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Opinion
Why Aren't the Lawyers and Bar Associations Screaming From the Rooftops for Trump's Impeachment?
Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. As trained attorneys trained in the Constitution and rule of law, his ouster is our sworn duty.
Jan 24, 2026
As Trump’s violent dictatorial grip over America worsens, his violations of our Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties become more brazen. Only the organized people can stop this assault on our democracy by firing him through impeachment, the power exclusively accorded to Congress by our Founders. This is one of the few things that Trump cannot control. According to a PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll, “A majority of Americans (56%) agree that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,’ up from 52% in March 2025.” Trump’s recent actions will only further increase this number.
In earlier columns, I discussed the potential power of 1) The Contented Classes; 2) The small minority of progressive billionaires; and 3) The huge potential of the four ex-presidents – George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who detest Trump but are mostly silent, and are not organizing their tens of millions of voters angry about Dictator Donald’s attack on the rule of law.
A fourth formidable constituency, if organized, is retired military officers who have their own reasons for dumping Trump. Start with the ex-generals whom Trump named as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), John Kelly, as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, and Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A fifth constituency is the legal profession, and their bar associations at the national, state, and local levels. There are over one million Attorneys in the U.S. who, when they are admitted to the state bars to practice law, are designated as “officers of the court.” This status makes them quasi-official persons with a monopoly to represent clients in courts of law.
Bruce Fein and others have called on licensed attorneys to become “our first responders” to violations of the rule of law, especially by government entities.
So, what have they done? A tiny minority are bravely on the legal ramparts representing clients victimized by Trump and winning many cases at the federal district court level, only to be often stalled by the circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.
As far as the bar associations are concerned, during Trump’s first term of serial lawless actions (he said in 2019, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president”), they were largely silent and AWOL. Bruce Fein and I sent two letters to all 50 state bar associations calling for them to stand up for the rule of law over Trump’s regime. Not one responded to our letters. (See Letter to Bar Associations, February 14, 2025).
We informed these bar associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) of the courageous “white papers” issued in 2005-2006 by three task forces brought together under then ABA President Michael Greco. They charged the Bush/Cheney regime with three impeachable offenses. The task forces had liberal and conservative lawyers working together on these statements. (See the ABA White Papers).
Greco’s successor to the one-year presidency of the ABA told him she was not going to extend the ABA’s watchdog project on the lawless presidency. This abdication has continued to this day, with one exception. Both the ABA and many state/local bar associations took a collective position in March 2025 against Trump’s punishing law firms for representing disfavored clients. They called his “lawlessness” an attempt to “remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”
In June, the ABA punctuated this charge with a federal lawsuit against the Trump regime. (Pending).
Going beyond protection “of the guild,” the New York City Bar Association released a report in late 2025 that called out the Trump Administration’s “ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust.”
Other bar associations signed a statement accusing the Trump administration of “treating [the law] as merely advisory, narrowly instrumental, mercilessly enforceable, or utterly irrelevant.”
It is not surprising that these actions by the bar associations received very little media coverage. They were not backed up with any further actions, testimonies, convocations, or alliances with grassroots groups to show the media that they mean business. There was no call for impeachment or even congressional hearings to expose these known, ongoing serial violations of the law, the Constitution, and treaties. (See Letter to President Trump – 22 Impeachable Offenses, April 30, 2025. New version to be released later.)
Reporters and others understand the difference between statements for the record and action on the ramparts. Words not followed by the exercise of these bar associations’ manifold status and power are largely ignored, especially when they are in legalese, and lacking conclusory judgments about Trump’s unfitness for office. Incredibly, Trump declared, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not the Constitution or the laws of the land.
Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. Critics who want to deter his slanderous and absurd outbursts should use tough, accurate language to describe his vicious actions and autocratic control of the federal government. Words like “dictator,” “serial law violator,” “extortionist,” “inciter of violence,” “persecutor of innocents for purposes of vengeance or bigotry,” “racist,” “abuser of women,” “chronic egotistical liar about serious matters of state,” “shredder of safety and health protections” and constantly “delusional,” and so forth.
