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Opinion
Democratic Socialism Is the Compromise Position
Given our scale of inequality, the egalitarian reforms of democratic socialism are only the start of what we should strive for.
Jul 31, 2026
Other than the continual circus in the White House, the most important political story in America may be the resurgence of democratic socialism. Ignited by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the movement achieved its biggest victory last year when self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Now, fueled by backlash to the extremist MAGA agenda and multiple ongoing crises, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have claimed 38 electoral wins so far this year and 120,000 active members, making them the largest socialist organization in US history.
Naturally, this has the establishment's hair on fire in both political parties. On the Democratic side, leadership oscillates between snubbing democratic socialists and disowning them outright, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) calling Mamdani’s rise a “gift to the Republicans” that makes Democrats look radical. Centrist-liberal magazine The Atlantic referred to DSA as “a parasite” that was “hijacking the Democratic Party.”
On the Republican side, the hysteria is even more severe. President Donald Trump, who seems quite enamored of Mamdani on a personal level, called him a “100% communist lunatic.” Recently Trump has been trying to resurrect the Red Scare, labeling DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists” and invoking communism some 94 times in just a few weeks. Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, connected leftist politicians, communism, and political terrorism into one vast conspiracy and declared it the “fatal cancer of civilization.”
Despite the delirium, many democratic socialist policies are popular, particularly those that expand public services and safety nets for healthcare and childcare. Such ideas only sound radical in a nation grown numb to the extremes of capitalism. But following decades of upward redistribution, worsening public services, deteriorating labor power, and all the other abuses of our current system, democratic socialism isn’t radical at all—it’s a compromise.
Defining “Democratic Socialism”
Like most political labels in America, “socialism” has been thoroughly twisted and misused. In 1952, President Harry Truman remarked that socialism was “a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” It was a Republican slur for the New Deal, public power, social security, bank deposit insurance, free and independent labor organizations, and “almost anything that helps all the people,” in Truman’s words.
To this day, that’s about as good a definition as any. In America, “socialism” is often used to describe—or denigrate—almost any publicly funded, government-run service: libraries, parks, fire departments, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, highways, public schools, safety net hospitals, animal shelters, community pools, and so on. Under this definition, the US military might be the most expensive socialist program in history.
Elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting.
This American concept of socialism, though, bears little resemblance to the theories formulated by Karl Marx. Marx articulated socialism in direct opposition to capitalism, under which individuals or companies own and control land, natural resources, and means of production. Capitalists rent labor—at least in societies where they can’t own it—and fight to make the terms of that rental as favorable to themselves as possible. This tug of war between owners and workers, in Marx’s view, is the central struggle of history. Marx sought to invert that structure, advocating that ownership, control, and the fruits of labor belong to workers, and theorizing that the only way to achieve such a reality was through revolution.
Democratic socialism, then, is also distinct from Marxist socialism. Both may strive for populist control of the political economy, but democratic socialists in America largely pursue their goals through reform, working within existing institutions. Democratic socialism often more closely resembles the Nordic model: a capitalist economy in which government takes a larger role in protecting human rights and guaranteeing certain essential goods and services.
Actually, this compromise of preserving the fundamentals of capitalism while trying to achieve the egalitarian goals of socialism is precisely what more committed Marxists don’t like about democratic socialism. They might argue that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, exploitative, and unreformable, relying as it does on never-ending growth and abuse of labor, and that working within it is doomed to only limited successes at best.
Reforming the Second Gilded Age
Whether or not one agrees with such ideas, it’s a discussion that free people are within their rights to have. Though we often treat capitalism as a national religion, there’s nothing sacred about it. Even the US Constitution is surprisingly agnostic on questions of economic organization. It’s not encoded in our DNA—in fact, we are much more naturally inclined toward cooperation than competition. Humans have a virtually infinite number of ways we can arrange society, and we are in desperate need of rethinking ours.
Because for the last few decades, the American economy has grown ever more off-balance, to the point where many analysts now say we’re in a second Gilded Age. We recently minted the world’s first trillionaire, while about half of us would be wiped out by any major illness, accident, or job loss. Workers have lost power, essentials like housing and healthcare are increasingly out of reach, and practically all the gains of our productivity have been accumulated at the very top, with corporations posting record profits. Billionaires are multiplying their wealth faster than ever, building anti-revolution doomsday bunkers, and plotting to rule their own fiefdoms as CEO-kings.
We live in a society that’s obsessed with law and order for things like shoplifting or overstaying a visa, but largely looks the other way on corporate crimes like pollution, wage theft, and fraud—not to mention war crimes and genocide. The president is a convicted felon who wants you to ignore his decades-long friendship with a child sex trafficker and instead fear and hate the immigrant next door.
In such a system, elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting. The wealthy surely all took note of the public reaction to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City. Mangione became a cultural icon who was openly celebrated in many circles, making clear the rage simmering within America’s dispossessed.
There’s a reason the progressive California Rep. Ro Khanna refers to a tax on wealth as an anti-revolution tax, or an attempt to save capitalism from itself. Progressive Democrats like Khanna often mediate between capitalist centers of power and the party’s left-wing base, who largely feel fed up with the party’s incremental approach of making small tweaks here and there. Democratic socialism, as practiced in today’s America, is still essentially incrementalism, but they’re much bigger increments.
Such a model works well in places like Finland, Iceland, and Denmark. These countries have high taxes, but they get far more out of them than we do. As a result they are consistently ranked as the happiest countries on Earth, with excellent numbers for education, homelessness, poverty, healthcare, life expectancy, and infant mortality—all areas in which the US, with its profit-first approach to every problem, is lagging behind.
High taxes and a mixed economy also once worked well in the United States. We dug ourselves out of the Great Depression with the New Deal. Government programs brought electricity to rural areas and established safety nets and Social Security. Our middle class boomed after World War II, when taxes were the highest they’ve ever been.
Republicans and Big Business called that socialism, too. They even conspired to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now, faced with another socialist menace, they’re playing just as dirty.
The Billionaire and Republican Backlash
The rich and powerful pay good money for their political representation, and the main things they expect in return are to be untaxed and unregulated. When Mayor Mamdani announced a pied-a-terre tax on luxury second homes, The Washington Post—which is owned by megabillionaire Jeff Bezos—published a column criticizing Mamdani’s “‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” Billionaire Steve Roth said on an earnings call, “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’... to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs… [the rich]... should be praised and thanked.”
So it goes whenever anything similar is proposed: Socialism punishes success; the rich will flee if we tax them and leave us simple folk immiserated; and the government will take your home, car, TV, coffee machine, and everything else until, eventually, we’re all sitting in the dirt, eating worms and hitting each other with sticks.
