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Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”
Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.
No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.
Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.
Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.
That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.
These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.
President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”
Now it's time to tax it back to where much of it came from.
Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbes real-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.
Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”
Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”
All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.
Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.
In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.
In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.
Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.
In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.
“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”
Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.
About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania — introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.
Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.
Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.
For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.
Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that privatized Medicare does not serve our seniors’ best interests and wastes money, Project 2025 wants to take over all of Medicare by automatically enrolling seniors in corporate insurance plans without their full consent.
Once you’ve been told you have cancer, waiting is the last thing you want to do. As a practicing Gynecologic Oncologist, I know patients with so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans will be waiting—waiting to find a specialist like me within their network, waiting to get pre-authorization for the tests they need so we can discuss their diagnosis and possible treatments and, ultimately, waiting to get approval for their surgery and treatments.
Unfortunately, Project 2025 would make this already difficult process even worse. By fully privatizing Medicare, this Heritage Foundation plan would shift even more power into the hands of corporate insurers, who prioritize profits over patient care. The result would be even narrower provider networks, more restrictive approvals for tests and treatments, and a system designed to delay or deny care to those who need it most. For patients, that means critical time lost—time that may mean more pain, more symptoms, and a decreased chance of being cured.
Under Project 2025, the burden of navigating these hurdles would fall not just on patients, but on physicians and health care workers who are already stretched thin. Physicians for a National Health Program estimates that doctors and their teams would spend up to 43 million hours annually dealing with prior authorizations alone. This clinically meaningless administrative burden steals time that should be spent caring for patients, wastes resources that we can’t afford to lose, and is a source of burnout and moral distress for healthcare professionals.
Corporate insurance plans are designed to make profits, not take care of patients.
I feel helpless to overcome the negative impact that delays in care have on patients’ chances of being cured. But delayed care is often the best-case scenario for seniors in “Advantage” plans, because there is a high potential that the best cancer center in their area is outside of their narrow network and that treatments will be denied.
Research shows seniors with corporate “Advantage” plans have lower access to the high-volume hospitals that most successfully care for uncommon cancers. For example, people with stomach, pancreatic, and liver cancer requiring surgery were shown to have a higher likelihood of dying when compared to seniors with real Medicare.
Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that privatized Medicare does not serve our seniors’ best interests and wastes money, Project 2025 wants to take over all of Medicare by automatically enrolling seniors in corporate insurance plans without their full consent.
This will be catastrophic for people on Medicare, who will face increasing financial burdens and decreased access to care. An estimated 24 million seniors in corporate “Advantage” plans would face limited provider networks that exclude up to 70% of the doctors in their regions. And more than 15 million people would be considered underinsured due to the reduced benefits available under privatized plans. Without the choice of sticking with real Medicare, our seniors would all be threatened by the health impacts of delayed and denied care.
Instead of funneling money into the hands of corporate insurers, we should be cracking down on overcharging and using those savings to strengthen Medicare.
Corporate insurance plans are designed to make profits, not take care of patients, and so they use shady techniques such as upcoding, which boost payment rates by making patients seem sicker than they are. In 2024, so-called “Advantage” plans overcharged the American people by as much as 140 billion dollars—and provided less care with worse health outcomes. If this system of skimming funds were extended to all seniors, the Medicare trust fund would immediately begin deficit spending, leading to insolvency within five years. It would cost $1.5 trillion more than real Medicare over 10 years.
Congress must take a stand to protect American seniors and the Medicare Trust Fund by rejecting Project 2025’s dangerous push to privatize Medicare.
Instead of funneling money into the hands of corporate insurers, we should be cracking down on overcharging and using those savings to strengthen Medicare. For example, a cap on out-of-pocket spending is crucial to ensure seniors receive the financial protection they deserve. We should also invest in much-needed dental, vision, and hearing coverage for everybody on Medicare.
It’s time to give all seniors access to the best care possible and stop wasting our healthcare dollars on corporate profits.
Survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate U.S. communities that are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.
It was William Shakespeare who, in Troilus and Cressida, wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” And yet, in the polarized news cycle since Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States and the hurricanes have kept coming, we’ve heard a tale not of shared humanity, but of ruin, discord, and political polarization.
