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Opinion
Charlotte’s Web, Redeployed: A Children’s Tale in the Hands of Power
White’s literary legacy is rooted in empathy, care, and the affirmation of life; the bureaucratic appropriation of his title stands in stark, almost satirical contrast to the world he sought to illuminate.
Nov 19, 2025
Growing up, there were a few books that left an indelible mark on me. Charlotte’s Web was one of them. Tolerance. Embracing those who are different. Overcoming fears. Seeing miracles in the ordinary. Having faith in the goodness of our neighbors. Love.
So when I saw that a federal immigration sweep in Charlotte, North Carolina had been named Charlotte’s Web, I felt a sharp, immediate repulsion. They were being clever—but how many of them had actually read the book? How different this country might be if more people absorbed its lessons: that protecting the vulnerable is an act of courage, not political theater.
Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899-October 1, 1985) was an American writer whose work has endured across generations. He authored beloved children’s books, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte’s Web ranked first among the top 100 children’s novels. Beyond children’s literature, White contributed to The New Yorker and co-authored The Elements of Style, the iconic English-language style guide. Kurt Vonnegut described him as “one of the most admirable prose stylists our country has so far produced.”
It is in this context—of a writer celebrated for clarity, humanity, and moral vision—that the repurposing of Charlotte’s Web for a mass immigration raid becomes especially jarring. White’s literary legacy is rooted in empathy, care, and the affirmation of life; the bureaucratic appropriation of his title stands in stark, almost satirical contrast to the world he sought to illuminate.
Charlotte herself, the real Charlotte, not the bureaucratic parody, spins her web to protect, not punish. She acts out of friendship, not force.
On a quiet Saturday in Charlotte, 81 people were arrested in roughly five hours as federal agents conducted a phase of the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown. Officers swept neighborhoods near churches and apartment complexes. Streets were unusually empty, businesses shuttered, and families stayed home, unsure whether their neighbors, or the law, could be trusted.
Gregory Bovino, the North Carolina-born Border Patrol commander leading “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” posted on X a quotation from the story’s ending, when Charlotte’s children float away on the wind:
Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.
The irony is almost literary. In White’s story, the line is a meditation on freedom, impermanence, and the continuity of life, Charlotte’s children carried safely into a larger world after she has saved the pig. In Bovino’s hands, it frames a mass roundup, turning human beings into objects carried off by a bureaucratic breeze.
White himself described the inspiration behind Charlotte’s Web:
The theme of Charlotte’s Web is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.
Martha White, who manages her grandfather’s literary estate, made clear that his ethos could not be more distant from these raids. E.B. White “certainly didn’t believe in masked men, in unmarked cars, raiding people’s homes and workplaces without IDs or summons,” she told CNN, adding, “He didn’t condone fearmongering.” He believed in due process, in the rule of law, and in the basic dignity of life.
The spectacle of the Charlotte operation extended to social media, where detainees’ faces and alleged criminal histories were posted as proof of public safety. Here, White’s words carry a sting:
Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.
Activists handed out whistles to warn neighbors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence. Community members skipped work, school, and medical appointments. One dental clinic alone reported nine cancellations.
“Latinos love this country. They came here to escape socialism and communism, and they’re hard workers and people of faith,” said Paola Garcia, spokesperson for Camino, a nonprofit serving Charlotte’s Latino community. “They love their family, and it’s just so sad to see that this community now has this target on their back.”
Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of immigrant advocacy group Siembra NC, called the operation “a shameful day for the North Carolina Republican Party,” noting the celebration of what she described as “terrorist operations” and the recycling of Bovino’s rhetoric about “going after criminals.”
Before Saturday, the largest number of immigrant arrests in a single day in North Carolina was 30. Eighty-one in five hours—nearly triple the previous record, underscores the unprecedented scale of federal enforcement in a city already trembling with fear.
White wrote:
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
And Charlotte herself, the real Charlotte, not the bureaucratic parody, spins her web to protect, not punish. She acts out of friendship, not force:
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you… By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
The contrast is stark. Charlotte’s web lifts; the raids constrict. The story teaches mercy; the sweep instills fear. Charlotte’s purpose is care; the operation’s purpose is spectacle. As White noted elsewhere:
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
Here, millions of hours of planning, messaging, and social-media framing were devoted to constructing enemies, while the human cost, fear, disruption, and trauma, remained largely invisible.
