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Opinion
Actually Michael Harrington Would Probably Love Today’s DSA – and Hate It Too
The "big tent" of the Democratic Socialists of America has its drawbacks too.
Aug 07, 2026
Kirkpatrick Sale has it half right in his lament over today’s Democratic Socialists of America, “Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave.” The imagined spinning stems from post-mortem distress at what its founding leader would make of the organization today. Sale—best remembered for SDS, his history of Students for a Democratic Society, the seminal 1960s “New Left” organization—calls himself Harrington’s “close friend and traveling companion,” and feels that today’s DSA “has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.”
While I cannot claim to have been Harrington’s friend, I did know him and arguably qualify as one of his colleagues, in that I was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, his prior organization whose 1982 merger with the New American Movement created DSA. I remain a member of the organization to this day, and when serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives was once one of DSOC/DSA’s handful of public elected officials. From my vantage point, while I understand Sale’s real–and Harrington’s imagined–distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right.
As a flat statement, Sale’s contention that DSA “is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist” is wrong, but he is not wrong in identifying parts of 2026 DSA that would seem unlikely to have appealed to Harrington. Sale clearly recognizes that the roots of the organization’s dramatic changes—its 20-fold inflation from the 6,000 member group of the 90's—lie in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He errs, though, in calling Sanders “a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress.” Sanders actually was not then, is not now, and so far as I know has never been an actual member of DSA—counterintuitive as that may seem.
After Sanders introduced “democratic socialism” to millions of American living rooms in his debates with Hillary Clinton and politically “lived to talk about it,” a whole lot of people who’d also been thinking about the idea googled the term and found DSA; some joined. They were then followed by some who indeed did not identify with the democratic socialist tradition but recognized that this was now where the action was—the hazard of success.
The result is generally understood as a “big tent” organization—a tent thus far large enough to contain both US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Democratic New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani—figures for whom I cannot imagine Harrington having anything but admiration—along with caucuses by no means committed to that approach, groups that Harrington would consider bizarre and out of place (as does this writer.) It contains serious divergences between local chapters and a tenuous national organization. How long this tent holds up is anyone’s guess. As for Sale, if he would actually consider the entirety of organization (the best description of which I’ve seen was recently published in a German Left Party newspaper—"Von Degrowth bis ML" Jungle World, July 30, 2026) he might well see similarities with the late years of SDS (an organization Harrington subsequently regretted having failed to productively engage with.)
Among those similarities is a certain not-ready-for-prime-time quality common in organizations trying to cope with the increased glare of the public attention spotlight. Foibles and foolish statements surface from the past. My personal nomination for the dumbest left slogan of recent years is “Defund the police”—its rational kernel of re-evaluating government’s approach to certain types of public safety situations smothered in a seemingly naive call for an end to law enforcement. And yet, even someone like Mamdani who is generally considered to possess masterful political skills—correctly, I think—has had to walk that one back.
On some points of his critique of current DSA, Sale seems perhaps frozen in time, such as his noting that “Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.” That “new Israel” has changed quite a bit in the thirty-seven years since Harrington has been gone. Would he remain a champion of a nation now planning a prison for Palestinians that includes a moat stocked with crocodiles – a proposal temporarily stalled by consideration of the animals’ subsequently repealed protected status? Sure hope not.
But where I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being “the left wing of the possible,” and that “generally meant working within the Democratic Party”—as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day “put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,” his contention that back then there was “Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism” makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings—and maybe didn’t keep up on his reading so well either. Even the small DSA had differing strands of thinking. One major one was all about imagining how to reach a genuinely democratically controlled economy beyond the “welfare state” and capitalism, something you will find reflected in Harrington’s writing.
So would the imagined Harrington be troubled by some of what he’d see in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would. And would he be positively thrilled by some of what he found in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would.
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The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End the Same Way
From the claim that dropping the atom bombs was necessary to end World War II to the fabricated nuclear threats used to justify the 21st century US wars in Iraq and Iran, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning deadly lies.
Aug 07, 2026
The atomic age began with a lie.
Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane, flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a second city.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another 100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the blasts. Over 90% were civilians.
The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie. The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
Because the United States had broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.
As Gar Alperovitz convincingly explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics, not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.
Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s capitulation.
A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8, 1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.
Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war against Imperial Japan.
“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”
US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff, agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.
The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to 1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers through starvation. And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning lies.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote fears of an imaginary threat.
The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths.
This year President Donald Trump returned to the right-wing dream of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims were both lies.
The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable fires, crop destruction, drought, famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.
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Democrats’ Affordability Message Misses a Key Expense—Student Debt
The largest bill increase any single person may get this year is a student loan bill, so why have Dems left it out of their messaging?
Aug 07, 2026
With just 100 days left until the midterms, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on CNN to deliver Democrats’ closing message. “Life in this country is far too expensive,” said Jeffries, rolling out a new "Fighting for an Affordable America" tagline. Americans do not have “enough food on the table, not enough gas in the tank,” and they’re “unable to actually regularly and consistently afford to pay the rent or pay the mortgage.” Jeffries blamed President Donald Trump’s costly war of choice in Iran, tariffs that have cost everyday Americans thousands of dollars per year, and the largest cut to Medicaid in American history.
Later that afternoon, in a steel workers union hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Jeffries joined Gov. Josh Shapiro at a joint campaign event for Bob Brooks, a LeHigh Valley firefighter running for Congress in Pennsylvania’s seventh Congressional District. Together, the three Democrats pointed to both the corruption plaguing our national politics and the high financial cost Americans have been forced to bear since Trump took office as causes of the affordability crisis. They implored voters in the “swingiest swing state in the country” to shift the tides of Washington, DC by voting against Republicans’ cost-raising policies and for Democrats’ cost-lowering solutions in November.
Democrats are right to highlight the impacts of giant cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, along with the rising cost of gas and utilities fueled by wars abroad and billionaire-backed corruption schemes at home. Uniting a broad electorate around an “affordability” agenda, akin to the messaging and policy success of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, will bode well for Democrats around the nation going into an intense midterm election where the winds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s terror, mobilization against AI data centers, and widespread opposition to war is at the left’s back.
But mysteriously missing from Democrats' messaging about costs that have gone up as a result of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a key expense that 40 million Americans are battling in the shadows—student loans. For many student debtors, the increase in their monthly student loan bill will be their largest bill increase of the year by a significant margin. This leaves a massive hole in Democrats’ messaging cadence that must be filled immediately. A successful affordability message requires engaging with the true reality of Americans’ purses, and holds a mirror to the specific financial burdens that working people lose sleep over each night.
A willingness to ignore such a massive systemic cost increase reveals that Democrats, at least in this moment, are not taking their own "affordability" messaging seriously—posing grave electoral problems.