New leaders from the legal community (including prominent law professors) need to immediately come forth and jolt this largely AWOL profession into action, with all its unused powers for justice and the rule of law behind our constitutional Republic. Lawyers are called members of a learned profession. They operate within ethical standards. Why aren’t they seriously working to counter Trump’s assault on the administration of justice in America?
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'Economic Statecraft' Exposed: A Key Pillar of US Hybrid Warfare for All to See
It's certainly not diplomacy and it's not coercion. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government.
Jan 24, 2026
John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On January 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.
On January 20, just one day after our article, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official US policy.
It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior... This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.
In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how US Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems. Bessent explained:
President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.
This is the explicit causal chain whereby US sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail. This monetary instability led to import shortages and economic suffering, causing the unrest. Bessent concluded by characterizing the US’ actions as “economic statecraft,” and Iran’s economic collapse as a “positive” development:
So, this is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.
What Secretary Bessent describes is of course not “economic statecraft” in a traditional sense. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government. This is proudly hailed as “economic statecraft.”
The human suffering caused by outright war and crushing economic sanctions is not so different as one might think. Economic collapse produces shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, while also destroying savings, pensions, wages, and public services. Deliberate economic collapse drives people into poverty, malnutrition, and premature death, just as outright war does.
This pattern of suffering as the result of US sanctions is well documented. A landmark study in The Lancet by Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues shows that sanctions are significantly associated with sharp increases in mortality, with the strongest effects found for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, and an overall death toll comparable to that of armed conflict.
Economic warfare of this kind violates the foundational principles of international law and the UN Charter. Unilateral sanctions imposed outside the authority of the UN Security Council, especially when designed to cause civilian hardship, are illegal. Hybrid warfare does not evade international law by avoiding bombing (though the US and Israel have also illegally bombed Iran, of course.) The illegality of US “economic statecraft” applies not only to Iran and Venezuela, but to dozens more countries being harmed by US sanctions.
While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold.
Europe has perhaps begun to learn that being complicit in America’s economic crimes is no salvation, since Trump’s government is now turning on Europe in the same way, albeit with tariffs rather than sanctions. Trump has threatened Europe with tariffs for not turning over Greenland to the US, though he rescinded that threat at least temporarily. When Trump “invited” France to join Trump’s Board of Peace, he threatened to impose a 200% tariff on French wine if France declined the invitation. And on and on.
The United States can wage this kind of comprehensive economic warfare because the dollar is the key currency in the global financial system. If third countries don’t comply with US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, the US threatens to impose sanctions on the banks of those third countries, specifically to cut them out of dollar-based settlements (known as the SWIFT system). In this way, the US enforces its sanctions on countries that otherwise would be happy to continue trading with the countries that the US is trying to drive to economic collapse.
While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold. The BRICS nations, and many others, are expanding the conduct of international trade in their own currencies, thereby building alternatives to the use of the US dollar and thus avoiding these sanctions. The US ability to impose its financial and trade sanctions on other countries will decline soon, probably precipitously in the coming years.
It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior. The US has been waging economic warfare with increasing intensity, all the while calling it “economic statecraft.” This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives. Europe has been looking the other way until now. Perhaps now that Europe too is under threat, it will wake up and join the rest of the world to put a stop to America’s brazen and illegal behavior.
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Power Bills Are Bankrupting DC Residents—but There's a Path to Affordability for All
Public ownership of power has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.
Jan 24, 2026
Affordability will remain a top issue in 2026, continuing to draw political attention and likely defining this year’s midterm election races. Among the principal contributors to the cost-of-living crisis are power bills. For millions, the cost of keeping the lights, heating, and cooling on feels like “a second rent,” a problem that the explosive growth in the development and use of AI and associated data center capacity appears poised to aggravate.