There is no limit to the hysteria Republicans can drum up around socialism, no lie so bold that they won’t tell it with a straight face on TV. In 2016, for instance, the right-wing Institute for Policy Innovation accused the Democratic Party of going even beyond full-blown communism for supporting things like higher wages, vacation time, a 30-hour workweek, maternity leave, and universal health insurance—each of which sound like terrific ideas that would improve human lives, and almost none of which, sadly, are actually supported by establishment Democrats.
Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital.
By design, Americans have come to expect very little from our system. We’re taught to regard the very concept of government as fundamentally incompetent, wasteful, and oppressive, rather than a tool we can take control of and use to improve lives. Despite the popularity of socialistic policies and goals, the word itself remains divisive. Some of those who have the least are the most aggressively anti-socialist. For this reason, there’s an open debate whether the movement should even label itself socialist.
However, public opinion is slowly evolving. Self-identifying as a socialist could have upsides, like signaling loftier aspirations for people who are desperate for change. And since Republicans will call anyone left of Sean Hannity a communist anyway, reclaiming the word could also blunt their attacks if people come to equate socialism with popular reforms like raising taxes on the wealthy and public options for healthcare.
Unfortunately, winning hearts and minds may not be enough. Because if the wealthy are unable to protect their power legally at the ballot box, the Trump administration has already declared its intention to combat democratic socialism with brutality and repression.
According to polls, Trump and the Republicans are heading toward a trouncing in the midterms, particularly in the House. As a result, Trump is already setting the stage for rigging or cancelling the election, using the threat of communism as one of his predicates. Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also been on the offensive, attempting to characterize leftist movements as inherently terroristic and calling on the state to “keep our people safe” from such threats.
Rubio said: “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist… It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation.” Leftists, Rubio said, are “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.” Miller said: “The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred… We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
These dehumanizing comments echo some of the worst periods in history, including the Red Scare of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Exactly what the administration plans to do is kept vague on purpose. The framework to take extreme actions—effectively criminalizing certain political beliefs—is laid out in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Perhaps, if democratic socialism appears too strong on the ballot in November, they will see fit to protect the voters from their own bad decisions.
Society Is in Desperate Need of Rebalancing
While the establishment tries to trigger a panic about democratic socialism, Mamdani remains popular in New York and his brief tenure as mayor has already been, by many measures, a success. There are no gulags, and he hasn’t seized anybody’s home. He’s the first high-profile politician in recent memory to speak to, and start delivering on, people’s desire for more access to dignity, time, and their personal pursuit of happiness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that message is resonating.
Every society has a mix of public and private endeavors. America is no different. The goal of the left is, broadly, to tilt the balance toward public support for education, healthcare, environmental initiatives, jobs programs, and so on. The goal of the right is to eliminate public investments, if not civic life altogether, and let people fend for themselves in a cutthroat social Darwinism. Our challenge as a society is to find a balance that fosters the kind of world we want to live in.
Capitalists will argue that our inequality is a natural consequence of the brilliance and drive of business leaders, that we all benefit from the largesse of the rich and anyone can get a piece of the pie if they work hard enough. But our inequality goes far beyond, say, a brain surgeon owning nicer golf clubs than an op-ed writer. The issue is a rigged system powered by insatiable greed, where a tiny handful own private islands and the masses can’t afford insulin.
Make no mistake: Corporate America wages class war constantly. Profit is their main motivation, and by definition, profit is created by getting more out of a deal than you put in. A little bit may be fine. Most people happily pay extra for good service or a worthy product. But trillions in profit means trillions in unpaid wages, overcharged rent, exorbitant medical bills, unpaid insurance claims, usurious lending, or any number of other ways the rich and powerful squeeze the poor.
In a business-run, profit-oriented society, human needs will inevitably suffer because they are simply not a factor in the decision-making. Libertarian right-wingers will argue that free-market capitalism meets human needs naturally through the invisible hand, but this amounts to a lot of hocus-pocus. If you value a more egalitarian distribution of labor, leisure, comfort, health, education, and happiness, the only way to achieve it is through some form of socialism.
Once you peel back the hype and fearmongering, democratic socialism looks more and more reasonable. Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital. They want to pool our collective resources, distribute them communally, and work toward a more dignified life for everybody. It wouldn’t actually be socialism, though Republicans will surely call it that—but it could be a start toward something better.
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Failure Insurance: Trump’s New Electoral Strategy in America
The objective of President Trump's warnings about election integrity are no longer merely to challenge an outcome, but to suggest that only a result delivering victory to Trump or his movement is legitimate.
Jul 31, 2026
Less than 10 days after President Donald Trump described the electoral system as “dangerous and under threat,” a federal appeals court blocked his administration from enforcing an order tightening mail-in voting rules in 23 states. The ruling showed that the dispute is not only about cybersecurity or foreign threats, but also about the rules that will determine the legitimacy of the 2026 midterms. Democracies begin to erode when citizens no longer believe the ballot box reflects their genuine will. Electoral legitimacy depends less on a flawless voting process than on public acceptance of rules that allow even the losing side to accept the outcome.
Viewed from this perspective, the most significant element of Trump’s White House speech was not his claims about China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, but the way he portrayed the American electoral system itself. Trump described it as “dangerous and under threat”—a characterization that goes beyond a warning about cybersecurity or foreign interference. It raises a fundamental question: Is the principal problem the external threats facing America’s electoral system, or the effort to persuade Americans that the system itself can no longer be trusted?
To support his claim, Trump presented a series of alleged threats. He said declassified intelligence documents showed that China obtained information from 220 million American voter-registration records and that intelligence officials concealed the matter. He also warned that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can penetrate America’s electoral infrastructure. Yet these countries are not the center of his narrative. Rather, they serve as evidence for a broader claim: that the US electoral system is vulnerable, insecure, and needs fundamental redesign.
The distinction between issuing a security warning and discrediting an electoral system becomes clear here. Few deny that foreign powers attempt to influence rival states’ political and information environments. Like many democracies, the United States faces cyber threats and influence operations. But there is a crucial difference between strengthening election security and cultivating the belief that the entire electoral process is fundamentally unreliable. The former protects democratic institutions; the latter erodes public trust.
If a society believes elections are valid only when they produce one faction’s preferred outcome, the problem is no longer a particular election; it is the erosion of democratic competition and the transformation of elections from a solution to political conflict into a source of crisis.
The significance becomes clearer when Trump’s remarks are placed within the US political context. The 2026 midterms are not an ordinary contest for the president. Declining approval ratings, public dissatisfaction with the consequences of the war with Iran and rising energy prices, and the risk of losing the House have placed Republicans in a difficult position. If Democrats regain the House, another effort to impeach Trump could follow—a possibility he has raised. For Trump, who refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, elections are not merely an institutional process; they are part of a struggle over his political legitimacy.
This backdrop helps explain the Trump administration’s effort to expand the federal role in election administration. The White House’s pressure on congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act—which would require proof of citizenship at registration, photo identification when voting, and the sharing of voter information with the federal government—rests on a single assumption: that the existing system requires sweeping changes to improve security and public confidence. The question is not whether electoral reforms are open to debate, but how they are presented: as reforms to improve a functioning system, or an attempt to rescue one that has already failed?
