups invest more in primaries.”

Super PACs, entities that can spend unlimited sums boosting their preferred candidates, pumped roughly $31 million into Tuesday’s US House primaries in Illinois. AIPAC-linked organizations accounted for around $22 million of the total.

“It’s time to kick AIPAC and other billionaire-funded super PACs out of Democratic primaries,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote ahead of Tuesday’s races.

This story was first posted at Common Dreams.

At 15, with my skinny legs swinging off the exam table, I sat and listened as my gynecologist stood before me with serious eyes and told me that I had a high risk of developing cancer someday. It was a shocking message to get as a teenager; nonetheless, I made immediate decisions to protect myself.

I stayed on birth control pills for years despite wild swings of emotion, including long stretches of depression, in an effort to keep cancer away. For years, I thought I would become a genetic engineer to one day help find the cure to cancer. I endured over 25 endometrial biopsies to try and keep my chance of getting pregnant intact. The cancer threat shaped me in so many ways.

At 19, while my emotions continued to swing, I found my first life buoy: community organizing. Mentored by two pioneering community leaders named Keisha and Peter Evans, I worked with two other students to launch a youth of color environmental justice organization in East Palo Alto, California. The organization brought together middle and high school students for a founding campaign targeting a toxic waste facility in the high-poverty, majority Black and Brown town. It was my first experience connecting my individual sense of power to growing collective power. Guided by our mentors, we focused on popular education to expand the consciousness of youth of color around systems of oppression, and through that work, I began to make critical connections for my own life. Though I had no idea at the time, this experience was a critical step toward moving me to a life committed to organizing.

For the next 30 years, I spent my life building relationships with Asian youth to tell their stories of gender-based violence, organizing hospital employees and Head Start workers into a union, building power with young workers across SEIU, and leading a powerful community-labor coalition in Illinois that increased the minimum wage in Chicago, seized back hundreds of millions in Tax Increment Financing money from highly profitable corporations, and fought to make the rich pay higher taxes. We built power with Black parents in Peoria around education justice issues and trained thousands of low-to-moderate-income residents across the state around issues of race, class, and gender. We organized politically as well, which led to our members running an alderman’s zoning committee as their Puerto Rican neighborhood faced rapid gentrification. We helped elect Delia Ramirez to Congress and Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago, building off our decades of organizing to cohere a shared analysis and vision of the future.

When I started union organizing, I also joined a peer counseling community that is rooted in a collective understanding of the impact of oppression and trauma on our lives, especially in our earliest years. It is a process that centers an equitable give-and-take of deep listening, focused on collective liberation. My counseling class was made up of Black and Asian Chicagoans, and for me as a young Asian woman mainly organizing Black and white low-wage workers, having this space to process was key to me being able to show up as an organizer day after day. Organized labor was and still is a tough place to be as a young woman of color, and I’ve seen so many others leave organizing because of how ruthless it can be.

Today, at 50, I see the numerous ways that my cancer journey and my organizing life have intersected to reveal clear learnings on how to approach any seemingly insurmountable challenge. This period of consolidation of an authoritarian state collides with my own growing threat of unbounded tumors. Here are a few lessons:

I could not face my third round of cancer without literally about 100 friends, family, peer counselors, and community members who have flanked me and my wife through this terrifying time. For me, leaning on people, and letting myself be helped, held, loved and cared for, has not been easy. Like many organizers, I am used to handling all the things. As this disease progresses, I find myself moving more and more toward my people.

During previous rounds of chemo, I always shaved my own head, but last September, I decided instead to ask my wife Neena to do it. Sitting in a chair, looking in the mirror, I suddenly realized that based on where I am with my disease, I may never again have hair on my head. The reality of potentially being bald until I die hit us both like a ton of bricks — less about the hair itself, but what it signaled — that I would forever be a marked cancer patient, and that I would die fighting this disease. It was then that I realized that this moment was bigger than just the two of us. I immediately texted a few friends and asked who might be able to join a video call in a few hours during which we would shave my head. Two hours later, eight friends called in and accompanied Neena and me as we cried, laughed, and shimmied to my hastily created hair-themed playlist. It was exactly what we needed.

Authoritarianism requires our isolation. Our broken connections, our aloneness. Our anger directed toward each other. The U.S., with a mainstream culture rooted in competition and isolationism, has been a prime breeding ground for fascism for so many years. In fact, the U.S. has been practicing fascism against Black and Native people since its founding.

To resist and build the world we want and need in this moment, our work must be deeply relational. Mutual care is not just a survival strategy, but also a direct route to community power building. Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and of course Minnesota offer us clear examples of the ways that communities have come together to resist Trump’s fascist border control, by organizing hundreds of neighborhood Signal chats; providing open trainings and guidance to each other; and showing up to disrupt, document, and stop abductions of neighbors to exemplify not just care in action but also what collective organizing can do against brutal state-sponsored violence.

We cannot win without each other.

At this point in my disease, the goal is to keep me alive long enough to find the medicine that will hold my tumors in check. Metastatic cancer at its best is a chronic disease, and my hope is that I can manage the tumors and keep living my good life. At some point in this last recurrence of cancer, as I jumped from drug to drug, hoping to find something that worked, I realized that I was waiting for that last part — the “something that worked” part — before I found a new role in movement building. I knew I needed to fight fascism, even as I was fighting my own cancer, which left me with uncertain energy and capacity. I was terrified of letting anyone down, of how to make a move during so much uncertainty.

What we need are possibilities, not certainty. And this principle is true in organizing against authoritarianism in this moment. We will never know it all, will never have the full set of conditions and dynamics to be able to plot out all of our steps. And we also cannot be afraid to move, even in times of turbulence and unpredictability. In fact, moving in such moments is even more critical.

Planning with metastatic cancer can feel impossible, but plan (and try) I must. I just need to be ready to pivot all the time — make a plan, pivot, make a new plan, pivot again. We must continually assess, continually shift, rest as needed, and then keep moving.

Now, I am happily part of a new project fighting authoritarianism, and I show up as best I can. It is deeply unsettling not to know how I will feel each day, but I remind myself that this uncertainty is OK. My life, like the majority of our lives, will always be hard. But my life is also very clearly so good. We need to stop promising people ease, or even that things will be better anytime soon. It might all be harder for a while, so how do we create and maintain the community bonds, the agency to try things, and move forward collectively? Having people, and moving collectively, is key to my life being good. It fills me deeply and fuels me to keep trying. And good is the goal — not easy.

Fighting brutal forces takes a real emotional toll on our minds and our bodies. We must have better tools and practices to deal with that trauma. Creating spaces to collectively grieve, to release the impact of the emotional and physical hits that we are taking in this moment — watching our neighbors be beat up, dragged, ripped apart from their families, and killed — cannot be ignored. How do we release these impacts, so that they do not fester inside us, and so that our thinking remains clear?

In my fight against cancer, I face so much discouragement and terror — triggered by new bloodwork, or a scan, or something that feels different from what I have experienced before. If I let those worries and fears build up in me, I would be so overwhelmed and immobilized. But by letting those fears out, in a community of counselors who are also working on their own pain — through crying, shaking, laughing and other physical releases — I am able to dissolve the fears and think freshly about the moment. I am able to reach for hope, but it takes significant time and energy, both of which are in short supply under capitalism. As Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” My vulnerability is a fast track to closeness, connection, and yes, even possibility.

We have so many traumas that we carry, and I see them disrupt our movements’ ability to cohere. We lack the skills in movement to address our upsets with each other, upsets that are rooted in our early and often lifelong experiences of oppression. I see this clearly in Chicago movement organizing. As someone who has been part of this movement-building space for decades, I reflect on situations where I wish I could have led differently, not just focusing on our campaign outcomes but also ensuring that we were addressing our leaders as whole humans. Leaders are fractured by so many assaults and pressures. The need to address the whole human is what Indigenous Hawaiian leader Norma Wong describes as the human quotient, which includes four essential capacities: courage, compassion, aloha (self-reflection and mutual relationship), and strategic wisdom. We struggle in movement to assess the first three aspects, leaving us vulnerable to fractures that not only stop the work, but also too often can set us backward. The lack of space for these types of practices has led to a buildup of mistrust that leaves us with collectively less power, to all of our detriment.

But when we can do this work together, so much is possible. For example, a few years ago there was a campaign co-led by two powerful and driven women of color from two different organizations. They hit a rough spot, which quickly escalated, given the past traumas that they both had experienced, the lack of tools in the ecosystem to manage through conflict, and the deep fatigue they were already experiencing taking on white supremacy and the carceral state. They both agreed to mediation, and in the weeks leading up to the session, I worked with one of them on what came up for her in the conflict, and supported her in doing deep emotional work on what had gotten activated through it. When these two women came to their session, they both came ready to be vulnerable and open, and through support, not only resolved the conflict, but went on to collaborate to this day as trusted comrades.

As I have waged campaign after campaign against cancer, I have noticed that it is easy to get caught up in what is directly in front of me and lament the difficult moments. This isn’t to say that I don’t get to feel the deep pain and trauma of continually shifting and emerging side effects and their rampaging of my body. But I cannot stay inside the trauma. I have learned that I must grieve the pain, feel the discouragement, and then keep reaching for possibility. Without a vision of where I want to go, I can get tossed around emotionally by the present-day difficulties.

In organizing, the same is so true. We too often wage short-term campaigns that do not necessarily lead to transformative wins. I think a lot of this is because we have not built a long-arc strategy and vision. In contrast, we are now witnessing the manifestations of the right’s long-arc plans. The authoritarian moment we are in today is the result of decades of planning and organizing on the right, which is now also formulating decades of plans further into the future. Even as we pursue important short-term goals on the left, we must conceptualize a long-arc vision and keep it in our sights.

Moreover, we need a political vision that is not just about one side winning and another losing. We need a vision where there is room for all. We are often not very good at this notion of “all under heaven intact” that comes from the Art of War and Buddhist traditions, but if we don’t have onramps for people to join us, we will never build the majority we need.

I don’t need all my tumors to disappear to have a good long life. My long-arc vision for my good long life includes tumors — they just need an environment where they chill the fuck out and don’t take over the rest of me. I must nourish the cells that are working hard to keep me alive, while doing all I can to remove the threat against my life — but I have no illusions that I will ever remove every cancerous cell from my body. The goal is not domination but building enough power to move forward in material ways. What’s our radical vision for justice that includes everyone?

There are of course many limitations to my analogy, but my experiences as an organizer and as a cancer patient inform each other in day-to-day ways that guide my life powerfully. My body is waging battles against forces that may kill me, while authoritarian consolidation grows and its deadly consequences become even more evident. We need to ask these questions of our movements, and ourselves: How do we refuse isolation and move toward each other? How do we take action amid unpredictable and shifting circumstances? How do we acknowledge and release the impacts of trauma as we organize? And how do we build a long-term vision that we can strive toward together, even in the hardest of times?

I never did find the cure to cancer as a genetic engineer. But my 30 years of organizing and power building work have led me to understand the work that is needed to stop this horrible disease — dismantling the oppression, corporate greed, environmental destruction, and consolidation of power destroying our families and communities. Now more than ever.

This story was originally published by Truthout.

It’s increasingly difficult for U.S. political commentators to neglect the centrality of socialism to the country’s affairs. We now see a spate of polling results and other commentary testifying to the popularity of socialist ideas, if not the label, as well as to the prospects of rising political stars like Mayors Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, as well as State Senator Omar Fateh in Minneapolis.

Whenever democratic socialism has a moment in the mainstream media, as it is having now, pundits and reporters ponder what “democratic socialism” really means. Those on the Left speculate on how, if at all, it differs from “social democracy”—generally taken to refer to the more egalitarian economic arrangements observed in the Nordic countries, and to a lesser extent across Western Europe. The relationship between democratic socialism and social democracy is a matter of dispute on the Left, but, in general, democratic socialists imagine a more far-reaching transformation of economy and society than they expect from social democracy.

I would contend that democratic socialism and social democracy are more alike than different, and so the term “social democrat” can be kosher again. The important justifications for seeing a close connection between democratic socialism and social democracy are twofold. First, in practical political terms in the here and now, they are identical. Take Medicare for All (M4A), for instance. Whatever you think M4A is or should be, there is nothing inconsistent between M4A advocacy, social democracy, and democratic socialism.

Second, the European nations whose policies most Americans are comfortable with—and that American socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) point to as models—often are led by governments and parties that self-identify as social democratic. It’s the word “socialism” that tends to scare Americans, not the content offered by most socialist politicians. Yet while the terminology of “socialism” still scares many people, “social democracy” is unfamiliar and foreign-sounding, so it is not a very politically effective label either. Clearly, Mamdani, Wilson, and Fateh, among others, are finding a language that appeals, without running away from the socialist label.

In the immediate term, then, the difference between the two concepts may not matter too much. Unless you think the capitalist state can be replaced wholesale, in one fell swoop, you are interested in politically feasible reforms achieved through our maddeningly dysfunctional democratic processes. The “socialist reforms” that many are finding digestible are not categorically different from the common and old advances of social democracy in Europe, so by all means, let’s have more of it. And the popularity of democratic socialist figures like Mamdani, Sanders, Fateh, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are due to the prospects they offer for reforms, not to a revolutionary smashing of the state.

Some on the Left, including fellow Jacobin contributors, want to stress the difference between the status quo and socialists’ desired end state. In so doing, however, there is the risk of glossing over the essential, inescapable path from here to there and narrowing socialists’ political appeal and accomplishments. My contention is that socialism is as much about the steps toward the goal as the goal itself. Neither means anything without the other.

Socialism is an important brand, but it is something more: it reflects a particular objective—in a nutshell, the reduction of alienation in the Marxian sense. The chief means for conquering alienation is increasing democratic control of the economy. Following Karl Marx, the central democratic decision is the disposition of the aggregate accumulation of “surplus value,” including the composition, distribution, and level of net investment. National economic planning would be opened up to popular input. At the enterprise or business-firm level, workers would take over management of day-to-day operations. This is all foreign to liberalism but not to social democracies around the world (though the extent of worker management in social democratic countries is still rather limited).

When Sanders broke the national political ice on the word “socialism” in 2016, I recall sappy messages to the effect that “socialism is nice; even your public library is socialist.” But that’s wrong—socialism is so much more than that.

Here I want to describe some economic policy projects that might define a distinctively socialist (or social democratic) approach to policy in the United States today, one that pushes beyond the frontiers of liberalism. These are differences in kind, not of degree. For the principal U.S. social democratic projects, I suggest the following breakdown:

1. Labor power

2. Industrial policy

3. Social insurance

4. Social ownership

5. Anti-federalism

There are traces of all of these in the history of liberal social policy, but I want to highlight the categorical distinctions between liberal and socialist approaches to each element. Such distinctions can give rise to political themes and to explicit campaigns.

(Socialists also crucially differ from liberals in our commitment to internationalism and our opposition to the United States’ militaristic imperialism. But I focus here on the distinctive elements of socialists’ domestic policy agenda.)