White’s fascination with animals and mortality lent his work an “eerie quality,” and he often described books themselves as “sneezes,” unexpected, uncontainable eruptions of human empathy. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this real-life web demonstrates the inverse: a calculated, coldly measured maneuver, a bureaucratic sneeze that spreads fear instead of care:
The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.
The authorities talked. They posted. They broadcast. But they did not listen. Families stayed home. Children missed school. Communities watched one another with suspicion. Safety, in the administration’s terms, was achieved only at the expense of freedom. And yet, White reminds us:
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
This is Charlotte’s enduring lesson: the value of life, the importance of compassion, the courage to act out of love. Freedom, dignity, and human connection cannot be suspended at the altar of political performance. The people caught in this web may be removed, but their absence leaves a void that no number of arrests can fill.
Charlotte’s web, whether in a children’s book or in our daily lives, asks us to choose differently. To see, to listen, to protect. To be, as White’s story quietly insists, the kind of neighbor, and the kind of nation, that spins webs of care instead of cages.
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The Case for Trump Not Using US Military Force Against Maduro and Venezuela
Any act of war by the United States against Venezuela is a terrible idea.
Nov 19, 2025
When the Spanish King Charles I learned that Pizarro and his men had executed the Inca king Atahualpa, the Spanish monarch was deeply troubled. He worried about what precedent might be set in the killing of kings, even Latin American ones.
The United States has assembled a large fleet of warships off the coast of Venezuela, vessels crammed to the railings with sailors and Marines. Naturally, many people are wondering what the purpose of all this might be. The flotilla deployed seems at once too large and yet too small for the success of any possible mission.
The Trump administration’s claim that the US military actions in the Caribbean and now the Pacific–carrying out strikes on small boats, allegedly to stem the flow of fentanyl and/or cocaine to the US–does not match the facts. Fentanyl for US drug users is manufactured in Mexico using raw materials the cartels import from China. Fentanyl comes into the US mainly hidden in trucks driving in from Mexico. Cocaine, made from coca leaves grown in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, is processed in Colombia and then shipped to Central America or Mexico to be imported into the US, mainly in trucks. Venezuela is a minor player in the drug trade to the US, instead taking part in some of the transport of cocaine to European consumers.
The American military power now in the Caribbean has been very poorly positioned if the purpose is to halt the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. The warships are in the wrong place and the fleet is needlessly large for the task. If the point is to blow up more small craft suspected of moving illegal drugs, it is worth recalling that, until now, drug running has not been a death penalty offense in the United States. Until now, drug dealers have received trials, with evidence presented, and juries deciding guilt or innocence.
Since President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” the project has lumbered on, decade after decade (except of course in the case of the heretofore dangerous and illegal drug marijuana, which can now be lawfully purchased and used for recreational purposes in 24 states). The war on drugs was ill-conceived from the beginning. It has cost countless lives, wasted billions of dollars, and has been, it is fair to say, a complete failure. It is way past time for taking a different approach, one that has as its goal the minimization of the harm that dangerous, addictive drugs can do. What drug addicts deserve is not prison; they deserve our sympathy.
If the purpose of the positioning of US warships near Venezuela is to kill President Nicolás Maduro, then this is the sort of project that even Charles I would agree is a bad example to set. It should not be American policy to murder tyrannical leaders, no matter how bad.
If the plan is to strike at the Venezuelan military, this attack could not possibly kill anywhere near enough of the young men and women who joined the military out of patriotism or because they had so few other job options. The Venezuelan military and militia number in the hundreds of thousands. If attacked, we would be wise to suppose that their response will be motivated by national pride and acts of self-defense.
If the plan is to destroy Venezuela’s economic assets, this would be an especially bad idea. We would be attacking a US company, as much of the petroleum equipment belongs to Chevron Oil. Worse still, if the economic misery of the Venezuelan people is horrible now, it will be even worse if the U.S. destroys the nation’s number one economic asset.