Take a typical student debtor in a family of four who earns a median US household income of $81,000. Under former President Joe Biden’s SAVE plan, their monthly student debt payment was $36. Under Trump’s Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) plan, that payment would increase to $440—well over 1,000% more than under SAVE. In an internal Debt Collective survey of more than 1,500 student debtors on the SAVE plan, 50% of student debtors reported an average expected payment increase of $500 a month—just a few bucks shy of the average monthly payment for a newly used car. Yet despite this grave expense, of which Trump and his Republican allies are solely to blame, student loan bill increases have seldom made it to Democrats’ November stump speeches. Except for a few sparing moments of attention—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has used his platform to showcase the absurdity of rising student debt for seniors—student loan bills have largely fallen off the radar for congressional Democrats. But for the millions on the receiving end of the Department of Education’s confusing and frightening emails, student loans dominate workers’ ability to make financial decisions.
Massive errors have rendered the student debt system dysfunctional at an unprecedented level. Millions of debtors have payments gone uncounted by their servicer, inaccurate balances, are awaiting cancellation for relief programs they’ve been eligible for, or are in limbo to simply enroll in a repayment plan that works for them. Weeks ago, Secretary Linda McMahon’s Department of Education admitted to a massive glitch in which thousands of student debtors were wrongfully told their monthly payment would be $50 a month, only to find out weeks later that the plan they’re now stuck in requires a monthly payment hundreds of dollars more. In recent days, debtors serviced by MOHELA were wrongfully sent delinquency notices asserting that they owed back-payments for the months in which courts have legally paused their payments. Separate ongoing litigation moving its way through a DC district court has called out a “shadow repeal” of the REPAYE plan, asserting that the Trump administration's refusal to allow student debtors to enroll in a repayment plan that may be their best option is illegal. Today, no member of Congress has called on the Trump administration to reopen the plan.
Worse than remaining quiet on student debt, some Democrats have seemingly regressed on the issue. In July, a dangerous student debt bill that would exempt—yes, exempt—state-based lenders from transparency laws passed in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. If the vote advances further, the new law of the land could give schools a financial incentive to push predatory loan products onto desperate students seeking to use private loans to pay for school. Nine out of 11 Democrats sided with Republicans on this measure, ensuring bipartisan support for deepening the student debt crisis and worsening the lending system.
Democrats' silence on the rising costs of student debt will fall flat with voters in November, many of whom are already dejected from the Biden administration’s botched attempt to cancel student debt broadly and the Supreme Court’s decision to side against debtors. A willingness to ignore such a massive systemic cost increase reveals that Democrats, at least in this moment, are not taking their own "affordability" messaging seriously—posing grave electoral problems.
The Debt Collective—the nation’s first union of debtors whom I organize with—is calling on Congressional Democrats to step up to the plate. At this moment, Democrats could call for an immediate pause on student debt payments—which Trump was the first to administer through executive authority in 2020—amid significant administrative errors, a costly rise in payments amid a worsening economy, and ongoing litigation. Without mentioning the one monthly bill that, for millions of Americans, rivals their mortgage, the blue wave Democrats will need to take back the House may resemble something more like a small splash.
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As More People Die In Their Custody, ICE Is Working Hard To Hide Its Abuses
By rescinding policies that mandate accountability and oversight, while simultaneously purchasing privately held detention centers, the Trump administration is working to hide the abuses, death, and violence occurring at their facilities.
Aug 07, 2026
On August 1, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadorian migrant imprisoned at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, died.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) insists that Lopez-Cornejo “received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals” while in custody, there are reasons to be doubtful. In May, 300 detainees launched a labor and hunger strike protesting medical neglect, being fed spoiled and rotten food, and other “torturous” conditions.
In June, Gothamist reported that more than 70 detainees at Delaney Hall had filed federal lawsuits alleging medical neglect. That includes 30 who claim they were denied prescribed medications for chronic conditions such as asthma, epilepsy, diabetes, and cancer.
Lopez-Cornejo likely experienced the same. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) said he spoke with ICE officials who told him Lopez-Cornejo had expressed feeling dizzy and fatigued earlier that day. Menendez further added, “We asked certain medical questions, which ICE couldn’t give us answers to.”
Detention centers have always been deadly. Under Trump, ICE is doing everything it can to make them even more dangerous.
Lopez-Cornejo had been prescribed medication for diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures—conditions that, if not properly treated, can lead to those symptoms as well as death. In an interview, his mother, Maria Cornejo, explained, “That is one of the reasons that I believe caused the death of my son, the negligence—that he wasn't given his medication that he had to take.”
Lopez-Cornejo is at least the 23rd person to die in ICE custody this year. In 2025, at least 33 people died in detention centers—the highest total in more than two decades according to the National Immigration Project.
Importantly, those numbers only represent the deaths that ICE has reported. During his visit to Delaney Hall on August 3, Menendez learned that another detainee had died at the detention center last month. That death was not reported because ICE agents had granted him a “discretionary release” in the middle of his medical emergency.
In June, ICE rescinded a Biden-era policy that required them to report on the deaths of detainees that occurred within 30 days of their release. ICE is now exploiting this change to obscure their death count.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In July, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purchased the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility for $1.5 billion from the private prison company CoreCivic.
According to an ICE spokesperson, these purchases were necessary because “the state’s sanctuary politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible.” Shifting ownership from CoreCivic to the federal government circumvents these measures, thereby allowing ICE to retain “crucial” detention capacity.
This, however, is not all it does. In 2025, California passed legislation that granted its Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight to regularly inspect and report on the conditions of “county, local, or private locked detention facilities in which noncitizens are being housed or detained for purposes of civil immigration proceedings.” In June 2026, the California DOJ found that conditions at Otay Mesa were overcrowded and dirty. Medical recordkeeping was “disorganized and violated PBNDS [Performance-Based National Detention Standards] requirements” which resulted in “lapses in basic care.” At California City, the department found that detainees spent “unnecessarily long periods locked down in their cells” and experienced “extremely cold temperatures, with leaks during rainy periods.” California DOJ reported that healthcare infrastructure and systems at the center were “inadequate,” including “crisis-level health care understaffing.”
By taking ownership of those detention centers, the Trump administration is placing them beyond the reach of state inspections. As Alexa Van Brunt, the Director of the Illinois office at the McArthur Justice Center, explains, inspection reports are crucial in lawsuits alleging constitutional violations. Without them, it is far more difficult to obtain evidence of ICE’s wrongdoings. “To that point,” she remarks, “it will make it more onerous to hold DHS liable.”
It is also worth emphasizing that while ownership is being transferred, CoreCivic will remain in charge of managing those facilities. Same management, same abuses, but now with less oversight—the perfect recipe for more unaccounted detainee deaths.
In July, CBS News reported that only 15 of the 45 detention centers holding 500 or more people had been inspected by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight in the last 12 months. This follows a shift in ICE’s policies whereby dedicated facilities, which exclusively hold ICE detainees, are now inspected once a year rather than twice; and non-dedicated facilities, such as county jails, are inspected every other year.