Hundreds are dead from that storm—the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005—hundreds more are missing, and hundreds of thousands of residences are still without power or clean water. And in addition to the staggering human loss and physical damage, a hurricane of misinformation and division has continued to pummel the region.
There’s Elon Musk’s politicized deployment of Starlink satellite internet access, which he’s used to credit Donald Trump less than one month before the November election, while undermining the legitimacy of federal recovery efforts. Indeed, listen to Fox News or read Musk’s claims on his social media platform X, and there’s no mention of the pre-arrangements the federal government made with Starlink through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide internet access—for local governments and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.
The economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump falsely claiming that the federal government’s response to Helene was delayed and insufficient because the funds that might have gone to hurricane victims are instead being used to house undocumented immigrants. (FEMA does spend some money on migrant housing, but through an entirely different program.) With this outrageous fearmongering, he’s fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate that are already raging during this election season. His racist and xenophobic rhetoric has also forced FEMA and the White House to spend precious time and energy trying to counter his lies, rather than focusing their full attention on saving lives and rebuilding broken communities.
And don’t forget Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who insisted that the government actually controls the weather. This ludicrous claim is taken from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (notorious for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax), who suggested that the government directed Helene towards North Carolina “to force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy.”
Such hateful lies and conspiracy theories (and there are more like them!) conveniently ignore the fact that conservative Republican lawmakers passed a funding bill that failed to allocate additional money to FEMA just days before Helene hit, even though the country was entering peak hurricane season in a time when the weather is growing ever more extreme. And it’s no surprise that these lawmakers are backed by billionaires who own some of the very companies most responsible for climate change. Through their scare tactics and anti-government misdirection, they have also provided rhetorical cover for the Christian nationalists and other extremists who were some of the first responders after the hurricane. The Southern Poverty Law Center confirms reports I’ve heard from local sources that “far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance—and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.”
Hurricane Helene (like Hurricane Milton that followed it in a devastating fashion) should be a brutal reminder that none of us are truly safe from the worsening effects of the climate crisis. For years, local officials and real estate developers marketed Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven.” With its temperate weather and mountain vistas 300 miles from the ocean, many falsely believed the area would be shielded from storms like Helene. No such luck.
Meanwhile, the last few weeks have also served as a stark reminder that the climate devastation increasingly coming for all of us is experienced most intensely by poor and low-income communities. Just look at the (lack of) full-scale evacuation plans for Hurricane Milton in Florida and it’s clear that those who cannot afford a $2,400 flight or have access to a car and enough gas money to wait out the massive traffic jams of those fleeing such storms may just be out of luck.
In western North Carolina, as rising waters from Helene consumed entire communities, many had nowhere to evacuate. Poor people living in rural areas, often with preexisting health conditions and without health insurance, skipped hospital visits in the chaotic days immediately after the storm. Thankfully, some hospitals opened up beds for patients whose homes were destroyed. But those who don’t have flood insurance—and the residents of the areas hit hardest by Helene were the least likely to have such insurance—and can’t afford to rebuild may soon find themselves joining the many others who have been displaced and made homeless by the storm.
Truly, as the experiences of Hurricane Helene—and now Hurricane Milton, Nadine, and potentially others, too—have proven, the economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and JD Vance. In fact, it was Vance who called the study and analysis of climate change “weird science” during the vice-presidential debate. He has also praised the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposes gutting FEMA, making it harder for states to get disaster relief, and blocking federal agencies from fighting climate change (not to mention 400 pages of other suggested cuts to this country’s social safety net).
And although they claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is looking after the interests and profits of the wealthy, it’s Vance and Trump who have regularly belittled the poor and cozied up to venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and others among the nation’s corporate elite. In fact, the decades-old abandonment of rural Appalachian communities destroyed by Helene has long been justified by the patronizing and classist “culture of poverty” arguments that Vance himself helped keep alive with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies. Worsening poverty and widening economic inequality should be considered preexisting conditions that are only magnified during moments of crisis. Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, recently put it this way: “The tragic flood event in the southeast U.S. is a poignant example of the confluence of multiple factors, including development in floodplains, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and management, and the specter of climate change, whose compounding effect can amplify the disaster.”