Here the meaning of Trump’s speech becomes more apparent. Before the election, he is constructing a framework through which the outcome is interpreted. If Republicans prevail, the election will be presented as proof of the system’s integrity. But if the result contradicts White House expectations, explanations are already prepared: foreign governments, the intelligence community, structural weaknesses, or the electoral process itself. This is political failure insurance.
Failure insurance does not require conclusive proof of a conspiracy. It consists of building a narrative that reduces the political cost of defeat before it occurs. Within this framework, losing is no longer necessarily the consequence of voters’ choices; it can be attributed to a “dangerous and under threat” electoral system. This is the key difference from 2020. Then, Trump’s allegations emerged after the results were announced. Now, the narrative of distrust is being constructed before voting begins. The objective is no longer merely to challenge an outcome, but to suggest that only a result delivering victory to Trump or his movement is legitimate.
Democracies have never been built on the assumption that elections are flawless. They rest on the principle that political disputes can be resolved within a shared institutional framework and that even the losing side accepts the legitimacy of the process. If a society believes elections are valid only when they produce one faction’s preferred outcome, the problem is no longer a particular election; it is the erosion of democratic competition and the transformation of elections from a solution to political conflict into a source of crisis.
The irony is that, for decades, the United States applied this standard when assessing elections in other countries. Washington argued that without public trust, even legally conducted elections cannot enjoy political legitimacy. Today, however, the president is invoking the same logic to describe America’s own electoral system. This is more than a domestic dispute; it raises questions about the credibility of the democratic model America has long sought to project abroad.
Ultimately, the central question raised by Trump’s recent speech may not be whether China gained access to voter-registration data, or how capable Russia, Iran, and North Korea are of penetrating America’s electoral infrastructure. The fundamental question is why, on the eve of one of the most consequential elections of his presidency, the president of the United States has chosen to convince millions of Americans—before the first ballot is cast—that their electoral system is “dangerous and under threat.”
Placed alongside political realities, the implications are troubling. Trump’s speech cannot be understood as a warning about election security or dismissed as another chapter in the disputes following the 2020 election. It represents an attempt to redefine the relationship between the voter and the ballot box—a relationship in which electoral legitimacy derives not from public trust and established institutions, but from the narrative advanced by those in power. This is how democracy begins to erode from within, long before fraud or foreign interference damages it. The greatest threat to American elections may lie not in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang, but in the moment when the president, seeking to insure himself against defeat, persuades his own citizens that the ballot box can no longer be trusted.
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Trillionaires Are Only Possible Because They Don't Pay Taxes Like Ordinary People
Without endless tax deferrals, they would have only a tiny fraction of what they own today, yet, as things stand, nothing stops them from wielding the power and influence their wealth buys to benefit themselves.
Jul 31, 2026
The valuation trends up and down, but one thing’s for sure: Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this summer. At the height of the SpaceX IPO he was briefly worth around $1.45 trillion.
Then SpaceX stock tanked, rallied, then tanked again. But the most important thing about Musk’s wealth isn’t whether it stays above the 13-figure threshold—it’s that 94% of it comes from not having to pay taxes on unrealized gains.
That’s right: Musk’s fortune effectively comes from not paying taxes.
It’s no exaggeration to say that trillionaires (Musk likely won’t be the last) are creatures of the tax code. They ought to be called “taxillionaires.” If it weren’t for laws that permit the wealthy to endlessly defer paying taxes by keeping their gains unrealized, there would be no trillionaires—and many fewer billionaires.
We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes.
According to Musk’s own account, when he sold his stake in Paypal in 2002, he netted $180 million, invested it all in SpaceX and Tesla, and borrowed to pay his living expenses. To get from $180 million to a trillion today implies annual returns of over 40% (returns that would be considered impossible for ordinary investors).
Allowing these returns to compound untaxed supercharges growth.
Musk paid some taxes along the way, when he exercised stock options or sold some Tesla shares, but any taxes he paid are insignificant compared to his wealth. By contrast, for most working Americans earning a good salary, total state and federal taxes are significant—typically around 40%.
They can put limited amounts in tax-deferred IRAs, 401(k) plans, and the like. But most of their savings comes from net paychecks after withholding for federal, state, local, Social Security, unemployment, and Medicare taxes. Musk is effectively exempt from these taxes.
But he doesn’t have to be.
Suppose he were subject to the same taxes on his annual wealth increase that most higher-earning Americans pay on what they make, and had to sell some Tesla and SpaceX shares to pay those taxes. We crunched the numbers based on the latest figures, and found he’d be worth around $47 billion today—rich enough to afford the most lavish lifestyle imaginable, but not a trillionaire, and not richer than the GDP of most countries.
It’s the same story for Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and other multibillionaires.
The vast bulk of their fortunes came from not paying taxes on their wealth as it grew. Without endless tax deferrals, they would have only a tiny fraction of what they own today (although that tiny fraction would still be a huge amount of money). Yet as things stand today, nothing stops them from wielding the power and influence their wealth buys to benefit themselves.
In the 2024 elections, Musk was the largest campaign donor, giving $291 million. That’s chump change for him, but it bought unprecedented power: lucrative contracts, the suspension of investigations of Musk’s businesses, access to government data, and the authority to dismantle government programs—including disruptions to foreign aid which are projected to result in over 14 million people dying from preventable diseases.
It’s a vicious cycle of wealth begetting power which begets more wealth, diverting it from the needy and vulnerable. We’re in the grip of unprecedented power accumulated by private, super-rich individuals.
We can check their power by fixing the untaxed wealth problem. We should end the practice of funding billionaires’ and trillionaires’ accumulation of power at public expense by letting them amass yet larger fortunes without paying taxes. We should adopt sensible policies requiring them to pay their fair share, such as the Billionaires Minimum Income Tax Act introduced in Congress in 2023.
Over the next decade, we will face crisis-level national debt and unmet needs for healthcare and retirement income. That will force us to decide whether to leave the vast pool of billionaire and trillionaire wealth untouched, or tax them like the rest of us to curb their influence and address public needs. The choice is ours.
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The Consuming Contradictions of Trump's Iran War
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities.
Jul 31, 2026
Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. "The US Mint stopped producing pennies," I said to her. “They might be valuable.”
She quickly replied, "I need gas."
Rising gas prices are an outcome of the US war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside.
One thing is plain as day. Ceasefires between Iran and the US are temporary and connect with fluctuations of oil prices, currently increasing. Rising prices of oil drive price increases at the gas pump.
The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically.
Meanwhile, this sentence in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation report stands out like a third thumb. “The index for energy increased 15.7% over the past 12 months due in large part to the index for gasoline rising 26.7% over the same period." That spike is despite presidential announcements about how well the war against Iran is going for the US to his dual audiences of MAGA voters and capitalist investors.
