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Opinion
America: We Need to Talk
The US has become a deeply polarized nation. One idea to overcome this is to pay people to disagree.
Aug 15, 2026
America is a polarized nation. Recent polls find that nearly half of us consider members of the opposing party to be “downright evil.” Perhaps this helps explain why more and more of us are choosing to live in towns and cities that match our political leanings—a phenomenon known as “the Big Sort.” Adding to this split is a media landscape where we choose news outlets that confirm our views, and the feeds we scroll offer up more of the same. The result is an American public increasingly sealed off from opposing views. Think about it: When was the last time you had a political conversation where you disagreed with someone? And more importantly, how did it go? You most likely found it stressful rather than informative.
I believe this is because we have lost a core American skill: the ability to disagree well. Not the faceless, angry kind we do online, but the kind that happens when people who disagree come together with the intention to understand one another and compromise. Our country was built on this. A summer of argument produced our Constitution. Four more years of it produced the Bill of Rights. This tradition endured in the form of New England town meetings and union halls. We’ve let this tradition lapse, and it’s costing us.
So here’s a simple idea to point us back in the right direction: We should pay people to disagree.
This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Organizations like Braver Angels have already built a framework for this, borrowing techniques from family conflict resolution and applying them to a country in conflict. I (Natasha, 21) have seen it work firsthand. In high school, one of my classes partnered with a school in Louisiana to run a Red-Blue Workshop—several weeks of facilitated dialogue between my liberal classmates and our conservative counterparts. As is usual in this program, we became fast friends, comfortable talking through the very topics that were supposed to divide us.
America’s problem is not that Americans disagree. It's that we’ve stopped seeing people who disagree with us as fellow citizens with different ideas about what's best for the country and started seeing them as enemies to be vanquished.
We learned what successful dialogue looks like. We learned that the goal isn’t to change the other person’s mind or to completely humiliate them, as is often modeled online (open YouTube, click one political video, and you’ll be recommended hundreds more with titles like “liberal DESTROYS conservative” or vice versa). Instead, the goal is to explore each other’s lived experiences and backgrounds to form a deeper understanding of what our peers believe and why. We left the program with more empathy for one another. We were no longer competitors trying to “win” and prove our side was right, but fellow citizens united by the shared goal of bettering our country.
Now imagine this at scale: a national program teaching Americans how to have effective civil dialogue and demonstrating that the villainous way the other side is depicted online is largely untrue. Who’s to say what would come of this? Maybe we would realize that over 80% of us favor stock trading bans for members of Congress. Or that over 70% of us favor term limits for Supreme Court justices. Maybe we would realize that much of the anger we are taught online is convenient for people in power. Maybe we would conclude that our power lies in looking past the differences we are sold and uniting to fight for issues that matter to us.
Paying people to participate in such a program isn’t completely unheard of either. AmeriCorps has paid Americans for civic work for decades. New York recently paid its residents to shovel snow after this winter’s blizzards. No one regarded either policy as a handout. The work was viewed as an investment in what a functioning city or country needs. Structured dialogue between political opposites belongs on that list of vital infrastructure. This would likely begin as a pilot program in a few cities, but national experiments abroad prove that such dialogue is scalable.
And it would be a bargain! We are already paying a high price for polarization. The most obvious cost is to the health of our democracy. But there’s a literal price tag too. When our government can’t compromise, it shuts down: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that in 2025, a single government shutdown cost the economy between $7 billion and $14 billion. Polarization affects the private sector, too. Research on private companies found that more polarized states see meaningfully less business investment overall. Investing in civic infrastructure would pay dividends. And the money is there. If $37 billion of our tax dollars can fund an aimless war in the Middle East, then surely a fraction of that can be used to repair our democracy at home.
America’s problem is not that Americans disagree. It's that we’ve stopped seeing people who disagree with us as fellow citizens with different ideas about what's best for the country and started seeing them as enemies to be vanquished. Of course, paying Americans to sit down together won’t fix this problem overnight. But it’s a start. With it, we can begin the slow work of democratic reconciliation. Doing so will remind us that disagreeing with one another never hurts our country. It is forgetting how to disagree well that does.
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Doctors Like El-Sayed and Me Agree: It's Time for Medicare for All
Polls of physicians consistently show majority support for universal programs like Medicare for All—support that is only growing among younger doctors and those working in corporate-style health systems.
Aug 14, 2026
It’s time.
It’s time for Americans to finally have healthcare that’s compassionate and effective.
When I became a doctor 44 years ago I volunteered at a free clinic for patients without health insurance. I remember our clientele: a substitute teacher, a self-employed plumber, and other working people who weren’t offered coverage by an employer and couldn’t afford it on their own.
These weren’t freeloaders. They were neighbors, family members, and friends who earned too much to qualify for Medicaid, but still didn’t have health coverage through their jobs.
During his run for the US Senate, Dr. El-Sayed has been an enthusiastic supporter of Medicare for All, which would provide better care for everybody.
I wondered then, “Why should our ability to have health insurance depend on where we work?” I never got an answer.
Decades later, when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed, our clinic’s clientele changed dramatically. Gone were the self-employed or under-employed patients; they had gained coverage through ACA plans. Until now. This year, ACA premiums are going up 50% or more, which means many people are disenrolling. I’ll be seeing these folks in the free clinic again.
Our healthcare system is broken. We have poorer health outcomes than in other “less fortunate” countries, meaning our people are dying earlier and suffering more. Meanwhile, trying to navigate our hundreds of health plans is a nightmare for doctors, as each plan has its own rules for preauthorizations, deductibles, and copays. Patients are also unhappy with these restrictions, no matter what kind of coverage they have.
Thankfully, there is one exception: Medicare. This longstanding program covers medical care for seniors and people with disabilities, and it works. Even those who favor smaller government agree, “Don’t touch my Medicare!”
I’ve seen the benefits. In my later years I worked as a nursing home doctor, caring for patients who were rehabilitating from a stroke or surgery before they could safely return home. Medicare covered 100% of the cost for up to 21 days and 80% for another three months, as long as the need and attempts at progress were shown.
What if everybody in our country had high-quality coverage through an even better version of traditional Medicare? What if we had improved Medicare for All?
This is the program proposed by Abdul El-Sayed, who trained as a physician, led the health departments in Detroit and Wayne County, and no doubt shares my experiences with our broken healthcare system. Polls of physicians consistently show majority support for universal programs like Medicare for All—support that is only growing among younger doctors and those working in corporate-style health systems.
During his run for the US Senate, Dr. El-Sayed has been an enthusiastic supporter of Medicare for All, which would provide better care for everybody.
Under our current system, millions of uninsured people hold off on getting care until they have an emergency, simply because they can’t afford it. By then, problems that could have been prevented or treated easily become very dangerous and expensive.
Under Medicare for All, a strong focus on primary care would encourage preventive measures and early diagnoses. This would give us an opportunity to reduce the extremely high cost of managing diseases that, too often, haven’t been addressed over a lifetime of inadequate care.
Medicare for All would also make improvements to the existing program such as eliminating out-of-pocket costs; negotiating lower drug prices across the board; and adding long overdue coverage such as vision, dental, hearing, and long-term care. All this while maintaining the best features of Medicare like guaranteed coverage and free choice of medical provider.