Notably, ICE’s detention center purchases extend beyond sanctuary cities. On August 5, CoreCivic announced that ICE had purchased the Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota and the Midwest Regional Reception Center in Kansas for a total of $734 million. Both facilities were previously shut down—the former in 2010; and the latter in 2021 as the Biden administration shifted away from private prison contracts. CoreCivic had been struggling since last year to reopen Midwest Regional amid protest from local residents—in a famously pro-prison town that Trump won with more than 60% of the vote in 2024—and legal challenges from city officials. Now it will, despite their objections and with possibly fewer guardrails.
Officials with CoreCivic and The Geo Group—which owns Delaney Hall—have reportedly discussed selling several more sites to the Trump administration.
By rescinding policies that mandate accountability and oversight, while simultaneously purchasing privately held detention centers, the Trump administration is working to hide the abuses, death, and violence occurring at their facilities. At the same time, these purchases have been a major windfall for CoreCivic, which has used our taxpayer dollars to pay down its $600 million debt.
Detention centers have always been deadly. Under Trump, ICE is doing everything it can to make them even more dangerous. Before it's too late, Congress must act immediately to not only abolish ICE, but punish everyone involved in enacting their campaign of domestic terrorism and death.
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2 Men Were Killed by ICE on Their Way to Work; Every Employer Now Has to Pick a Side
A movement that spent years avoiding a labor identity can't afford that caution anymore.
Aug 07, 2026
Last month Immigration and Customs Enforcement killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father and Houston construction worker, on the way to a job site. Just six days later another ICE agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Guerrero on his way to work, who left behind a partner and 3-year-old daughter.
When I helped organize the fight for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), we put young people in caps and gowns and asked the country to see them as exceptional, college bound, English speaking, worthy of protection in a way that set them apart from the majority of undocumented people, who were not students but workers. It was a strategy built for a specific moment, and it won us what respectability politics ever can: temporary inclusion that separated us from the rest of our community. Many of us also shied away from the economic argument on principle, even though mainstream organizations were already making it, because it had become associated with more middle-of-the-road groups. We narrowed our own lane instead of widening it.
That caution has run its course. Two men were killed on their way to work within a week of each other. No amount of careful language changes it.
What's needed now is to say plainly that this happened to people doing exactly what all workers do every day, and that everyone who depends on immigrant labor, starting with employers and extending through the broader labor movement, has to decide what they owe them.
Employers, unions, and labor organizations cannot afford to look away while businesses that have relied on workers like Lorenzo and Johan for years stay quiet as their own workforce is targeted by the government.
None of this is about making immigrants prove they deserve safety by pointing to what they contribute. Nobody should have to justify their right to exist with a paycheck.
But there's a difference between demanding immigrants justify their worth and simply describing how this economy runs. Construction, hospitality, agriculture, food delivery, garment production, whole industries in this country would not function without an estimated 10 million undocumented workers, most without any union protection at all. That labor isn't a contribution to the American economy. It is the American economy.
My mother came to this country to work, and to build something for her family, and so did the workers I've spent my career organizing alongside. That desire, to work hard and provide rather than be given something, isn't unique to immigrants.
Every night, at kitchen tables across this country, whether the family is undocumented or not, people are asking each other, "How was work?"
Wanting to work and provide for the people you love is one of the most ordinary parts of being human, and there is real pride in the work itself. That labor is an identity, not just the exploitative relationship it's so often reduced to, one that wouldn't change even if our immigration status did.
I organized car wash workers in Los Angeles, in shops where owners stole wages and denied bathroom breaks because workers had no path to citizenship and no union behind them. A boss who can threaten to call ICE on one worker has leverage over the whole shop floor, and in plenty of workplaces that threat is the boss' whole labor strategy, cheaper and more effective at stopping organizing than firing people or hiring anti-union law firms ever was.
Employers have a different kind of leverage too, not the threat they can hold over a worker, but the influence of being a major employer, the kind that gets a phone call to the White House answered, or makes silence too costly to just sit on.
Last year, farmers raised alarms about the raids loudly enough that President Donald Trump's own agriculture secretary carried the message to the White House, and enforcement paused, for four days, before Stephen Miller pushed to reverse it and the raids resumed.
In Minneapolis this year, more than 60 CEOs signed a joint letter calling for "de-escalation" after federal agents killed two residents. The letter didn’t name ICE, and it didn’t ask for anything specific. The letter added to the scrutiny that was already mounting against ICE and Border Patrol after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Within a day, the Border Patrol commander was pulled from the city. Within two days, Trump himself was using the language of de-escalation. A vague joint statement helped move that. Imagine what an actual one could do.
The choice to speak up for workers, clearly and specifically, should be harder to dodge in the days since the killings of Lorenzo and Johan.
Rather than address why agents opened fire on unarmed men on their way to work, the administration's border czar, Tom Homan, went on Fox News and warned that there would be more "bloodshed" unless Democrats who criticize ICE stop talking. Homan is trying to make silence about these ICE killings the price of safety, and to put the blame for these two deaths anywhere but on the agents who pulled the trigger.
Every employer, every union, every business owner who has ever depended on an immigrant showing up to work now has to pick a side. Either stand with the workers whose labor built their businesses and industries, or fall in line behind a White House that is driving a white nationalist agenda. There is no third option where staying silent counts as staying out of it.
The administration isn't waiting to see whether employers choose workers or fall in line. The same crackdown that's killing and deporting workers who are already here is also causing real labor shortages in construction, agriculture, and dairy, and the administration has an answer for that shortage that has nothing to do with accountability.
This year alone, it has added 65,000 new H-2B guest worker visas and, for the first time, opened dairy farms to guest workers under a program where a worker's legal status, housing, and wages all depend on the same employer. Advocates have documented what that leads to for years: wage theft, confiscated passports, and workers threatened into silence because there is nowhere else for them to go.
Formerly enslaved people fought for this same principle a century and a half ago, insisting that only full citizenship, not tolerated presence, guaranteed they wouldn't be treated as less than fully human. This summer, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that exact principle when it struck down Trump's attempt to strip citizenship from children born to undocumented parents.
If the labor and immigrant rights movements don’t make the case ourselves, loudly and now, that immigrant workers deserve full rights and not just a job, that’s the model we’ll be handed. The alternative gets built for us either way, one where people are welcome only as controllable labor and for exactly as long as an employer finds them useful.
Employers, unions, and labor organizations cannot afford to look away while businesses that have relied on workers like Lorenzo and Johan for years stay quiet as their own workforce is targeted by the government. Unions and labor advocates also have a responsibility to clearly say that worker safety does not end at the shop door. Workers have the right to get to a job and get home without risking their lives.
Two men are dead because they went to work, and the mistake the immigrant rights movement cannot afford right now is forgetting that it is also a labor movement.
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India’s Cockroach Movement Shows How to Fight Autocracy and the Testocracy
How a leaked high-stakes exam exposed capitalism’s broken promise—and why standardized testing keeps igniting struggle.
Aug 07, 2026
They called them cockroaches.