Apparently, repetition of a falsification has limitations. Don’t tell the president, though.
Inflation as a result of supply disruptions as we experienced with global value chains during the pandemic is a systemic contradiction. Global economic integration, e.g., the shift of US industry abroad that increases the distances of supply chains, is no risk-free strategy to increase profits and market share for corporate America.
We see in real time that the global economy which requires oil to operate feeds the imbalance between consumption, production, and distribution of commodities such as energy. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea with Yemen’s entry into the Iran-US war are driving the decrease in oil production and distribution, and therefore consumption.
Under the current phase of capitalism, or neoliberalism, the government shores up the weakening buying power of the working class with direct support of the corporations and the wealthy. In the case of the Iran-US war, despite the endless American taxpayer outlays for military spending with bipartisan support, the dwindling supply of energy from the Persian Gulf that businesses and consumers rely upon is driving inflationary pressures. The rise of gas prices is proof of that. There’s more.
Spending a bigger chunk of household income on gas means that working families spend less in other areas. Take fast food spending. Consumption of fast food is down 4% in May 2026 from its peak in September 2025, according to the US Bureau of Economic Affairs.
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-US war, now including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities in the US. The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically. Claiming to know what's next is a fool's errand.
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Haley Stevens Is an Enemy of International Law
If Michigan Democrats nominate someone so out of touch with her constituents and so supportive of Trump’s opposition to human rights, many thousands of Michiganders will likely vote third party or stay at home in November.
Jul 31, 2026
Michigan Democrats face a critical choice next Tuesday in what polls show is a tight primary race for the US Senate. It pits Rep. Haley Stevens, one of the more hawkish and pro-corporate Democratic members in the US House of Representatives, against public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive advocating Medicare for all, progressive taxation, and getting corporate money out of politics.
Much attention has been given to the Stevens campaign’s dependence on contributions from corporate donors and conservative political action committees (PACs), including those affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Various PACs supportive of Israel’s far-right government have donated up to $30 million to her campaign in appreciation of her strident opposition to conditioning military aid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.
Stevens has supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, voted to defund United Nations agencies helping Palestinian refugees, denounced Amnesty International and other human rights groups for documenting Israeli war crimes, and attacked the International Court of Justice for investigating Israeli violations of international law.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza and the US’ provision of military aid. He has underscored the importance of conditional military aid in adherence to internationally recognized human rights standards to all nations and supports international legal institutions that consistently advocate for universal standards. He has stressed the differences between criticizing a government and attacking the religion or ethnicity of a nation’s population. For example, he also opposes US military aid to Egypt, an Arab Muslim country from which his parents came.
She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.
But Stevens’ dismissal of international humanitarian law goes well beyond Israel. She opposes any accountability for war crimes by any US ally.
Stevens was one of only a handful of Democratic members of the House to support a 2024 Republican-sponsored bill designed to punish anyone who directly or indirectly participates in the investigation or prosecution of those suspected of war crimes if they are part of a government allied with the United States.
The bill, which passed the House that June but never made it to the floor of the Senate, was rooted in the belief that the prosecution of suspected war criminals by the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be based not on the available evidence, the severity of the crimes, or what the law says, but on the geopolitical orientation of the government of those accused. While Stevens has no objections to prosecuting war criminals belonging to organizations or governments that the US government opposes, her backing of this bill would seem to indicate that she believes those supported by Washington should somehow be held unaccountable.
It’s not as if the ICC has an anti-Western bias. Since its founding in 2002, the ICC has indicted 73 people, including African warlords, Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials, and Hamas terrorist leaders. Only 2 of those 73 indicted have been affiliated with US-allied governments. However, it would appear that even that is too many for Stevens.
Indeed, Stevens’s list of those impacted by the sanctions she supported would have included some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers and international jurists, along with their immediate family members. Their property and other assets held in the United States would have been subjected to seizure and they would have been banned from entering the country.
Almost all of these targeted individuals have been involved in other war crimes prosecutions, including those stemming from atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Liberia, and elsewhere. None of them have ever shown any ideological bias against Israel or any other US ally. They simply believe that international humanitarian law should be defended regardless of political considerations—which is exactly what seems to upset Stevens.
Among those targeted by these sanctions would have been Theodor Meron—a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada, and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—because he was one of the experts consulted by the ICC regarding suspected war crimes committed by Israeli leaders.
Another target would have been the prominent British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been involved in human rights cases in dozens of countries. She would be subjected to sanctions for her participation in an ICC Panel of Experts in International Law which, in addition to recommending the prosecution of three Hamas terrorist leaders, also supported the prosecution of two Israeli leaders. She is married to American actor George Clooney, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, and would have been banned from ever again living with or even visiting her husband in California.
The Biden administration, despite its own criticisms of the ICC and support for Israel in the face of large-scale war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, issued a statement in June 2024 saying that it “strongly” opposed the bill because it “could require sanctions against court staff, judges, witnesses, and US allies and partners who provide even limited, targeted support to the court in a range of aspects of its work.”
Stevens, however, sided with Trump and her Republican House colleagues against the Democratic administration.
Indeed, the Trump administration imposed its own sanctions on the ICC in February 2025, although they were not quite as severe or comprehensive as those supported by Stevens. She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.
Stevens’s hostility to the ICC is not popular. Polls show that Americans have been broadly supportive of the ICC, with only a small minority supporting sanctions. And a poll released July 23 showed that Americans, by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, support arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was indicted by the ICC in 2024 (along with a Hamas leader) for multiple war crimes, including crimes against humanity.
This could be a big political mistake. If Michigan Democrats nominate someone so out of touch with her constituents and so supportive of Trump’s opposition to international law and human rights, many thousands of Michiganders will likely vote third party or stay at home in November, thereby risking handing this critical Senate seat to a right-wing Republican.
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The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won't Stop Israel’s Genocide
What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it.
Jul 31, 2026
The words "killed," "injured," "maimed," and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.
Take, for example, a headline like: "13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded." Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.
According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.
The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.
The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.
On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.
It is this "and so on" that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.
Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel's daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.
A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read "Santa Monica Beach"; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.
These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to United Nations and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.
Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.
There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.
What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel's barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.
Yet the outcome remains unchanged: The death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.
A July 23 joint report by the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme found that 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza face acute food insecurity.
The report also warned that more than 74,000 children under 5 are expected to require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming year.
This report was released on the same day that Gaza health authorities updated the official death toll to over 73,311 Palestinians. That number is already higher now, as more have been killed since.
On that same day, Thameen Al-Kheetan of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that "no place in Gaza can be considered safe."
That statement is true, of course, but it is also the most well-known fact in the world right now. No one is contesting it. And yet, no one acts: Israel keeps bombing, the US Congress continues assigning it more weapons, and the rest of the world tracks the death tally.