It’s time to make our healthcare system work effectively for everybody. It’s time—it’s past time—for Medicare for All.
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The Climate Crisis and Its Solutions, by the Numbers
Math illuminates the parameters that humans must live within, and it shines a light on our possibilities. Above all it explains why these are the crucial years: Temperatures and solutions are rising at the exact same moment.
Aug 14, 2026
Last time I marked the fifth anniversary of this newsletter with a remarkably heavy burst of analysis—a "where do we stand" summary that let me speak at the highest possible level about our past, present, and future. So of course I’m worn out, and perhaps you as well. We’re going to proceed less systematically this time—I’m going to show you some numbers that have arrived in the last few days, and try to make sense of each of them, with only slight regard for how exactly they fit together.
And it’s all a useful reminder that though the climate and energy crises have everything to do with psychology and sociology and economics and political science and theology and love and art and winter, they are rooted in quantifiable physical fact, which cannot be wished away and which must be faced resolutely.
So, to begin:
#76.9°Fahrenheit
That was the average temperature for the lower 48 states in July, according to just-released federal stats, making it the hottest month in American history, 3.3°F hotter than the 20th-century average. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Wyoming was the furthest above average for the month. Among other things, this development robs climate deniers of a cherished talking point. July 1936 had been the co-record holder. We understood why—in the words of climatologist Andrew Dessler:
During the early 20th century, aggressive plowing and the replacement of native grasses left Great Plains soils exposed. When drought conditions developed, those degraded soils dried out quickly, reducing evaporation and soil moisture and reinforcing the heat.
But try telling that to Fox News. Dessler, by the way, has had a fascinating three-part series on those century-old Midwestern extremes. But now it’s mostly academic; we’re living in a hotter country than any American has ever seen. And indeed a hotter world. As Jeff Masters reports, July 2026 tied for the warmest month in the planet’s history, with July 2024.
#3.6°F
That’s how much temperatures have risen on average in Europe since the 1960s, according to the new State of the Climate 2025 report, which veteran analyst Bob Berwyn broke down this week. Just think about that for a moment, because it helps you to understand the scale of what we’ve done. When you walk outside your home, in Europe or America, it’s 3°F hotter than it would have been a just few decades ago. Think of that amount of extra heat (and remember that ninety percent more is stored away in the oceans, waiting to be released).
Writing from Berlin, Jim Tankersley and Tatiana Firsova offer a vivid account of what that feels like in every day European life:
It’s changing the way children see summer.
“Some days it’s too hot, and the heat is just so oppressive. I’m more of a winter person,” said Sophia Nachtsheim, 15, who visited Krumme Lanke on Thursday with her mother and three younger siblings.
#$65 billion
That’s the windfall profit so far for the oil industry thanks to the Iran War, according to a new analysis from the folks at Oil Change International.
The five major international oil companies (IOCs) recorded massive jumps in profits in Q2 2026 compared to the same quarter of 2025. Their total adjusted net income amounted to $51 billion for the 3 months—that’s nearly $400,000 per minute. Meanwhile, people around the world are paying around 30% more for gasoline and diesel, with some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, seeing increases of 80% or more.
It would of course make great sense to tax these windfall profits, earned entirely on the back of dead Iranians and Americans, and everyone who’s paying $4.50 a gallon at the pump. Portugal actually is, at a 33% rate. Exxon’s Darren Woods has responded to wider EU efforts with threats:
We canceled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax. In fact, we’re suing the EU because we don’t think that’s a legal taking for the industry.
#4.8% of Global Energy-Related Carbon Emissions
So far the energy debate around AI has focused on how much electricity it takes to run data centers. But the number above comes from a different heretofore uncounted part of the problem: It’s what a new study says artificial intelligence could add to the atmosphere simply by making it easier for the fossil fuel industry to find and exploit oil and gas wells. Emily Atkin has a top-notch account of the new study, which makes it clear that a data center might as well have an oil derrick sitting on top. She includes these additional numbers:
Specifically, they found that Big Oil’s use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI’s data centers.
On the low end, these tools could enable additional yearly carbon emissions equal to Mexico’s, according to the research. On the high end, they could enable yearly climate pollution equal to Russia’s—the world’s fourth-largest emitting country.
Meanwhile, I mentioned this parenthetically last week, but it deserves more attention: Climate researcher Zeke Hausfather took the time to calculate how much energy is used when you really use AI “agents” for carrying out tasks. And the answer is: a lot. Asking Claude a question is not so energy-intensive, but as he explained to Robinson Meyer this week:
Increasingly AI is being used in an agentic form. And that more means that you give AI a set of instructions or a goal to achieve. And then AI goes off and does many, many, many, things to try to achieve that goal. AI agents are, at least in the corporate world and the software engineering and scientific world, the vast majority of AI use today. And those agents make both much more complicated calls than the prompts would suggest and many, many more calls. And so when you look at the actual energy use of these AI agents, it’s something on the order of 600 times larger per prompt than the traditional, like, type something in a chat box and got to get an immediate response. And so that does end up adding up. I actually looked at two months of my own AI use because I had local logs of all of the numbers there… I found that on average I was using about three kilowatt hours a day for my agentic energy use which is the equivalent of running two refrigerators.
#70%
That’s been the average growth in US battery installations over the last three years, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it’s continuing to accelerate. Here’s the chart:
Notice that it’s continuing to rise this year. And as long as we’re doing charts, here it is broken down by state, with batteries in lavender. You’ll note that only four or five states are really participating in the battery revolution so far, which leaves enormous room for rapid growth elsewhere. Batteries are the transformative technology for the second half of this decade, as sun and wind were for the first half. Note also the incredible damage the Trump administration has done to the wind industry.
#44%
That’s how much you’d save in carbon emissions by retiring your internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) and replacing it with an EV—even if it was only two years old, and taking into account the amount of energy used to build both vehicles. A new study in Science from G. Elliott Campbell attempts to answer a question that’s puzzled many good-faith people: Does it really make sense to get rid of my ICEV if I’m worried about the climate. It does, beginning the day you drive it off the lot. It’s somewhat more complicated if you sell your used gas-guzzler to someone else, but as Science editor Jesse Smith notes:
The energy impact benefits from swapping an EV for an ICEV begin to accrue as early as the first day of the life of the ICEV, and that replacement early in the life cycle consistently provides reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Financial considerations will also affect when people choose to make the replacement, of course, but from the perspective of emissions, it is almost never too soon to switch.
As Campbell explained to Tik Root:
“We’re trying to show that there’s not an environmental motivation for extending the lifetime of a gas vehicle,” he said. “Electric vehicles are a very clear winner.”
This isn’t true of everything you own, by the way. It basically depends on whether the carbon emissions of the thing mostly come from building it, or from powering it. Hence this chart that Professor Campbell sent me. Hold on to your cell phone another year!
#20 percent
That’s how much of French nuclear capacity is offline due to low river levels with the summer’s heat and fierce drought. (Oh, and a jellyfish invasion at a coastal plant, itself caused by warming seas). As Le Monde reports:
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP) calculations based on data published by energy group EDF since 2015, 20.4% of generating capacity was unavailable. Between 9:45 am and 10:00 am, EDF's nuclear fleet recorded a new peak in outages due to "environmental constraints" or "external environmental causes," both in terms of the number of reactors shut down or operating at reduced output and in terms of lost generating capacity.