If the plan is to invade Venezuela and topple the government, then the U.S. would need a vastly larger force. Recall that when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 to free the monarchy of Kuwait from Iraqi control, the U.S. military assembled an army of over 500,000 to carry out the mission. At most, the U.S. has 16,000 armed troops bobbing about on ships adjacent to Venezuela. If the U.S. invades Venezuela with a force of this size, don’t count on an easy victory. Invading Venezuela would be another Bay of Pigs, the 1961 CIA operation to overthrow Castro that ended in a bloody fiasco.
If the US somehow manages to kill Maduro, don’t expect a happy result for Venezuela. The Venezuelan military is united in one goal: corruptly profiting from an authoritarian regime. If Maduro is dead or gone, one can expect that the various elements of the Venezuelan armed forces will splinter and fight one another over which branch or group in the military will get to control the continuing looting of the nation. With a US military invasion–either with the impossible goal of trying to occupy the country, or even with less ambitious goal of just assassinating Maduro–the likely result in Venezuela will be civil war and military rule.
There are many authoritarian leaders in the world, those who try to stage coups to overturn election results, vastly overstep the laws that would limit their power, those who rule by decree, and who try to jail their personal enemies. But no one is proposing that the American armed forces should remove any of these autocratic rulers.
Any US act of war against Venezuela is a terrible idea. Many people will die, nothing will be solved, and America will find that it has created a new generation of enemies.
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Two Negotiations, One Crisis: Why COP30 and the UN Tax Convention Must Finally Speak to Each Other
The world can no longer afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
Nov 19, 2025
This week, governments are negotiating climate finance in Belém, Brazil and new global tax rules in Nairobi, Kenya. The coincidence of these talks happening at the same time—yet with almost no structured conversation between them—may be the clearest indicator of how disconnected the global response still is.
Climate negotiators discuss financing needs without asking where predictable public resources will come from, while tax negotiators debate revenue rules without acknowledging the rising costs of the climate crisis.
Treating these as separate worlds is no longer viable. Both deal with cross-border harms and deep inequality, and both require cooperation grounded in equity and responsibility.
The world cannot afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
What tax negotiations can learn from climate governance
The climate regime learned early that unequal responsibility cannot be ignored. Under the Paris Agreement, global standards are paired with nationally determined plans. The system links international expectations with domestic realities.
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore.
International taxation has never made this leap. Failure to cooperate has allowed multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to underpay tax by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and hiding wealth behind secrecy. As a result, countries lose an estimated US$492 billion each year to cross-border tax abuse, according to research by the Tax Justice Network. These losses directly undermine governments’ ability to fund the climate action, social protection, care systems and economic diversification essential for a just transition.
With this round of Nairobi negotiations now concluded, countries have signaled a rare opportunity to advance a stronger UN tax convention—one that delivers fairer rules on taxing rights, tackles profit shifting, and strengthens transparency.
The convention represents a historic chance to shift the burden from ordinary people to those who profit most from pollution and extraction, and to build an international system that restores countries’ tax sovereignty—the ability of states to use tax to deliver on their people’s aspirations.
Subnational leaders are already doing what global systems have failed to do
Cities, states, and regions are carrying the weight of climate action. They build early warning systems, reinforce infrastructure, manage disaster response, and support communities during heatwaves, floods, and droughts. In practice, this means that the vast majority of climate implementation takes place at the subnational level—in many countries this accounts for 70 percent or more of climate-significant public expenditure, rising to over 80 percent in some cases. Yet these same actors receive only around 10 per cent of climate finance.
This mismatch is structural. Global climate finance is built around national governments and large international funds, with access that is slow, complex, and tilted toward institutions with high administrative capacity. Local authorities dealing with climate impacts every day are left without the stable resources they need.
Despite this, subnational governments are modelling practical, fair climate finance. Kerala’s 1 percent flood levy helps rebuild homes, roads, and schools after major floods and strengthens community readiness for future shocks. Elsewhere, solidarity arrangements between neighbouring jurisdictions channel revenue from polluting activities into joint adaptation projects. Together, these examples show how small, well-designed levies can generate stable public revenue and ensure those with greater responsibility contribute more.