It was meant to reduce them—to make millions of young people seem small enough to squish and contemptible enough that no one would mourn their extermination.
But instead of crushing them, the insult only made them multiply.
Every blow from a police lathi—a long, heavy club used by Indian police—brought more bodies into the streets. Every attempt to scatter them revealed how many there were. What authorities dismissed as an infestation became an uprising powerful enough to drive India’s education minister from office and deliver one of the sharpest popular rebukes yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
At the center of the revolt was a test that promised merit and delivered betrayal.
India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, or NEET, determines admission to undergraduate medical programs. More than 2 million young people took the examination, often after their families had sacrificed for years to pay for specialized coaching. The test presents itself as an impartial judge: Everyone receives the same questions, the same clock, and the same numerical verdict.
Then the questions were leaked and reportedly sold in advance.
Young people told to outstudy one another discovered that some contestants might simply have purchased the finish line. The test promised an even starting line, but the marketplace had filled some lanes with hurdles and cleared others for the wealthy.
Their fury grew into weeks of mass protest that forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.
The movement took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit activist from one of India’s historically oppressed caste communities, seized the slur and sent it crawling back toward those in power. “What if all cockroaches came together?” he asked online.
From that question emerged the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)—a name that mocked Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy celebrated the CJP members as “young roaches riding in on the rain,” as protesters poured into Delhi beneath the monsoon skies. Their numbers were formidable, but so was their irreverence. When police aimed water cannons at them, young people dared the officers to turn them on—then danced in the spray. The state brought water cannons into the streets to produce fear. The protesters transformed the streets into a stage and danced in the spray.
In a Democracy Now! interview, Roy described a movement alive with “mockery and humor,” “dancing,” and “singing”—a rebellion defined by “exuberance.” Protesters joked that fleeing police lathi attacks was helping them maintain their running streaks on Strava, a fitness-tracking app. They turned footage of the chases into video-game parodies and posted mock influencer-style “get ready with me” videos and “fit checks” featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear. One demonstrator held a placard declaring, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
That creative humor—an intelligence no standardized test could measure—was not an escape from struggle, but rather one of the movement’s weapons. They met contempt with laughter, intimidation with choreography, and isolation with an expanding circle of solidarity.
The uprising forced Modi to announce a national task force to overhaul the examination system, while the government proposed stronger penalties for exam fraud. The Cockroach Janta Party also secured commitments to compensate families of students who died by suicide amid the crisis and withdraw criminal cases against protesters.
While no single event explains a suicide, movement leaders linked the deaths to the despair produced by a system that made one examination appear capable of determining an entire life—then revealed that the exam could be bought.
Near the main protest site in New Delhi, students erupted in celebration. Dipke reportedly fell to his knees, raised his fist, and declared, “We have done it.” He called the result “a victory for the people of India” and “a defeat for the dictator.”
But the government did not accept defeat quietly. The movement called off its demonstrations after officials agreed to its central demands, including withdrawing criminal cases against protesters.
Within days, however, the Cockroach Janta Party reported that students and protesters were again being detained and arrested in several states. Movement leaders accused the government of violating the agreement and threatened to return to the streets.
The government subsequently announced that most Delhi protesters would face no further action. But organizers warned that closing proceedings was not the same as formally withdrawing the cases—and that the movement would resume if the government again broke its promises.
The government had retreated—but only far enough to gather itself for another attack. After officials agreed to withdraw cases against protesters and promised that no punitive action would follow, authorities began detaining and arresting students across several states, with Muslim and Dalit participants reportedly among those singled out. At least 100 people were arrested, many on stringent non-bailable charges, as the movement accused the government of backtracking on its agreement. By then, however, the students had done more than expose an examination leak. They had opened a crack in the façade of the system itself.
Why would a compromised examination provoke an uprising powerful enough to force out a cabinet minister—and frighten the government into trying to seal that crack through repression? Because a high-stakes test is never merely a collection of questions. It is a promise about how society works. It tells young people that wealth, caste, language, and power do not matter—that the future belongs to whoever studies hard.
When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.
Whether in India or across the world in the United States, standardized testing is one of capitalism’s most effective laundering machines. It takes a dirty hierarchy built through unequal access to wealth and education, scrubs away its history, and returns the result stamped with a single word: merit.
The Testocracy
Every high-stakes testing system tells young people some version of the same story: Work hard, follow the rules, outstudy everyone else, and a high score will make the future yours.
For the millions of students taking NEET in India, that promise carries enormous weight. The examination is presented as the great objective referee, capable of determining who deserves entry into medical school. It supposedly does not care about a student’s family income, caste, gender, language, region, or access to private coaching. Everyone receives the same questions, the same time limit, and a score that appears to settle who is prepared to advance.
But a society does not become equal merely because it administers the same test to people who have been given profoundly unequal lives.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Some NEET applicants attend well-funded schools and spend years in expensive private coaching programs. Others learn in overcrowded classrooms, study in regional languages, work after school, care for siblings, or worry about whether their families can afford another year of preparation. “Everywhere you look, you can see the desperation of young people in this country,” Shree Kumar Verma, a 19-year-old NEET student studying in Kota—the center of India’s exam-coaching industry—told The Guardian. “Being at Kota is either going to bring you success or totally break you down; it’s all or nothing here.” Some students enter the testing center trained specifically to defeat NEET. Others arrive carrying every burden that caste, poverty, geography, and educational inequality have already placed on their backs.
Standardized tests convert these unequal conditions into a clean numerical hierarchy and then present the result as a neutral measure of individual merit. This is the central function of what I call the testocracy: a social class of elites that uses standardized testing to make inequality appear earned.
The NEET leak laid bare the crudest form of class privilege: Students with enough money or the right connections could allegedly purchase the questions outright. It was corruption in a form no one could mistake.
The scandal has a close parallel in the United States. In 2019, federal prosecutors exposed Operation Varsity Blues, a sprawling college admissions scheme in which wealthy parents paid consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure places for their children at selective universities. Some arranged for stand-ins to take the SAT or ACT or paid corrupt proctors to change answers after the exams. Others bribed college coaches to designate their children as recruited athletes, sometimes fabricating athletic résumés and staging photographs of students participating in sports they did not actually play.
The scandal provoked outrage because wealthy families had purchased test scores and admissions outcomes outright. But affluent families routinely buy educational advantages that remain perfectly legal: elite schools, private tutoring, test preparation, admissions consultants, and access to universities that favor donors and children of alumni.
The comparison with NEET is striking. In both scandals, public outrage erupts when wealth abandons even the pretense of fairness and simply buys access to education and opportunity.
These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.
Testing as a Tool of Colonialism and White Supremacy
The camouflage of inherited advantage as individual merit is not an accidental flaw. It is rooted in the white supremacist, colonial, and eugenic history of standardized testing—a system designed to translate racial and imperial hierarchies into the seemingly neutral language of scores.