The point is not to say "shut down nuclear power plants." It’s merely to point out that charge long leveled at sun and wind—that they provide “intermittent power”—is probably truer now of other energy sources (including the natural gas that can get shut down if, say, a war breaks out in the Strait of Hormuz). See the numbers on batteries above—I think it’s pretty clear that once you connect them to a solar or a wind farm you’ve got some of the world’s firmest power. By the way, that’s how BMW has kept its Hungarian plant churning out EVs even as the country’s lone nuke shut down, causing a cascading energy shortage across the country.
#22%
That’s how much domestic airline emissions have fallen in Austria over the last three years, since the government banned short haul flights to domestic destinations that were served by trains; something similar happened in France, which passed a more limited version of the same law. As Logan Varsano writes:
These initial successes in Austria and France are promising.
They also prompt a number of follow-on questions: What might be the climate benefit if such policies were more broadly adopted across Europe? What if they were implemented beyond Europe’s borders? What if they were applied to short-haul international flights, and not merely domestic routes?
Research published in 2021 found that, in Finland, replacing all short-haul flights with non-high-speed rail could cut emissions by 95%. One year later in 2022, different researchers took a broader look at commercial passenger flights across 31 countries. A 2023 study took a closer look at Spain's two busiest domestic corridors: Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Valencia. In 2024, data from IATA focused a lens back on France. And more recently, a September 2025 study on commercial intra-European aviation concluded that substituting short-haul flights with rail alternatives could reduce a trip's emissions by up to 97%, depending on the length of the trip.
I’d just add: City center to city center trains are infinitely nicer than dealing with airports, at least for me. Until we get the blimps up and running, more rail please!
#5.5°C vs 2°C
This last one is a little complicated, but it underscores the most important point I keep trying to make in this newsletter: We must act fast!
It comes from a new study about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Currents, or AMOC, the most important heat distribution on planet Earth, and one we’re threatening to wreck by raising temperatures. What the study—out Thursday in Nature—calculates is the risk of raising the temperature fast, which is what we’re doing now. On a “slow ramp,” this computer model shows that the currents stay stable until temperatures are raised 5.5°C—which is a lot of breathing room. But if you ramp up the temperature quickly, going past 2°C can shut them down. Rosa van den Dool interviewed one of the study’s authors:
The explanation lies in how the ocean is able to adjust to change. “Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganize and adapt to the changing conditions,” says co-author Henk Dijkstra, professor of dynamical oceanography. “Under faster warming, the ocean simply can’t keep up.”
According to the researchers, the critical warming rate lies around 0.3°C per decade, a pace the world is already approaching. Van Westen compares it to driving a car: “If you’re driving toward a wall, it makes sense to steer around it. To do that, you need to brake, otherwise you fly off the road. When it comes to global warming, the world is still pressing extra hard on the accelerator right now.”
Math can’t tell us everything we need to know about the climate crisis. At some level, the crucial calculation is about the size of the human heart, and whether we’re ready to really press for the change that’s required. But math illuminates the parameters that humans must live within, and it shines a light on our possibilities. Above all it explains why these are the crucial years: Temperatures and solutions are rising at the exact same moment. Our job is to see if we can nudge the odds in this race.
And we can, so we must. Thank you for being part of the fight!
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Venezuela: Don’t Blame the Victim
The solidarity movement must unite in the broadest alliance around the defense of national sovereignty and the right to self-determination, strongly opposing the farcical New York trial of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, demanding the lifting of all sanctions, and calling for the return of stolen assets.
Aug 14, 2026
“Nothing is easier than to be idealistic on behalf of others.”—Karl Marx, 1858
Under cover of night, the US military kidnapped the lawful Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026. Collateral damage included over 100 fatalities of civilians and Cuban and Venezuelan guards.
This unprovoked surprise attack flagrantly violated international law. The hegemon acted in full expectation that it could operate with impunity. Even the neighboring left-leaning governments of Brazil and Colombia offered only mild rebukes. Then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil said, “We found ourselves alone.” That is the context in which subsequent developments need to be understood.
The egregious military action culminated a quarter of a century of US and allied (particularly Canada and the UK) machinations against Venezuela: asphyxiating sanctions, stolen assets, diplomatic isolation, cyberattacks, assassination attempts, mercenary invasions, and establishing an ersatz parallel government. For the two months preceding the invasion, the US navy blockaded oil shipments. Still the empire’s goal of regime change was not achieved.
The Revolution’s Resilience Compelled the US to Escalate
Washington and its allies failed to destroy Chavismo, the movement founded by Hugo Chávez and carried forward by his successor Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela did not collapse or degenerate into chaos after the decapitation. Domestic peace prevailed.
The US-backed and funded far-right opposition did not seize power, but found itself ever more marginalized and in disarray.
The Chavista leadership continued in a seamless constitutional succession with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez sworn in as acting president. The unity of the top command held firm, backed by the National Assembly and supreme court. Likewise, the civic-military union and the communes and grassroots Chavista institutions fully supported the government.
Notably, the core Chavista leadership, the military, Socialist Party, and communal formations have remained united under tremendous pressure—pressure designed to fracture that unifying accord.
Relying on its overwhelming military superiority, Washington made a Mafia-style offer you can’t refuse. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Rodríguez on that day of infamy and delivered an ultimatum to collaborate with the US or face the country’s military destruction and the murder of her and other leaders. Variations of this scenario are corroborated by both the corporate press and Chavista sources.
President Donald Trump explicitly threatened, “There is more where that came from.” The alternative was the devastation currently being rained down on Iran, a country with far greater military capacity. With US forces deployed throughout the region and off its coast, a military confrontation would have meant annihilation, including the destruction of the oil industry. Rodríguez did what any responsible leader would do given the existing options; she made a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming force.
Venezuela did not surrender
All the Chavista state institutions and the powerful universe of grassroots organizations that sustain the revolution remain intact. Yet US imperialism, by having a gun pointed to the government’s head, is in a position to exert substantial coercion leading to unpalatable decisions, such as Alex Saab’s deportation.
These accommodations reflect pressures that those of us on the outside can only imagine. How the solidarity movement should respond is a central question.
Former Chávez official Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein describes the current negotiations as an exercise in essential national self-preservation. He observes, “What is at stake is the survival of the State and the republic, which if lost, would make the discussion on any other topic banal.” As former Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said, “Everything is now negotiated,” with Washington obliged to be in daily give-and-take with Caracas.
Legislative reform had long been on Maduro’s agenda. However, revisions to laws governing the exploitation of hydrocarbons and hard minerals involved offering generous conditions to international capital in order to attract much-needed foreign investment (which Cuba is also doing).
The new amnesty law, another planned initiative, is a key instrument promoting reconciliation and denying extremist elements arguments to incite violence. The law strictly excludes “anyone who has committed war crimes, human rights violations, homicide, drug trafficking, or treason.”
The government is in negotiations with the moderate opposition. Such successive rounds of dialogue were a recurring feature of the Maduro presidency.