Meanwhile, Israel—which has seized control of even more territory in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire—is now constructing massive earth barriers stretching an estimated 23 kilometers across the strip.
Though it was never fair to begin with, even the original Trump Gaza plan never mentioned the building of interior borders, the theft of additional land, or the concentration of displaced Palestinians into tiny enclaves within an already small piece of land.
Israel's long-term plan is not only to maintain permanent military control over Gaza, as top Israeli officials have declared, but also to prolong its torment indefinitely.
Even as I write this article, news reports indicate that four more Palestinians have just been killed. It is unlikely the number will remain that low; the Israeli army rarely kills in small numbers.
But even these small numbers represent human beings whose grief cannot be measured in statistics, summed up in official statements, or reduced to clichéd headlines.
Nor do survivors cling to the empty promise of international law prevailing over US-backed impunity. History has made Palestinians cynical. For generations, through every massacre and land theft since the 1948 Nakba, waiting for justice has yielded nothing but hollow promises and rising body counts.
The only difference between the past and the present is that today, we all know, see, and hear exactly what is happening in Gaza and across Palestine.
The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.
If we allow that to happen, we become culpable, too: Israel does the killing, using American arms, while we sit by, counting the dead and shaking our heads at the sad state of the world.
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Nevada’s Data Centers Power a Surveillance Pipeline That Ends at Our Doorstep
Data centers built in our hometowns are already bringing the surveillance technology of war to our public spaces and private lives.
Jul 30, 2026
The Israeli military’s Orwellian use of artificial intelligence for surveillance, targeting, and execution of attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been well-documented by journalists, reporters, and activists in Israel and the United States. Less known is the close collaboration between the military and police departments in the United States, which have been quietly adopting tactics pioneered by Israel in their perpetual campaigns in the Occupied Territories, including US police departments sending their officers to Israel for training.
This dynamic, combined with the US’ direct funding of the Israeli military through taxpayer dollars, creates a feedback loop in which the US is effectively funding the real-world experimentation and refinement of AI technology on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, which then provides models for how the police in the United States can more effectively surveil their own citizens and—especially chillingly—potentially quash dissent. Cities in Nevada, like Reno and Sparks, find themselves at the forefront of this unsettling reality, as developments on both ends of the process—data center construction that powers AI use, and the proliferation of Flock and Axon cameras used for state surveillance—are currently taking place under the sanction of our local governments.
The Generative AI systems that are being used for warfare abroad and surveillance at home require staggering amounts of data storage and energy. In Northern Nevada, data centers can occupy huge swathes of land with footprints larger than the biggest nearby cities, or nestle right into our communities where they can support local police surveillance. Apart from initial construction, they produce few jobs, poison the groundwater, and generate noise pollution that can harm physical and mental health. The Great Basin is so called because the water that enters the Basin does not drain out again—any toxins that leach from the data centers will stay there, despite promises about closed-loop wastewater-based systems. Data centers also facilitate the shadowy nature of private entities that are funded by the government—Palantir, which develops a variety of AI-based surveillance technologies utilized by the US, does not own its own data centers, but rather contracts with companies like Google to hide their exact location.
Much of the processing power generated in these centers is utilized by the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus, which is in turn funded by US aid. The US has sent Israel approximately $174 billion in aid to date, allowing Israel to continuously remain on the cutting edge of surveilling and murdering Palestinians and their other neighbors in the Middle East. Unit 8200 is one of Israel’s cyber warfare units, and it has developed a variety of target identification tools that rely on generative AI to generate lists of potential targets with little or no human intervention or decision-making. Lavender is a system that has been used to generate kill lists. The Gospel is another—one which had its guardrails with respect to target size removed in 2023. These systems rely on a variety of data sources, including facial recognition and data mining through social media and internet use. Unit 8200’s technologies closely mirror those developed by Palantir, such as ELITE—a system used in Operation Black Rose, the Department of Homeland Security surveillance project in Oregon designed to identify and arrest targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These similarities should not be surprising—it’s not unusual for key players in Palantir and other private AI technology developers to have close ties with Unit 8200.
We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible.
For those who follow the Epstein files, it’s important to note that Jeffrey Epstein was deeply involved in Israeli intelligence—and therefore can be connected to the burgeoning projects of surveillance in the US—representing the fusion of private interests and military operations. As sinister as these systems are, it’s essential to recognize that they are fundamentally faulty: Palantir also developed the Maven Smart System, which was used to target the school in Iran where 120 children and 37 adults were bombed to death based on faulty, out-of-date information. The lack of human decision-making contributes to violence on false premises.
Now we are witnessing the disturbing yet unsurprising development of surveillance technology developed in Israel with US aid money returning to US cities. Flock Cameras and the systems that support them are an increasingly notorious example. Flock claims that its own cameras function only as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), but they allow police departments to connect a wide range of camera systems to a central database. Police cameras, as well as privately owned cameras, can be connected to these databases, which are typically then shared across police departments nationwide. This is already making Americans less safe, as was demonstrated when a journalist in Georgia discovered that an unauthorized Flock employee was viewing the cameras within a Jewish community center. Faulty target identification is also coming home to roost in the US, as evidenced by the false charge against Chrisanna Elser in Colorado. Elser was charged with stealing a package on the basis of a false identification by ALPR cameras. While the case was eventually dropped, this precedent will inevitably lead to more individuals being wrongly targeted for crimes they did not commit.
These systems are all supported by data centers. Data centers built in our hometowns are already bringing the surveillance technology of war to our public spaces and private lives. We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible: tax resistance, blocking data centers from being built in our communities, and resisting the reckless use of AI by government and private entities. The struggle for Palestinian rights, dignity, and livelihood is inextricably connected with the preservation of our freedoms in the US.
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Celebrate Medicare and Medicaid—and Protect Them From Trump!
Trump and his allies in Congress have not so much dismantled these programs yet as chipped away at them; if this movement continues unabated, we may be left with the crumbling foundations of programs that were built to last.
Jul 30, 2026
There is reason to celebrate Medicare and Medicaid turning 61 years old. Both highly successful programs were signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965 as a cornerstone of his Great Society agenda. But this year, our celebration is tempered by grave concern over the future of both programs under the Trump regime.
Let’s compare the words of the two presidents:
LBJ:
No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents.
It’s not possible for us to take care of… Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.
The comparison speaks volumes. One is a leader who understood that the federal government has a crucial role in the protecting the health and well-being of our most vulnerable citizens—including the poor, disabled, and the elderly. The other is a president who claims to support Medicare and then says that the federal government can’t afford it because of his illegal war in Iran. So much for supporting Medicare.
But this goes deeper than Trump’s rhetoric. The Medicare program, like Social Security, is at a pivotal point in its history. The Part A hospital) trust fund must be fortified so that it doesn’t run dry in the 2030s. (There are reasonable solutions that Congress could enact without hurting seniors.) So far, though, we have heard no constructive ideas from Trump.