Labor power

The great liberal John Kenneth Galbraith proposed, or at least popularized, the idea of “countervailing power” as a justification for elevating trade unionism. The implication was the desirability of a “fair” political competition between labor and capital.

Who needs fair? As anarchists say, “No gods, no masters!” We want to stack the deck in favor of the working class—or at least unstack it from its contemporary extremely biased state. This is one distinction between socialism and liberalism. There has been plenty of thinking done about how to do this, but the objectives are clear: remove constraints on union organizing and agitation.

The Obama administration disgraced itself in this context by its weak support for the public employee upsurge in Wisconsin. Both former President Barack Obama and, before him, Bill Clinton sold out their own allies in labor with their advocacy of anti-worker “free trade” deals. Joe Biden made a bit of a splash by not merely calling for labor peace and a labor-management kumbaya but by explicitly favoring the contract sought by the United Auto Workers in their historic strike against the Big Three automakers in 2023. It says a lot about the Democratic Party that this was an unusual milestone.

Industrial policy

Again, we got a taste of industrial policy (IP) under Biden and now a bit more, albeit of a perverse nature, under President Donald Trump. The idea is to restructure the economy—to shift the composition of what is produced—in the direction of higher-value-added industries. That means higher profits and wages and ultimately more tax revenue. Liberalism has been historically unfriendly to IP, in obeisance to the mythical free market.

How would IP be pursued? The first problem is to determine which industries to expand and then to reckon with which ones would contract (and disemploy people, often at great personal financial harm). The tools for Biden’s attempt at IP were disproportionately tax credits. Relief for anyone negatively affected was usually nonexistent, though Biden broke this pattern temporarily with his extraordinary Covid-era expansion of unemployment benefits.

For Trump, it’s whatever idea comes into his howling wilderness of a mind, legalities aside. His objective here has been showing off, to demonstrate that our national CEO-in-chief can deliver tangible factories and good manufacturing jobs. It’s mostly a con. If anything, the scandal of the Georgia raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the ensuing mistreatment of Korean workers will have a negative impact on foreign direct investment in the United States.

For socialists, the tools for IP would be a mix of direct grants, loan guarantees, and public enterprise. An important qualification is to ensure transition assistance for workers negatively affected by structural changes in the economy in the short term.

An obvious candidate for IP is production in the service of transition away from fossil fuels. That means solar, wind, and maybe nuclear. (I’m skeptical of the latter because I doubt our regulatory apparatus is up to enforcing prudent safety standards, but I won’t get further into that thicket of weeds.) For energy aficionados, there is also the need for a robust, national power grid.

A negative example of IP has been the U.S. government’s historic support for automobile transportation and lack of investment in social transit. A leading case is our pathetic intercity passenger rail system, aka Amtrak. There are also urban intraregional rail systems begging for upgrades, support for which is plausibly in the national interest.

The climate benefits of social transit are obvious. Since our metro regions are the drivers of the national economy, so, too, is the health of the cities at their centers. We may be getting a teaspoon of this with Mamdani’s free buses—hopefully a prelude to more.

One branch of IP is trade policy. Here, too, we see a clear difference between liberal and social democratic approaches. Trade policy can be used to actively restructure a domestic economy, not merely to facilitate whatever corporations are wont to do. Liberalism tends to default to the latter, since traditionally Democrats have been in bed with Big Tech companies and finance, who desire government protection of their “intellectual property.”

As mentioned above, a common objective of IP is supporting higher-value-added industries. This is what most other nations want to do as well, so negotiation is required to get a division of the spoils that is superior to whatever would happen absent such negotiations—a different kind of trade deal. Trade deals can serve IP goals, and not incidentally, the interests of labor. Liberals, with their emphasis on free-trade deals that effectively prioritize the interests of capital, have been on the wrong side of this struggle.

Another branch of IP emphasized by liberals is antitrust. Again, the underlying motivation for breaking up big corporations is for the sake of a mythical free market, a delusion upheld by liberalism. It is true, there can be opportunities to enhance market efficiency by breaking up monopolies. But what tends to be overlooked is the option of replacing monopolies with public enterprises. That’s the social democratic or socialist alternative.

Social insurance

The chief basis for social welfare in the social democratic nations of Europe has been their social insurance schemes. The idea is you tax people to finance benefits against likely, adverse events, what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the great disturbing factors of life.” Injury, illness, and involuntary unemployment are top of the list, followed directly by retirement, disability, and death of the family breadwinner.

Social insurance should not necessarily be financed through progressive taxation—the idea is people should be willing to pay for what we are selling. If they aren’t, something is wrong with us or with the product. One benefit of the approach is that it provides political robustness to a program. It’s harder to take something away if people have been paying for it and feel they are owed a debt.

The liberal commentary about social insurance has been unhelpful. In the case of Social Security, it has featured flat-out bogus predictions of insolvency or crackpot remedies such as individual, privatized stock market accounts. Long ago, someone suggested that, if he hadn’t been consumed by the scandal with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton might have wrecked Social Security with privatization.

In the case of healthcare, we have of course the Rube Goldberg Obamacare system. I would not deny it was an improvement in its time, but more straightforward, simpler models are available and on view in other countries. Even here in the United States, we still have the federal Veterans Administration, which employs its own doctors and provides health care directly.

The biggest poison pill in Obamacare was spurious, liberal defense of deficit reduction that constrained the subsidies made available to the insured. At the root of Obama’s crippled healthcare reform effort was the Democratic establishment’s mantra “We believe in the market.” Of course, if they had a clue what a market really is, either in ideal terms or in the real world, their behavior would be very different.

But the Left has also been mixed up about social insurance, including cash benefits. In the matter of health insurance, it is reduced to the slogan of taxing the rich to pay for M4A. First, socialism will require more dough than we can get just by taxing the rich and corporations. The idea of focusing taxes on the rich has reached absurd lengths with the Democratic Party’s now-standard assurances that it doesn’t want to further tax anyone earning less than $400,000 annually, or some similarly ridiculous number.

Second, M4A is an empty box. What is it, exactly? Existing Medicare, for all? I’m on it, and no thanks. Medicare covers only 80 percent of catastrophic expenses. For most, including me, 20 percent of a catastrophic expense is still a catastrophe. Furthermore, it’s hard to find doctors who accept Medicare patients.

Some other version of Medicare? What exactly? The possibilities are endless, and you wouldn’t like some of them. The Left needs to deliver specifics about what its envisioned national health system, or national health insurance plan, would look like, including how it will be realistically financed.

On cash assistance, we have the faux-left dead end known as the universal basic income (UBI). Not for nothing have some libertarians latched onto it. The hope is to set up all cash assistance to be like “welfare,” then come in swinging with the wrecking ball. If you’re for socialism, consider what social democratic governments actually do: it’s social insurance, not UBI.

Social ownership

Here we are out past Bernieland. Sanders says he is uninterested in “nationalizing the means of production.” (So am I, to be honest: I don’t want the U.S. Congress trying to run Nvidia.) That hasn’t stopped Sanders from making some friendly noises about Trump’s machinations in establishing U.S. government stakes in tech companies, however.

As usual, there are many incremental way stations. Once again, Mamdani gives us a taste with his public grocery stores. At one point, in the teeth of the Covid-19 pandemic, even the loathsome former Gov. Andrew Cuomo fiddled with the idea of New York State producing protective equipment to deal with the Trump administration’s shortages. In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom took steps to acquire Covid supplies the federal government was failing to provide.

Perhaps the two most pressing needs for social ownership are in the fields of energy policy and housing. In both, the private sector has proved itself utterly inadequate. We rely too much on fossil fuels, and housing costs, due in large part to supply shortages, have become prohibitive for aspiring homeowners and renters.

It perhaps feels a little easy to say, “Well, the government can build this stuff.” But it is also true. As I mentioned above, we will need much more revenue to do so, a bullet most liberals are not willing to bite.

Social democrats can first sell the program: if you build it, people will be willing to pay. Liberals usually wring their hands and lead with, “Gee, how will we pay for it?” But if what you build is more beneficial than foregone tax revenues, it is more difficult for the other side to take it down. If it is not, then somebody screwed up somewhere.

Anti-federalism

Finally, there is the conundrum of U.S. federalism. Decentralization of the public sector in the United States is extreme by international standards and retards economic and social progress. Back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “anti-federalism” meant opposition to a strong central government, in favor of states—I mean the opposite.

Centralization begins with an expanded revenue system—more taxes, and not exclusively progressive ones. Such revenues could go to the states in part while serving the purposes described above.

Some public services are properly national in scope and require federal design, funding, and management. Examples already mentioned are intercity rail and a national power grid. Transition off of fossil fuels must be a national policy, though implementation can and will likely be decentralized and incremental.

What’s so bad about federalism? Income and wealth, as they are in most nations, are unevenly distributed geographically. The larger the nation, the greater the burdens of a unitary central government. Insofar as we assign taxing and spending to local jurisdictions, we get inadequate public funding and gross inequality. A state tax is better than a blizzard of local taxes. For one thing, it raises more revenue, even if the rate is the same. And a federal tax is better than 50 state taxes.

It is possible to take the principle too far, since people have sorted themselves out geographically, to some extent, based on preferences for public services, and it is possible to excessively flout those preferences. I would say we presently have the reverse problem, however—too much indulgence to decentralized finance.

A social democratic alternative

On all these dimensions, social democratic or socialist policy visions are categorically or conceptually distinct from “more liberalism.”

In a nutshell, the Left can make political hay by advocating more power for labor, industrial policy, social insurance, social ownership, and less federalism. These are well-regarded ideas. Making clear that democratic socialist politics need not mean a pell-mell avalanche of new and unfamiliar programs can reduce people’s fears about the ideology. The popularity of Mamdani’s baby steps in these directions attests to their political viability, as do the polls that suggest that people are receptive to the content of democratic socialism, even if the label makes some apprehensive.

A common alternative understanding of democratic socialism foregrounds the question of the political power of the working class. I find this notion amorphous. Who, exactly, is the working class, and how does it, whatever “it” is, win and exercise that power?

One idea in this vein is worker ownership, or at least worker control of workplaces. There is no question such an arrangement would be an improvement, but the gains can be exaggerated too. Workers at a particular workplace could be as collectively self-seeking as the owner they replaced, and there are still all the problems inherent in commodity production. There are also questions about how control without ownership would be meaningful or how the transfer of firm ownership should be financed.

Worker ownership of individual firms encounters the same problem as local financing of public services that I discussed in Jacobin recently. There will be rich firms and poor firms, and their geographic locations will be haphazard, fomenting inequality.

Labor management of firms is a benign improvement, but it seems a dubious candidate for a systemic improvement. So, too, with cooperatives or renters’ unions. Of course, these are not novel ideas nor is there anything wrong with them. There have been attempts in the past, and there are many existing examples. But in the absence of broader change, their spread would still leave us with capitalism.

A socialist vision has to go beyond the atomized management of firms or a proliferation of cooperatives. The crucial political point is to grasp a dynamic of comprehensive change, through the inauguration and expansion of progressive policies and institutions that strengthen workers’ bargaining power and expand democratic public control over the economy.

Socialists championing these reforms can offer a robust, realistic alternative to liberalism while showing the American public that the “S-word” is nothing to be afraid of. And if they start by enacting just some elements of this agenda, they can grow momentum and popular support for more changes to build a less alienated economy.

This story was first posted at Jacobin.

MINNEAPOLIS—With thousands of supporters behind them, roughly 100 faith leaders sang, “Before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail—everybody’s got a right to live,” as they blocked a key road to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport.

It was an act of civil disobedience against federal immigration agents outside the busy Terminal 1 drop-off. Some of the faith leaders held signs showing photos of abducted members of Unite Here Local 17, which represents food service workers at the airport.

It was late morning on January 23, and the crowd—including striking workers and union members, some of whom work at the airport—stayed outside in subzero temperatures to cheer on the faith leaders. Supporters passed around hand warmers and snacks to help sustain the crowd.

The clergy made good on their vow to “go down to jail.” They were each arrested, one by one, kneeling in prayer. The crowd chanted, “We love you,” as they were taken away.

The civil disobedience was part of “A Day of Truth and Freedom,” an economic shutdown led by unions, faith organizations and community groups. Under the banner of “no work, no school, no shopping,” organizers called on Minnesotans to “suspend the normal order of business” to protest the Trump administration’s unprecedented deployment of thousands of masked, armed federal agents.

For weeks, federal agents have been stalking and abducting people at schools, daycare centers and homes—and unleashing violence on people trying to protect their neighbors.

The response was overwhelming. About three hours after the clergy were arrested, tens of thousands of Minnesotans—chanting, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here”—marched through downtown Minneapolis to demand ICE leave the state. (Organizers’ crowd estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000.)

The big turnout was remarkable in part because the temperature was minus 9 degrees when the march began, which can quickly cause frostbite to exposed skin.

“Oh my God, today is amazing, overwhelming, and very powerful,” said Feben Ghilagaber, an airport food service worker and steward for Unite Here Local 17. “It was bigger than I was expecting, much bigger. I was kind of worried about the weather, but everybody showed up.”

According to Ghilagaber, “a lot” of airport workers in her union didn’t go to work to support the shutdown, with many of them calling in sick.

Organizers say that 1,000 local businesses closed as part of the day of economic shutdown, some of them because of worker pressure. It is too early to assess how many workers went on strike, but workers and unions were central to the day’s events. A commercial electrician and member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 292, who was holding a sign reading “General Strike is a Path to Justice,” told me during the march that he was “out here to support immigrant rights, support every American.”

Another Minnesotan, who requested anonymity to protect her from retaliation by ICE, said, “I’m here today to stand up for everyone, stand up for myself. I am impacted. I came here when I was 2 years old. My parents brought me here from Mexico. All I know is America, so seeing everything that’s going on—seeing my family ripped apart, seeing kids being snatched, an innocent woman shot for standing up for what’s right—it’s all surreal.”

For the throngs of those participating in the shutdown that Friday, the stakes were not academic. Service Employees International Union Local 26, which represents more than 8,000 of the state’s janitors, window cleaners and other property service workers, has “lost over 20 members to these abductions by federal agents, often without warning, often without due process,” said Greg Nammacher, union president, at a January 19 press conference.

Solidarity actions took place across the country on January 23, from Massachusetts to New York to Chicago. Some labor and community leaders also traveled to Minnesota for the shutdown, including members of the group Rabbis for Ceasefire, who joined with her clergy, and Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

“I’m sick of wiping tears, I’m sick of hugging people, I’m sick of saying I’m sorry,” Gates said. “Today, we saw people who are sick of doing the same thing. I think it was glorious, and I think everyone is going to have to do that—and at the same time.”

The morning after, protesters were confronted with a terrible reality: Immigration agents executed ICU nurse Alex Pretti while he was observing agents and trying to protect a fellow observer. Agents fired 10 shots in five seconds, killing Pretti while he was pinned to the ground.

