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Opinion
Let's Be Very Clear: Trump's Iran War Is Making You Poorer
In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, his belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least he and his friends will get even richer.
Apr 02, 2026
Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.
The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.
The Military Is Really Big Bucks
There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.
Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5% of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.
It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter 10 seconds and add maybe 10 words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.
It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid-19 relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually.
And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.
The Peace Dividend
In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.
At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.
Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, President George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.
It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.
This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.
It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.
The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War
President Barack Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with President Joe Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration could be pushed by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.
But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5% of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.
That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.
If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.
The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with its President Vladimir Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the US economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?
Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.
As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.
In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
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No Kings, One Planet
Trump has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself.
Apr 02, 2026
The glow of the recent No Kings rally still pulsates in my heart. Some 8 million people across the planet took part in over 3,000 separate events—people carrying signs that said things like “Power of Love, not Love of Power,” and “Jesus was a refugee,” and, well... “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS” and “Grab ’em by the midterms.”
Credit to President Donald Trump. He wages his wars and struts through life with so much arrogant swagger—so much indifference to politically correct propaganda—that he has made himself the perfect target for what may well be a growing movement to rebuild humanity itself. Oh God, I hope this is the case! Trump is the fool, the bellicose idiot of the moment—in partnership, of course, with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu—but they’re only the current faces of the trek to hell and nonexistence we’ve been on for a while.
No Kings is bigger than “no kings.” It’s more than just a movement to reclaim the democracy we used to have (back in the days of George W. Bush, for instance). Yes, it’s a movement in opposition to actions of the Trump administration: the pointless war in Iran and the global economic chaos it has created; the war on immigrants; the invasion, especially of blue cities, by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo; and, no doubt, people’s ongoing shock and outrage over the Epstein files and the sexual abuse of young girls.
“But voicing opposition is one thing,” as a recent piece in The Christian Science Monitor put it. “Turning it into action is another. The long history of American protests, dating back to the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, shows that not all mass movements produce tangible or lasting results.”
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love.
And tangible, lasting results are definitely what the participants want: what we want. And it’s crucial we don’t let this movement go, this movement emerging from “a broad progressive coalition,” according to the article, “with supporters across the country. No Kings organizers include labor unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union; veterans organizations, such as Common Defense; environmental groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters; and civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union.”
As I pushed my wheeled walker through the streets of Appleton last Saturday, feeling an urgent connection with the thousands of people present, I wanted to swaddle the moment in my arms. I knew it was bigger than Donald Trump. I felt like we were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge—stepping into, and beyond, humanity’s hatred of itself. We were marching not simply for No Kings but for One Planet.
Could this be the civil rights movement rebirthing itself? This movement, of the ’50s and ’60s, wasn’t just about the nation’s great wrongs—the racism, the segregation, the enormous lie that some people are less than human. It pushed against the hatred that had been structured into law and turned into national certainty. The civil rights movement pushed us toward a connected world. It opened the nation’s eyes... and soul.
So on Saturday I knew that we marched with open souls. We felt the wrong that’s underway, perpetrated by our country, and turned that wrong, as best we could, into hope. Into love. Love for the children our bombs have murdered. Love for the families ICE has torn apart. Love for the lost refugees whisked to concentration camps.
This is One Planet! We know it on the streets. We will not stop marching until it is known in the halls of Congress. Until it is known in the White House.
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The DR's Anti-Birthright Escalation Is a Cautionary Tale for the US
Racism and bigotry can never become the basis for deciding who gets rights and who belongs; families should never be stripped from their homes for the sake of violently manufacturing an ethnostate.
Apr 02, 2026
On April 1, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s executive order to ban birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.
Every lower court that has ruled on this issue thus far has found this executive order to be straightforwardly unconstitutional—and they are correct. The 14th Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The Trump administration contends that to be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means one must owe “direct and immediate allegiance” to the United States and receive “protection” from it. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argues that the children of US citizens and formerly enslaved persons meet this test by virtue of having “a permanent domicile”—a permanent home they intend to stay indefinitely. By contrast, the children of undocumented immigrants “do not owe primary allegiance to the United States by virtue of domicile” because their parents “lack the legal capacity to establish domicile here.”
This reading adds much to the Citizenship Clause that is clearly not present. No plausible interpretation would assume that the drafters meant anything about loyalty, allegiance, or domiciles.
Ultimately, Trump’s birthright restrictions, like those implemented in the DR, are nothing more than racism and xenophobia masquerading as legitimate policy.
Those challenging the Trump administration argue: “The government is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations. The Order may be formally prospective, applying to tens of thousands of children born every month, and devastating families around the country. But worse yet, the government’s baseless arguments—if accepted—would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”
This warning should be taken seriously. We have already seen similar events play out in the Dominican Republic (DR).
In 1997, the mothers of Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico requested that the local registry office provide them with a copy of their daughters’ birth certificates. Without it, the children could not enroll in school and were at risk of deportation. While both Yean and Bosico were born in the DR to Dominican mothers, their fathers were Haitian temporary workers. On that basis, the registry denied their mothers’ request. This blatantly discriminatory denial effectively rendered the girls rightless and stateless.
Under the 1994 Dominican Constitution, both girls were entitled to birthright citizenship. Per the Constitution, citizenship is granted to “all persons born within the territory of the Republic, with the exception of the legitimate children of foreigners residing in the country in a diplomatic capacity or those who are in transit therein.” Important here is the “in transit” clause. As Ernesto Sagás notes, “This clause was originally designed to address the issue of children born on ships passing through Dominican ports, and whose parents were not intending to settle in the Dominican Republic.” However, over the years, politicians had argued (and at times acted as if) that clause extended to the children of temporary workers, like Yean and Bosico.