More urgently, though, the Trump administration is actively undermining the "traditional Medicare" program that LBJ signed into law. The administration has begun a pilot program to use AI bots to determine whether traditional Medicare patients will be covered for procedures their doctors have ordered. This appears to be an attempt to cut costs by erecting obstacles to medically necessary care—with decisions made by bots instead of human beings.
It could be the first step in a scheme to corrupt traditional Medicare and make it more like the privatized Medicare Advantage program run by for-profit insurers, which is a glorified HMO (with frequent denials of care, limited provider networks, and surprise out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries). Unfortunately, thanks to deceptive but pervasive advertising, Medicare Advantage has now captured more than 51% of the market, leaving traditional Medicare with a shrinking share of enrollees.
The problem is that Medicare Advantage (MA) puts profits over patients. Participating insurance companies have been overbilling the federal government by billions of dollars a year. Ironically, this privatized program was supposed to save taxpayers money. Instead, Medicare Advantage plans cost the government an average of 14% more per patient than traditional Medicare. That translates into an additional $76 billion in federal spending this year alone.
The bottom line: Medicare Advantage puts taxpayers’ money into the hands of large insurance companies while failing to deliver superior or more cost-effective care. It is fair to say that this is not what LBJ had in mind when he created the public Medicare program. (Medicare Advantage arrived—in nascent form—in 1997, after considerable pressure from the insurance industry.)
When we talk about the financial shortfall facing the Medicare program, we must look at Medicare Advantage as an aggravating factor. Reining-in MA would go a long way toward restoring the overall program to fiscal health—along with other commonsense reforms. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been inconsistent on this issue, initially floating strict curbs on MA overpayments but ultimately rewarding insurance companies with higher payouts.
Traditional Medicare is far from perfect. It should have caps on patients’ out-of-pocket medical costs. It should cover vision, dental, and hearing care. (President Joe Biden attempted to expand coverage in the ill-fated Build Back Better Act.) These are improvements that we have long urged Congress and the White House to enact.
Medicare also faces compound financial challenges—including the overall rise in healthcare costs and soaring prescription drug prices. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress took a major step in the right direction with the Inflation Reduction Act, which empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma. This process is expected to save the government more than $230 billion by 2031.
For the most part, the Trump administration has adhered to the law and continued negotiating with drugmakers—but it also expanded the list of cancer drugs that won’t be eligible for negotiations. The president has largely relied on smoke and mirrors to make it appear that the administration is "tough on Big Pharma," using gimmicks like TrumpRx. Meanwhile, in a move that will make medications less affordable for seniors, the Trump administration has just announced it is ending Biden-era subsidies in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.
Of course, it’s also Medicaid’s 61st anniversary. The damage that Trump and the Republicans have done to Medicare’s sister program would take up another entire article. Suffice it to say that more than 3 million Americans have already lost health coverage since Trump and the GOP enacted their Big, Ugly Bill, which slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid. (This also hurts older people dually enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid.) It was correctly labeled the biggest cut in healthcare in US history—to pay for tax cuts largely benefiting the wealthy.
The political right has always been wary of the New Deal and Great Society legacy programs that lifted people out of poverty and provided older and lower-income Americans with basic retirement and health security. Some on the right have outright committed themselves to dismantling these programs, despite their distinguished histories. Trump and his allies in Congress have not so much dismantled these programs yet as chipped away at them under the guise of fighting "fraud and abuse." If this movement continues unabated, we may be left with the crumbling foundations of programs that were built to last, for the good of the American people.
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A Semiquincentennial Declaration
Meditations and incantations on America's 250th anniversary.
Jul 30, 2026
Note: I wrote this poem as a way of reflecting on and grappling with this country's 250th anniversary and the time of existential crisis we are in, both as a nation and a species. It is a poem of rage but also of love and aspiration. It is an offering and a declaration about this country's history, our present moment, and our potential. I offer this poem-essay as part of what I hope will become a new declaration of independence and interdependence.
One
On your two hundred and fiftieth birthday, let us speak openly.
Oh, say something nice, you say.
Don’t rain on this flash-bang parade.
Some things nice:
You contain multitudes of fine, decent people.
Folks who will pick you up when you’re broken down.
Who’ll rescue you from a flood or a fire.
Who’ll give you a buck or the shirt off their back.
They’ll welcome you into their homes, share their food.
They’ll help you raise a barn or put out a fire.
Friendly, good-hearted folk.
Then there’s this land, our land, erupting in soul-stirring beauty.
Towering mountain crags thrusting into horizon-splitting skies.
Canyons painted in sediments of red, orange, sienna, and crimson.
Ancient ridges hued in purple and blue, sloping and slouching into infinity.
Oceans of grain prairies, their amber waves swaying.
A resplendent and bountiful terrain fruiting more than enough for everyone.
Come to America, its vast cornucopias will seed and feed you.
Give us your tired, your poor, and we will raise them from the floor.
Two
You told us to stand up, take off our hats, put our little right hands on our chests, and “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America… one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You commanded us to love the flag, the God, the country.
Broad stripes, bright stars, and perilous fights.
You insisted we are free and brave, uniquely blessed with happiness and liberty.
Bombs bursting in air from dawn’s early light to twilight’s last gleaming.
We are the best, the greatest, the most exceptional, you said.
We are blessed and fortunate to be Americans, you said.
Nobody is like us. Everybody wants to be like us.
Three
You speak of freedom. Of liberty.
Are we free yet?
Are we free of wars, of racism, of sexism, and homophobia?
Are we freed by your bombs bursting across the world’s airs?
Does that star-spangled flag wave proudly for all your global slaying?
Did America become free and brave by decimating Vietnam?
Did we become liberated by eviscerating Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran?
Have your unrivaled invasions and coups set us free?
Or maybe liberty arrived back in 1776 like you keep reminding us,
When we were free at last, thank god almighty, from kings and colonizers,
All those liberating muskets, canons, and armies powered by genocide and slavery.
America, your gold and your flag are soaked in centuries of blood.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He answered: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
Four
America, how many victims will you claim in your fraudulent name?
How many victims does it take to purchase our “freedom”?
Did your endless wars buy freedom for all of us?
This truth is self-evident: Not all freedoms are created equal.
Our freedoms are separate and unequal.
Our ballots and dollars germinated by bullets and bombs.
We are free to speak, shout, howl, or wail into the wind.
We are free to buy whatever we can afford.
We are free to vote at the polls and with your dollars.
Billionaires and millionaires are free to buy the votes.
Dollars are people, too, they say.
Those dollars have purchased our democracy and sold it
down the river flowing with ancestral bones and tears.
Five
The "America" I love is the land of dissenters, resisters, and persisters
The nation I love is in a perilous fight for justice and equality.