Rodríguez has counseled prudence and strategic patience. Notably, the core Chavista leadership, the military, Socialist Party, and communal formations have remained united under tremendous pressure—pressure designed to fracture that unifying accord.
Long-Sought Gains Achieved
The US has reversed itself and in practice recognizes the Venezuelan government as legitimate. The Bolivarian project has not only persisted but forced its greatest adversary to come to some accommodation.
Not since 2019 had the US allowed transactions with Venezuela’s central bank and major state banks. US restrictions had previously cut Venezuela off from the global financial system, preventing access to dollar-denominated transactions and US financial channels. Oil sales to the US have resumed, with some revenues returning to the domestic economy. The US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) is again engaged with Venezuela. Rodríguez has stated that Venezuela is not seeking IMF loans, but access to its own frozen funds.
As a Venezuelan activist friend said, “You gringos tell us how to make our revolution when our problem is you have failed to make yours.”
Although sanctions largely remain in place, special licenses and a temporary easing of economic restrictions for earthquake relief have provided some breathing room for Venezuela’s besieged economy while also facilitating oil flows to the US. The concessions are limited and reversible, leaving the broader structure of US economic warfare intact. Still, the arrangement is preferable to the total oil blockade imposed immediately before the January 3 assault.
Rodríguez has repeatedly demanded that Venezuela be free of sanctions, while formally seeking the release of Venezuelan assets abroad to address the devastation caused by the earthquakes. She has even appealed to King Charles III for the return of 31 tons of Venezuelan gold held by the Bank of England.
Changed Political Landscape
The balance of forces confronting today’s Venezuelan leadership is substantially less favorable than under Chávez, so judging its compromises by an idealized Chávez-era standard is mistaken.
Some internationals invoke Chávez to discredit the current leadership. Overlooked is that during Chávez’s presidency, Venezuela sold oil almost exclusively to the US, when dependency was significant. Ignoring the changed context, infantile leftist claims are made that Chávez never compromised and that “one does not negotiate with the enemy,” forgetting the famous advice from Fidel Castro during the 2002 coup: “Don't immolate yourself, Hugo.”
Chávez governed during a commodities boom that provided the Bolivarian project with resources for material benefits markedly unavailable today under sanctions. The geopolitical context has shifted significantly since Chávez’s time, especially under the present “Donroe Doctrine.” Not since Maduro’s victory in July 2024 has a left-leaning candidate won in Latin America. The last seven presidential elections have been swept by the right. Until this broader reactionary trajectory is reversed, further retreats are likely.
The purpose and cumulative impact of the illegal unilateral coercive measures have been to erode public support for the government. Years of comprehensive sanctions—despite the 2021-2025 economic recovery following an approximately 75% GDP contraction—have left Venezuela in a vulnerable position. Currently the Venezuelan economy is operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.
The Rodríguez government is trying to buy time to recover the economy, although the June 24 earthquakes dealt a terrible blow. According to the United Nations, direct physical damage is estimated at over $37 billion, representing over one-third of Venezuela’s gross domestic product.
Most Venezuelans want domestic peace and a return to prosperity, not a confrontation with the empire.
“Unity Is the Most Important Thing—Without It, Nothing Is Possible; With It, Everything Is Possible.”
Those were the words of Fidel Castro as he was organizing the Cuban Revolution in 1956. Most dangerous for the sister Bolivarian Revolution is the suggestion that the current leadership has betrayed the cause and that a truly leftist “third way” can be fostered to replace them. There have always been competing factions within the Bolivarian movement. But political choices must ultimately be resolved within Venezuela itself, without interference from internationals.
These “third way” analyses, rejecting both Caracas and Washington, typically fail to address what Venezuelans could realistically do at this historical juncture—long on what’s wrong but short on viable alternatives.
Venezuelans will determine their path without foreign interference, either right or left. Solidarity necessitates efforts to accompany and uplift, not dictate.
It was not so long ago that it was the likes of far-right María Corina Machado who highlighted “cracks and fissures within the Chavista ranks” and anticipated “the beginning of a social explosion” against the elected Venezuelan government. Now some solidarity activists are saying the same.
The “tragic essence” of left disunity in Bolivia should be a cautionary lesson of what could happen in Venezuela. The Chavista leadership is painfully aware of this, hence their vigorous effort to establish the broadest united front against US colonization. Rather than being traitors to the cause, the Rodríguezes and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello represent the most militant Chavistas—fighters from the very inception of the revolution.
What Solidarity Requires
Constructive criticism and solidarity activism need not be counterposed. Dissident opinions are appropriate when contextualized and given as part of a collaborative effort to advance common goals—not as individualistic venting.
Some among the left have appointed themselves as guardians of the faith judging negatively from afar the very difficult and risky tactical retreat undertaken by the Bolivarian leadership, even though it prevented a suicidal military confrontation with US imperialism.
The international left’s angst and disappointment regarding Venezuela’s retreats is understandable. But the Global South is not about to fulfill the revolutionary aspirations of those living in the belly of the beast. That, it should be clear, is the task for people in the imperial core.
As a Venezuelan activist friend said, “You gringos tell us how to make our revolution when our problem is you have failed to make yours.”
Venezuelans will determine their path without foreign interference, either right or left. Solidarity necessitates efforts to accompany and uplift, not dictate. Internationals living in the US, Canada, and the UK need to place the primary focus on our own imperialists. All other contradictions are secondary.
The solidarity movement must unite in the broadest alliance around the defense of national sovereignty and the right to self-determination, strongly opposing the farcical New York trial of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, demanding the lifting of all sanctions, and calling for the return of stolen assets.
El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.
(A united people will never be defeated.
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Solidarity Is Not Enough: Why the World Must Force Accountability for Gaza Now
Israel’s official position leaves the international community with no choice but to take direct, coordinated action across five key fronts.
Aug 14, 2026
It is now official: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has flatly rejected the core conditions of the Board of Peace framework, explicitly stating that Israel will neither adhere to a ceasefire nor withdraw its forces from Gaza.
During a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu stated with unambiguous language, "Israel rejects the 15-point document published by the Board of Peace for Gaza."
In a previous conversation with lead envoy Nickolay Mladenov, Netanyahu set conditions—such as demanding unilateral operational freedom for the Israeli military to strike inside Gaza at will—that render a genuine peace agreement structurally impossible.
The Israeli army leadership, under Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, reinforced this posture by outlining three uncompromising "red lines" to the political establishment: complete operational freedom to eliminate perceived threats anywhere in the strip, strict control over all weapons entering or exiting Gaza, and zero military withdrawal unless Hamas is completely disarmed.
We must resolutely reject the premise that the slaughter of the innocent can ever become an accepted routine.
One can fault Netanyahu for many things, including ongoing genocide. But in recent years, he has been remarkably straightforward about his intentions; therefore, no one can claim that Netanyahu has fooled anyone.
Earlier this year, while speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement, Netanyahu explicitly boasted that he had instructed the Israeli military to expand its physical footprint and permanently occupy at least 70% of the Gaza Strip—a massive expansion far beyond the temporary administrative demarcation lines established in previous truce outlines.