British colonial rule imposed a standardized examination system on India, reorganizing education around centralized curricula, externally controlled tests, and official credentials. Historian Jana Tschurenev describes the resulting culture as centered on “memorisation, examination, and technocratic management.” British authorities expanded schooling not to achieve equality, but to prepare most colonized people for subordinate positions while opening a narrow path to government employment and elite credentials.
A decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education. Macaulay admitted that he knew neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” His contempt expressed the racist logic of British policy, which treated European knowledge as universal and Indian intellectual traditions as inferior. Whatever opportunities English education later offered some people excluded by India’s caste hierarchies, the colonial policy itself was designed to elevate the language and culture of the rulers. Mastery of that culture became increasingly essential to credentials, employment, and social advancement.
Wood’s Despatch of 1854 further centralized the system. The universities established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857 were modeled after the University of London and operated largely as examining and affiliating institutions, prescribing curricula, administering tests, and conferring degrees. Teaching became organized around examinations controlled by colonial authorities.
The Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination made the colonial function of testing especially clear. Indians could formally compete to enter the elite administrative corps that governed their country, but the examination was held only in London and structured around subjects associated with elite British schooling. British officials argued that the examination should secure candidates trained in the “highest and best form of English education”—a principle they said would be sacrificed if the test were also offered in India.
The effective exclusion of most Indian candidates became an early nationalist cause. At its founding meeting in 1885, the Indian National Congress demanded that the exam also be offered in India. The dispute exposed the contradiction of colonial meritocracy: Britain proclaimed an open competition while designing it to reward those with the wealth to travel to Britain and the greatest access to the colonizer’s language, schools, and culture.
A related system of race and class sorting developed in the United States, and the use of standardized tests gave that hierarchy the appearance of objective measurement. As Rethinking Schools has written:
Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the "natural superiority" of wealthy, white, US-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since.
Beginning during World War I, psychologists administered the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests to more than 1.7 million military recruits. The tests sorted soldiers and were then used to make sweeping claims about the intelligence of entire racial and national groups.
Eugenicist psychologist Carl Brigham drew on the Army test results in his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, to promote the supposed superiority of “Nordic” people and the inferiority of Black people and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Warning that “the decline of American intelligence” would accelerate “owing to the presence here of the negro,” he called for public action to prevent what he described as racial deterioration. Three years later, Brigham helped develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), turning a system shaped by military classification and eugenics into a gatekeeper for higher education.
By the 1920s, standardized tests were also sorting millions of children into academic, remedial, and vocational tracks. They disproportionately directed white and affluent students toward universities and professional careers while steering Black, immigrant, working-class, and disabled children toward lower-paid positions in a racially stratified economy. Testing was essential for reproducing hierarchy and making it appear deserved.
Black intellectuals organized an early counterattack against this racist testing regime. Reflecting on the rapid spread of psychological testing after World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:
It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.
Du Bois was part of a larger movement of Black scholars challenging the tests’ methods, assumptions, and political uses. In 1924, educator Horace Mann Bond systematically dismantled Brigham’s claims, exposing the supposed science behind intelligence testing as an instrument of “propaganda and encouragement for prejudice.” Bond urged Black intellectuals to understand how the tests were constructed and used so they could resist efforts to portray Black people as incapable of exercising the full rights of citizenship.
Du Bois and Bond understood that the tests converted the consequences of segregation, poverty, and unequal schooling into supposed evidence of Black inferiority. The state denied Black children equal resources, measured the predictable results, and then used their scores to restrict access to advanced education and professional work.
The colonial testing system in India and the eugenic testing system in the United States were not identical. But both converted the language, culture, and advantages of dominant groups into supposedly universal measures of merit.
The openly colonial and eugenic language eventually became less acceptable, but the sorting machinery survived. “Racial fitness” became “aptitude.” Assertions of British and white superiority became supposedly universal “standards.” Claims about racial differences in intelligence became claims about an “achievement gap.” This year marks the SAT’s 100th anniversary—a century after its creation by eugenicists, it is still used to rank and sort young people for unequal opportunities.
When Exams Cause Eruptions
High-stakes tests become politically explosive because they ask young people to place their faith in a promise our economic and political system cannot keep.
Capitalism produces enough wealth to house, feed, clothe, and educate everyone, but concentrates that wealth at the top. Education is celebrated as the “great equalizer,” yet schools operate within—and help reproduce—this unequal order. Education may help some individuals move within the hierarchy, but it cannot abolish a hierarchy the economy depends on. Standardized tests manage this contradiction by ranking young people, rationing scarce opportunities and presenting the results as merit rather than economic design.
When a test carrying the weight of a young person’s future is exposed as corrupt, arbitrary, or rigged, the promise of meritocracy can collapse into rebellion. In India, a leaked medical entrance examination sent masses of young people into the streets. In the United States, resistance to high-stakes testing grew into what organizers called the Education Spring. Though these movements confronted different systems, both revealed how supposedly neutral exams ration opportunity, discipline educators, and disguise inequality.
The protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades.
I learned something about resisting the testocracy at Garfield High School in Seattle. In January 2013, teachers voted to refuse to administer the district-mandated Measures of Academic Progress test, known as the MAP. We were not opposed to assessing students. We opposed a test disconnected from much of our curriculum, costly in time and resources, and increasingly used to rank teachers rather than improve learning.
When the district threatened us with a 10-day suspension without pay, students and parents joined the struggle. Families opted out, students urged classmates to refuse the exam, and educators at other schools joined the boycott. By the end of the school year, the boycott forced the district to end the required use of the MAP in Seattle high schools.
The boycott became one of the brightest sparks of the Education Spring, the largest revolt against standardized testing in US history. The uprising carried the critique of Occupy Wall Street into public schools. Occupy had exposed how the wealthiest 1% manipulated political and economic institutions; the Education Spring challenged the use of testing, austerity, and privatization to reorganize education around corporate interests.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families opted out of state exams; students organized walkouts; and educators challenged testing mandates through resolutions, rallies, and boycotts. In New York alone, more than 200,000 students refused the state’s Common Core exams in 2015. The Garfield teachers did not create this movement alone, but our refusal helped spread a dangerous question: What if we simply stop cooperating?
The Education Spring and the NEET revolt both erupted because high-stakes tests compress vast social conflicts into a single score. An exam can determine whether a student graduates, enters medical school, receives a scholarship, or is shut out of a profession. It can also rank schools, punish educators, and justify closures. Resistance has since helped push a growing number of states to abandon standardized exams as high school graduation requirements.
Standardized tests become detonators because they promise fairness while making life-altering decisions among people never given equal opportunities. When that promise collapses—through leaked questions, racial disparities, corporate profiteering, or educationally useless exams—the test reveals itself as more than an assessment. It becomes a symbol of the system deciding who advances and who is left behind.
The testocracy tells young people they must defeat one another for access to a scarce future. Resistance begins when they recognize that the real obstacle is not the person sitting beside them, but the system forcing them to compete for what should be a right.
The Test We Must Pass
The Cockroach Movement did more than expose a corrupted examination. It exposed a society that tells young people their futures depend on defeating one another while the wealthy purchase every imaginable advantage—and sometimes the answers themselves.