The nation’s capital is no exception. A quarter of residents in the District of Columbia are unable to pay their power bill and in debt to the city’s private electricity company Pepco, which prioritizes short-term profits over affordable service. In 2024, the utility sent disconnection notices to 187,000 customers, threatening to shut off their electricity if they did not pay their arrears in full and forcing them to choose between, for instance, keeping their home safe and comfortable and food fresh or making their car payment.
Thankfully, we have a proven alternative–public ownership of power–that has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.
Alongside rent, home prices, dining, and entertainment, our electric bills have shot upwards. The only difference? Our power rates are comprehensively regulated. To protect against the monopoly power of Pepco, we have the Public Service Commission (PSC): a three-person board that reviews Pepco’s costs when the company wants to raise rates. Officially, the PSC acts as our watchdog to protect consumers from being billed thousands of dollars each month and to ensure the lights stay on in an environmentally sustainable way. In reality, it’s a depressingly familiar story of corporate capture of government.
We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District.
In just the past few years, Pepco has jacked up rates while slow rolling climate action and energy efficiency. According to a 2023 PSC report, Pepco obtained only 16% of its power supply from renewable energy sources, while it thwarted the adoption of rooftop solar across the city. In response to this bad behavior, the PSC rewarded Pepco: approving a $147.2 million dollar rate increase in 2021 and a $123 million dollar rate hike in 2023. These dollars flow out of the District and into the coffers of Pepco and its holding company owner, Exelon of Chicago.
Despite a wide-ranging outcry from the community, industry experts, and even landlords, the PSC in November 2024 largely approved Pepco’s latest proposed rate increase. Commissioner Richard Beverly wrote a blistering dissent in which he said the other two commissioners were essentially approving the case “because Pepco said so.”
The effects of the rate increase were immediate and expected. Following a cold winter, the additional 5% bump on bills slammed DC residents, with some customers seeing their bills double or triple. Public anger forced Pepco to suspend shutoffs for the first few months of 2025—but both bill collection and the rate increase stayed in place.
Meanwhile, Exelon flaunted the rate hike in DC as a major success, all the while an impending recession looms across the city and the country at large. Even in bleak times, the pursuit of profits by Pepco (and utilities like it) is relentless.
Unfortunately, the District is not an outlier: Regulators across the country rubber-stamp requested rate increases, despite the lack of economic logic. State regulatory agencies liberally reward utility shareholders even though they assume little risk by parking their money in a safe and stable industry.
Fortunately, there is an alternative for all of us. In towns and cities across the country, utilities are not controlled by shareholders—instead, they are governed by the communities that they serve and run on a not-for-profit basis. Public power is a proven model that altogether supplies electricity to about 55 million Americans in around 2,000 towns and cities across red and blue states, including Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle. On average, publicly owned utilities provide electricity that is cheaper and more reliable than their shareholder-controlled counterparts. Public power is not foreign or experimental but firmly established in the United States.
Affordable power is not the only argument in favor of public ownership. The urgency of the climate crisis means that we cannot rely solely on cajoling private utilities to remake our power grid. Despite the declining costs and rapid growth of wind and solar over the past 15 years, decarbonization of the American power sector is not happening quickly enough.
Furthermore, for the next few years, the responsibility of cleaning up the power sector will largely fall to state and local governments. Congress’ gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act in the One Big Beautiful Bill means that federal tax credits for wind and solar will soon dry up. Instead of trying to bribe the private sector to invest, we should take control of the climate transition through direct public investment. New York did exactly this in 2023 when it enacted the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and empowered the state-owned New York Power Authority to build large-scale renewable projects and lead a just transition to a clean electric sector.
Inspired by the successful movement behind BPRA and determined to end the unbearable burden of power bills for hundreds of thousands of residents, We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District. A utility governed by us could provide reliable service at lower rates; provide high-quality union jobs; and be a leader, not a laggard, in the fight against climate change. On top of its grassroots organizing, We Power published a report describing in detail how DC would benefit from a publicly owned utility, and how we can get there. While the road to public power can be long, the report outlines key intermediate steps that DC should pursue, including commissioning a study on municipalization of Pepco, taking control of grid planning, and building and operating community solar projects.