After years of obstruction from government officials, the mothers finally succeeded in obtaining their daughters’ birth certificates in 2001.
In 2003, the case was submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In court, the DR denied any wrongdoing. Rather, they defended a broad definition of “persons in transit” based on its 2004 General Migration Law (Ley No. 285-04). Under that Law, “temporary workers” were formally classified as “persons in transit.” The DR argued that Yean and Bosico were not Dominican nationals themselves because their fathers were Haitian temporary workers—their fathers were “in transit,” thus they too were “in transit.” The IACHR rejected this reasoning.
If the Supreme Court has any legitimacy left, they will do the right thing and end Trump’s birthright madness.
In September 2005, the IACHR ruled that the DR had violated several of the girls’ rights under the American Convention of Human Rights, including their right to a nationality, equal protection, and humane treatment. The IACHR ordered the Dominican government to award the girls $8,000 USD each, issue a public apology, and amend their domestic laws to make the procedure for acquiring birth certificates “simple, accessible, and reasonable since, to the contrary, applicants could remain stateless.”
In October 2005, the Senate of the Dominican Republic issued a resolution rejecting the IACHR’s decision. In December 2005, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Dominican Republic, in further defiance of the IACHR, upheld the General Migration Law’s broad definition of “persons in transit.”
In 2010, the DR took matters one step further by formally amending their Constitution. Under the 2010 Constitution, citizenship is granted to “persons born within the national territory, with the exception of the children of foreign nationals who are members of diplomatic and consular missions, of foreigners who are in transit or residing illegally within Dominican territory. Any foreigner defined as such under Dominican laws shall be considered a person in transit.” Importantly, this redefinition divorced the concept of “person in transit” from any notion of temporary stay. A person could, for instance, live continuously in the DR for years and still be considered “in transit.”
Initially, this did not impact people who already had Dominican citizenship. But in 2013, that too changed. The Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic retroactively applied the new standard to all persons born between 1929 and 2010. The Court ordered the government to thoroughly review all birth registries within that period and remove any persons who no longer count as Dominican under the new guidelines. In the decade that followed, this ruling would strip as many as 245,000 Dominicans of their citizenship and trigger a humanitarian crisis.
Up to 86% of those impacted have been Dominicans of Haitian descent. This is no accident. It reflects the historical and persistent discrimination against Haitians rampant across the DR. The 2013 ruling made legal what people like Santiago Riverón, the mayor of Dajabón, at the Dominican-Haitian border, have long since thought. In an interview with journalist Marius Loiseau, Riverón claims that, “Haitians and Dominicans are like water and oil.” He continues, “They have already begun to invade us for good.”
Dominican President and Trump ally Luis Abinader echoes these sentiments. He remarks: “The rights of Dominicans will not be displaced. Our identity will not be diluted. Our generosity will not be exploited. Here, solidarity has limits.” He insists that stricter penalties against undocumented migrants are necessary to ensure that the “violence that is destroying Haiti will not cross over to the Dominican Republic.”
In October 2024, his administration announced plans to deport up to 10,000 undocumented migrants per week. Between then and March 2025, more than 180,000 people were forcibly deported to Haiti by Dominican officials. These mass deportations have fueled discrimination and racial profiling, excessive violence, arbitrary detention, and family separation as well as numerous human rights violations.
While there are many important differences between the DR and US, on the issue of immigration, the parallels are unmistakable. The Trump administration is also motivated by the belief that immigrants, including Haitians, pose an existential threat to the nation’s identity; that they are a serious risk to public safety; as well as a strain on social, political, and economic resources. Like Riverón and Abinader, President Trump insists that, given the scale of the “invasion,” aggressive immigration enforcement is necessary. This includes imposing denaturalization and immigrant arrest quotas. Even the formal justification for restricting birthright citizenship is similar. For both the Trump administration and the Dominican government, no matter how many years they have lived in the country or how long they intend to stay, an undocumented immigrant is always “in transit.” They never obtain a “permanent domicile.” The Dominican government does and the Trump administration aims to extend the purported ‘transientness’ of the parents to their children as a justification for denying them citizenship.
Ultimately, Trump’s birthright restrictions, like those implemented in the DR, are nothing more than racism and xenophobia masquerading as legitimate policy. If the Trump administration succeeds in restricting birthright citizenship, it—or a future MAGA presidency—will likely seek to build upon this ruling. Like the Constitutional Court of the DR, the Supreme Court may eventually rule to retroactively apply their decision to all persons born after the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
Racism and bigotry can never become the basis for deciding who gets rights and who belongs; families should never be stripped from their homes for the sake of violently manufacturing an ethnostate. What happened in the DR should be a cautionary tale for those of us in the US.
If the Supreme Court has any legitimacy left, they will do the right thing and end Trump’s birthright madness. That said, Trump cares little for democracy or the rule of law; regardless of how they decide, we will need to remain vigilant to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities.
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Urgent Message to Democrats: Stop Dragging Your Feet and End Trump's Iran War
Many congressional Democrats seem more interested in using Trump's war on Iran to score victories in the midterms than to use what power they do have to bring it to an end.
Apr 02, 2026
President Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that:
A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.
Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “the administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”
For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians
At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”
On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep US troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet.
Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”
Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like?... Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.
And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts—the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”
“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!
“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”
Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.
Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:
If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government... you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you... proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform...
Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At The Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”
By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89%.”
Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war:
The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences... They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security... This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.
“A Gift to Our Country”
Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.
More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim-American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”
He wrote:“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.
It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human, and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare for All. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”
In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan... None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed... Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good healthcare or good schools.”
Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past 50 years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.
Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
* * *
Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.
After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.
Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.
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