These local approaches matter far beyond their borders. They show that progressive, people-centred taxation can be implemented at scale and can complement national and international systems. They are blueprints for how global rules could be designed to be more equitable and more closely aligned with lived realities.
Global South leadership on solidarity levies shows what climate and tax reform can achieve together
A coalition of eight countries—including Kenya, Colombia, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Tanzania, France, and Spain—launched the Premium Flyers Solidarity Coalition, backing levies on business class, first class, and private jet travel. These charges target the highest emitters and, if coordinated across willing countries, could raise around €121 billion a year, depending on design—offering a major new source of finance for adaptation, resilience, and loss and damage.
This approach builds on existing practice: more than 52 countries already apply some form of aviation levy. Several governments in the Global South are now examining just and equitable air-passenger levies that place higher costs on higher-income and higher-emitting travellers. In Kenya, for example, the new Air Passenger Service Charge sets fees at KSh 600 (about US $4) for domestic flights and KSh 6,500 (about US $50) for international flights, with higher rates for premium-class travel and the possibility of future increases through Gazette notice. These measures demonstrate how countries can advance climate ambition while strengthening the revenue tools needed to deliver it.
For many countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, fiscal space is tightening, debt is rising, and private finance cannot meet essential adaptation needs. Solidarity levies are not a replacement for existing commitments, but they remain one of the most practical tools for generating reliable, debt-free public revenue at the scale highlighted in the Baku-to-Belém roadmap.
The Nairobi negotiations cannot become another exercise in managed ambition
A familiar dynamic has emerged in Nairobi. Countries from Africa and the wider South are pushing for meaningful shifts, while some high-income countries and tax havens are using procedural delays and vague language to avoid commitments. Concerns about sovereignty are raised selectively, even as the climate crisis shows that sovereignty today is strengthened through cooperation, shared rules, and predictable public finance—not through isolation.
A new global tax system is being designed, but many negotiators do not yet seem aware of the scale of this moment or its implications for climate action, inequality, and development. Without mechanisms to tax major emitters, high-net-worth individuals, and multinational polluters, the emerging convention risks becoming another symbolic agreement.
The reforms under discussion are not abstract. Ending harmful tax incentives, tackling profit shifting, and strengthening transparency could raise US$2.6 trillion a year for governments worldwide—more than enough to meet climate-finance needs and expand fiscal space for development. These are the tools countries require to invest in resilience and reduce debt pressures. Choosing not to adopt them is, in effect, choosing climate austerity—underfunded systems facing ever-rising climate costs.
Tax rules decide who carries the costs of the climate crisis
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore. Since 2015, the richest 1 percent have captured US$33.9 trillion in newly created wealth—an amount that dwarfs the total wealth owned today by the entire bottom half of the world’s population.
Alongside this, the world's largest oil and gas companies made around US$200 billion in profits in 2022, much of it in the form of windfall gains amid the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And all of this sits atop a global economy that still directs more than US$7 trillion a year in fossil fuel subsidies—public money that props up the very industries driving the crisis.
It is against this concentration of wealth and public resources that this week’s negotiations show how closely climate action and revenue systems are intertwined. Recognizing that connection—and acting on it—will determine the future governments choose to build, and whose pockets they expect to fund it.
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Gigs That Work For All
A California pilot program offers a new blueprint for workforce development.
Nov 19, 2025
For over a decade, academics and progressive policymakers have been fretting about the “future of work” and the “gigification” of labor. And for good reason. Since the ascendance of companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart in the early 2010s, hundreds of thousands of people have taken on the work of fulfilling “gigs” provided by such apps. Consumers have become habituated to getting their rides, groceries, and household goods at the push of a button.
Workers often turn to “gig” jobs because they need flexible work schedules due to caregiving responsibilities or the need for multiple jobs to make ends meet. However, this work is usually low paying, precarious, and unprotected by employment or labor laws. That’s by design, and it’s a big problem: Those laws were created with the intention of protecting just these sorts of workers. The companies behind the apps argue that this is simply the price of flexibility.