Meanwhile, his far-right ministers have pushed the government’s rejectionist stance even further. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Missions Minister Orit Strock issued a joint demand for an emergency cabinet meeting to roll back authorization for the deployment of the International Stabilization Force (ISF).
The ISF, designed under the Board of Peace framework as a transitional peacekeeping body, was meant to oversee humanitarian security, starting with pilot recovery zones in Rafah.
Yet Smotrich and Strock claimed the security cabinet was "misled" into approving the force, arguing that allowing international personnel into Gaza endangers Israeli operational freedom and directly contradicts their explicit war aims.
These latest moves, along with the military's strict "red lines," confirm what recent months of relentless bombardment have made clear: The Israeli government has no intention of ending its genocide in Gaza or relinquishing control over the besieged and devastated territory.
But highlighting such positions will make no difference, aside from once more accentuating Israel's total lack of desire for peace and its intention to perpetuate conflict.
While true, such realization on its own is worthless considering that what is taking place in Gaza and the West Bank is beyond horrific, and that the daily killing of Palestinians makes the term "ceasefire" a cruel joke.
While diplomats debate frameworks, Israeli strikes continue to claim civilian lives daily—bringing the post-truce death toll to over 1,250 and the total killed since October 2023 to more than 73,000.
Therefore, action is needed, and urgently so. Indeed, Israel’s official position leaves the international community with no choice but to take direct, coordinated action across five key fronts.
First, Arab, Muslim, and allied governments must leverage every available international platform, starting with the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, to formally condemn Israel’s violation of the Gaza peace framework and expose its bad-faith negotiations.
States must move beyond symbolic statements and invoke mechanisms like the "Uniting for Peace" resolution to bypass Western vetoes, push for binding sanctions, and implement a universal arms embargo against Israel.
Second, a renewed global campaign must recenter Gaza and the West Bank, exposing Israel's broader territorial objectives—specifically the systematic ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the quiet, administrative annexation of the West Bank.
Civil society, trade unions, and grassroots organizations worldwide must pressure their respective national governments to sever diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel until it complies with international law.
Third, International legal bodies must accelerate their proceedings. Pressure must be renewed on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to execute arrest warrants for senior Israeli leadership, while the International Court of Justice (ICJ) must enforce provisional measures and issue definitive rulings regarding Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention.
Legal compliance must be treated as a non-negotiable prerequisite for international relations.
Fourth, a unified international media push is necessary to counter state-sponsored propaganda, keeping public focus fixed on Israel's long-term strategic plans: the permanent displacement of Gaza's population and the formal takeover of Palestinian land.
Independent media outlets, journalists, and cultural institutions must challenge official narratives that frame Israeli aggression as self-defense, centering the lived realities and testimonies of Palestinians under siege instead.
Fifth, the international community must bypass Israeli obstruction to ensure massive quantities of food, medical supplies, and shelter materials enter Gaza immediately to prevent widespread starvation and winter exposure.
International aid agencies must establish protected humanitarian corridors by global mandate, refusing to allow Israel to use manufactured famine and humanitarian denial as weapons of war.
With Israel’s intentions fully unmasked, the global community must shift from passive mediation to active enforcement.
Israel wants to normalize genocide, just as it normalized the illegal siege on Gaza before that; the military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza before that; and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians since 1948.
We must resolutely reject the premise that the slaughter of the innocent can ever become an accepted routine.
Knowledge of the atrocity is not enough. Expressing solidarity in words alone is not enough. Concrete, decisive action is required today—and holding the perpetrators accountable remains entirely within our power if the world finds the political courage to act.
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US Military Morale in the Middle East Is in the Overflowing Toilet
Rotten food, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscation of alert notification devices for incoming missiles (cellphones), infrequent mail, jumping off aircraft carriers, overflowing toilets... military families speak out for their loved ones, again and again.
Aug 14, 2026
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, social media closed down, were some of the issues that military families identified at the national conference of Veterans For Peace.
Spouses and parents of Air Force, Army, Marine, and Navy members told of plummeting morale, lack of basic supplies, and attacks on US military bases that are not reported in the US media.
The frustration of the military families at the VFP conference echoed the descriptions of life on US military bases in the Middle East under attack by the Iranian response to the brutal US-Israeli five-month attack on Iran made by military families who met with the acting assistant secretary of the Navy and the commander of the US Pacific Fleet in San Diego on August 6, 2026.
Big Problems on Long Deployments for US Naval Vessels, Ships’ Infrastructure, and Sailors' Physical and Mental Health
On August 6, 2026, the Navy's senior leadership held listening sessions with the families of aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln's sailors—one in-person session in San Diego, and a second online session later the same evening. Family members leaked recordings of those sessions that described conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: showers plagued with stubborn mildew, flagging morale, heavy fatigue, shortages of supplies and food, contaminated water supplies, and lost mail.
US troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma.
Since departing from Naval Base San Diego on November 21, 2025, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of 5,000 sailors and Marines has been deployed more than 250 days, with only a stop in Guam in December and a brief visit in Oman in June after 208 days at sea.
A second aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford had similar problems when it sailed from the Caribbean to the Middle East after being off Venezuela in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January 2026. During that deployment, the ship’s toilets kept failing, with sewage often overflowing and spilling onto the floor. Additionally, a fire broke out in the laundry room, causing enough damage that the Ford went into a port on the Greek island of Crete for repairs.
More than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation, with one sailor medically evacuated from the carrier, after being injured in the damage control effort. Two others were treated for lacerations.
The smoke damage from the laundry room fire extended to the berthing. More than 100 bunks and personal gear were destroyed in the fire.
Articles in Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times detail at least six attempts by crew members to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, with interviews conducted with sailors and families of those on board who described the impacts of the lengthy deployment.
USS Abraham Lincoln Sailor's Father Proposes 'Parent Swap' To Replace His Son
One parent was fed up with the conditions his son is living under. On August 13, Jefferson Kelley, the father of a USS Abraham Lincoln sailor wrote to his U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) asking Moreno to make an official inquiry to the US Navy to see if he could do a “parent swap” with his son, Jackson, 20, due to the terrible conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Kelley said he had not been asked by his son to make the swap, but he had read of the conditions on the aircraft carrier that included food rations, safety concerns, water contamination, and poor mental health, which has purportedly led to some sailors attempting to jump overboard during the 250 days at sea and felt that he as a parent should share the burden.
Kelley had not discussed his proposal with his son, before writing to the Senator, which may make his son’s remaining time on the aircraft carrier more difficult than it already is!
Army and Marine Ground Forces Under Missile Attacks
Families of US ground forces on the US military bases scattered all over the Middle East describe overcrowding to no room in shelters against incoming missiles and command's confiscating of cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles.
The US military says that Iran watches social media postings of attacks and to prevent such postings, cellphones may be taken away, but families respond that notification of incoming missile attacks is by cellphone.
According to the news outlet War Horse, the only public source for injuries during the US attack on Iran is the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which provides monthly totals for the War on Iran with limited demographic data.
More than 400 casualties (nonlethal) were recorded in the first month between February 28 and April 8 of the US attack on Iran, with Army personnel accounting for most of the casualties.