A fairer NEET would matter. But no perfectly guarded test can make an unequal society just. India remains scarred by poverty, caste oppression, concentrated wealth, and repression. The United States is likewise defined by mass poverty amid extraordinary wealth, racial inequality, and attacks on dissent.
A fairer competition for scarcity does not end scarcity. A cleaner testocracy remains a testocracy.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
But struggle is the greatest teacher. Young people who entered the streets demanding a fair exam learned that the corruption ran deeper than a leaked test. They learned how wealth and power shape the institutions governing their lives—and that institutions presented as immovable can be forced to retreat.
The Cockroach Movement did not end that repression. But it showed that even a government accustomed to surviving mass dissent can be forced to concede.
Most important, the protesters unlearned the lesson the testocracy had taught them. They had been told to view millions of other students as competitors standing between them and their futures. In struggle, they discovered one another as comrades. Their power did not come from defeating the student beside them, but from uniting in solidarity.
The government called them cockroaches because it believed they were small, disposable, and easy to crush. But cockroaches are legendary survivors, said to be capable of outliving even a nuclear apocalypse. These young people came through the monsoon rain, danced beneath the water cannons, and transformed an insult into a warning: The powerful may build the machinery of destruction, but those they despise may yet survive them.
Power wants the isolated student hunched over a standardized test, stomach knotted and nerves frayed, believing every failure belongs to them alone. It fears the moment that student looks up, sees millions carrying the same burden, and realizes that the failure belongs to the system.
The cockroaches have come together. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep competing for our assigned places in an unjust world—or join them in creating one in which every child has the chance to flourish.
That is the test our movements must pass.
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GOP Senate Shit Show: Focusing on Fauci Instead of Cyclospora Diarrhea Disaster
GOP lawmakers would rather relitigate the pandemic than have public attention focused on the epidemic happening on Trump's watch.
Aug 06, 2026
It has taken the Trump administration just eighteen months to turn a seasonal stomach bug into a national epidemic.
Cyclospora, the food borne parasite that causes severe diarrhea, has infected an estimated 18,000 Americans so far this summer—more than six times the number of cases the U.S. typically experiences over a full year.
This surge in case counts represents the largest recorded outbreak of Cyclosporiasis in U.S. history. As of writing, it has led to more than 400 hospitalizations across 45 states. Worse still, Michigan recorded its first two Cyclospora-related deaths earlier this week.
With all this in mind, it makes sense that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently spent nearly three hours grilling a health official over their response to a disease outbreak…
…until you realize that the topic of discussion was COVID-19 rather than Cyclosporiasis.
On July 29, Congressional Republicans called an oversight hearing to do something they’ve done many times before: ask Dr. Anthony Fauci to explain, once again, where COVID-19 came from.
These COVID-origins hearings have now run for years, generated multiple staff reports from both parties, and reliably produce the same result:
- Republicans accuse Fauci of a cover-up,
- Fauci denies,
- Democrats call the exercise theater,
- Everyone goes home having learned nothing they didn’t already believe going in.
This most recent hearing was no different. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) subpoenaed Fauci and the 85-year-old retired scientist, more than three years removed from federal service, declined to answer questions. The only notable part about this go-round was that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than a hundred times to avoid responding.
On Thursday, the committee voted—along strict party lines—to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his recent testimony.
COVID-19 origin hearings have established themselves a predictable, low-yield use of oversight capacity. That makes it worth asking: why are Republicans calling attention to the issue now?
Oversight hearings involve real and finite resources including a Senate committee’s subpoena power, its staff’s investigative time, and a chair’s agenda-setting authority. To have that congressional attention wasted on an issue both sides have already litigated to exhaustion is revealing—especially when juxtaposed with the fact that not a single Republican has subpoenaed anyone over a historic outbreak that continues to spread with no real end in sight.
The Food and Drug Administration’s current acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas could have easily replaced Fauci in the hot seat. Not just for the agency’s failure to adequately communicate with the public about their cyclospora investigations, but also for his professional history as “corporate lawyer that defended Abbott Laboratories in 2022 for its key role in creating an infant formula crisis.” That’s the same Abbott responsible for the contaminated baby formula that spawned a multiyear criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, which has since been dropped despite having yielded, per the DOJ’s own prosecutors, enough evidence to support criminal charges. According to the Wall Street Journal, that call was made by the DOJ’s “top decision makers,” which in all likelihood included the man the GOP plans to confirm as the country’s top lawyer: Todd Blanche.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—and his former Department of Government Efficiency co-lead Elon Musk—could have similarly been forced to answer questions about how their brand of “efficiency” has hollowed out federal, state, and local health departments charged with monitoring viral threats and inspecting food facilities. Do the American people not deserve to know that thanks to these cuts, there’s a thousand fewer people overseeing our food supply to ensure instances of cyclosporiasis don’t become widespread outbreaks? Or that the principal national office with cyclospora expertise was dismantled during Musk and Vought’s campaign?
There are ample administration officials to place in the hot seat, but the list of culpable targets extends even further. Taylor Farms’ surreptitious handling of this ongoing tragedy is obviously deserving of microscopic inquiry. People all over the country will not look too fondly on the summer they were forced to eschew their bright salads out of fear of becoming too well acquainted with their bathrooms. But Rand Paul & co. evidently have no desire to satisfy the public’s itch for accountability since Taylor Farms’ CEO Bruce Taylor continues to sit easy even as Americans die. A grim reminder of the privileges that political donations have secured under Trump.
The precedent for achieving this sort of accountability was already set by House Democrats. Two days prior to the Fauci hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)—the Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—demanded Bruce Taylor answer questions about his (company’s) role in this outbreak.
Neither the ongoing cyclospora outbreak, nor the next manufactured health emergency under Trump, will be solved by another round of questions for a Biden-era retiree. But Republicans aren’t looking for solutions, they’re looking to shift blame for—and from—a shit-show of their own making.
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81 Years on the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation
When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.
Aug 06, 2026
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am local time, our world changed forever when the US dropped the first atomic bomb used in war over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was approximately 70,000 with ~140,000 to have died by year's end. Three days later, the US would drop a plutonium bomb over the city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there was ~40,000 with ~70,000 to have died by year's end with a combined total of ~210,000. Three weeks earlier, following the atomic bombing of New Mexico with the Trinity test, the nuclear age was thrust upon mankind. The nuclear legacies from victims and survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, and their history lingers to this day. The legacy extends from the mining for the nuclear materials and its impact on local communities to the processing, testing, use, storage, and waste management, as well as the impacts and risks of nuclear power to this day.
Amnesic of past history and events, the United States initiated a new arms race beginning in 2010 with then-President Barack Obama‘s “grand bargain“ to garner favor with the Republican Congress to ratify the New START Treaty. Following our lead, all of the remaining nine nuclear nations are working to modernize their stockpiles as well.