There’s no reason that flexible work should require sacrificing the protections, rights, and opportunities provided by employment, like a guaranteed minimum wage and overtime for long hours; the right to a healthy and safe workplace; protections against discrimination and harassment; and insurance against the downside risks arising from the loss of jobs or workplace injuries.
Treating workers as independent contractors without rights and protections has become standard practice for many platform companies. Promoted by venture capital funders, the practice feeds a narrative that the acquisition of skills, experience, and on-the-job savvy—traditionally a responsibility of employers—falls on individual workers to “entrepreneurially” pick up such training on the job. Yet this perspective contradicts a fundamental principle of workforce development, which recognized the wider economic benefits arising from building a skilled workforce.
The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs.
An innovative public pilot in Long Beach has shown it is possible for gig work to benefit workers, employers, and the broader community. The Workers Lab, an organization that funds innovations for and with workers, and Pacific Gateway, the City of Long Beach’s public workforce board, have invested in a platform called WorkLB. The technology behind the platform, originally developed with the British Labor government, plays a matchmaking role by connecting employers and workers based on needs, skills, and schedules.
Pacific Gateway is demonstrating that flexible schedules and the opportunity to do short-term work can go hand in hand with decent earnings, protections, rights at work, and upward mobility. Moreover, the program shows that such opportunities can also benefit businesses and public agencies looking for workers and seeking to improve the workforce development system.
This simultaneously undermines the dominant narrative of a trade-off between flexibility and workers’ rights, and shows how government intervention can effectively address issues arising from the so-called Gig Economy.
The Long Beach model allows Pacific Gateway to either act as, or delegate the responsibility to vet and oversee workers, ensure proper payroll management, provide healthcare, abide by labor law, and pay for liability insurance.
To participate, employers must be willing to pay the local minimum wage (currently $16.50 per hour in Long Beach), with a markup of 2.5% ($0.40 per hr) to help defray the costs of administration. For workers, this unique model helps them find the best work opportunities based on their skills, interests, and scheduling needs. Whether short or long-term, these work opportunities are W-2 jobs providing good wages, benefits, and labor protections. All that, and flexibility.
Pacific Gateway credentials workers through its formal intake process, awarding them “badges” to market their skills. Unlike traditional, for-profit staffing agencies, which have also proliferated in the gig economy space, that treat workers’ skill levels as proprietary data, Pacific Gateway makes this information readily available to prospective employers.
By using a public workforce agency in this staffing agency role, Pacific Gateway is fulfilling the original intention of the federal Employment Services program—to match workers with employers, connect workers to the appropriate training opportunities, and then place them in actual jobs.
In a reversal of gig work common sense, WorkLB’s app allows workers to review their employers, which helps ensure that Pacific Gateway recruits employers providing good jobs rather than placing workers in exploitative and precarious work. While the app currently does not allow employers to rate the workers, it enables them to track the progression of a worker to incentivize full-time work conversion where desired.
Participating workers in Long Beach report high satisfaction with the program, saying that it provides quality jobs with transparent pay, clear expectations, and legal protections and allows them to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers. Employers get a vetted, skilled workforce for on-demand jobs that serve their longer-term workforce needs. The federal workforce system was created to do this, but perpetually lacks the funding to do so at the appropriate scale.
Given its success thus far, there is growing interest in adopting similar pilots in other parts of the country. Additionally, these pilots may provide a salient avenue for much-needed workforce development at the state and local level that meets both workers' and employers’ needs, especially as the current Trump administration slashes federal programs, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and mandate greater work requirements that may impact state and local workforce funding. However, the greatest challenge is funding these pilots, especially as federal funding is cut. The Long Beach pilot was primarily funded through philanthropic dollars, but given the need to scale future efforts, public funding is critical. Now is the time for states and localities to think creatively, whether by developing sector-based partnerships with employers and unions where all partners have “skin in the game,” or identifying other public funding streams, to support this growing workforce.
Workers often accept low-paid and precarious gig jobs because they need them to shore up failing household budgets while juggling complicated schedules. The Long Beach pilot demonstrates that flexibility can also come with good jobs and opportunities to enhance skills while meeting pressing employer staffing needs, thereby benefiting workers, families, and the wider community.
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