We Power is accompanied by fights for public power in places as far flung as Ann Arbor, Michigan; Clearwater, Florida; and Tucson. Last month, a financial feasibility study found that power customers in New York’s Hudson Valley would save money right away by converting their private utility to a locally controlled public power authority. At a moment in which climate action and our political institutions are under full-frontal assault at the national level, We Power is one of many fights to build democratic and sustainable utilities.
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When Peace Collapses, So Does Climate: A Call for Peace Ecology
The damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another.
Jan 24, 2026
Peace ecology considerations make it clear that a long-neglected aspect of armament and military activities is the massive environmental destruction caused worldwide by the military, especially during and after wars (Trautvetter 1919, Scheffran 2022, Moegling 2025). But even in its normal day-to-day operations and military exercises, the military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. In addition, the environmental destruction and emissions caused by the production of weapons must be taken into account. Emissions from the reconstruction of destroyed cities must also be considered.
The concept of peace ecology has high analytical value and normative appeal and should be used in the future as an important subfield of peace studies and research. Peace ecology addresses peace between people and societies, as well as peace between humans and their ecological context, and in particular the connection between these two perspectives. The point here is that the damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another. Only through peaceful coexistence can the energy and necessary measures be generated to curb or reverse the environmental destruction that is already occurring.
Military Domination of Nature
The poisoning and destruction of the environment, with serious consequences for the biosphere, i.e., for the earth, air, water, humans, animals, and plants, is only now gradually coming to public attention on the fringes of the current protests by the environmental and peace movements. However, Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung already addressed this aspect in 2004 from a peace-ecological perspective:
One thing is the damage done to the ecosystem, another is the reinforcement of the general cultural code of domination over nature, which is also part of the rape syndrome. Countless millions of people are watching not only how people are being killed and wounded, but also how nature is being destroyed and going up in flames.
Wars not only kill and injure people and destroy infrastructure, they also destroy the planet's ecology in various ways. Wars are an extreme expression of the separation of ruling powers and warring states and groups from their natural environment. What humans do to nature—and thus to the conditions necessary for all life on this planet—is of little interest to the ruling circles that wage wars and attack other states.
The fact that they are destroying the conditions for the survival of future generations is of no concern to imperialist states and governments. And there is no difference between the US and Russia in this regard. Imperialist warfare and the ecological destruction it causes are, in an extreme way, a crime of generational selfishness.
And Vice Versa: If the Climate Collapses, so Does Peace
Peace ecology, as a newer subdiscipline of peace studies and research, makes it clear that wars are not only the cause of climate damage, but that the climate crisis that is already occurring is in turn a further cause of military conflicts and the destruction of political systems, especially in the poorer regions of the world, according to Michael T. Klare (2015), professor of peace and global security at Hampshire College in Massachusetts"
The strongest and richest states, especially those in more temperate climate zones, are likely to cope better with these stresses. In contrast, the number of failed states is likely to increase dramatically, leading to violent conflicts and outright wars over the remaining food sources, agriculturally usable land, and habitable areas. Large parts of the planet could thus find themselves in situations similar to those we see today in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Some people will stay and fight for their survival; others will migrate and almost certainly encounter much more violent forms of the hostility that immigrants and refugees already face in their destination countries today. This would inevitably lead to a global epidemic of civil wars and other violent conflicts over resources.
In addition, those states that are at war with each other—but also those societies that feel threatened by this—will then use the resources necessary to combat the climate crisis to finance warfare and weapons systems. In particular, the huge sums of money within the European Union, but also in Germany, that will be spent in the future on special programs for the procurement of weapons systems will be lacking in a sensible climate policy—not to mention the enormous arms investments of the US and Russia and their unwillingness to combat the climate crisis.
Some Figures on Environmental Destruction Caused by the Military
The environment is destroyed by wars, but also by normal military operations in peacetime.