More than 270 of the roughly 400 casualties (nonlethal) were Army soldiers, and about one-third of those were reservists. Enlisted soldiers accounted for most Army casualties, including 57 sergeants and 53 specialists. But also wounded were 64 Army officers, including 20 captains, and 13 lieutenant colonels or colonels.
The Navy reported 64 casualties, none of whom were classified as seriously injured. The Air Force recorded 51 casualties, and the Marine Corps recorded 19. Unlike the Army, the other branches did not list the type or cause of injury.
US troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma.
Hundreds of Troops Suffering From Head Trauma
A large portion of the wounded suffering from head trauma has led some military health experts to worry that traumatic brain injuries—caused by damage to the brain that can impact thinking, movement, and emotion—could become the signature injury of this war, as in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
18 US troops have been killed and 624 wounded Since February 28
The Pentagon has attempted to reduce the accounting on the number of US military killed or wounded in the war on Iran by separating those killed or wounded before the May 1 ceasefire and after. The total killed and wounded before and after the ceasefire are 18 US troops have been killed and 624 wounded since the US began its war against Iran on February 28.
Senate Armed Services Committee Finally Getting Involved
The US Congress is finally getting involved. On August 12, 2026, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the acting secretary of the Navy to express “serious concern” about the increasing length of deployments and demand answers about living conditions aboard the carrier.
“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, he said in the letter, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Blumenthal’s letter ends with six questions for Hegseth and the Department of Defense to answer concerning conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln and a call to treatment servicewomen and men properly:
The men and women aboard the Lincoln have answered the call to serve their country. The Department owes them not only adequate supplies, maintenance, and support during this deployment, but a sustainable force-generation model that does not rely on repeatedly extending sailors and ships to meet persistent operational demands.
Our servicemembers deserve nothing less than the full support of their government—and the American people deserve a military strategy that is worthy of the sacrifices we ask them to make.
Update: This article has been edited to include a new section, "USS Abraham Lincoln Sailor's Father Proposes 'Parent Swap' To Replace His Son."
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Governments Must Act Like Access to Water Is a Human Right, Because It Is
The responsibility to protect access to clean water must guide their decisions on data centers, carbon capture and storage facilities, and other large industrial projects.
Aug 14, 2026
Increasingly, communities are facing threats to clean water from large industrial projects such as data centers and carbon capture and storage, or CCS, facilities that are being proposed and constructed in communities across the United States. The question is how should decisions about these facilities be made? Should government officials privilege capital and financial investments? Should they balance investment with other considerations such as noise, water, and energy costs?
Of all the issues raised by these large projects, water is one of the most crucial for the simple reason that we cannot live without water. Given this necessity, access to clean water must be treated as a human right with governments charged with the ethical responsibility to serve as the trustees of water to protect it for present and future generations. This responsibility to protect access to clean water as a human right must guide their decisions on data centers and CCS facilities and other large industrial projects.
Data centers are buildings, sometimes the size of large warehouses, that can contain hundreds of thousands of computer chips that provide processing and storage for online data including data used for energy-intensive artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, as well as less energy-intensive activities such as storing websites and other data. Carbon capture and storage facilities capture carbon dioxide emitted from industrial facilities and store it underground to prevent the CO2 from escaping into the atmosphere where it would contribute to climate change. Carbon capture facilities can include factory-size machinery that removes carbon dioxide from industrial air emissions, pipelines that transport the CO2, and underground storage repositories. Data centers and carbon capture and storage facilities typically consume large amounts of energy and water. They commonly also have toxic emissions, posing further risks to air, water, and health.
People have a human right to a clean environment—an idea recognized by the United Nations and enshrined in the constitutions of multiple states including Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania. The provisions from Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania explicitly mention the importance of protecting water supplies. Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment says, for example: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people."
Current projects being rushed through city councils or county boards, cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and granted tax credits, deny the public the right to full information about the project and undermine the ability of governments to fulfill its public trust duties.
Most constitutions, like Pennsylvania’s that contain the human right to a clean environment have a parallel provision, that asserts the responsibility of government to serve as the trustee of the commons or natural resources. For purposes of an ordinance on water, government, as the trustee of water, has a duty to make decisions that guarantee water quality and quantity now and into the future for the people within its jurisdiction.
If access to adequate, clean water is a human right—and given the uncertainty about water quantity and quality in light of unstable climate and weather patterns, increasing demands, and aging infrastructure—arguably the most appropriate decision-making tool for governments to use to fulfill its trustee responsibilities is the precautionary principle. The principle stands for the premise that we should take action, even in the face of scientific uncertainty, to prevent harm by
- Setting goals;
- Heeding early warnings;
- Exploring alternatives to potentially harmful actions;
- Placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on those who might be disadvantaged; and
- Using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle—including the public’s right to free, prior, and informed consent.
This principle is the commonsense idea behind many adages: “Better safe than sorry.” “Look before you leap.” “First do no harm.”
One step in implementing the precautionary principle to protect water requires special focus: the public’s right to give free, prior, and informed consent to projects that will impact water quantity and quality. The consent of the governed is fundamental to democracy as expressed in documents dating back to the Declaration of Independence. Current projects being rushed through city councils or county boards, cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and granted tax credits, deny the public the right to full information about the project and undermine the ability of governments to fulfill its public trust duties.
By protecting local water supplies that may be threatened by these new, energy- and water- intensive uses, communities can help ensure that our most important natural resource remains clean and abundant for generations yet to come.
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The Third Door: How Covert Regime Change Slips Past the War Powers Resolution
Congress can stop a war it can see. It cannot stop one its members are forbidden to describe—and that is now the door the pressure campaign against Cuba has walked through.
Aug 13, 2026
Last December, writing here about unrest in Iran, I had to be careful. We must resist the temptation to treat capability as conspiracy, I wrote, while also resisting the delusion that absence of evidence means absence of action. That caution was owed to readers, because I could point to a history and a capability but not to an operation.
That caution is no longer necessary. In the first week of August, American newspapers reported that the Central Intelligence Agency has established a dedicated Cuba task force—case officers, analysts, cyber operators, specialists in covert influence—whose reported mandate is to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in the hope of pressuring the replacement of officials deemed anti-American with leaders more agreeable to the president's demands. Cuba has been elevated to "Priority 1" in the intelligence community's collection framework, alongside China, Iran, and Russia. Satellites are being re-tasked. The Agency declined to comment.
We are told there are limits: no organized Cuban partners, no authority for lethal operations. We are also told, in the same breath, that the president may modify those authorities at any time.
What is remarkable here is not the operation. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's Covert Regime Change documents 64 covert American attempts to change foreign governments between 1947 and 1989, against six overt ones—a ratio of 10 to one. Only 25 succeeded even by the undemanding measure that an American-backed client took power. Her most damning finding is the one least quoted: States targeted for regime change—especially those that survived the attempt—were more likely to experience civil war or mass killing in the years that followed.
Covert action undertaken to alter the composition or constitutional order of a foreign government should be forbidden.
What is remarkable is that nothing in American law stands in the way—and that the reason has nothing to do with secrecy.
A Statute That Ends Things, and a Statute That Only Reports Them
The War Powers Resolution is not, at bottom, a reporting statute. It is a termination statute. It gives the president 48 hours to report and 60 days to finish, after which he shall terminate the use of the forces concerned unless Congress affirmatively says otherwise. Congressional silence ends the operation. That default is the whole of its design.