“We saw the very next day that there’s still a lot of work left to do,” said Sheigh Freeberg, secretary-treasurer of Unite Here Local 17. Organizers are still demanding federal agents leave Minnesota, that officers who kill civilians face legal accountability, that “Trump’s ICE” be shut down, and that corporations stop their complicity with ICE. The events of January 23 give organizers a palpable sense of solidarity for the fight ahead, Freeberg said.

Katrina Zabriskie, 22, described t his solidarit y t he mor ning of January 23, shortly after watching her mother, a Minnesota-based chaplain, get taken away by police. “It was really emotional,” she told me. “When the crowd started chanting, ‘We love you,’ I started to cry.

“Mostly, I’m just really proud.”

The second time was the charm for striking nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, as 93 percent of New York State Nurses Association members at the hospital voted to approve a tentative agreement and returned to work in late February.

The vote came just two weeks after those same nurses voted overwhelmingly to reject a previously-proposed agreement, extending their historic strike which ultimately lasted 41 days.

For a look inside the union’s strategy in the pivotal weeks of their fight, The Real News Network Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez spoke with Beth Loudin, a neonatal nurse and member of the executive committee of the New York State Nurses Association at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Maximillian Alvarez: We've got another urgent strike update episode for y'all today on a critical health care workers strike: the longest sustained strike in the history of New York City. As Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Ben Fractenberg report in The City:

“NewYork-Presbyterian nurses rejected a tentative agreement by an overwhelming margin Wednesday, voting to extend their strike — now 31 days running — against the hospital system.

Their union, the New York State Nurses Association, said the unfair labor practice strike and bargaining will continue. Out of approximately 4,200 NewYork-Presbyterian nurses who were eligible to cast ballots, 3,099 voted to reject the deal and 867 voted to approve it.

At Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Morningside and West, and Montefiore, nurses voted to approve their contracts Wednesday evening by margin of 87%, 96%, and 85% respectively and will return to work this weekend.

A NewYork-Presbyterian spokesperson said the hospital was “disappointed that our nurses did not ratify the mediator’s proposal, which we accepted on Feb. 8 and NYSNA leadership endorsed.” The spokesperson, Angela Karafazli, said the hospital is willing to honor the rejected proposal for reconsideration.

Nancy Hagans, the president of NYSNA, called on the hospital to “agree to a fair contract and bring all of our nurses back to work.

Nurses at the three hospital systems have been on strike since Jan. 12 trying to secure stronger nurse-to-patient ratios, claiming that staffing shortages put their and their patients’ wellbeing at risk.

To break this all down, I am grateful to be joined on the show today by Beth Loudin. Beth, now that we know that listeners, at least, have that much information up top, please do step in and tell folks about anything that has been missed about this strike, where it started, how it's evolved, and what is happening right now?

Beth Loudin: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. We'll take it back to the very beginning. We've been bargaining since August, which is just absolutely insane at this point. Our contract expired December 31. Prior to expiration, we had been very clear that expiration was our deadline. We had done a strike authorization vote with our members, and we had the strongest authorization vote we ever had in probably the history of NYSNA, but definitely in the history of NYSNA at NYP, New York-Presbyterian. We had just record engagement and a solid 98% of nurses voted yes to authorize us to use a 10 day notice to go on strike if necessary, and it became exceedingly clear that it was going to be necessary, as even the basic things like health care and our pension had not been resolved by our deadline.

We were informed that our specific hospital, New York-Presbyterian… wanted to cut a lot of what we currently have in our insurance plans because they just said it's too costly. So rather than engaging in a process about how we could do cost savings and any of those ways that they normally do at the trustee level, New York-Presbyterian tried to take it outside of the trustee level and demand cuts, cuts, cuts for healthcare for healthcare workers.

Our hospital wanted to just give us a bucket of money to disperse nonstalled proposals instead of saying, let's engage about your wage proposal, let's engage about your differentials proposal, let's engage about your health care, let's engage about your pension. Because we know all of these things will go up with money, like the pension will go up, the healthcare, of course, just like everybody else's plans, the cost is going up. So the process in which we were trying to get any of these issues resolved was very blocked by management doing this bucket proposal and also stalling on our healthcare benefits.

We were presented with a mediator proposal that was put together… we already had four mediators involved, one at each of the tables that were negotiating actively. That was Mount Sinai-Main, Mount Sinai- Morningside-West, Montefiore and us, so four mediators were mediating between our tables and the boss, and then a fifth mediator came in and put together a large mediator proposal to address everything. To be clear, this proposal did have standard wages and standard health care, pension and a return to work plan for all the tables. And also, to be clear, we always wanted to be in alignment with our brothers and sisters across the city and stand in solidarity with 15,000 nurses. That had been our plan since day one, to stand strong together and fight together and use our collective power together.

That being said, we were also still negotiating at four different tables. So within this mediator proposal, the other tables were a little bit ahead of us in terms of their boss moving on proposals. We had a lot of issues still outstanding. When we were given the proposal, there were two things lacking for us. One was staffing. They gave us some but it was not enough to meet what our minimum needs are. The second part was job security. If you were aware, last year, New York-Presbyterian decided, in advance of any of the federal funding cuts that were coming down, they decided to do a 2% layoff across the whole enterprise. This affected about 1000 NYSNA represented employees at our site here, and a lot of the targeting was at the nurse practitioner level, our advanced practice nurses. So we have that as a high priority in our contract fight this year, that we should be able to protect our jobs and protect especially advanced practice nurses from being replaced with other workers, as it had been done in the past three years. We had seen this was a goal of our boss for the past three years. As they started chipping away, they got rid of some of the pain nurse practitioners, and then they came for our beloved midwives, and said, oh, we don't need that service anymore. But then a week later, opened up the service under Columbia University, so that New York-Presbyterian was not paying for it, but Columbia was. This was clear union busting from the past three years. That's why it was a high priority for us. Those two items are the only two outstanding from the mediator proposal.

When we brought it to our membership on Sunday, we were very clear. These are the gaps. We're going to push back on the mediator and say these are the gaps they need to fix. If they fix it, then we will recommend this proposal. They came back around midnight and said, no, that was not possible, so therefore our committee was not going to move forward with this proposal.

We all agreed to the top portion that was a unified wages, pension, health care and return to work program. But the secondary parts that were hospital specific did not meet what we needed at New York-Presbyterian from the union. Since then, as quoted in the article, our NYSNA executives did put it to the membership to take a vote, and our membership stood with our local decision making.

So from there, we're back to where we were on Sunday night, which is we should be continuing to bargain. We expect New York-Presbyterian to give us dates to meet us at the table so we can finish this contract. This has always been about getting a fair contract. We never wanted to go on strike. We miss our patients. Our patients miss us, we've heard that time and time again from the patients on the inside. We want to do our jobs. We love our jobs, but we can only return when our patients are being cared for safely through the language that we will get with more staffing and job security so that our specialized nurses can and nurse practitioners can stay at that bedside throughout the years.

So where we're at now is that we are planning next steps. We encourage anyone and everyone to put pressure on New York-Presbyterian to come to the table. They have threatened us that they won't give us dates for weeks. We're not going to stand for that. So please enact all of your networks. We do think our resolution is close. Our membership is excited for that to be completed and that we will have a strong contract going back into the hospital. It is very possible. New York-Presbyterian just has to come to the table.

Alvarez: The episode that we just published was an interview that I did with a panel of folks from UNAC, UHCP out on the West Coast. To listeners, that's United Nurses Associations of California / Union of Healthcare Professionals. And they said a lot of really important and powerful things connecting what they were fighting for and going on strike and staying on strike for, and what y'all have been striking for, and also, the connections that have been building between healthcare workers across the country. How is this stuff connected and why are these demands that have not been resolved worth staying on strike for for you and your fellow union members?

Loudin: I mean, it's pretty clear that the hospitals themselves have been pretty well organized. They talk to each other. They're always scheming about how to bust unions to keep workers down, to financially strap organizations while they become richer and richer at the top. Our struggle is the same, and our struggle is the same even in hospitals that don't have unions that can protect them. So we hope that this is a wildfire.

We're strongly standing with our California and Hawaii brothers and sisters. We all are in the fight together. Any of the advancements that we achieve in our contract directly benefit anyone who enters our hospital. Our patients, their families.We know it benefits people to have nurses that are protected, nurses that want to stay on the job, and also enough nurses period. You need enough nurses so that you can stay alive and you can get well and get out of the hospital or the clinics here at NYC Presbyterian specifically. So there is a fight.

I hope there's many more that will pick up the fight and know that you can fight any pressure that comes towards you. Worker power can prevail. Organizing with your coworkers, organizing across facilities, we have really opened up the relationships between all of our nurses in the city, and then even over to California and Hawaii, new relationships are being formed through going through the struggle together. So it's really been a beautiful, difficult, heartbreaking, all the emotions, period, but really the solidarity has been the best outcome of this strike so far.

From the warehouse floor at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK), Talia Rose can see the FedEx planes.

"They're directly across the tarmac from me," they told me.

Rose works the overnight shift at the UPS air hub. Most days, they clock in before dawn, when much of Oakland is asleep. Metal containers—ULDs—are rolled off the aircraft and pulled into the building. Rose unloads them, sending boxes down conveyor belts to be sorted and routed. Sometimes they're on the other side, throwing freight toward outbound trucks. It's physical work, repetitive and precise.

Around six months ago, during a weekly organizing meeting at the Oakland Liberation Center, they learned that military cargo bound for Israel had been moving through the airport. Activists had just released research documenting hundreds of such shipments passing through OAK.

The report, published by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), identified more than 280 military cargo shipments to Israel since January 2025, including shipments of parts manufactured by U.S. defense contractors for F-35 aircraft. The report traced cargo moving through OAK, including the BRU-68 bomb release system—a product that enables F-35s to release 2,000-pound bombs. Similar research into Maersk's shipping routes helped identify how military materials move across maritime corridors, underscoring that Oakland's airport is one node in a larger commercial infrastructure serving the war effort.

FedEx—whose facility sits across the tarmac—was handling the OAK shipments.

Rose went home after the meeting and read the full report.

"I just kind of lay there all night," they said. "I genuinely was in shock. I see these planes fly in and out every single day, and any of them could be carrying these parts."

Since then, every landing feels different.

"Every single time a FedEx plane lands and I'm watching them land," they said, "I wonder, 'Oh, is that the one?'"

Rose has since joined a campaign called the Oakland People's Arms Embargo (OPAE), a coalition of more than 30 organizations calling on city officials to stop what they describe as "killer military cargo" from flying out of Oakland's publicly owned airport.

Organizers argue that if the airport is governed locally, the Port of Oakland can and should refuse to facilitate shipments of weapons components to Israel. The effort has garnered support from a wide range of labor unions, including the 100,000-member California Nurses Association. On November 10, the Alameda Labor Council—representing 135,000 Bay Area workers across healthcare, transportation, education, construction, manufacturing and service industries—voted unanimously to endorse the campaign.

A Harvard-affiliated geospatial study found that in the first six weeks of Israel's assault on Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023, nearly 600 such bombs were dropped across the Gaza Strip. Eighty-three percent of Gaza's 36 hospitals had bomb craters within 800 meters, and at least nine had bombs land within what researchers describe as a lethal range.

Those bombs don't move themselves. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion annually in military aid under a long-term memorandum of understanding, and since October 2023, Congress has approved additional emergency funding totaling more than $14 billion. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied roughly two-thirds of Israel's major conventional arms imports in 2023. Weapons move by sea and by air and pass through public civilian infrastructure.

Organizers argue that Oakland is a key link in a wider logistics chain linking U.S. manufacturers to overseas deployment. In recent months, activists across the globe have pressured shipping giant Maersk over its role in transporting military cargo. In Spain, organizers successfully alerted port authorities to Maersk shipments tied to Israel, prompting scrutiny and rerouting in some cases. In Morocco, dockworkers have refused to handle certain cargo. In Colombia, the government has announced an embargo on coal exports to Israel. None of these interventions have ended the war, but they did demonstrate that supply chains can be contested.

At OAK, nothing announces itself as part of a weapon.

"These pieces aren't huge and heavy," Rose said. "It's not as if they're not specially marked, outside of maybe a high-value marker."

There is no crate labeled WAR. No flashing indicator that the freight in a ULD will end up as part of an aircraft over Gaza.

"It feels like there should be a big stamp saying, 'This is a genocidal can,'" they said.

Instead, it looks like any other freight: socks, legal documents, medical supplies, machine parts. Containers inside planes inside contracts inside federal aviation rules.

"We're all being made so complicit in this," they said.

That complicity is structural, and responsibility is fragmented. A carrier moves the cargo. A port authority leases out the space. Federal regulators oversee the airspace. Congress appropriates funds. Each actor performs a discrete role and can plausibly disclaim the whole.

Oakland officials have expressed concern about the shipments. Some have argued that federal aviation law limits what the city can prohibit. Rose has attended Board of Port Commissioners meetings and heard the debate. "There are members that are absolutely on our side," they said. But it has been "really disappointing" to hear others insist, "'Well actually, it's not our job.'"

"If our city says it supports human rights, but still lets this go through, then what does that actually mean?"

Asked what they would say directly to a Port commissioner, Rose did not hedge. "We have to put our foot down now," they said.

If the city declines to act, they argued, it sets a precedent that publicly owned infrastructure can quietly facilitate military cargo so long as the paperwork is in order. "Old good precedents," they said, referring to Oakland's history of labor and anti-apartheid resistance, "will be trampled over, and we'll have these new precedents that turn Oakland into a town for killer cargo."

The Port of Oakland oversees both the seaport and the airport. In 1984, ILWU members in Oakland refused to unload South African cargo from the Nedlloyd Kimberley ship for 11 days. The action did not depend on federal permission; it depended on dockworkers deciding they would not handle it. The stand was part of a broader municipal divestment movement that eventually pressured the city itself to sever financial ties with apartheid. The episode remains a touchstone in local labor memory. More recently, Bay Area longshore workers have declined to handle certain cargo linked to Israeli shipping interests during moments of Israeli escalation in Palestine, as part of community pickets invoking that same tradition.

The airport, too, sits under Port authority. The question now being pressed by organizers is simple: If Oakland's maritime side has been shaped by political and labor action before, why should its air cargo side be treated as untouchable?

This is what sovereignty looks like in practice. The Port Commission is locally appointed, and the airport is publicly owned. Yet the authority exercised within that space is threaded through federal aviation law, private carrier contracts, military procurement systems and international trade regimes. Sovereignty persists, but it is structured to facilitate movement.

The contradiction is not unique to Oakland. South Africa, which brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, has also faced internal debate over coal exports tied to Israeli energy supply. Multinational firms operating through subsidiaries and joint ventures can continue moving material even when public opinion or national leadership shifts. Corporations often operate across jurisdictions in ways that blunt the force of democratic mandates. The formal authority of a state remains intact, but the economic levers are harder to pull.

