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Opinion
While UAE Backs Sudan Genocide, NBA Cup Should Drop Emirates Sponsorship
The NBA’s credibility as a league that stands for justice and fairness is at risk. Will they take actions to break off their connection to a government that is funding and arming some of the worst atrocities in the world?
Dec 15, 2025
The National Basketball Association, a league renowned for its support of civil rights going back to the Bill Russell era, is now connected to the former member of Sudan’s Parliament Siham Hassan Hasaballah, who organized soup kitchens out of her home after the country’s most recent war began in 2023. Just weeks ago, she was executed in Darfur by a genocidal militia called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
The NBA, a league that actively promoted racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, is now connected to the Saudi Maternity Hospital in Darfur, where RSF soldiers murdered hundreds of patients and health workers last month. One video shot by RSF soldiers themselves reveals a dozen victims lying on the floor, while an RSF soldier kills an elderly survivor. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the Director of the World Health Organization, was “appalled and deeply shocked by reports of the tragic killing of more than 460 patients and companions” at the hospital.
The NBA, a league undertaking major investments in youth programs in Africa and around the world, is now connected to the world’s fastest displacement crisis taking place now in Sudan, which is the “largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee.
What’s the connection? The NBA has developed a deep and evolving commercial partnership with the United Arab Emirates, which is providing weapons and support to the RSF, that genocidal Sudanese militia. The most visible and public manifestation of the relationship is the Emirates NBA Cup, the increasingly popular in-season tournament sponsored by the UAE’s flagship airline. The tournament's final round will take place this coming Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Global business dealings are complex, but surely genocide should be a red line for the NBA.
The NBA also has a deepening partnership with Rwanda, which over the last two years has sent thousands of troops into neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, sponsored one of the deadliest militias in all of Africa—the M23—in support of its Congo intervention, and looted Congo’s valuable natural resources.
The league is now one degree of separation away from the two worst abusers of human rights in all of Africa: the RSF and M23.
“Sportswashing” has a long history. The Roman Empire had its bread and circuses. Hitler hosted the 1936 Summer Olympics, Mussolini hosted the 1934 World Cup, and Putin hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. Saudi Arabia owns the LIV golf league. They all recognized that attention from their own misdeeds could easily be diverted by investing in sporting events that entertain the masses.
To that end, the NBA relationship isn’t the only sportswashing the UAE is engaged in, as the Emirati government and its subsidiary companies are also sponsors of Formula One racing, US Open tennis, Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts events, European soccer teams, and National Football League teams, among others.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s deputy, Mark Tatum, has argued that the NBA follows “directives and guidance” from the US government, and he has told private audiences that if American policy changed, the NBA’s action would change accordingly.
That change is underway. On November 12, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stopped just short of saying the quiet part out loud: “"We know who the parties are that are involved [in arming the RSF]... I can just tell you at the highest levels of our government that case is being made and that pressure is being applied to the relevant parties… This needs to stop."
At the moment, it remains unlikely that a US official would publicly name the UAE as the largest supplier of weapons to the RSF. But it is clear US policy toward the UAE’s arming of the RSF is shifting. NBA Commissioner Silver has a duty to recognize that change, as his deputy said, and “change accordingly.”
With the crisis in Sudan only getting worse, now is the time to act. The activist campaign Speak Out On Sudan, coordinated by a number of humanitarian and human rights organizations including Refugees International and The Sentry, is calling on the NBA to make it clear to its Emirati partners that as long as the UAE continues to fund and arm the RSF, this will be the last Emirates NBA Cup. The NBA is one of the most powerful sports leagues in the world—surely it can find another sponsor.
There is precedent for this. Recently, partly in response to growing activist pressure, the English Premier soccer club Arsenal announced the end of its commercial partnership with Rwanda, which has invaded neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and is looting the Congo’s mineral wealth. The German club Bayern Munich did the same earlier this year. These teams have shown brand sensitivity and willingness to change when called out for commercial arrangements that connect them to horrific human rights abuses. The UAE's support for a genocidal Sudanese militia is no different.
The NBA’s credibility as a league that stands for justice and fairness is at risk. Will they take actions to break off their connection to a government that is funding and arming some of the worst atrocities in the world? Or is “shut up and dribble,” the infamous line used by Fox News host Laura Ingraham to LeBron James, going to be the way forward for the NBA on this issue?
Global business dealings are complex, but surely genocide should be a red line for the NBA. As this year’s Emirates NBA Cup concludes this week, let’s hope it’s the last.