Covert action runs under an entirely different law, 50 U.S.C. §3093. There must be a written presidential finding. The intelligence committees must be kept "fully and currently informed." These are real constraints, born of real scandals, and it would be wrong to say Congress is blind.
But §3093 contains no clock, no expiry, and no vote—ever. A finding, once signed and reported, may run indefinitely. Silence continues it. And where a war powers report enters a public record on which any member may act, a finding goes to two committees behind closed doors, sometimes to eight members alone. Those outside may not be told; those inside may not speak. The floor vote that the War Powers Resolution treats as the ordinary constitutional remedy becomes structurally impossible, because a legislature cannot vote on what its members are forbidden to describe.
Then there is the definitional gap, which is the loophole properly so called. The resolution regulates the introduction of "United States Armed Forces" into hostilities. Case officers are not Armed Forces. Identical objective, identical target, identical effect—but a different statute, depending on which badge the operator carries.
I have argued in these pages that economic warfare capable of collapsing a foreign economy should be subject to reporting and time limits comparable to those governing armed force. I still believe it. But I have to report that it would not close this gap. The War Powers Resolution regulates a category of actor. An economic amendment would regulate a category of instrument. Any scheme built on categories will leak, because the executive may always choose the category nobody regulates. Only a rule keyed to effects will hold.
Consent That No One Can Authenticate
In January I argued here that Washington's claims of Venezuelan "cooperation" were null and void, because consent extracted under coercion is not consent. Covert action takes that one step further, and it is worse.
Suppose the task force succeeds. Suppose that some month soon the Cuban leadership is reconstituted, or a concession is made, or an agreement signed on precisely the terms demanded. Who will be able to say who authored it?
Not Congress, which will have seen a finding but not its consequences. Not the United Nations, whose bedrock principle protects a state's freedom to choose its own political and economic system without external coercion. Not the Cuban people, in whose name it would be done. Not the American public, in whose name it was mounted. And not the negotiators themselves—the same agency whose director flew to Havana in May to meet Cuba's interior minister, its intelligence chief, and the intermediary through whom talks are said to run is the agency now tasked with fracturing the leadership those talks would bind.
A settlement whose authorship cannot be established is a settlement no one can rely on—including the party that obtained it. Covert influence aimed at the composition of a foreign government does not merely violate the norm against intervention. It destroys the evidence by which compliance with that norm could ever be judged.
The Trap in the Obvious Remedy
The obvious answer is to regulate: an effects-based trigger reaching any sustained effort to alter a foreign government's composition, whichever agency conducts it; a finding that expires by law unless renewed by recorded committee vote; a path by which a committee can reach the full Congress in closed session.
I proposed exactly that, and then thought better of the framing. A statute that regulates a practice licenses it. Write a clock for operations aimed at foreign governments and you have conceded that such operations are lawfully available—and that concession reaches backward across O'Rourke's 64, converting a record of illegality into the quaint era before the paperwork. This is, not coincidentally, what intelligence services themselves have long wanted: Statutory footing transfers the risk from the officer to the statute. The vocabulary follows on its own. Subversion becomes stabilization. Regime change becomes democratic transition assistance. Fracturing an elite becomes engagement with reform-minded elements.
So the operative provision must be prohibition, not licensing. Covert action undertaken to alter the composition or constitutional order of a foreign government should be forbidden. The trigger, the clock, and the escalation path are then not the scheme but its enforcement—and the governing rule for the intelligence work that legitimately remains: collection, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation.
What Is at Stake in Havana
None of this is abstract in Cuba right now. On August 2 the national grid collapsed for the sixth time this year. On August 3 the restoration itself failed, and it collapsed again. The country's own energy minister said plainly that Cuba has no fuel and expects none in the volumes it needs, and that containers of solar panels, food, and medicines sit held at nearby ports—some destined for children whose medical condition depends on electricity. On August 6, United Nations experts said the humanitarian consequences are unfolding into a full-blown crisis, called the measures incompatible with Article 2 of the Charter, and urged the Security Council and General Assembly to take the matter up as one of international peace and security.
Into that, we have now introduced an effort to fracture a political elite. Whatever one thinks of the Cuban government—and one may think a great deal—an operation of that kind, in a country in that condition, is not an operation with a narrow band of outcomes. It sits adjacent to the conditions in which atrocity becomes possible.
Congress can stop a war it can see. Six months ago I asked in these pages whose job it is when Congress can no longer stop an unauthorized war. The answer keeps narrowing, and the doors keep multiplying. Two have been narrowed. A third stands open, and we have just been told, in the newspaper, that someone has walked through it.
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Big Brother Is Watching You... Through a Flock Camera
Millions of Americans are being watched as the US ramps up mass surveillance with help from AI, data brokers, and partnerships with private tech companies.
Aug 13, 2026
Government surveillance isn’t new, but new wide-ranging technologies that can detect our faces and track our movements are making it more ubiquitous. While the tools have changed, the purpose remains the same: to chill independent thought, free speech, and dissent, bringing our country closer to 1984.
Millions of Americans are being watched as the US ramps up mass surveillance with help from AI, data brokers, and partnerships with private tech companies. Immigrants, people seeking reproductive healthcare, and activists are among the most intensely monitored, but tech like Flock cameras has brought the issue into communities across the country.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, police departments have increasingly deployed automated license plate readers (ALPRs) powered by AI to track drivers “without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.” And they’re doing this with little to no oversight or regulation.
Flock Safety is one of the largest ALPR vendors in the US. Their solar-powered, teardrop-shaped cameras capture images of all passing vehicles, storing the car’s make, model, and other identifying features. Any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can access the company’s nationwide database without a warrant.
As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another.
Flock cameras also track people. Their “FreeForm search” feature has allowed police departments to search the database using phrases like “male with tattoos” and “person on skateboard,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media.
DeFlock, an open-source project that maps license plate readers, has identified over 128,000 ALPRs in the US. Even my small town of around 20,000 people in Southern California has at least 35 ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras.
No independent research has shown that ALPRs can reduce crime. But there’s mounting evidence of the technology’s alarmingly high error rate. An analysis by the Roseville, California police department found that 71% of Flock’s alerts to the Roseville police incorrectly flagged vehicles as stolen or used in a felony.
Far from promoting “public safety,” the tech has led to wrongful arrests, profiling, and countless other abuses.
Flock reportedly has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among other cities, Los Angeles recently suspended their use of Flock cameras amid mounting privacy concerns over who controls the data and how it’s shared.
Court records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Texas deputies searched 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide to track a Texas woman across state lines because she allegedly “had an abortion.” In Dunwoody, Georgia, a public records request revealed Flock employees accessing cameras in children’s spaces at a community center as part of sales demonstrations.
Other reporting has found cops repeatedly misusing the Flock system to stalk exes.
More communities are organizing and fighting back against this unregulated AI technology. As a result, at least 100 cities have now rejected ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras. But Flock is only one cog in the machine. Cities can easily replace their Flock cameras with those from competitors like Axon, Motorola Solutions, or Genetec, as some have already done.