The modern global economy didn't weaken states so much as repurpose them. Governments police borders, enforce contracts and protect investment. What they struggle to do, especially at the local level, is interrupt the movement of capital. The rules are written to keep goods flowing. Stopping them requires swimming against legal architecture built for efficiency.

The global air cargo industry handles more than a third of the value of world trade by air, even though air freight accounts for a small share of trade by volume. Air hubs exist to move high-value goods quickly. The infrastructure is built for throughput.

At OAK, the shipments identified by organizers are handled by FedEx, which, unlike UPS, is a nonunion enterprise.

"It's not lost on me that it's the one non-union company at the airport that is handling these shipments," Rose said.

Rose is a member of Teamsters Local 70 and has been building support inside their local to secure formal endorsement of the embargo campaign. Should the local back the campaign, they can push the issue up to Teamsters Joint Council 7, which covers much of the Teamsters' West Coast membership.

"If FedEx workers were unionized and knew about this, there's actual action to be taken," they said. There could be negotiations between the local and that facility or corporate, with workers making the argument that the shipments put workers in danger by involving them in the movement of weapons for a war that has been defined by international courts as a genocide.

Rose said they've talked about the shipments with coworkers across political lines. One former Marine they work with reacted immediately when he learned what was moving through the airport. "His exact words were, 'It's just fucked up and fucking evil,'" they recalled. "He was the quickest to draw the connections."

Others, they said, don't need convincing that something is wrong. The anger isn't ideological so much as visceral. "Coworkers ask, 'How is that not illegal?' and get angry once they understand the issue."

Mohamed Shehk, organizing director of AROC Action, one of the organizations leading the Oakland People's Arms Embargo, framed the stakes in broader terms.

"Workers are the backbone of our society and of our economy," he told me. "Without workers' participation, none of this infrastructure would be able to function."

The campaign continues to gather support. Organizers say additional unions are weighing endorsements, and pressure at the Board of Port Commissioners meetings has grown. The question is no longer whether residents know about the shipments; it's whether the Port will act.

From the OAK warehouse floor, the stakes are not abstract. The planes sit less than a quarter mile away.

"I feel like I should be able to do something about this," Rose said. "I'm right there."

Individually, they cannot cross the runway and halt a shipment. Collectively, they believe workers and residents can force a decision.

"With collective action," said Rose, "this key node can be interrupted."

Jim Stewart at a CNN Town Hall:

I'm angry. I'm angry about this. I lived in East Palestine for 65 years. That's my home. You took it away from me.

You seem like a sincere man. I'm not calling you names. But your company stinks. You got to do something about this. I lost a lot. I lost the value of my home.

Did you shorten my life? I want to retire and enjoy it. How are we going to enjoy it? You burned me.

Do I mow the grass? Can I plant tomatoes next summer?

What can I do? I’m afraid.

Maximillian Alvarez: It's been three years since a Norfolk Southern bomb train that was carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine on the cold night of February 3, 2023. Three days later, Norfolk Southern led local authorities to make the disastrous and completely unnecessary decision to empty five giant carloads of vinyl chloride into a ditch and set the contents on fire. The so-called controlled burn of vinyl chloride released a massive black chemical plume into the air and exposed residents in East Palestine and the surrounding area to deadly toxins in one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history.

Three years later, residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area are still suffering the toxic fallout. They're still getting sick. Folks are even dying off. Many are still buried in debts from costs related to the derailment. They've been screwed over by Norfolk Southern, by their own government, by Biden, Trump, Democrats, Republicans—I mean, even their own damn class action attorneys. They have been exploited by everyone and helped by hardly anyone.

So I am begging you guys, please don't forget about the people affected by this disaster. And do not let their corporate poisoners go unpunished. What happened to the people in and around East Palestine is a national tragedy and a humanitarian outrage.

And it could happen to any of us, as corporations and the government turn more and more of the United States into one giant sacrifice zone. If we don't do something to stop this now, I promise you, our toxic future will look a lot like how East Palestine looks today.

Evelyn Albright: My name is Evelyn Albright. I'm 10 years old. The train derailment affected me. It gave me a really, really bad rash. We lived in a hotel for four whole months. It was a lot, honestly. I had to do mostly online work, and we had [four] people in there, two dogs, and our cat had to go live down at our aunt's house, and it was just like torture. I had my sister help me with my schoolwork because I didn't understand most of it, because of not being in school. My dad got severe heart failure, and he had to be in the hospital for Christmas.

Chris Albright: My name is Chris Albright. I live half a mile from where the train derailed.

I'm very angry. I'm pissed. I'm pissed at the fact that everybody thinks we're doing fine, and that everything in East Palestine, Ohio is good. It's not. We are still fighting the same battle we were fighting three years ago. It's ridiculous.

We have been through Democratic presidents. We have been through Republican presidents. And nobody is stepping up to help us. Nobody gives a shit about what happened to us in East Palestine. I'm pissed.

Anybody who is [reading] this, step up. Talk about it. Bring it up to your state representatives, your congressman—anybody. Help us. Please, help us.

Sharon: I think people might be under the impression that we've already gotten help, that we've already gotten our lawsuit money, but most people haven't yet. There are still lawsuits going on, but I imagine those are going to go on for decades.

I’m with Ohio Valley Derailment Mutual Aid (OVDMA). We're just trying to keep people in their homes, keep them going until they can maybe get a little bit of settlement money.

The politicians have all let us down. We have to beg them for help, and then when they finally say they're going to help, it's another health study. We already have six health studies going on. We don't want to be studied like guinea pigs. We want to be helped.

Christa Graves: My home is just outside the one mile zone. This time three years ago, we didn't know if we were supposed to evacuate, we weren't super concerned, and here we find ourselves, three years later, minus one family member, with another one pretty sick.

We see so many community members who are sick, and more who want to pretend that it's all all over. They don't want to believe there's anything wrong with their beautiful small town life.

The world's moved on, and we're stuck in a vacuum of time.

Hopefully, when we get on the other side of this, we can try to prevent future rail disasters and chemical disasters. And we have worked with some rail activists, former railroaders, who saw this coming and tried to stop it. I wish I could still live in a world where this didn't happen, but I'm so thankful for the wonderful people that we've met on this journey. I hope there's a fourth anniversary with the same people that we have right now, or that more have joined up, but I hope we're not down any more. And more and more, it's not looking that way.

I hope we’re overreacting. But nothing that I’ve read suggests that this is an overreaction, and that the uptick in serious health issues is just coincidental to a chemical bomb being blown up over top of our community.

I'm taking my mother to pulmonology appointments where they will not look me in the eyes, and they will not address the fact that she was exposed to chemicals. We've been waiting for two weeks for a replacement inhaler for the one that was causing drastic side effects. I’ve been told that these disasters can make people sensitive to medications. So now she can't breathe well.

We're thankful for all of those who bring their skills and their talents to help us in whatever way they can. At OVDMA, we desperately need funds to help people cover medical bills or maintenance on their cars, or copays, or repairs on things that they would have had the money for if they weren't paying it all on medical bills. Bottled water. There's still so many needs that aren't met.

I hope and pray that this doesn't happen to your community, because we never dreamed it could happen to ours. And then when it did, we were sure the right things would be done. We were sure, as we found that we were sick, that the EPA would protect us, that FEMA would do their job, that the railroad would be held accountable. Well, we have found none of that to be true. We have found no accountability.

Edward Siceloff: My name is Edward Siceloff. I'm 7 years old. I was exposed to the train derailment badly and the second day, I had puffy cheeks because I was sick and I couldn't stop licking my lips for some reason.

My mom used to take me to the creek when I was a little kid, and now it’s polluted. I know the words, like vinyl chloride.

We went up the neighbor's driveway and we saw the smoke. And I was scared to sleep in my bed by myself that night when the train derailment happened. And I was four years old when it happened, and I was in my bed with my mom. She was putting me to sleep. She was looking at Facebook on her phone. It popped up on her phone saying, Please do not go to East Palestine, Ohio.

When I grow up, I'm going to try to be the president, and I'm going to stop all of this.

Alvarez: What are you going to do to companies like Norfolk Southern?

Edward Siceloff: Put them out of business.

Christina Siceloff: I’m from Darlington, PA. And now it's been three years since the derailment happened in East Palestine, and I really think that a lot of us in PA have been left out.

There are still people from both Ohio and PA that are getting sicker. The doctors are still not sure on how to treat us. A lot of people don't have a doctor to go to because they can't afford it. Norfolk Southern says that everything is cleaned up. But if it is, then why are people still smelling things?

My home that I grew up in for 37 years, it's not my home anymore. It's Norfolk Southern's home.

It doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're coming from: nobody cared about us. Joe Biden, he wouldn't sign a [Stafford Act] disaster declaration for us. He gave us health studies. When Trump's administration took over, he gave us more health studies.

We've been so let down and our trust is so broken. Everything's been taken from us.

We worry about the soil that our kids play in. We can't go fishing in the creek. We can't go forage for mushrooms out in the backyard anymore. We don't know if the air is safe for us to breathe, and we don't know if any cough that we get is a natural cough that everybody gets sick from, or if it's a new symptom of the derailment.

We've seen [the same government neglect] in Conyers, Georgia, in Roseland, Louisiana and in Moss Landing, California. It’s the same thing over and over and over again. If you want our trust, then get us to trust you by helping us, and not just giving us false hope.

I’ve heard JD Vance has got a new one on the way. And if this happened in his town, what would he want for [his] kids?

Alvarez: I want to thank everyone in and around East Palestine for continuing to speak with me after these three horrendous years, and for continuing to fight even when they have suffered and endured so, so much.

Please share these stories with everyone that you can, and if the people you know don't listen to podcasts, we've also included more video interviews that I've done with residents in the show notes for this episode.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Don't forget East Palestine. Solidarity forever.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was published on Feb 6.

Before she was Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice in New York City, before she was President Biden’s Labor Secretary in Washington D.C., even before she led California’s Labor Department, Julie Su had a long career as a civil rights attorney.

It was in that role in 1995 that Su served as lead attorney in the El Monte Thai garment slavery case, which would lead to a landmark ruling in favor of 72 Thai nationals who had been enslaved in a sweatshop, winning them $4 million in stolen wages and legal status, and eventually leading to the creation of the “T visa” for victims of human trafficking. Su had successfully argued that manufacturers should be held liable for wage theft, part of a broader campaign around the El Monte case which Su has said, “turned my life upside down and changed me forever.”

Earlier this year, Su went back to Thailand with a group of the workers she represented in the case, reconnecting with them more than three decades after the watershed ruling which put in place sweeping immigration and labor reforms. The trip came as Su has taken the helm of a new role in New York City government—Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice—where she will oversee a broad swath of economic and regulatory policy in the city, and serve as one of the key people tasked with making Mamdani’s political agenda a reality.

We spoke with Julie Su about her new job, how the lessons of the El Monte case helped form her approach to economic and immigrant justice, and what she has planned for her role in Mayor Mamdani’s administration in New York City. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your position, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, is newly created. How do you conceive of it? What are your priorities?

Julie Su: Economic justice, right? It is both by definition and by breadth a reflection of this mayor’s commitment to using every tool in this city’s portfolio to make life better for working class New Yorkers. That includes making sure that the laws that protect working people are enforced fully, so that a worker who goes to work at the beginning of the day knows they’re going to come home with all the wages that they earned. It means that we are going to measure the economic health of the city—including its growth, including our development, by how working people do. Whether they benefit from capital investments, or property and real estate. It means that we don’t just want working people to get the basics. We want them to be able to enjoy the full cultural and artistic life of the city. The things that make it a world class city should not be out of reach for the workers that live here.

Based on some of the enforcement actions announced so far, it seems to be both consumer protection and worker protection, is that right?

Su: Well, oftentimes it’s the same people. Workers are consumers and consumers are workers. In New York City, that agency protects both, and that’s not by accident. But we also have broader enforcement. We enforce the human rights laws of the city, making sure that if somebody goes to search for housing or search for a job, they don’t get excluded because of some status. One of the things about this portfolio and putting together various enforcement agencies is recognizing that commonality. We also have small business services under economic justice. Oftentimes, the same corporate entities that exploit working people, either by wage theft or misclassifying them, are the same ones who engage in price gouging and junk fees that hurt consumers, and are the same ones that make it very hard for small business to operate—either through competition, or through creating platforms that small businesses have to pay an enormous amount of their hard earned money to just participate in. So the ability to look at that holistically is the mayor’s vision of not just picking and choosing among the ways that people struggle to make a living.

Are there measurable economic goals that you plan to judge your success by in this job?

Su: I fully adopt the mayor’s goal that we’re going to measure the health of the city by whether it’s affordable for working people. One of those measures will be whether we can reverse the exodus of working people from the city by making it easier to make a living. That includes having child care, a problem that we’ve already begun to deliver on. It means having transit that people can afford so you can do something as basic as get to and from work. It also means increasing what workers keep in their pockets. Part of this is about money, but part of it’s about time. Working people can’t live a decent life or feel secure at the end of the day if they have to work two or three jobs. It’s part of the cruel trick of this idea that stripping workers of protections gives them more so-called “flexibility,” right? If the flexibility is just to go get another job because you can’t live, that’s not flexibility, and it’s actually not well-being.

It’s how much workers make. It’s how much workers have a chance to organize. We are looking at everything that we can do with our tools to support workers organizing for a better life. There are a number of workers who are negotiating for first contracts in New York City. We support strong first contracts for working people who have chosen a union. Our mayor has shown up on the picket line. It’s still too hard to join a union and get a first contract in this country. We want New York City to be different.

Are there policy levers that you can push in this job that will make it easier for workers here to organize and win?

Su: I am taking a hard look at every lever that we may have, and my direction to the entire team under economic justice is that we should unleash our whole power for the good of working people. That means looking at authorities we already have, and dusting off ways that they’ve been interpreted to be narrower or weaker than they should be. It also means understanding that who we see and who we invite into the halls of power matters.

I learned this at the federal level. There are lots of authorities that you can exercise when you are in governing that might not be explicit authorities, but that can really show whose side you’re on—that can demonstrate that workers are at the heart of your agenda. That can be everything from helping to achieve good contracts, to looking at how capital investments go to benefiting people who have always been an afterthought in the past.

My sense is that the business community in New York is still figuring out how to navigate this administration. Have you found them to be nervous about you?

Su: Yes, but mostly I hear that secondhand. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. We have to have the highest aspirations—which this mayor has been clear about, and which is what swept him into office with a real mandate—and we have to be very pragmatic about what we can deliver. Anybody who’s willing to help us deliver a more affordable New York City, a New York City that does right by its workers, I want to work with them.

The gig economy in New York runs the gamut from food delivery workers to graphic designers to writers. What can people in the gig economy look for from you?