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Economic Self-Interest Will Draw Millions To Solar Energy
A good investment never did so much good. Eventually, more and more people will realize it.
Dec 15, 2025
Many Americans who don’t believe in global warming will opt to invest in solar energy simply because it will save them lots of money.
Unfortunately, not everyone can install solar panels on their roofs. People in apartments or renting will not have that opportunity, though some might cash in through community solar organizations or plug-in solar --- portable panels that can be placed on balconies or in yards.
Even some single-family homes may have roofs aimed the wrong direction or too shaded. But for those with suitable houses, solar panels are increasingly a no-brainer.
In 2019 we installed 32 panels on our home roof at a cost of about $18,000--- about $22,000 in 2025 dollars. However a 30% federal tax credit reduced our out of pocket cost to about $12,600.
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” repeals the federal tax credit starting in January, but solar panels remain an excellent investment.
In seven years, our panels have generated more than 72,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This would have cost us more than $7,250 at the local price of ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Thus, in less than seven years our panels have saved us more than half of what we paid for them. And they should be good for 25 years, or more.
They have generated more than half of the electricity we have used in our all-electric household, including charging up the battery in our electric car, a Chevrolet Bolt EV. To indicate how much energy 72,500 kilowatt-hours represents, that would be enough to drive our electric car about 280,000 miles!
The cost of installing solar panels may come down further. The panels themselves are getting cheaper. And for various reasons, including local building regulations, installation costs in the U.S. are much higher than in some other countries. Many cities are exploring how to make local laws more receptive to solar.
Maximum benefit from solar panels will come if you pay cash for them rather than borrowing the money and paying interest on it. Assuming you have money that you might otherwise invest in a CD, bonds, or stocks, just compare what such investments would earn compared to what the solar panels would save you.
Assuming panels would cost you $20,000, investing that amount instead in a 3% CD would bring in $600 a year in taxable income, so maybe you would have $450 after taxes. In 7 years, after tax interest would come to $3150, less than half of what we have saved during that same period with our solar panels. Of course, with stocks and bonds you very likely have something left at the end of solar panels' lives.
Bond funds currently earn about the same 3% interest, and of course with stocks you never know what they will earn and also face the danger that they will suffer from a Wall Street crash.
And taking taxes into consideration, the money solar panels save you provides the equivalent of tax-free income, so a $7,250 saving over 7 years would leave as much in your pocket as $9600 in taxable income would have, assuming you are in a 25% marginal tax bracket.
Furthermore, remember that the price of electricity will undoubtedly go up. The savings from having solar panels will therefore also increase, making them an even better investment.
I don’t recommend borrowing to pay for solar panels. But if you are considering this, be sure to subtract the interest you would be paying on the loan from the benefits the panels will produce before you sign anything. It may not pencil out.
Check out your solar installer – most are reputable, but perhaps not all. The installer can tell you how well your local utility treats customers with solar panels, which can vary greatly.
And be ultra cautious about anybody offering to install solar panels for “free.” They will retain a property right in the panels until you pay them off, which could scare off buyers if you need to sell the property.
There truly is no free lunch! But solar panels can be the next best thing.
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Congress Must Fight Back Against Supreme Court's Anti-Democratic Crusade
Lawmakers should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country.
Dec 15, 2025
The 2026 election will take place in a political system that is divided, discordant, flagrantly gerrymandered, and marked by widening racial discrimination. Thank Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the Supreme Court. And the supermajority of highly activist justices seems poised, even eager, to make things appreciably worse.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court refused to adopt any standard to police partisan gerrymandering, and it even prevented federal courts from hearing that claim. Fast-forward through a census, six years of line-drawing, and a flurry of lawsuits, and predictably, our democracy has become much less fair.
Redistricting is supposed to take place once a decade, after the census. In fact, that’s why the census is written into the Constitution. But earlier this year, Texas abruptly drew new congressional maps in a gambit to squeeze out five extra seats for Republicans. It was in the middle of the decade and at the behest of someone who doesn’t live there (President Trump) — and all at the expense of Black and Latino voters. Even though 95 percent of population growth in the state came from those communities, the map’s main feature was fewer districts where those voters can elect their preferred candidates.
Bad, right? A panel of three federal judges agreed, temporarily blocking the map from being used in the upcoming election until a full trial could be held. Texas first resisted allegations of a partisan gerrymander, then insisted it was actually acting at the behest of the Justice Department for racial reasons, then said it was, in fact, a partisan power grab. (“I don’t see race. Just Democrats.”) Talk about a Texas two-step! Amid these gyrations, the court found it illegal.