Mass surveillance remains the fundamental problem. Ever more companies collect our data through cellular networks, facial recognition, surveillance cameras, and ALPRs, among other sources.
The US government, in turn, purchases massive amounts of our data from commercial data brokers without obtaining warrants—bypassing our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. In tandem, multiple federal agencies now have sweeping access to Americans’ sensitive personal data through systems built by Big Tech company Palantir, following President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order that expanded data sharing across agencies.
This metastasizing mass surveillance state—what George Orwell called “Big Brother” in 1984—is eroding our privacy, freedom, and Constitution.
As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another. We need oversight and regulation of the entire surveillance industry, as well as the government agencies that rely on it.
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Aging Under the Planet-Destroyer in-Chief
Honestly, once upon a time, no one could have made all this up: the greatest power on Earth in the midst of the most stunningly dangerous “war” of all time, our war on the planet itself.
Aug 13, 2026
Talk about unjust, unfair, or just plain not right: Here I am at 82 years old with children, grandchildren, and old (and I mean old!) friends, and (like me) our country and our world seem to be all too distinctly on the downhill slope. I could, of course, have added aided by my president, Donald J. Trump, and (except for the “my”) that would be anything but inaccurate. And yet, the very fact that a near majority of Americans (46.4% in 2016 and 49.8% in 2024) elected him president of the United States should tell you that the process was already well underway; otherwise, such a... you chose the word... parody or atrocity (or both) of American politics would never have been possible.
In short, after all these years—16 as an editor at Pantheon Books, a decade in a freelance editing (and writing) life, and almost a quarter of a century running and writing for TomDispatch.com, the website I created (and that’s now being run by the wonderful Nick Turse)—somehow, I still can’t believe (not truly) the world I find myself in. Phew! That was an exhausting sentence! (And no surprise there, since we’re on a distinctly exhausting planet.)
If there were a god (which, unfortunately, I doubt there is), he (she, it, they?) would surely be no less unable to believe the world we now find ourselves in. Of course, from the Stone Age on, humanity has always represented a difficult proposition. Our history is, in many ways, a running story of conflicts and wars, one seemingly grimmer than the next—a history that has anything but ended in our moment.
You would think, of course, that, with our very planet imperiled by climate change, which is slowly heating it to the boiling point, we might at least have taken a passing break from fighting each other. That would seem like an especially obvious thing to do, since war pours into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion the fossil fuels that are heating this planet so destructively. But no such luck, of course.
And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Even in Europe, a continent warming up approximately twice as fast as the rest of the planet, where only recently more than 300,000 people in France and Spain were displaced by heat and wildfires of a startling kind, there’s still an ongoing major war between Russia and Ukraine. And thanks at least in part to it, at a time when humanity seems incapable of putting much effort into fighting climate change, a whole new form of fighting each other (by drone) has been developed in a distinctly unnerving fashion. And of course, Europe is hardly alone, since wars continue to be fought across parts of the Middle East (thanks significantly to “my” president and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu), and in Somalia and Sudan in Africa. In short, despite everything we humans might theoretically learn from our past, nothing truly seems to get in the way of more of the same.
Only recently, of course, “my” president launched a war more or less out of the blue against Iran. Yes, Iran, a country that—my best guess—most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map of the world! And talk about learning nothing from the past, how totally mad that my country—theoretically still the greatest power on planet Earth—should start yet another war thousands and thousands of miles away, given that it hasn’t actually emerged victorious from a single one of the wars it’s fought since World War II. And that’s true, despite the fact that it continues to fund its military to the tune of about a trillion dollars annually, year after endless year. And note that “my” president, who only recently launched that seemingly random war on Iran, also appears all too determined to raise the Pentagon budget from a mere (just joking, of course) trillion dollars yearly to one and a half trillion dollars.
A Planet Heading for the Boiling Point?
And yes, I’m aware that, almost 25 years after I first began writing pieces like this, I’m distinctly repeating myself, which is hardly unreasonable given the repetitiveness of both my country and humanity when it comes to such crucial matters. Although, wait a second, I may not be giving Americans the credit they deserve! After all, there was nothing repetitious about Donald Trump (not until his second term in office anyway)! Historically speaking, he’s come about as close as anyone could to being a one-of-a-kind American president and something of a unique global leader as well. He’s certainly a distinctive reminder that, from time to time, we humans can indeed truly change the script (however dismally).
I mean, the country that once elected George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy (as well, of course, as Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, and Ronald Reagan) has certainly flipped the script entirely with Donald Trump in the White House. We’re talking, after all, about the man who is now building not an Arc de Triomphe or even an Arc de Trump in Washington, DC, but an Arc de Défaite (yes, that’s defeat in French!)—the largest on Earth. But perhaps that shouldn’t be considered even faintly strange, given what the American military has been unable to do—win a war—across this planet since World War II.
In the future, all of us could become a new version of migrants with nowhere to go (unless Elon Musk truly does settle Mars) on a planet heading for the boiling point.
And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time. Who would have believed it once upon a time? (Of course, who would then have believed that humanity could potentially destroy this planet as a habitable place for life?)
Honestly, once upon a time, no one could have made all this up: the greatest power on Earth (oh, wait, that may now be China!) in the midst of the most stunningly dangerous “war” of all time, our war on the planet itself (all too mildly and pleasantly labelled climate change, rather than climate catastrophe, climate explosion, or climate hell) and led by—yes!—that living climate catastrophe Donald J. Trump, distinctly the madman-in-chief of a country in decline on a planet that itself is beginning to experience the kind of decline that would once have been unimaginable.
Whew, that was one long sentence! And imagine that, in the years to come, barring a surprise, we humans—incapable of stopping our wars and so much else—could all too literally heat this planet to the boiling point, leaving us all in the situation that hundreds of thousands of French and Spanish people recently experienced. In the future, all of us could become a new version of migrants with nowhere to go (unless Elon Musk truly does settle Mars) on a planet heading for the boiling point.
And in that context, imagine what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think about the fact that nearly 50% of American voters (twice!) elected Donald J. Trump, the planet-destroyer-in-chief, as president of the United States.
Excuse me, I’m starting to sweat...
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Be Prepared to Protect Our Democracy in November From a Trumpian Plot
Given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.
Aug 13, 2026
Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving President Donald Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.
On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:
Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections…
And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under [Ronald] Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha, that if you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.
Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”
Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Richard Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey—who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam—when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.
When the FBI informed President Lyndon B. Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.
In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Spiro Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.
The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s reelection chances.
The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the Bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.
In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: It would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.
While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.
None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.
As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.
While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.
- He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
- A federal judge back last October ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and 10 months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
- Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
- Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.
So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.
We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seat belt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.
Therefore, Democrats must:
- Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
- If Trump tries to claim a national emergency—even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event—Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
- States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
- Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly 11,000 ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
- Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards, and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
- Prepare for Trump’s goons—federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys-Klan-types—around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
- Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
- Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
- Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of right-wing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.
People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.
While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.
For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: Lawyers, election officials, and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.
Contact your local elections office and volunteer to help out if you can; right-wingers are doing so right now, particularly in places where they can challenge mail-in vote signatures. We need to be there, too.
Better safe than sorry, as the old saying goes. Pass it along…
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