In the face of so much loss and destruction, the heroism of impacted communities, which have joined together in extraordinary acts of solidarity, has been tragically underreported in mainstream media outlets. Much of the mutual aid and community support for those affected by the hurricane has come from community members themselves, who are working tirelessly to ensure that everyone in need is cared for. The streets of Asheville and neighboring towns have been filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, as everyday people with various skills have driven in from all over the country to lend a hand. On social media, it’s been heartening to see all of the love and support that has poured into these communities.
In Asheville, the stories of this local solidarity are many. There is the Asheville Tool Library, which, while officially closed, is supporting repair projects, including the fixing of generators and chainsaws. There are medics and doctors running free clinics. There are local breweries that are using their equipment to make sure desperate communities still have clean and safe water. There are young people passing out free gasoline to anyone who needs it and others who are writing out instructions in English and Spanish on how to make dry toilets.
The ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.
These examples of grassroots leadership offer hope in hard times. After all, this is how bottom-up movements have so often begun throughout American history. In pre-Civil War America, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery and igniting a movement to end it. In the 1930s, the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions even before President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. In the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities organized themselves to oppose lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence. And no one can deny the powerful example of the carpools and other community projects of the Montgomery, Alabama freedom struggle during the 1950s.
Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.
Consider the free breakfast program organized by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. For many Americans, the enduring image of the Black Panther Party is of Black men in berets and leather jackets carrying guns. The self-defense tactics of the Panthers were an emphatic rebuttal to a society that regularly dehumanized and exacted violence on Black Americans. But in truth, most of their time was spent then meeting the needs of their communities and building a movement that could transform the lives of poor Black people. The Panthers bravely stepped into a void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for the poor. But their survival programs weren’t just aimed at meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used such programs to highlight the failures of government policymaking to deal with American poverty. By feeding tens of thousands of people, they also forged community-wide relationships and developed widespread trust among the poor, not just in Black communities but in poor white and Latino communities as well. The Panthers’ survival programs were always meant to be launchpads for a wider movement to end poverty and systemic racism.
Indeed, the Panthers consciously called out the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, while it spent billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (This paradox continues today, as the U.S. has been funding Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, one of the poorest places on Earth, and now its invasion of Lebanon). Their survival programs gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human rights movement, interweaving all of their community work with political education and highly visible protest.
At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials feared that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In that context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.
The experience of the Black Panthers features prominently in the anti-poverty organizing tradition that I come from. In fact, the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union, sibling poor people’s movements that I was part of in the 1990s, used to teach new organizers the “Six Panther Ps” of poor people’s organizing: 1) Program, 2) Protest, 3) Projects of survival, 4) Publicity work, 5) Political education, and 6) Plans, not personalities. When combined, these six principles form a model for the poor organizing the poor that has been responsible for creative nonviolent action that has called America to conscience and for anti-poverty policies that have impacted millions.
Much like recent beautiful acts of local solidarity in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee and in low-income communities across Florida reeling from Hurricane Milton, the significance of the historic work of the Black Panther Party or of unhoused leaders and welfare-rights activists across the decades begins within poor communities themselves, where people are already engaging in life-saving actions. Out of such depths, grassroots leaders find new and creative ways to connect survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement focused on building and wielding political power. From such local struggles come the very policy solutions to a community’s (and even this country’s) varied problems. This is what it means to work bottom up, not top down!
In a world whose weather is growing grimmer by the year, such examples of mutual solidarity and mutual aid are perhaps the most concrete and material form of hope in these hard times. Such scrappy and life-giving action needs more than acknowledgment and appreciation. Those facing injustice, violence, and displacement need more than thoughts and prayers. Rather, to turn the tide on division and lies, as well as deeper impoverishment and pain, heroic and creative community-building—or what I like to call “lifting from the bottom so that everyone can rise”—must be spread, scaled up, and significantly supported by the larger society. Our politicians, news agencies, and larger population must stop paying homage to billionaires who will profit off our predicaments or politicians who will try to capitalize on any crisis. It’s time to see that projects of survival and solidarity among those struggling the most are our only true hope for a future that will otherwise be ever more perilous.