Su: I’m glad you mentioned artists. In the portfolio is the arts and culture—the museums, the libraries, the industries like entertainment and media that make New York City such a world class destination. Looking at that through economic justice is probably about who can afford to participate. But also about, what is the life of artists, and those who create? This problem is not unique to New York City, but many of those jobs have become increasingly insecure for people. Some of that is the evolution of the industry, but it’s also choices that have been made to strip working people of their ability to organize, their ability to be protected by labor laws. Those industries matter a great deal to us, because they’ve already lost a number of protections that were guaranteed to workers for a hundred years.

You just got back from a trip to Thailand. Tell me about that.

Su: About 30 years, in one of my first cases as a young lawyer, I had the incredible privilege of representing a group of garment workers who’d been trafficked from Thailand and forced to work behind barbed wire, and under armed guard, in an apartment complex in Southern California, where they sewed clothes 18 hours a day and were paid pennies for it. When they were discovered by federal authorities, they were thrown into a federal prison and told they were going to be deported. We fought for their freedom from detention. We fought for their ability to stay in this country. One of the first spaces in which I saw that attacks on immigrants are attacks on workers. And we filed a lawsuit against the companies they were sewing for, who disassociated themselves entirely from the operations and said they weren’t responsible, they didn’t know. Our argument was: You are responsible, and it’s not enough to say you don’t know. It’s not enough to close your eyes to the exploitation that you enable and then blame somebody else for it. That case really brought about some changes to this idea of corporate responsibility when you subcontract for labor. [Su’s work on the case eventually helped to win a settlement for the workers, led Congress to pass an anti-trafficking law, and earned her a MacArthur Genius Grant.]

They not only were able to get stability living in the United States, they also went back to Thailand and did things for their families that I think they never imagined. They’ve been asking me to go visit Thailand for—this is a trip decades in the making. Last year, after the Biden administration, I promised them that I now had some time and was gonna go with them to Thailand, so that trip was planned for February.

That case centered on immigrants and labor. Did you take anything from that case that seems relevant to the political atmosphere around immigration today?

Su: In that case, initially, the workers had been trafficked. Their passports had been taken from them. They had been working in the country. When they were rounded up, forced into prison jumpsuits, and told they were getting deported, I saw it as sending a message to all working people who were working under unspeakable conditions, who were regularly threatened by their employers that their immigration status would be weaponized against them, as a message back to all those workers. If this group of workers could be summarily deported, then other workers would be made even more vulnerable too. So it was about this group of workers, but it was about all workers whose immigration status is used to exploit and dehumanize them…

The government is supposed to enforce labor laws, not enable employers in breaking them. We changed policy that would allow workers to come forward when they are being abused and end that exploitation without fear of deportation. So now, fast forward to today, where the machinery of the federal government is being used to send that exact message that working people are criminals—and that the power of the federal government is going to be used to support exploitative employers. It is bad policy. It’s bad for individual workers. It’s bad for our economy. It’s bad for the rule of law.

What’s the experience been like for you over the past year, watching the Trump administration more or less dismantle a lot of what you did in Washington?

Su: Well, it’s disastrous. I think it’s also tragic. One of the lessons of my life’s work is that when working people do well, everyone does better… Working people, when given a shot, transform their communities. They create real security and become key to the economic life of their entire neighborhood. So I think what’s happening is disastrous at the hands of the federal administration, by vilifying immigrant workers. The federal government has decimated communities. Hurt small businesses. You hear about businesses that close because they no longer have their workforce, or they no longer have people coming to the stores and restaurants because people are afraid to leave their homes. That cannot be the America that we are trying to build. You tied this to what we were doing in the Biden administration—President Biden was very clear that the federal government has tremendous power, especially if we use federal dollars to stimulate real growth and to rebuild our infrastructure. And that wasn’t just physical infrastructure, although that was a big part of it—roads, bridges, pipes for drinking water, high speed internet—but it was also, you know, child care infrastructure. Infrastructure that supports families and makes it easier to live. And the reversal of all of those funds, many of them midway or 80% of the way through finishing of projects, has also been really devastating to the union workers who were doing that job, and also what was being built.

A lot of the analysis in the labor world now is that the only real way to do good policy in the near term is on the state and local level. Is that your analysis, too?

Su: I’m never gonna give up on the importance of federal policy. The ripping up of federal union contracts, that’s been disastrous too. Any time you attack working people, you not only hurt those groups of workers, you’re really taking away the basis for security in families, in streets, in neighborhoods, and in our country. You have people who have devoted their lives to public service, and are now completely thrown out of work.

When you dismantle FEMA, the next time there is a federal disaster, everyone is gonna pay for that. When you stop any kind of scientific research, the next time there is a pandemic—or even just the fact that we are seeing a rise in diseases that have been largely addressed through vaccines—you hurt everybody by doing those things. So you can’t give up on the federal government. There’s nothing like the breadth and depth of what the federal government can do. But yeah, when it comes to pro-worker policies, I think cities and states are now demonstrating that they’re going to do everything possible to fill the gaps. And here in New York City, we are gonna show what is possible when government actually aligns with and prioritizes working people. My hope is that that’s not just going to be good for New Yorkers—it’s going to show the country a way forward.

A version of this story was also posted at How Things Work.

This story was originally posted at The 19th.

A third of American workers now have access to some form of government-issued paid leave—the biggest share ever.

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t have a federal paid leave policy offering workers paid time off after the birth of a child or to seek medical care, for example, and access to unpaid leave is only about 30 years old. In that dearth of federal action, states and jurisdictions have moved ahead to pass 14 paid leave laws since 2002, which now cover a third of the population. Ten of those were passed in the past decade, as support for paid leave has risen; three go into effect this year.

Some states’ paid family and medical leave programs expand beyond time off to care for a new baby or to get medical treatment. This year, Colorado expanded its paid leave program to include an additional 12 weeks for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In Oregon, survivors of domestic violence also qualify for paid leave. Connecticut offers paid leave if you’re serving as an organ or bone marrow donor.

According to research from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group, the 14 laws now cover 32 percent of private-sector workers, an estimated 46 million people. Of those covered, a third are women and a third are men, while overall a third are parents. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders have especially benefited—55 percent have paid leave through their state programs, as do 41 percent of Latinx workers due to a concentration of these communities in states that have enacted programs.

Paid leave laws are in 13 blue states and the District of Columbia: California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Delaware and Minnesota.

Though other workers may receive paid leave from their employers, workers of color—and especially women of color—are less likely to be in jobs that offer any paid leave. That’s one of the reasons advocates have pointed to a state or federal system as an equalizer that could improve access.

“All workers will at some point need paid leave, whether for their own health or to care for loved ones. But when access is not guaranteed, the workers least likely to have paid leave also tend to be those who are likely to face greater health and caregiving challenges and have fewer financial resources to fall back on,” the National Partnership for Women & Families noted in its report.

Low-wage workers, two-thirds of whom are women, have less access to paid family and medical leave from their employers than do high-wage workers.

“This creates a double bind for low-wage workers who often can’t take off unpaid time because they lack savings or might lose their job if they do. This inequity especially impacts women who are more likely to be low-wage workers and at the same time do two-thirds of unpaid caregiving,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families and one of the authors of the report.

Large paid leave campaigns in six more states—Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia—could, if passed, bring the share of American workers covered to 44 percent, the national partnership estimated.

The most imminent of those is a proposal in Virginia. Last month, lawmakers in the Virginia House and Senate passed a pair of paid family and medical leave bills that are likely to be signed by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who called for passing a state program in her State of the Commonwealth speech this year.

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are hoping to reignite momentum behind a paid leave bill that has bipartisan support. Lawmakers in Hawaii and Illinois are also considering a bill this session. And both Nevada and New Mexico have come close: In Nevada, a paid leave bill passed in the legislature last year was vetoed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and in New Mexico, a paid leave bill passed the House last year but not the Senate.

At the federal level, part of the momentum of the past decade has come from men—especially dads in Congress—pushing for more paid leave access. During the Biden administration, the United States got as close as it ever has to passing a federal paid leave policy before it was removed from a spending bill. Now during the Trump administration, lawmakers made permanent a tax credit for employers who voluntarily offer paid leave to certain employees.

So while the issue does have bipartisan support, Republicans and Democrats remain at odds about what form a federal paid leave policy should take. At a House hearing last week, U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Pennsylvania Republican who has a newborn, said his wife is able to care for their daughter because of her company’s paid leave policy.

“We know that this practice makes an important difference for many in our community. Unfortunately, paid family leave has been out of reach for millions of Americans who are hoping to grow their families,” he said.

But while state bills are “encouraging,” Mackenzie said it is also “difficult for state administrators and private-sector benefits managers to navigate the patchwork of paid leave policies across different states. While one program may work in Maryland, Alabama likely has its own workforce challenges to manage. One state’s approach should not be forced upon another’s workforce, or vice versa.”

For paid leave, he said, “there is no silver bullet solution.”

Dawn Huckelbridge, the director of Paid Leave for All, a national advocacy organization pushing for federal paid family and medical leave, said she is “heartened to see there is bipartisan interest and dialogue” on the subject.

But, she added, “there are states that will likely never pass paid leave, so as long as there isn’t a federal guarantee, this is going to create a system and have and have nots that will just continue to grow inequities.”

The war Israel and the United States launched against Iran on February 28, with the “decapitation” of the country’s leadership and the bombardment of hundreds of military and civilian sites—including a girls’ school in Minab where at least 165 children and staff were massacred—has quickly transformed into a regional conflagration with incalculable consequences.

While already weakened by the Israeli-U.S. “12-Day War” in June 2025—which President Donald Trump declared had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities—and despised by many Iranians for its murderous repression of civilian protest, the Iranian regime has not yet been undermined by the loss of key government figures, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the minister of defense and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Anticipating such a decimation of its elites, Iran used a decentralized command structure to organize strikes on not just Israeli and U.S. targets, but energy and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf states on which U.S. regional strategy depends.

Iranian drones and missiles struck an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia and liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities in Qatar, forcing the sites to halt operations, as well as several other ports and energy facilities across the Gulf. Amazon cloud-computing data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were also hit, and the IRGC threatened to “set ablaze” all shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for global energy, prompting calls for an international force to prevent a blockade that could upend the global economy.

Meanwhile, the war’s military dimension is already spreading beyond the Middle East, with Hezbollah drones hitting a British Royal Air Force base in Cyprus and a U.S. submarine sinking an Iranian warship in international waters off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing scores of sailors. As political commentator Séamus Malekafzali has suggested, Iran is employing guerrilla tactics with the military might of a state.

Trump has voiced surprise at Iran’s willingness to regionalize the war, despite the fact that his administration, in keeping with predecessors, has lambasted Iran’s theocratic regime as a destabilizing force. But such incoherence is par for the course for a president who has variously forecast that the conflict may continue for days, weeks or months—qualified by his claim that the United States could fight “forever.”

Trump’s rationale for starting the war has likewise oscillated wildly: from compelling Iran to fully “capitulate” over its nuclear program, to triggering popular uprising and regime change, to stopping Iran from exporting its revolution through regional proxies like Hezbollah, to even the grandiose claim that Iran’s regime had to be toppled because it had “waged war against civilization itself.” Trump has also mused about deploying the “Venezuelan” option of replacing the country’s rulers, while simultaneously acknowledging that U.S. attacks had “knocked out most of the candidates” to assume new leadership.

“It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” Trump said. “Second or third place is dead.”

In the face of such absurdity, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has argued that what appears incoherent is actually strategic genius, allowing Trump to “look for opportunities and off ramps and escalations for the United States that creates [sic] new opportunities to execute what we need on our own timeline.” Couldn’t be clearer.

What’s beyond doubt is that the wellbeing and future of Iran’s people count for nothing in the U.S.-Israeli calculus. As scholar Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, a former death row inmate in Iran, pointedly noted, the attack on the regime, including Khamenei’s killing, is part of a “package,” wherein “the assassination of the Iranian supreme leader is also part of the killing of Iranian schoolchildren. It’s also part of the killing of Iranian innocent people. It’s also part of the attack on Iranian hospitals.”

Where Trump and his administration appear afflicted by a kind of imperial attention deficit disorder, Israel has laid its objectives bare. On March 1, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said U.S. involvement in the war “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years—to deliver a crushing blow to the terror regime.” Since his December meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Netanyahu has worked strenuously to ensure negotiations with Iran did not succeed, and thereby scupper his wish to break the Islamic Republic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to acknowledge as much, telling reporters, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Whether the global economic pain inflicted by Iran’s retaliation will lead Trump to wind down the war remains to be seen, as does the question of whether the war will in fact bring down the Iranian regime. As scholar Robert Pape has argued, “It would be a historical first” for an aerial bombing campaign to trigger regime change, even as those campaigns inflict tremendous civilian suffering. For all their homilies about nation-building, the U.S. neocons who advocated for regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya did not shy away from nation-breaking, leading to various forms of state collapse that devastated those countries’ populations.

Similarly, for all of Israel’s direct appeals to the Iranian people—including a March 1 video in which Netanyahu called on them to break the “chains of tyranny”—it’s evident that its goal is less regime change than state collapse and fragmentation. This, after all, is the policy Israel has carried out with regards to Syria, a historical adversary whose territory it can now occupy with impunity. It also defines its repeated aggressions against Lebanon, whose territory it has once again invaded.

In partnership with the United States, Israel is continuing its policy of supporting separatist movements among Iran’s ethno-national minorities, demonstrating its willingness to be surrounded by shattered and hollowed-out states as long as that weakens any challenge to its oppression of Palestinian people and its bid for regional dominance. According to Danny Citrinowicz of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, Israel’s view is, “’If we can have a civil war, great.’ [It] couldn’t care less about the future…[or] the stability of Iran.” This horizon of state collapse perfectly complements the colonial-theocratic ideology of Greater Israel that animates many in Netanyahu’s cabinet and which was recently endorsed by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who believes Israeli borders were established by God and recorded in the Bible.

Despite recent frictions over Greenland and hollow invocations of international law, NATO allies have stepped in line. Canadian PM Mark Carney, who only recently made headlines with his Davos speech about the end of the rules-based international order, has voiced his support of this illegal war “with regret,” while France, Germany and the United Kingdom have committed to take “defensive action” against Iran. The only European country to stand out from the chorus of enablers has been Spain, whose Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez forbade the United States from employing its Spanish bases to attack Iran. In response, Trump—once again showing how little he regards the sovereignty of putative allies—vowed he could use the bases if he wanted to and threatened to immediately cut off all trade with Spain.

After the Iraq war, economist Giovanni Arrighi defined late-stage U.S. imperialism as grounded in “dominance without hegemony”—that is, its willingness to wield overwhelming military and economic force without even attempting to persuade allies that its superpower was to their benefit. As the United States further yokes itself to Israel’s project to dismantle its neighbors’ sovereign statehood, U.S. policy is growing increasingly nihilistic, as though the scope of its military power and its imagined immunity from repercussions gives it license to destroy and destabilize at will.

Given that, it’s difficult to see how the U.S.-Israeli war machine can be stayed by any political opposition, whether international or domestic, despite the profound unpopularity of the conflict in the United States already. Whether ratcheting economic chaos can have an impact where politics and law do not is an open question and it’s hard to imagine Israel pulling back from its long-held goal to break the Iranian state.