With the advent of artificial intelligence programs already utilized by President Donald Trump’s Department of War and the race to bring this technology to war, we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, either by intent, miscalculation, mistake, or cyber attack using disruptive technologies. This fact was recognized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, moving their Doomsday Clock forward this past January to 85 seconds to midnight.
In order to survive, we must awaken from the myth of deterrence, realizing it for what it is, the greatest driver of the arms race. The unexamined assumptions that these weapons must exist is blatantly false. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to disassemble them. From a height of roughly 64,000 weapons in 1986 we have reduced global stockpiles to approximately 12,187 currently. We also know that even a “limited nuclear war“ in a remote region of the world, for example, between India and Pakistan, using less than one half of 1% of global stockpiles, will result in a global nuclear famine. This could potentially result in up to 2 billion deaths on the planet due to the catastrophic climate change that would follow.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons.
When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.
What is required in this race to save ourselves is the political courage and will to do so. Thankfully, there is hope both internationally and nationally. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 75 nations and signed by 25 additional nations representing a majority of the global population. Here at home the Back From the Brink grassroots movement currently has endorsing congressional resolutions. There are 70 members of Congress, who have endorsed House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons. We must demand our elected officials endorse this campaign or move out of the way for those who will.
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Working Family Champion Rep. Larson Faces an Empty Suit Stuffed With Billionaire Cash
Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act would protect and expand Social Security by making billionaires pay in on all of their income, just like the rest of us. That’s why billionaires are so desperate to defeat him.
Aug 06, 2026
Democratic Connecticut Rep. John Larson has a long record of fighting for working families. He has a 98% voting record with AFL-CIO. He’s endorsed by over three dozen unions and the Working Families Party. And he is Social Security’s No. 1 champion in the US House.
Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act would protect and expand Social Security by making billionaires pay in on all of their income, just like the rest of us. That’s why billionaires are so desperate to defeat him—and they’ve found just the empty suit to do it.
Luke Bronin, the former mayor of Hartford, is challenging Larson in the August 11 Democratic primary. As mayor, Bronin laid off hundreds of workers, slashed worker benefits, and tried to undermine collective bargaining rights. Bronin’s frosty relationship with labor was a major reason that he abandoned a bid for governor. But now, billionaires are trying to use Luke Bronin to take out John Larson.
Bronin is backed by The Bench and Majority Democrats, two billionaire-funded PACs created to prop up corporate-friendly Democrats. Notably, Bronin is the only candidate challenging an incumbent Democrat that The Bench has endorsed. That’s how badly the billionaires want to take out John Larson.
“We're not gonna let the billionaires buy a seat in Congress to stop the progress that John Larson has led for his entire career.”
Labor leaders and Social Security experts have lauded Larson for his consistency and stalwart determination to protect, in his words, “the best economic development plan that this nation has ever had.”
Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, who served under the Biden administration, attended a press conference Larson hosted at the Hartford, Connecticut Laborers’ Local 230 Union Hall in late July. O’Malley affirmed that “John Larson is truly the only reason why 70 million beneficiaries of Social Security did not see their benefits interrupted.”
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the Social Security Administration through mass layoffs of nearly 8,000 experienced employees. Additionally, congressional Republicans attempted to covertly shove half of the disability beneficiaries over the age of 55 off the program. “Rep. Larson, in 24 hours, mobilized 200 members of Congress to send a letter to the Trump administration to tell them, if you do this, you're going to have a knock-down, dragged-out fight. And they pulled back,” O’Malley triumphantly noted
Lori Pelletier, president emeritus of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, used the press conference to highlight Bronin’s attempts to take away collective bargaining, take away safety and health protections, and go after workers in the city of Hartford. Pelletier describes Larson as, “a bona fide ally, a bona fide friend, and a bona fide champion of workers.”
I was also in attendance at the press conference, representing Social Security Works. I told the crowd, “We're not gonna let the billionaires buy a seat in Congress to stop the progress that John Larson has led for his entire career.”
“[Rep. Larson] is a leading voice on Capitol Hill for strengthening Social Security,” added Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
“Some politicians have got other ideas,” said Richtman. “We've heard them in Washington: Cut benefits, raise the retirement age, reduce the cost-of-living adjustment, privatize Social Security. John Larson looks at all these proposals, and he says, ‘No, that's not going to happen.’ John Larson will not let your earned benefits be cut.”
If Democrats gain the House majority, Larson plans to reintroduce his legislation. Social Security is often referred to as “the third rail of politics” given how important the issue is to voters. Larson has pushed for the bill to go to the floor for a vote so members are on record and constituents can know where they stand.
“I don't care who gets the credit,” said Larson. “What we want is to make sure that people are able to live out their lives in dignity. And that children aren't impoverished. And that the elderly aren't impoverished. And that the disabled are taken care of. That's the genius of Roosevelt and Perkins.”
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Nuclear Abolition Is Possible, and We Must Act to Make It a Reality
During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
Aug 06, 2026
“The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”—A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, Nobel peace prize ceremony for ICAN, December 2017
This August 6-9 marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, having committed the unspeakable sin and crime in 1945, thus ushering in the nuclear age.
Rather than repenting for the evil of building and using nuclear weapons, making reparations to the victims, and promising to eradicate its nuclear program, the US government has instead made nuclear weapons the cornerstone of its military policy. This policy holds that the United States must be prepared to use any military means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect and ensure its “vital” national security and geopolitical interests.
The US nuclear weapons program was conceived under a shroud of secrecy that continues to this day, and without the consent of the US people. Beginning with the Manhattan Project in 1940, the US has spent over $9 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable.
To date, the US government refuses to adopt a “no first-use” nuclear policy, declaring it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the case of conflict. Therefore, a US president could unilaterally order a nuclear attack at any time. According to peace advocate and author Joseph Gerson, the US has prepared or threatened to use nuclear weapons against adversaries an estimated 30 times to bolster its aims.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review includes planning for limited nuclear war by developing low-yield nuclear weapons to counter an adversary’s limited use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. The US government is now continuing a several decades long process to modernize its nuclear arsenal at a cost of nearly $1 trillion. Instead of funding vital human needs programs, this exorbitant expenditure (along with the $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget) constitutes a direct theft from the poor! The US, along with the eight other nuclear nations, refuse to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which now deems nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date, 75 nations have ratified the TPNW.
On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This is due to the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate crisis, AI, and worsening world tensions and other perils. The Ukraine war has further aggravated the nuclear threat between Russia and NATO.
The nuclear threat is further exacerbated by recent threats against Iran by President Donald Trump, including to “blast Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages,” and his warning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
As a leading nuclear superpower, the US practices a double standard by calling on other nations to disarm while, at the same time, it refuses to disarm and instead is rapidly expanding its own arsenal.
AI technology also increases the risk of nuclear war. A study by King’s College London published earlier this year revealed that AI models used in 21 simulated nuclear crises escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear war in 95% of 329 turns of play.