The America I love is the country of Martin Luther King, Jr., country of Malcolm X, of Shirley Chisolm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson; country of farmworkers marching, of Chicano rights and Brown Power; nation of women’s liberation and rights and rising power; of queer rights and queer love and queer existence; I love the land of Black Power, Black Joy, and Black resilience; country of the American Indian Movement, Indigenous rights and justice; land of all the unnamed nurses, teachers, farmers, janitors, garbage workers, tenants’ rights activists, all the unnamed soldiers for peace who never fired a bullet, all the unnamed marchers and masses of protesters, all the unnamed, unaccounted lovers and tenders of beauty, all the stewards and shepherds of this land, our land.
I love all the unnamed, unaccounted souls who are brave enough to care for other souls.
America, this misnamed and misguided land, contains multitudes of soulful, spirited love in spite of itself.
Six
On your 250th birthday, it is long past time
For a new declaration of independence and interdependence.
A declaration of love and mutual care and respect over hatred, fear, and division.
Maybe it begins, simply:
We declare our steadfast and fierce independence
From racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and endlessly voracious and avaricious capitalism.
We declare our loving, passionate, unwavering commitment to a society based on care, mutual aid, and interdependence.
We declare that all living beings have those inalienable rights you spoke of so long ago—every living thing.
We have the right to freedom and liberation.
We have the right to housing, food, water, education, and healthcare.
We have the right to a decent and dignified existence in a world defined by humanity and mutual respect.
We declare our steadfast and unapologetic love for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We have the right to not be replaced, displaced, or eradicated by deified digitized beasts and virtual machines.
We declare the right to be and love whomever we damn well please.
We declare the right to love and care for and tend the Earth, this planet that makes us and everything possible.
At last, we declare, simply:
We will love and care for one another.
We will put love and care before everything else.
We will empower joy and beauty across this land, our land.
We will build a society based on love, care, and respect for all living beings.
We will not stop loving. And love will win. And you, America, will love it.
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How to Celebrate Medicare's 61st Birthday? Expand It to Everyone
Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way.
Jul 30, 2026
Sixty one years ago, July 30, 1965, Congress enacted Medicare to provide health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. At the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Harry S. Truman and his wife, former First Lady Bess Truman, became the first recipients of the new Medicare health insurance program. President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress enacted Medicare under Title XVIII of the Social Security Act.
Medicare was a momentous act because it provided new health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. In the years since, Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way. Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance and is administered at a cost of 3-4%, as opposed to private, for-profit health insurance, which has administrative costs above 15%.
Following the successful 1965 grassroots campaign to enact Medicare, many also believed that the dream of a full national, single-payer health insurance system that included all age groups, “Medicare for All,” was right around the corner. Unfortunately decades later, Medicare still has not been expanded. Most of the changes have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, Big health insurance industry companies-oligarchs-profiteers, and their champions in the White House and Congress.
Big insurance and Big Pharma continue opposing legislation for the new, improved Medicare for All because these resistant, self-serving industries have the most to lose if their huge profits are redirected to direct patient care for all. Individual and corporate predators regard democracy, government, and community as obstacles to their greed and avarice, always placing profits over individual patients, families, and public health. It’s no wonder so many beholden members of Congress want to protect the interests of Big Insurance and Big Pharma, industries that spent $371 million on lobbying in 2017 alone.
The Big Health Insurance-Big Pharma-Congressional Profiteering Complex
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, framed by former Trump administration staffers and secretly endorsed by President Donald Trump himself, proposes changes in Medicare benefits that could destroy Medicare as we know it. Instead, we must fight back and expand Medicare. Although health insurance affordability for the majority of US citizens still remains elusive, President Trump’s health insurance plan still wants to shift many more dollars into private, Wall Street insurance industry hands. The takeover of public health insurance, as with Medicare Advantage plans and others, by private Wall Street entities continues apace as Republicans and Trump propose to increase taxes and give it to the private profit insurance industry—the basic source of our profound administrative waste, along with the costly administrative burdens they place on the delivery system that requires large profits. Profiteering continues unabated as private insurance sells us services we don’t need or want, such as deductibles and other cost sharing and maintenance of narrow networks, requiring prior authorization with increased administrative costs, excessive ongoing paperwork, and documentation requirements, all while avoiding paying for surprise bills and other denied benefits.
No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma.
Dealing with Covid-19 could have been more lifesaving if Medicare for All had been in place. A New York Times editorial, "Health Care for Some is a Recipe for Disaster," stresses the importance of covering everyone. Even before Covid-19 was known to humans, Northeastern University professor of public health, Wendy Parmet, presciently warned that the push to exclude immigrants from access to healthcare services would be both dangerous and quixotic. “None of us can be self-sufficient in the face of a widespread epidemic,” she wrote in 2018. “That is just as true for noncitizen immigrants as everyone.” In any pandemic, self-sufficiency can be self-deluding; everyone’s health, citizens, immigrants, etc. alike is only as good as our most vulnerable neighbor’s.
Truly a recipe for disaster, vested interests reject the science of public health epidemiology by asserting that only a slow, incremental approach to health insurance reform is possible or acceptable. So, what are we willing to settle for, should we just settle for what we can get? Lower the expectations, turn down the public heat, and keep waiting?. Gradualism, baby steps, extending health insurance coverage to some, but not all, is the mantra of the day; "Medicare for Some," but not "Medicare for All," is fawned over by politicians, profiteers, and advocacy groups alike while reducing communities resources to deal with dangerous epidemics and other health problems.
Virtually all the risky gradual reforms being touted would reinforce a dysfunctional health insurance system with as many standards of insurance as there are dollars to purchase them. It would further lock us into an obsolete private insurance-based model that holds everyone's health hostage to profiteering HMOs and unaccountable big insurance companies for years to come. For these proponents of political expediency, the question remains: Who will be left behind while we wait? Every year many unnecessary deaths are linked to lack of health insurance coverage. Pandemics can quickly increase these numbers.
Big Insurance and Big Pharma dominate our government, and public health takes a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same "profits over public health" ideology, even though the Covid-19 pandemic clearly showed how our economic system failed to serve our citizens by allowing these groups to privatize, sabotage, fragment, and cripple our health, public health, and other social services. Many of the changes in traditional Medicare have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, and Big Health insurance. No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma and their inherent tendency to invent new needs, disregard all boundaries, and turn everything into an object for sale and big profit.
Medicare for All 2026 Meets Eight High Standards
Medicare for All Act (M4A)-2026 is best solution because it meets eight basic standards:
- Health insurance coverage should be stable and permanent throughout life. M4A-2026 would be a single program—permanent throughout life.
- Employer-sponsored insurance can create problems such as job lock, which many conservatives and progressives believe should be terminated. M4A-2026 would end employer-sponsored insurance, and, for most, M4A-2026 would be better.
- Medicaid carries the stigma of being a welfare program which results in legislative underfunding and neglect. M4A-2026 would fully terminate the Medicaid program and move everyone into a universal, comprehensive, and equitable program.