Whatever trajectory the war takes, all we know is that its damage will be lasting— compounding all the disasters that U.S. imperialism, Israeli colonialism and homegrown autocracy have already wrought on the region.

This article was originally published by Roosevelt Institute and was reprinted with permission.

It seems like a lifetime ago, but last Tuesday, something really important in U.S. constitutional history happened. In the longest-ever State of the Union speech, while staring directly at the four Supreme Court justices sitting just feet away, President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the Court's anti-tariff decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump as "unfortunate" and "disappointing." In a press conference just days before, he was even more pointed, saying "the Court was swayed by foreign interests," and that the justices who opposed his tariffs were a "disgrace," "fools and lap dogs," and "very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution." He even appeared to passingly entertain the idea that the Court should be expanded from nine to 21 members. One week later, the president took to Truth Social to query whether the "highly disappointing, to say the least," decision could be reheard or readjudicated.

These episodes were some of the most direct verbal assaults by a president on the judiciary in U.S. history. Even former President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), who confronted a Supreme Court dead set against his New Deal, disguised his court-packing plan in the language of improving efficiency,¹ whereas Trump all but brazenly admitted his attacks were retaliatory. Some observers will understandably see this diatribe as just the latest insult to U.S. democracy by a president who has proved willing to weaponize the power of the state against his political enemies. And while Trump's reasons for disparaging the Court are, of course, rooted in his petulant inability to handle being told no, his comments reminded us of how rare it is to hear progressives (whose preferred policies the Court has often overturned) call out a branch of government that is itself broken.

The Roberts Court has long been one of the most inhumane, anti-labor, pro–Big Business benches in U.S. history. And in the last few years, the reactionary majority has repeatedly sided with Trump by granting him absolute immunity, functionally greenlighting his attempts to limit birthright citizenship, and allowing immigration agents to continue racially profiling in conducting their stops. And while the tariff case had some of the reactionary justices bucking the head of the party most aligned with their ideological leanings, as former Biden official Bharat Ramamurti noted, they were not bucking the desires of capital—and the decision will actually worsen inequality.

Nonetheless, the libertarian law firms that brought the cases met their apparent goals. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett expanded the "major questions" doctrine's deregulatory impulse toward foreign policy and Trump's priorities; Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito continued to bless the doctrine as applied on the homefront to progressive priorities like fighting climate change, student debt, and pandemics; and the liberal justices came closer to the doctrine by interpreting a trade delegation narrowly. (This is despite the fact that the policy history, dating back to the FDR administration through the 1970s, would have argued for a broad interpretation).

After arguing before the decision that Trump could better rebalance trade through other statutes, opponents of activist trade policy are now making clear they want to pare back those other statutes as well. For instance, in legal filings before appellate courts in July 2025, Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute and fellow counsel argued that it is "Section 122, not IEEPA, that governs where—as here—the President seeks to impose special tariffs in response to trade deficits. That statute gives the President the flexibility he needs to remedy problems associated with those deficits." But now that Trump is actually using that other statute, Somin maintains: "If allowed to stand, this action would undermine the constitutional system almost as much as the IEEPA tariffs did."

As recounted in a series of blogs and briefs over the last year, the immediate sources of Trump's anger were the successful legal challenges against his tariff actions under the International Emergencies Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). While news reports understandably highlighted the top-line fact that the right-wing Court ruled by majority against Trump, the story beneath the surface was more complicated. At both the appellate and Supreme Court level, there were at least four different camps, with no single rationale commanding a majority as to why Trump's tariffs were illegal. What's more, dissenting opinions were issued by jurists appointed by the "free trade"-oriented presidents George H.W. Bush (1 jurist), George W. Bush (3 jurists), and Barack Obama (2 jurists)—with only one of the jurists (Kavanaugh) being appointed by the trade skeptic Trump himself.

Long before Trump decided something was amiss with the Court, others were well aware. Over 2019 and 2020, under pressure from progressives and a public dissatisfied with the Court's increasingly rightward turn, court reform was central in the public policy debate. But Trump's predecessor, former President Joe Biden, was notably reluctant to take on fundamental democracy reforms. In 2020, he ducked questions on the Court, allowing only that the body was "getting out of whack." As president, he mothballed Court reform by appointing a powerless Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, which recommended against Court expansion, and instead expressed openness to term limits—despite the infeasibility of such a proposal. Even when, in 2022, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, taking away the fundamental right to choose, Biden issued a few executive orders aimed at safeguarding some reproductive health services, and pledged to attempt to codify Roe, an idea that became moot when it failed in the Senate. (Activists faulted him for dampening enthusiasm on the question in 2022.) But he crucially failed to take any real action to rein in the Court. It was not until 2024 that he announced his support for Supreme Court term limits and an ethics code—relatively modest reforms that close observers deemed "mostly useless."

Or rewind still further, to one of the previous (relatively recent) high-water marks of presidents confronting the Court: Sixteen years ago, former President Barack Obama delivered a State of the Union address that generated a fair bit of controversy, though not for the right reasons. Speaking just days after the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United v. FEC, Obama criticized the ruling before Congress and the American people: "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections." As the camera panned across the chamber, watchful observers took note of Alito in the crowd, shaking his head, scowl on his face, and appearing to mouth the words "not true." (Last week, the justices in contrast remained stoic.) Obama went on to declare that he didn't "think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign enemies. They should be decided by the American people."

It was a tepid statement—benign, if not outright commonsensical. And yet, Obama got flak for it. Roberts called the address a "political pep rally," centrist voices wrung their hands about institutional decorum, and legal bloggers who rushed to fact-check the president noted that, technically (*pushes glasses up bridge of nose*), Alito "had a point" and was correct to discount Obama's description of the holding of the case. (Technically, the Court hadn't "reversed a century of law" as the president had claimed—the majority in Citizens United declined to resolve the question of foreign corporate spending, leaving existing statutory prohibitions in place.)

If this were an isolated case of amateur political-theater criticism, we could write it off as the spectacle it was. But the inertia on Court reform cannot be solely attributed to Obama or even Biden. It reflects a deeper and wider problem with our country's political-cultural mythology surrounding the Court in general—and Roberts in particular—as some sort of neutral and detached arbiter of the truth that operates wholly outside the domain of partisan politics.

Take liberal legal commentator and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who wrote in 2015 that "Roberts deserves admiration, not contempt." Or The Atlantic's Jeffery Rosen, who in 2020 claimed that Roberts was "establishing his own preeminence by working with his colleagues to maintain the Court's bipartisan legitimacy." That same year, writing for the New York Times, liberal legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar expressed his relief that in an era of rampant political polarization, the Roberts Court was "outperforming" the rest of government and the media when it came to scaling back on partisanship: "Fortunately, there is no aisle on the Supreme Court bench, literally or figuratively."

Sentiments like these pop up in the mainstream legal discourse just about every time the Roberts Court avoids handing down a worst-case-scenario decision. This time around was no exception, when The Atlantic's center-right commentator David Frum likened the Court's tariff decision to parliamentary reassertion of the taxation prerogative in the 1640s English Civil War, or when the outlet's center-left writer Idrees Kahloon celebrated the Court's decision because it would block future progressive administrations from instituting carbon-based tariffs. All of these episodes follow from the standard narrative that FDR's greatest error was his own effort to expand the ranks of the Court—even though the mere threat of doing so succeeded in jolting the judiciary from opposing to supporting the New Deal.

The short answer: yes. But it requires a willingness to question the trajectory we have been on in recent decades to an unchecked judicial supremacy. As one of us, Shams, wrote, the Roberts Court has invented judicial doctrines like major questions, which enables the judiciary to second-guess Congress's delegation of power to the executive branch—even when it does so clearly and intentionally—if a regulation could have a major economic impact. Given that such doctrines can be applied or not applied on a case-by-case basis, this amounts to a judicial policy veto on decisions that were democratically made.

Americans don't have to accept this state of affairs. As the other of us, Tucker, wrote in a Roosevelt report, Off-Balance: Five Strategies for a Judiciary That Supports Democracy, former presidents from Abraham Lincoln to FDR reshaped the Court to better reflect the popular will and protect human rights. Should there again be an opportunity to push forward meaningful progressive reforms, it's imperative that we follow in their footsteps and demonstrate the will to take meaningful structural action against the Court.

Notably, since last week, Trump has eased on his anti-Court rhetoric and appears to be complying with at least the immediate implications of the opinion. He is also not asking Congress to do anything differently, which House Speaker Mike Johnson ecstatically endorsed last week. Instead, in typical Trump fashion, he is attacking the Court for lack of loyalty to him personally, and certainly not for excessive loyalty to the business class. His most sycophantic followers are following his lead, expressing irritation with the decision but not proposing to do anything structural about it. (See the posts from right-wing talkers like John Eastman and Mark Levin.)

This leaves a lane wide open for progressives to advance reform by outflanking Trump's mere rhetoric with actual policy and movement-building to rebalance the Court. The Left has the ideas and the moral authority. What remains to be seen is if finally, at long last, there is the will to make transformational reform a progressive priority and put it at the center of the public debate.

1. Of course, his public communications were much more explicit about this systemic critique of the Court, as Josh Chafetz notes on Bluesky and we write in our 2018 report.

Published jointly with the Center for Media and Democracy

Update: On March 17, immigrant rights organizer Miguel Alvelo-Rivera survived the onslaught of corporate money spent against him and toppled his opponent—entrenched incumbent Jaime Andrade—to win the Democratic primary for the deep blue 40th District House seat.

Last September the sports betting duopoly DraftKings and FanDuel ran into a brick wall in Illinois. Once the state started assessing a $0.25 trade tax on every bet, sports betting “plummeted” in the state by 15% year over year.

The result? American Future, a super PAC bankrolled by DraftKings’ wholly owned subsidiary, DK Crown Holdings, is spending big—$1.2 million—in the Democratic primaries for Illinois legislative seats, according to reporting from Capitol Fax and the latest campaign finance filings. Intent on electing representatives who will resist further taxes on the gaming industry, the PAC has become the largest outside spender so far in the Illinois state legislative primary slated for March 17.

Nationwide, sports betting companies have massively amped up their spending, with FanDuel and DraftKings donating over $4 million to SuperPACs this cycle, in marked contrast to earlier cycles where they spent barely anything at all.

American Future’s biggest beneficiary, receiving more than $263,000, is Emil Jones III, a state senator who was indicted in 2022 on federal bribery charges, and faces little-known opponents in his race to hold on to his seat. In a race featuring a stark ideological contrast, American Future has spent over $220,000 in the 40th Legislative District in northwest Chicago, backing an entrenched Democratic machine incumbent, Jaime Andrade, Jr., against a democratic socialist challenger, Miguel Alvelo-Rivera, who, in a statement to the Center for Media and Democracy, pledged to “fight to tax wealthy corporations and individuals in Illinois, and… make sure they know our legislature isn’t for sale.”

The industry is particularly incensed about the way Illinois has chosen to structure its tax on sports betting. Instead of taxing winnings as in most other states, it collects taxes on a per-bet basis, which in turn has led to the decrease in betting. “[T]his is the only jurisdiction across all 30 states with online sports betting where this is actually happening,” Joe Maloney, head of the national Sports Betting Alliance, told Peoria-based 25News, an ABC affiliate.

The state’s tax per wager is also coupled with local taxes, as in Chicago, where progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson has assessed a 10.25% sports betting tax under a new licensing law—one that the Sports Betting Alliance is challenging as unconstitutional.

Representative Andrade has been in office since 2013. Prior to being elected to the state House, he worked for longtime Chicago Alderman Richard Mell, the father-in-law of disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D), who was pardoned by President Donald Trump in February 2025.

Andrade is being challenged by Alvelo-Rivera, the executive director of the workers center Latino Union of Chicago. His backers include Democratic Congresswoman Delia Ramirez and two more progressive Democrats, the area’s Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez and State Senator Gracila Guzman, as well as the Chicago Teachers Union. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CTU organizer, has championed Chicago’s local betting tax. (Mayor Johnson has remained neutral in the race.)

American Future has also spent $164,000 to support Adam Braun, a former lobbyist who has worked for the corporate law firm Orrick, which represents DraftKings and FanDuels, who is running for state representative in the 13th District; $125,000 on Saba Haider in the 84th District, running against a candidate, Jared Ploger, who is also backed by teachers unions; and $159,000 backing Aja Kearney, also in Chicago in the 34th district.

Since Illinois implemented its sports betting tax last fall, changes in federal tax law that are seen as disadvantageous to the industry have also taken a toll, leading to precipitous declines in the value of stock in both DraftKings’ and Fanduels’ parent companies.

DraftKings earned a profit of just $3.7 million in 2025, while FanDuels’ parent company Flutter lost over $400 million. Until 2023, Flutter had received significant backing from the powerful private equity firm KKR. DraftKings, for its part, has launched a venture capital firm with powerhouse General Catalyst.

While 22% percent of Americans have bet on sports in the last year, increasingly more people are beginning to view sports betting as a public health problem. By amping up their electoral funding efforts, sports betting giants like DraftKings are feverishly betting on ways to keep states like Illinois and cities like Chicago from eating into their profits.

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 165 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.

Last year, when Israel and the United States launched the strikes that would be a prelude to this attack, I wrote that the two countries were “shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.” In the wake of those strikes, once the immediate violence ceased, we largely heard crickets from U.S. lawmakers. This, despite the fact that those strikes, like these, were illegal under U.S. and international law. We cannot let this continued lack of accountability stand. If we do, what will happen next?

Over the years, U.S. and Israeli leaders have become increasingly vocal about their hopes for “greater Israel” — the expansion of the apartheid state into Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Before the start of the current assault on Iran, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a favorite in the country’s upcoming elections, accused Turkey of being the hub of a threatening axis “similar to the Iranian one.” This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program. It is not a war to free Iranians from a repressive regime. This is a war to preserve U.S. power and hegemony across the entire region.

It is also not accurate to say that Israel is dragging the United States into a war against its choosing. Reporting has shown that these two nuclear powers were in lockstep in their planning of this attack. In order to stop this violence, we need to really contend with how it started. The United States is hardly a victim here.

This state of affairs is intolerable. I am disgusted to know that my tax dollars are being spent to bomb my ancestral homeland. I was sickened to wake up to messages from family members telling me that the city where they live was under attack from the country where I live. I’m terrified now that Iran’s government has cut internet access yet again, leaving us disconnected from our loved ones. No fear, of course, can compare to the terror of being on the receiving end of missiles or guns, whether they are wielded by a foreign power or your own government; Iranians have been killed by both in horrifying numbers over the last year. But for those of us in the diaspora, the fact that it has now become routine to check in on family and friends living through untold violence does not make it any less traumatic.