A study by Stuart Parkinson (Scientists for Global Responsibility) not only took into account direct carbon dioxide emissions from transport and exercises, but also emissions from weapons production, infrastructure construction, and supply chains. Parkinson calculated 340 million tons of CO2 equivalents for 2017 for the US military, by far the largest in the world, and this figure is unlikely to have decreased. For the global situation, Parkinson calculated that 5.5% of worldwide CO2 emissions are attributable to the military of all nations. This does not include wartime emissions. It can therefore be assumed that the percentage of global CO2 emissions caused by the military is significantly higher.
A study by de Klerk et al (2023) found that during one year of war in Ukraine, both sides of the conflict emitted approximately as much CO2 as Belgium did in total during the same year. This amounted to 119 million tons of CO2 equivalents.
Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell (2022) summarize their study on climate damage caused by the military and wars as follows:
If the world's armed forces were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world—larger than Russia's. This underscores the urgent need to take concerted action to reliably measure military emissions and reduce the associated carbon footprint—especially as these emissions are likely to increase as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Olena Melnyk and Sera Koulabdara (2024) estimate that approximately one-third of Ukrainian soil has been contaminated by toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury as a result of the war. Soil and its fertile layer took thousands of years to form and have now been poisoned by the war within a few years, rendering it unusable for agriculture.
The war in Ukraine is leaving behind a devastated environment, for which the Russian Federation would have to pay billions of euros in reparations, although ultimately only the superficial damage could be repaired. The profound impact on human health due to inhaled emissions, drinking contaminated water, and exposure to radiation cannot be compensated for with money.
Hungarian climate researcher Bálint Rosz (2025) summarizes the CO2 emissions caused by the war in Ukraine in the first two years of the Ukraine war up to February 2024 and compares this with the annual emissions of 90 million vehicles with combustion engines.
Israel's campaign of destruction against the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, as a disproportionate response to the brutal attack by Hamas, is also causing considerable environmental destruction, in addition to the appalling suffering of the Palestinians. For example, Neimark et al. (2024) estimated that the CO2 emissions from the necessary reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, destroyed by the Israeli military, would be so high that they would exceed the emissions of 130 countries and be comparable to the emissions of New Zealand.
These are just a few examples of military-induced ecological destruction. This anthropocentric madness could be illustrated with numerous other examples (Moegling 2025).
The Common Interest of the Peace and Environmental Movements
Global military activities can be both a cause and a consequence of environmental destruction.
The environmental and peace movements therefore have a substantial common ground in their understanding of peace ecology: The demand for an end to environmental destruction by the military and wars, combined with the demand for internationally coordinated disarmament, should be addressed by both the environmental and peace movements as central expectations of politics.
Furthermore, the analyses and research findings of peace ecology could help both the environmental and peace movements to take targeted action against planetary destruction based on facts.
Who Pays the Ecological Costs?
In this context, the question of financing the remediation of environmental damage caused by the military must also be addressed. In addition to the warring parties responsible, the producers in the arms industry should also be called upon to contribute. It is particularly unacceptable for the arms industry that the (considerable) profits are privatized while the costs are socialized and passed on to the state and taxpayers. Such externalization of costs and internalization of profits in the arms industry, which is typical of capitalist conditions, is no longer acceptable. It is completely incomprehensible why, for example, the manufacturers of landmines should not also pay for their removal and for compensation claims by the victims.
Above all, the exclusion of the military as a climate polluter from the Kyoto Protocol and the attempt to leave this non-binding in the Paris Agreements, particularly under pressure from the US at the time, further highlights the international dimension of the problem. The United Nations in particular is called upon to include environmental issues related to military activities and war missions more bindingly in international climate agreements. This should be easier for them if corresponding international civil society pressure were to be built up via interested governments and internationally coordinated NGO initiatives, e.g., via the Fridays for Future movement, Indigenous NGOs, ICAN, IPPNW, Greenpeace, and the traditional Easter March movement or other activities of the peace movement.
Peace ecology also makes it clear that the more peaceful societies are internally and externally, the more they can work to restore the destroyed ecological order. This is the common interest of the peace and environmental movements.
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