As we confront the nuclear peril today, it is imperative that we hear and heed the testimony of those who were directly impacted by nuclear weapons. Since 1945, the Hibakusha has urgently called on all the nuclear nations to abolish nuclear weapons stating that “humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Additionally, people of faith and conscience have actively opposed and resisted nuclear war preparations, including those of blessed memory such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who immediately condemned the 1945 bombing; Bishop Tom Gumbleton (first bishop president of Pax Christi USA); Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Philip Berrigan—all Pax Christi USA teachers of peace—Thomas Merton, OCSO; Sr. Anne Montgomery, RSCJ; Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI; Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP—as well as peacemakers today like Pax Christi USA teachers of peace Elizabeth McAlister and James and Shelley Douglass, plus Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, and so many more!
Throughout the Nuclear Age, different church denominations, faith leaders, and organizations and groups, including International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Back from the Brink, and Warheads to Windmills have also called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And there have been countless non-violent actions for nuclear disarmament and ending war. Since 1980, plowshares peacemakers have enacted the biblical prophecy of beating swords into plowshares by hammering and using others symbols to literally begin the process of disarmament. I have been blessed to be part of two plowshares actions.
Catholic leaders have made significant statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons and present nuclear peril.
- In 1972 St. Pope Paul VI stated, “It is unthinkable that no other work can be found for hundreds of thousands of workers than the production of instruments of death.” In 1976, he described the atomic bombings of Japan as a “butchery of untold magnitude.”
- In 1976, Fr. Richard McSorley, SJ said, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.”
- In 1981, Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, the 1987 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, stated: “Trident is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound… I say with deep sorrow that our nuclear war preparations are the global crucifixion of Jesus… the final crucifixion of Jesus, in the extermination of the human family with whom he is one.”
- In 1982, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the 2009 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, told Catholics in his diocese who worked at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, “In the name of the God of peace, quit your jobs.” In making this appeal, he said he would try to offer financial assistance to any defense worker who would quit.
- In 2017, for the first time ever, a pope condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Pope Francis declared: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race…”
- In 2020 Pope Francis reiterated, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago.”
- Pope Leo has since continued his predecessor’s stance of calling for nuclear disarmament.
- On January 11, 2022, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and recipient of the 2026 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award, released a landmark pastoral letter: “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace-A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament.“
- There has also been the development of a new partnership of US, Japanese, and South Korean bishops. Last year they declared: “On the solemn occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Catholic bishops from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have come together in Hiroshima to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Representing the Partnership for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the bishops joined with atomic bomb survivor organizations to honor the memory of those who perished, to stand in solidarity with survivors, and to urge the global community to reject the possession, use, and threat of nuclear arms.“
Last year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, more than 500 people and 60 organizations in the US signed an Apology Petition to the Japanese people calling on the US government to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings and pledge to ratify the TPNW. The mayor’s office of Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo (the main Hibakusha organization and 2024 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and Catholic clergy and religious in Japan acknowledged receiving this petition and expressed their great appreciation.
Most recently, the groundbreaking “Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development,” was signed by over 200 Nobel laureates, leading AI innovators, and global academics.
Nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal, and no follower of Jesus should be involved in their production, financing, or use of them! The Catholic Church and all churches have a crucial role to play in helping to bring about a disarmed world. What if the church leadership in all denominations were to call on all Christians in the military nuclear chain of command to refuse orders to kill and use nuclear weapons, and publicly support those who do so? What if the churches could take the lead in calling for the conversion of arms industries to non-military production, while advocating for full and just protection of workers’ rights during the transition process? What if the church would provide material resources for those who quit their jobs for reasons of conscience? And what if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all Catholics—clergy, religious, and laity—and Christians in the US demanded that the US government ratify the TPNW? These efforts would go a long way to help create the climate necessary to bring about real disarmament.
Followers of the non-violent Jesus, who commands us to love and never to kill, cannot allow nuclear weapons, death-dealing technologies, and idols of death to ever be normalized, and must reject any ideology or theology that justifies war, genocide, and even omnicide. We need to adopt non-violent practices, as many are doing today, as a primary means to respond to conflict, to resist systemic violence and injustice, and advocating non-violent civilian defense as an alternative to militarized-based national security.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable, for with God, and people acting on their faith convictions, all things are possible. History bears out this truth. I join with many peacemakers worldwide who believe that nuclear abolition can happen, and who are acting to make it a reality. During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
On September 4, 1989, six peacemakers and I participated in the Thames River Plowshares action in New London, Connecticut. We were able to swim and canoe to the docked USS Pennsylvania, the 10th Trident, and hammered and poured blood on the hull. Three of us, including myself, were able to climb on top of the submarine where we prayed for the abolition of nuclear weapons. From aboard this most destructive weapon, I believed then, as I do now, that if people have the faith to believe that disarmament is possible, and act on that faith, it can occur. Now is the time to act!
This article was first published on the Pax Christi USA web site.
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The Rulers of the Nuclear Powers Are Slow Learners
Unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.
Aug 06, 2026
Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19% increase over the preceding year. The US government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.
As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “This overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance, and build tools to exterminate humanity.”
Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86% of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.
Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war.
The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from President Vladimir Putin. But America’s President Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.
Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Seldom, if ever,” reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, “has war ended leaving the victors... with such a realization that... survival is not assured.” The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world “a barren waste, in which the survivors... will hide in caves.” In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had “reached the last degree of savagery,” in which nations were faced with the prospect of “collective suicide.”
As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.”
Over subsequent decades, the anti-nuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, anti-nuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.
Hard-pressed by anti-nuclear campaigners and public opinion, even the small number of governments that built nuclear weapons found themselves unable to resist agreement on nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not nuclear “doves” when they entered office, but, in response to popular pressure, they took significant action to curb nuclear dangers. Some government officials, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even became fervent converts to the anti-nuclear cause.
As the 20th century came to an end, however, progress in rolling back the nuclear menace began to unravel. Popular protest declined, and nuclear disarmament organizations dwindled in size. By contrast, conservative and militarist forces grew more assertive, blocking US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, demanding the building of new nuclear weapons, and derailing Barack Obama’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapons-free world.
Although nuclear disarmament organizations were on the defensive during the early 21st century, they retained enough strength to produce one major victory. Joining together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, they cooperated closely with officials in small, non-nuclear nations to produce a series of United Nations conferences on nuclear issues. Then, at the 2017 conference, the national delegates voted 122 to 1 to adopt the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which banned nuclear weapons. Entering into force in January 2021, the treaty has been signed, thus far, by 100 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.
Even so, the situation remains dire. Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war. Not surprisingly, none of them is willing to sign or even abide by the TPNW. Although the anti-nuclear movement continues to oppose their priorities, it remains weak and unable to halt the momentum toward nuclear catastrophe.
Thus, unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.
Admittedly, it’s possible that, when a calamitous nuclear war does occur, it will finally convince even the slow learners among government officials that the nuclear age requires new thinking about international relations. Unfortunately, that recognition will arrive too late to matter, for such a war will snuff out most life on Earth.
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