Despite the abject horror of this moment, we cannot afford to slip into despair. There is still space for things to get much worse, but, more importantly, there is still so much left that we must protect. No one can predict what will happen over the coming days and weeks, but we know they are likely to be filled with more violence and uncertainty. We need to use every single tool at our disposal to chip away at the war-making systems inflicting this horror, which are so thoroughly embedded in the heart of the United States.

We can start, of course, by demanding that Congress immediately pass a War Powers Resolution to put an end to this destructive assault. Beyond that we can lift up the call being made by groups like Defending Rights & Dissent for Congress to impeach not only Donald Trump but every single member of his cabinet who had a hand in making this unjust and illegal war possible.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Our elected officials need to publicly explain why they hemmed and hawed over a War Powers Resolution before these attacks occurred, despite an obvious military buildup.

We must demand that every member of Congress who has voted to increase our military budget to over a trillion dollars account for their choices. We must push those members who have personal investments in the military machine — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — even further. They need to explain their conflicts of interest, and why they continue to profit off this death and destruction. Lawmakers who take money from groups like AIPAC that are relishing in this war especially need to answer for their votes.

It’s also imperative to not view this war in a silo, but instead see it as part of the same violent, hegemonic project that has been conducting genocide and spreading violence across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond. We must hold elected officials accountable for failing to uphold U.S. and international law by continuing to support the transfer of weapons to Israel as it commits genocide against Palestinians. We must make it politically toxic for those lawmakers not to support legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which aims to stop many such transfers.

We also can’t expect elected officials to do more just because we ask them to. We need to build power. We must support grassroots movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctionsmovement that seek to make war, apartheid, and genocide too costly to wage. We must back campaigns like Taxpayers Against Genocide that are searching for legal avenues to keep federal funds from being used to violate human rights.

We can wage campaigns against death-dealing corporations and make sure that war-profiteering is exposed and subjected to public outrage. The No Tech for Apartheid movement has long been organizing to push Silicon Valley to stop supplying the Israeli military with computing power, and has already found some success. The Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence in Gaza has received a great deal of reporting; now that OpenAI has announced a deal to allow the Pentagon to use its models in their classified networks, the fight against AI has taken on renewed urgency. Campaigns across the country against data centers are now also a crucial nexus of resistance against militarism.

So too are campaigns for immigrant rights and against deportations. In the wake of the U.S. strikes against Iran last June, the Trump administration rounded up Iranian immigrants for deportation. Those deportations continued into this year, even as the Iranian government staged a brutal crackdown on protesters. As we prepare for war to rage across the region, we can demand the United States and Europe open their borders to people fleeing violence and despair. We can continue to show the links between the occupation of cities by federal immigration agents here at home and imperial wars waged abroad. The enemies of democracy here are also the enemies of democracy abroad.

Some of these demands may seem futile under this murderous president, backed by an obedient Congress, and with a Supreme Court that has offered comparatively little restraint. But this unaccountable bureaucracy makes it all the more essential that we build grassroots power to issue these demands and force those in power to heed them.

Polling shows that this war is unpopular. Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability. And we cannot let the leaders who follow him believe that they, too, can unleash such violence without consequences. After all, would we be here if there were any real repercussions for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day — not only in moments of crisis, but whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

President Donald Trump's unprovoked assault on Iran is the latest phase of a rampage in which the administration is making war and militarism central features of life in the United States. While the Pentagon's violence has been unavoidable for many people around the world, it has largely been hidden from the view of most of the U.S. population. Not anymore.

The U.S. and Israel opened this war by launching attacks across Iran on the morning of February 28. Since the beginning of the bombing campaign, at least 555 Iranians have been killed, including well over 100 people—mostly girls—at a school in Minab. Iran is now following through on the retaliation that it promised, and has launched missiles toward at least six countries. At least six U.S. troops have been killed, and with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing to continue bombing, the war is escalating and expanding.

While brazen, aggressive U.S. military action in the 21st century did not begin with Donald Trump—the current president is simply bringing the unvarnished reality of U.S. militarism into the spotlight. By doing so, he has exposed the deeply unpopular and undemocratic nature of U.S. foreign policy. In this moment, antiwar organizers must seize upon this new awareness and outrage to build movements against escalating U.S. militarism.

Trump’s predecessors were more selective in exposing the public to the machinations of the war machine. For example, former President George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, and his catastrophic “shock and awe” occupation of Iraq, were undertaken with extraordinary publicity, such as the speech that he gave under a “Mission Accomplished” banner a mere six weeks after the invasion of Iraq began.

But these highly publicized attacks were also conducted alongside covert wars in Pakistan and Somalia. Bush established a surveillance and policing architecture that targeted Muslims—both in the U.S. and around the world—but many of its operations were kept invisible to most Americans. Former President Barack Obama escalated and expanded the “war on terror” through drone strikes while attempting to conceal them from the U.S. public. During his presidency, Joe Biden largely maintained this approach.

Trump is bringing the brutality of U.S. militarism out into the open in the form of a spectacle—combining his expertise in shaping media narratives with his penchant for coercion through violence. But while Trump takes credit for creating the military capabilities that he is putting on display—contrasting himself with his “weak” predecessors—the United States’ capacity for the kinds of violence we are seeing both in our streets and on our screens was built up over decades by previous administrations and Congress’s implementation of vast “war on terror” policies.

In Trump’s meandering press conference following the U.S. attack on Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine bragged that “the past two decades have honed the skills of our special operations forces,” which the Pentagon could draw on for “an unprecedented operation.”

“We leveraged our unmatched intelligence capabilities and our years of experience in hunting terrorists,” Caine said. “And we could not have done this mission without the incredible work by various intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA and [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency].”

Bravado aside, there is truth in what Caine is saying: The Pentagon, the intelligence establishment, and police have been collaborating for decades. They have “learned by doing”: carrying out night raids, air strikes, abductions, and other violent actions across the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, in countless military operations in the post-9/11 wars. To a great extent this cross-collaboration was facilitated by bipartisan “war on terror” policies, such as the involvement of FBI agents in missions with special forces during the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many of these activities were largely hidden from the U.S. public—no press conferences, no official announcements, no tweets. The Pentagon has been carrying out countless versions of what we witnessed in Caracas on a much smaller scale for two decades—bursting into Iraqi and Afghan homes with guns blazing and dragging people out in the night. Whatever U.S. leaders fed to the public was curated, such as the raid leading to Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011. If these capabilities, honed in the dark, were preparation for abducting Maduro, as Caine narrates, then the January 3 operation in Venezuela was their spotlight debut for the American public.

The seizure of Maduro from Venezuela is far from the only example of intentionally, highly visible military activity under the Trump administration. That assault—and the bombardment of Iran that followed weeks after—was the culmination of years of aggressive and devastating military actions. During Trump’s first term, the president was “very proud to” have dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal on Afghanistan. In 2020, he assassinated Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Iraq by a drone strike.

Months after the second Trump administration took office, it bombed Somalia in what the Pentagon boasted was “the largest air strike in the history of the world.” Trump subsequently bombed Yemen for weeks. He joined Israel in its war on Iran and dropped massive bombs on that country in June 2025. Starting in September 2025, his administration conducted air strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean as part of an alleged war against narco-trafficking, with at least 110 people killed by the end of the year. Trump ended 2025 by bombing Nigeria on Christmas.

In all of these cases, Trump posted on social media with bombastic language that dehumanized the people impacted by these attacks. When U.S. planes bombed Iran last summer, Trump inaccurately declared that the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. This is because the story Trump is telling is far more important to him than actual facts.

At home, he has deployed federal agents in fatigues with military-grade weapons to U.S. cities in order to round up immigrants and crackdown on dissent, paired with highly produced videos for social media. These actions have all been horrific. Central to his approach has been relating to overseas state violence not as a potential PR disaster for the public, but as a PR opportunity for his base—a celebration of weapons and the iron fist of the U.S. military.

Military operations abroad and brute force tactics by feds in our cities have, of course, not been invisible to everyone in the U.S. Many in communities with roots in the Global South have witnessed their countries of origin targeted by U.S. sanctions and military actions to devastating effect. And many people in Black, immigrant, and Muslim communities have experienced federal police agents conducting surveillance, kicking in doors, and abducting people before—and increasingly since—September 11, 2001.

But these actions, enabled by both Democratic and Republican administrations, largely involved a strategy of hiding them from the bulk of the U.S. population and underplaying them in any national conversation. While officials and whistleblowers occasionally brought these policies into light, these moments were few and far between. The practices were daily, but the conversations about them were rare. Activists worked to call attention to and resist these violent practices, but their campaigns were largely marginalized by the media.

Whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were able to temporarily bring the reality of U.S. imperial violence into the national conversation but were met with intense prosecution. And while some journalists carried out exceptional investigations, the U.S. news media largely complied with not asking too many questions as the government abducted people from around the world and tortured them in Guantánamo Bay, bombed countries in the Global South, and terrorized communities here—all in the name of “fighting terrorism” and stopping “criminal activity.”

Why does it matter that Trump is putting the horror of militarism on display for the U.S. population at large? For starters: Majority opposition to the U.S.’s “running” Venezuela; the fact that nearly 90 percent of Americans are against a U.S. invasion of Greenland; that nearly half of Americans opposed the attack on Iran before it even began and 59 percent of Americans now say they’re against the bombing campaign; and the widespread, fierce protest against the deployment of militarized, federal forces in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere—all of which are enormous developments. This polling data represents reflect the abandonment of a strategy of manufacturing consent among the public in favor of energizing Trump’s base with unapologetic displays of state violence.

In fact, in Washington and Tel Aviv's current bombardment of Iran, Trump has not felt compelled to persuade the public at all. He made no case to Congress, and he barely provided a justification, just videos posted to his social media account. He is appealing to the most war-loving section of his base, but sending a message to all of us: Military violence will be a fact of life, and you should get used to it.

This is why it is so important that we refuse to get used to it. Building on the outpouring of protest against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it is critical that people in the U.S. are confronting Trump’s attacks—both domestically, in places like Minneapolis, and around the world. The challenge will be making sure that, as we oppose and resist Trump’s most egregious violations of domestic and international law—and people’s human rights—that we do not stop there.

By recognizing that these actions were built on a decade of bipartisan collaboration, we can reject the idea of returning to an imaginary peaceful past and become conscious of the need to resist all acts of injustice before they escalate into global catastrophes. Though Trump campaigned as an opponent of the post-9/11 wars, he is instead updating those wars for a new, more aggressive, and visible era. We need to dismantle the war machine in its entirety.

This story is being co-published with Truthout.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.

For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”

But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.

Even the Republican rank-and-file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.

Polls show that in summer 2025, 40 percent of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved—even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.

While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.

That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the un-redacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.

And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American Left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.

Epstein was a glorified drug dealer and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.

Georgia Sen. John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters—at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult—are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.

“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”

He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.

This story was produced via Otherwords.org.

Here’s what we know.

We know that the U.S. government is once again lying to us—the U.S. public. Iran poses no threat to the American people.

We know that Israel and the United States started this war, that they have once again broken international law to violate yet another nation’s sovereignty.

We know that states have a right to defend themselves, and that includes Iran.

We know that this war is illegal according to U.S. law. It was neither approved by the U.S. congress nor the American people. This war has no mandate.

We know that the United States has destabilized much of the world through intervention, after intervention, after intervention. None have benefited the American people.

We know that bombs have never liberated anyone.

We know that this is not about Iran’s people, it’s about Iran’s oil and wealth.

We know that this attack protects the political career of the war criminal heading the Zionist entity.

We know the Zionist entity is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Already their victims include a sports complex and a girls’ school, already they have killed civilians. Israel committed a U.S.-funded, live-streamed genocide against the condemnation of the entire world, that slaughtered more than 70,000 Gazans in two years. We know Israel cannot be trusted to liberate anyone.

We know that Israel has broken the so-called ceasefire agreement in Gaza hundreds of times with no consequence from the United States. Is this a partnership we want to take into yet another endless and destabilizing war?

We know that the ruling class tries to use wars to distract us from our own stagnant wages, rising housing and grocery costs, and falling standards of living. Destroying yet another country will not make us safer, it will not make our lives easier, it will not address any of the issues we have within our own borders.

We know that to stop this unjust and illegal war, we have to stand up—united across movements and communities—to say “de-escalate now.”

President Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that the United States has launched a massive military operation aimed at toppling the Iranian government as blasts were reported in Tehran, including near the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is taking part in the assault. Unnamed Israeli security sources told Channel 12 that Israel and the Trump administration are “going all in” against Iran as Trump instructed Iranians to “stay sheltered,” warning that “bombs will be dropping everywhere.” People were seen seeking cover in Tehran as the United States and Israeli bombs began to fall.

The assault, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” by the Pentagon, comes days after the United States and Iran took part in talks in Geneva, which Trump’s envoys characterized as “positive.” In announcing military action on Saturday, Trump said falsely that the Iranian government has “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.”

The United States and Israeli attacks—which both nations characterized as “preemptive”—are plainly illegal under international law, which prohibits the threat or use of force except in response to an armed attack. The Trump administration is also violating United States law, which gives Congress the sole power to declare war.

“The term ‘preemptive’ is pure propaganda,” wrote Drop Site journalist Jeremy Scahill. “The US once again used the veneer of negotiations as a cover to bomb Iran. Tehran had just offered terms that went far beyond the 2015 nuclear deal. What was preempted was diplomacy. The same propaganda tactics used in the 2003 Iraq war.”

Trump, who ditched the 2015 nuclear deal during his first White House term, repeatedly made clear in his remarks Saturday that he does not intend the new assault on Iran to be limited in scope like his bombings of Iranian nuclear sites last year. In the weeks leading up to Saturday’s attack, the Trump administration carried out a massive military buildup in the Middle East even as the president publicly claimed he was open to a diplomatic resolution.

“We may have casualties,” the U.S. president said of American troops. “That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future.”

Trump also urged the Iranian armed forces to surrender or “face certain death” as the United States fired Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions at Iran.

The Iranian government’s immediate response to Saturday’s onslaught was a pledge of “crushing retaliation” and a wave of drone and missile attacks on Israel. The Associated Press reported that “hours after the strikes on Iran, explosions rocked northern Israel as the country worked to intercept incoming Iranian missiles.”

Iran’s foreign minister later informed his Iraqi counterpart that Iran would be targeting U.S. military installations in the region in retaliation for Saturday’s attacks.

A spokesperson for the Iranian military declared that “we will teach Israel and America a lesson they have never experienced in their history.”

“Any base that helps America and Israel will be the target of the Iranian armed forces,” the official added.

This article was reprinted from Common Dreams.

"I’m a real bug for poetry,” 24-year-old Malcolm X wrote in a February 1949 letter to his brother, Philbert X. Writing alone in his cell at the Norfolk Prison Colony, Malcolm continued: “When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.”

This year marks 101 years since Malcolm X was born, and his sharp words on the reality of the American nightmare remain true today.