- We need a program that is affordable for each individual and for society as a whole. M4A-2026 would achieve all goals of financing reform without significantly increasing spending.
- Patients should have free choice of their professionals and healthcare institutions. M4A-2026 allows choices within the entire healthcare system.
- The privatization of public programs such as Medicare through Medicare Advantage and Medicaid through private managed care programs have proven to provide poor value for the taxpayer (obscured by cherry-picking and lemon dropping) and should be eliminated. M4A-2026 would eliminate them.
- Fragmentation results in dysfunctional financing of healthcare; M4A-2026 would bring an end to it.
- M4A-2026 is specifically designed to greatly reduce fragmentation and its associated costs; health insurance industry profiteering is ended.
Summary
To continue our 61 years of progress, it’s time to upgrade Medicare by establishing a 21st century improved “Medicare for All” health insurance system that covers all age groups, cradle to grave. Newborns will leave the hospital with their new Medicare card, and drop it off years later at life’s end. Two comprehensive M4A bills now filed in Congress, H.R. 3069 and S.1506, propose to insure or cover all medically necessary services. Patients have their choice of physicians, mental health professionals, other healthcare professionals, hospitals, and clinics.
M4A insured health services include:- Primary care
- Medically approved diet and nutrition services
- Inpatient care
- Outpatient care
- Emergency care
- Prescription drugs
- Long-term care and palliative care
- Mental health services
- Dentistry
- Eye care
- Substance abuse treatment
Because our government, instead of private profit health insurance companies, serves us as the health insurance financing authority, co-pays and deductibles paid at health professionals' offices are ended because payment for health insurance is fully prepaid directly into Medicare, much like Social Security, and covered at first dollar amounts. This means the obsolete 80%-20% payment split between private health insurance companies and Medicare is eliminated, with Medicare for All covering 100%.
The major reason private health insurers are more expensive than government health programs in the US is due to profiteering and administrative costs. Those extra taxpayer funds going to private insurers include costs such as advertising and marketing of their plans, costs of contracting for restrictive provider networks, administering prior authorization requirements, complex systems of processing claims including denial of benefits, simple administrative costs of operating large corporate entities, and distributing generous profits to their executives and passive high profiteering by Wall Street investors.
The Medicare for All Act-2026, now filed in Congress, would much better fill our healthcare financing needs without wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on superfluous administrative costs and end immense profiteering by private insurers and Big Pharma. The USA is a country where health insurance for medical and mental healthcare is a function of socioeconomic status. Everyone knows that this inhumane system should have been corrected long ago.
Please tell your legislators that it’s time to end inadequate and dangerous health insurance programs. Insist on real health insurance reform essential for individuals and families. American history is filled with examples of fundamental, democratic change brought about by successful mass action and public pressure against the counseling of the go-slow, vested-interest crowd. No more waiting! Ask your legislators to fully support Medicare For All 2026 now: H.R. 3069 and S. 1506
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Republicans Want to Dismantle Medicare; Democrats Must Fight for Medicare for All
While America’s current healthcare system is painfully vulnerable to Republican attacks, there is an opportunity to create a better future where all Americans can rely on guaranteed healthcare.
Jul 30, 2026
Sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law, while former President and long-time national health insurance champion Harry Truman watched. What Johnson and Truman understood was that the fight for guaranteed healthcare for everyone has been a generations-long struggle. The creation of Medicare and Medicaid was a key victory in that struggle. Importantly, though, Medicare and Medicaid are—to paraphrase what President Franklin Roosevelt said about the signing of Social Security into law—“a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.”
After President Truman was unable to achieve his goal of guaranteed healthcare for all Americans, healthcare advocates decided to move incrementally. They began by pushing to cover seniors. Older Americans have the highest medical costs, the hardest time affording private health insurance, and need care the most often. The signing of Medicare achieved this important milestone, alongside the creation of Medicaid to cover healthcare for low-income Americans.
In 1972, Medicare was expanded to cover people with disabilities. But that is where progress stopped. It is well past time that we expand Medicare to cover children and everyone in between. We must also improve Medicare to cover such vital services as hearing, vision, dental and, perhaps most importantly, long-term care. And we must, in this age of abhorrent income and wealth inequality, require the wealthiest to contribute more while eliminating all premiums, co-payments, co-insurance, and deductibles.
Currently, we are at a crossroads. While America’s current healthcare system is painfully vulnerable to Republican attacks, there is an opportunity to create a better future where all Americans can rely on guaranteed healthcare.
With Republicans doing everything they can to disrupt and dismantle the current healthcare system, it is the perfect time to fight for a more durable and universal alternative.
Shamefully, Republicans are chipping away at both Medicare and Medicaid. The attacks take many forms. They include the effort to confuse Americans with the inferior, propagandistically named “Medicare Advantage;” the Trump administration giving AI the power to overrule doctors and block care for Medicare patients; the $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (beautiful for billionaires, ugly for everyone else) passed by Republicans; and new Republican rules for Medicaid that would force cancer patients to get back to work and would cause millions of Americans to lose their healthcare coverage. Though Republican politicians would deny it, their hostility to Medicare and Medicaid is overwhelming.
Meanwhile, Democrats are working to expand and improve Medicare and Medicaid. They have taken concrete steps to lower prescription drug prices. The Inflation Reduction Act, which gives Medicare the power to negotiate for lower prices, was signed into law by a Democratic president, Joe Biden. Democrats are fighting to provide those same savings to those with commercial insurance and lower prices in other ways as well. Importantly, a growing number of Democrats are supporting and fighting for improved and expanded Medicare for All.
It may seem daunting and overwhelming to think about achieving improved and expanded Medicare for All in the current political environment, but it is within sight. Indeed, I have written a book-length road map to achieving improved and expanded Medicare for All, which will be released this September. It is called The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge Press, forthcoming, 2026).
What would improved and expanded Medicare for All mean? It would mean this: no premiums, co-pays, co-insurance, or deductibles. It would mean comprehensive healthcare coverage for everyone in America, automatically. It would mean going to the doctor of your choice, without worrying whether your provider is in your insurer’s network. The vision of improved Medicare for All would include all services being covered automatically, including dental, vision, and hearing coverage. Medicare should also be expanded to cover long-term care, both at home and in nursing homes.
This November’s election will determine the future of Medicare and Medicaid. Will Republicans make Medicare and Medicaid work even worse for Americans? Will even more hospitals and nursing homes close? Or will Democrats be able to fight back and not only defend Medicare and Medicaid from Republican attacks, but enact a bold vision of improved and expanded Medicare for All?
With Republicans doing everything they can to disrupt and dismantle the current healthcare system, it is the perfect time to fight for a more durable and universal alternative: improved and expanded Medicare for All. Instead of a precarious and shaky patchwork system where a disruption to your healthcare is one job loss or plan change away, it is time to fight for a world where healthcare is truly a right, not a privilege.
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