Enter the Supreme Court. Last week it blocked the lower court’s ruling, thus allowing the election to go forward with freshly gerrymandered maps. It’s yet another brazen use of the shadow docket — the Court’s supposed emergency docket (with limited briefing and no oral argument) — to hand Trump a win with only a few sentences of explanation.
Where does that leave things? The Texas seat grab set off a partisan arms race across the country. Furious Democrats acted. California voters overwhelmingly supported drawing new Democratic-leaning congressional districts there to counter the GOP gains in Texas. Republicans in Indiana and Florida are moving to redraw lines, while Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia aim to do the same.
With all this headbutting, the gerrymander war of 2025 could turn out to be close to a wash in partisan terms. Moreover, voters may have their own ideas. If Democrats win big, as recent races have suggested is possible, the gerrymander might produce extra GOP losses. (The technical term for this, believe it or not, is a “dummymander.”)
All that sound and fury, in short, might signify . . . not exactly nothing, but not a decisive partisan gain.
That’s where the next big intervention by the Supreme Court would come in. And its impact could well be even more dramatic — and if possible, more harmful.
The Court seems poised to demolish the effectiveness of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Two weeks ago, in Louisiana v. Callais, it heard arguments about whether the law’s Section 2 remains constitutional. For decades, that provision effectively barred states, particularly in the South, from enacting maps that dilute or cancel out the voting power of racial minorities. As our friend-of-the-court brief pointed out, the provision has transformed both Congress and legislative bodies across the country. And the disparity in registration rates between white and Black voters dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 percentage points just a decade later. Now the justices seem ready to wreck Section 2 if not strike it down entirely.
This would not only mark a shameful retreat from federal action to protect racial equality and fair representation. It could have a dramatic and specific impact: A bad ruling, especially early, could be followed by another wave of redistricting in coming months, maybe even in time for the 2026 election.
As my colleague Kareem Crayton writes, “The argument invites a return to the era when race was a barrier to entry for political representation — the cruel and painful experience of political exclusion that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place.”
Nate Cohn of The New York Times has crunched the numbers and predicts that an extreme Supreme Court ruling could allow Republican states to eliminate between 6 and 12 districts currently held by Democrats. That would be a margin larger than the House majority either party has had in recent years.
When politicians pick voters — whether based on race or politics — instead of the other way around, our elections become less fair and less democratic. The country would slide toward even greater division and balkanization. Republican voters in Massachusetts (where there are no Republican members of Congress even though Trump won 37 percent of the vote) have no party representation in Congress, while Democrats in Texas (where Kamala Harris won 42 percent) would have only about 7 of the state’s 38 seats. John Adams famously said that the legislature must be an “exact portrait of the people at large.” The current portrait doesn’t bear much of a resemblance.
So what’s the answer?
There must, above all, be national standards that apply to red states and blue states alike. The Constitution gives Congress that power. It should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country. In 2022, it almost did: The Freedom to Vote Act would have banned mid-decade redistricting and set other standards. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have strengthened protections against racially discriminatory maps. Both came achingly close to enactment.
And then the ideologues on the Supreme Court should stop meddling in elections. Over the past 15 years, the Court demolished campaign finance rules in Citizens United, wrecked the Voting Rights Act starting in Shelby County, and gave ex-presidents vast and unprecedented immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — thus ensuring no legal accountability for candidate, now president, Trump.
In a season when it seems increasingly clear that the justices plan to hand President Trump even more power, inexcusable rulings and interventions in partisan politics will leave a very sour taste for many voters. The Supreme Court itself, increasingly, will become an issue in American politics. That’s as it should be.
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Morbidly Rich Idiots Destroy Democracy (and How to Beat Them)
Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. History also shows what it looks like when the people fight back.
Dec 15, 2025
The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”
And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.
Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.
The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.
Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.
(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)
Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.
Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:
“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”
The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin
“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land
Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.
All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.
As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. And America’s Founders believed it.
Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”
And we get there through voting.
This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.
In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.
As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.
But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?
Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.
We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.
But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.
“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”
Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”
Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and JD Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.
Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.
With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.
“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.
Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”
What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.
“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”
This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.
With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.
Dr. Tim Roper told me:
“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”
I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.
He was emphatic:
“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“
Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.
When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.
When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).
It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.
This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.
As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.
Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.
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