Malcolm’s poetics—his love of language and for his people, his gentleness and ability to speak to the truth of things for oppressed peoples across the continents—is what shaped and awakened his radical politics. It’s what led Malcolm to write poetry in prison, to embody a magnetic rhetorical style as a street corner orator in Harlem, to cut straight to the nature of the human condition as a minister for the Nation of Islam, to pull masses of people into a movement. His legacy, the spirit of which is visible in Black and brown poets across the world, shows the power of language to shape who people are and to help them imagine another world on her way, quietly breathing.

Malcolm sometimes joked in his letters to Philbert that poems filled the pages when he had nothing to say and much to hear. In doing research for the book Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr encountered the poem Malcolm wrote at Norfolk, “Music.” It reads:

Music is not created / It is always here / surrounding us / like the infinite particles that constitute life, it cannot be seen but can only be felt […] / Music with out the Musician is like life with out Allah / both in desperate need of a home / a body.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a sense of mysticism pervades this previously unknown poem, a possible influence of his prison reading. While much is said about how Malcolm’s love for language flourished at Norfolk by reading the dictionary, he also read ancient Persian poets, seeking to learn more about Islam. His curiosities included Saadi Shirazi’s The Gulistan, Hafiz’s The Ruba’iyat of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam’s The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam.

“Prison, thanks to Islam, has ceased to be a prison,” Malcolm wrote in a letter to Philbert on March 26, 1950. “For I have learned to love the preciousness of Pure Solitude.”

At the archives of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, which houses a treasure trove of Malcolm’s personal notes and diaries, I found evidence of his notes before his speeches to students at universities and to his community as a minister for the Nation of Islam. Malcolm, as an orator, spoke from his gut; for many of his public talks, there were few planned words—just his thoughts, abilities and personality laid bare, speaking in a language that resonated with thousands. As Amiri Baraka, poet and founder of the Black Arts Movement, said, Malcolm had the ability to give voice to the unspoken: “He’d say things and instantly it’d make sense or confirm something I’d not even thought but felt.” Haki Madhubuti, another architect of the Black Arts Movement,
explained that when Malcolm spoke, it was as if someone was “cutting into your heart and then stitching it back up.”

But Malcolm’s invocations and speeches are also exemplary of poetic sensibility and lyricism, what scholar Joshua Bennett calls a “dance between page and speech, sentence and song.”

In his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” speech, with the parable of the “house Negro and the field Negro,” Malcolm used figures from chattel slavery to help explain how aligning with white supremacy could colonize a mind:

That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro—remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.”

Malcolm beckoned his audience to align with the figure of the “field Negro,” representing the masses who fight against oppression at the grassroots level.

In Malcolm’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or The Bullet,” given at the Cory United Methodist Church in Cleveland, alliteration abounds in his articulation of Black nationalism. Using repetition with natural pauses for the audience to call and respond, Malcolm invoked: “Whether you are a Christian or a Muslim or a nationalist, we all have the same problem. They don’t hang you because you are a Baptist, they hang you because you’re Black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim, they attack me because I’m Black … All of us catch hell from the same enemy. We’re all in the same bag … We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation.”

Journalist Mark Whitaker traces the influence of Malcolm on the cultural landscape of America in his book, The Afterlife of Malcolm X. He references cultural critic and playwright Larry Neal to emphasize Malcolm’s style and vernacular as rooted in Black folk memory—and the memory of Malcolm’s Garveyite father, Earl Little, who was also a preacher. Neal described the visceral impact that listening to Malcolm had on him, the musicality of Malcolm’s voice: “We began to hear Malcolm, the Black voice skating and bebopping like a righteous saxophone. We could dig Malcolm because the essential vectors of his style were more closely related to our urban experiences.”

In no small part because of this style, membership in the Nation of Islam grew exponentially under the influence of Malcolm X. During his time as a minister, Malcolm was known to have carried Rudyard Kipling’s galvanizing poem “If” in his pocket, gifted to him by his sister, Ella Collins. Following Malcolm’s rupture with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Ella provided the funds for him to undertake the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. After undergoing a personal and spiritual transformation, he adopted the Arabic name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

During his post-Hajj travels across what Malcolm called the “dark world” of the Middle East and West Africa, he saw Black nationalism as making his people in the United States “conscious”—an awakening he called “doing for self” that would link Black people to Africa, while Islam would spiritually link to Africa, Arabia and Asia. When Malcolm met Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader and revolutionary, both saw Pan-Africanism as a key solution to the problems faced by African people, stressing unity between Africans on the continent and the African diaspora in the United States.

As part of his travels, Malcolm undertook a two-day sojourn to Gaza, crossing the Egyptian border at Rafah in early September 1964. There, he met Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid in the refugee camp of Khan Younis. Rashid’s memories of escape from Khan Younis in 1956, where Israeli military forces killed about 275 unarmed civilians, left a lasting impression on Malcolm. At the time, Rashid shared a poem titled “Hattā ya‘ūd sha‘būnā” (“Until Our People Return”), echoing the Palestinian longing for return. Malcolm wrote down this poem in his travelogue:

We must return

No boundaries should exist

No obstacles can stop us

Cry out the refugees: “We shall return”

Tell the mtns: “We shall return”

Tell the valley: “We shall return”

We are going back to our youth

Palestine calls us to arm ourselves

And we are armed + are going to fight

We must return.

Malcolm’s visit to Gaza and his encounters with Rashid would inform his critique of Zionism as a new form of colonialism. This stance was years ahead of other leading Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who first saw Zionism as a model for self-determination before, years later, viewing Israel as a neocolonial state. As part of Malcolm’s anti-oppression and anti-exploitation ethos, his travel diaries connect colonialism in South Africa, imperialism in Congo, and Zionism in Palestine as conceptually tied to racism in the United States.

Within two weeks of his visit to Gaza, Malcolm penned “Zionist Logic” in the Egyptian Gazette, a Cairo-based newspaper. In the essay, Malcolm argued that Zionists lacked legal and moral rights to invade Palestine and uproot people from their homes based solely on a religious claim. “Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain,” Malcolm wrote. “Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation …where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?”

This subversive position was a precursor to the Black radical tradition and its solidarity with Palestinian revolutionaries, a practice echoed by poet June Jordan. Her poem “Moving towards Home” was published after the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, where Israeli-backed militias killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in two days. Jordan proclaimed:

I was born a Black woman

and now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

June Jordan was a pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement—a spiritual and aesthetic sister to the Black Power Movement birthed out of the grief and rage of Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. In a defining essay in The Drama Review, poet Larry Neal conceptualizes Black art as having a social purpose not just to entertain, but to unite and mobilize for Black self-determination and nationhood. “Poetry is a concrete function, an action,” Neal wrote in the essay “The Black Arts Movement.” “No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists, daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns.”

It is hard not to think of Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet and writer killed in December 2023 by the Israeli military. Alareer thought of storytelling as resistance; in the life of Malcolm X, he saw a parallel to his own, and he taught his students Malcolm’s words. Weeks before Alareer’s death, in an interview with The Electronic Intifada—against the audible backdrop of bombs—Alareer articulated that, as an academic, the toughest thing he had at home was a dry erase marker. “But if the Israelis invade ... I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”

Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die,” a symbol of resistance against Palestinian erasure, has become one of the most read and translated poems of the 21st century. The poem concludes: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.” Literary scholars term this type of resolution “late style,” a reference to the survival beyond death, as Alareer’s poem transforms personal mortality into collective immortality.

In response to Malcolm’s assassination, the first and only poetry anthology dedicated to his life, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, features a eulogy from Sonia Sanchez:

do not speak to me of martyrdom,

of men who die to be remembered

on some parish day.

I don’t believe in dying

Though, I too shall die

and violets like castanets

will echo me.

An embrace of Malcolm’s life, Sanchez’s percussive work is a drumbeat that continues his legacy, a collective immortality embodied in the work of poets and activists alike.

As Malcolm lay in his final moments in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, shot over a dozen times, Malcolm’s friend Yuri Kochiyama ran to his body and held his head in her lap. In a Democracy Now! interview, Kuchiyama recalled, “I said, ‘Please, Malcolm! Please, Malcolm! Stay alive.’ ”

As Kochiyama wrote in December 1965, in the dedication of the inaugural issue of the North Star newspaper: “No bullets could destroy what he was and what he meant.” Malcolm lives.

Update: The Trump administration has joined Israel in launching large-scale attacks across Iran intended to destroy the country’s military and eliminate its nuclear program. The strikes mark the beginning of “major combat operations,” according to President Trump, and in response Tehran has reportedly launched retaliatory attacks in Middle Eastern countries that host U.S. military bases.

President Donald Trump’s Pentagon is reportedly preparing a potential military assault on Iran. Washington and Tehran are set to resume Omani-mediated talks on Thursday, but the threat of war is rising nonetheless. This month, the White House and Pentagon have repeatedly met with Israeli leaders who are lobbying against a deal with Iran and are in favor of launching an attack on the country of more than 90 million people.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will go forward with military action, but the White House is feeling confident after its January attack on Venezuela.

Trump recently told Israeli media that “either we reach a deal” with Iran “or we’ll have to do something very tough.” Whenever Trump speaks, it can be challenging to tell what is bombast, what to take seriously, what is pure fiction, and what is reality.

So here are five realities to keep in mind as White House officials escalate their threats.

1: Trump says he’s trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But it’s the United States and its allies that are the greatest nuclear threat.

The United States, not Iran, is the country setting the worst example in promoting nuclear weapons in the world today—and making nuclear-armed conflict more possible.

Trump just let the START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia lapse, resulting in no existing bilateral agreements regarding nuclear weapons between the two countries in the world with the most warheads. The U.S. is giving unconditional backing to Israel—the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons. And the Trump administration is now supporting the launch of a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia.

Regarding Iran, Trump pulled out of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) during his first term, which had required Iran to limit its uranium enrichment and accept extensive monitoring by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency—and for the U.S. to lift some of its harsh, devastating sanctions in exchange. Iran was abiding by the terms of the deal—which ensured that its nuclear program continued developing materials only for civilian use, not weapons—and the UN certified that Iran was in compliance.

But Trump still abandoned the agreement in 2018 in favor of what he called the “Maximum Pressure Campaign,” in which the U.S. re-imposed sanctions and deployed more troops and weapons to the Middle East to threaten Iran. Then, in 2020, the U.S. assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani—a key figure in Iran’s foreign policy and a popular political leader.

If the hope is that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons, Trump's policy is pushing the country in the opposite direction. Trump’s escalation of sanctions and military hostility despite Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal only bolsters the claim of Iranian leaders who are skeptical toward negotiations that the country needs nuclear weapons as the only deterrent against aggression.

2: Trump is contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranians, not rescuing them.

The Iranian government is carrying out a brutal crackdown on protesters and critics. Experts now put the toll at more than 7,000 killed—although given the government’s control of media and the internet, it is impossible to know the extent of the killing.

Trump has claimed that the U.S. is “coming to the rescue” of Iranians who are challenging their government. But in reality, his actions have put countless Iranians in harm’s way.

Last September, Trump deported 55 people back to Iran in a deal his administration made with the Iranian government—the same government the president is now decrying—after detaining them for months and threatening to deport them to Somalia or Sudan. In December, Trump deported 55 more back to Iran.

In January, Trump even deported a dozen people to Iran during the government’s crackdown.

Meanwhile, Trump is maintaining the decades-long U.S. policy of economic sanctions on Iran, which has crashed the country’s currency and isolated it in the world economy. This has devastated the country’s population—especially women, children, the sick, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable people. And last June, Washington joined Israel in its air war on Iran, which killed more than 1,000 people—including children—and wounded more than 5,000.

A policy that is actually guided by concern for Iranians would involve stopping the detention and deportation of Iranians in the U.S., lifting the sanctions against Iran, and refraining from further military attacks on the country.

3: The United States has shown that it is an unreliable negotiator.

Iran entered the JCPOA with the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China, and complied with it, but Trump unilaterally withdrew from it anyway. His successor, former President Joe Biden, did not seriously pursue a return to the nuclear deal while he was in office.

So how could Iran—or any country—now take the U.S. seriously at the negotiating table? What is the point in entering an agreement if the next U.S. president is going to walk away from it and return to a hostile posture?

Since Trump took office for his second term last year, his administration has vacillated between the longstanding U.S. position that Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon, and the notion that Iran cannot have any nuclear program at all, including the kind of civilian nuclear power program explicitly allowed to all non-nuclear weapons states by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The latter, more extreme position has long been held by Israel, whose government Trump has been in close contact with throughout the negotiations with Tehran.

In its current negotiations, the U.S. keeps moving the goal posts, going from the demand that Iran not develop a nuclear weapons to saying that the country’s nuclear program, its treatment of dissidents, its relationship with regional allies, and its ballistic missile arsenal would be on the negotiating table, but without clarity about what the administration meant. As Trump put it bizarrely in an interview with FOX News, the deal he wants should have “no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things that you want.”

4: The United States is aggressively threatening Iran, not the other way around.

On February 3, a U.S. fighter jet from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln shot down an Iranian drone that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said was “acting aggressively.” But it is Trump’s deployment of the Abraham Lincoln itself—along with 5,700 additional U.S. troops and other warships and planes—that constitutes an act of aggression.

Trump has moved these weapons and troops to the Middle East to join the tens of thousands already stationed there. This is coming after the U.S. bombed Iran last June and carried out a major military operation in Venezuela in January, all raising the threat level of what military actions the U.S. was prepared to take. Trump has deployed a second aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford—with its thousands of troops, dozens of warplanes, accompanying warships, and more—to the waters off Iran to join the USS Abraham Lincoln already deployed there.

Iran does have a recent history of deploying its military forces in the Middle East—participating in Syria’s civil war, for example. But Iran never attacked Israel directly before April 2024 and has never been anywhere close to matching Washington’s military capacity or breadth of power projection in the region. Iran’s allies have been decimated by Israel’s assaults over the last several years, and Iran’s own military power has been set back by the June 2025 Israeli-U.S. attack.

U.S. military bases across the region surround Iran with troops and weapons, but there are no Iranian troops or military assets anywhere near the United States. There is no question that the most aggressive Middle Eastern power at the moment is Washington’s ally Israel—which continues its genocide in Gaza and has attacked six countries in the last year alone—all enabled through military assistance, arms transfers, and political protection by the United States.

5: Trump’s threats against Iran—and his aggressive foreign policy generally—are unpopular with Americans.

The majority of Americans—61 percent—disapprove of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy in general. Almost half of all Americans—48 percent—disapprove of the U.S. attacking Iran, while only 28 percent approve. Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it.

The first year of this Trump administration has involved a rampage of militarism—from masked, armed ICE agents storming communities across the United States to bombings and other attacks in Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, the Caribbean, and Venezuela. Trump has threatened Greenland and armed Israel’s violence against Palestinians.

Whatever criticisms one could have of Iran’s government, they do not justify an assault by the United States military, which would only compound the suffering of innocent Iranian civilians. As the White House beats the drums of war, we should keep in mind that it is the U.S. that is threatening the world, not Iran.