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It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this Ronald Reagan and neoliberal bullshit any longer.
Young people are furious. A survey released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics finds that under-30 Americans are “a generation under profound strain” who’ve lost pretty much any confidence in government or corporate institutions.
By a 57% to 13% margin they told pollsters America is on the wrong track, and only 32% agree that the US is a healthy democracy or even one that’s “somewhat functioning.”
Fully 64% of young American adults say the system is either in trouble or has completely failed. Pollster John Della Volpe summarized the Institute’s findings:
“Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”
Which raises the urgent question: How the hell did we get here from the widespread prosperity of the postwar years?
The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because they saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS, which I had joined. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.
Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders focused on running their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.
Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with:
— modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation;
— nearly free college, trade school, and research support;
— enforcement of antitrust laws which produced healthy small and family businesses;
— unions protecting a third of America’s workers so fully two-thirds of us had a living wage and benefits on a single salary;
— and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports paid for with tax dollars that transformed the nation’s commerce.
When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class. Young people saw a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them, and wealthy people were doing well, too.
The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It was a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then seize control of the institutions of America.
Those groups, inspired by Powell, decided to take his advice and infiltrate our universities, create a massive, billion-dollar conservative media infrastructure, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to collect millions of votes, and turn upside-down our tax, labor, abortion, and gun laws.
That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented, billionaire-owned GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts for the rich, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, ending Roe v. Wade, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered citizens (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “dependent on the government”).
Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 44 years of Republicans’ so-called Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to simply say out loud — as our young people are yelling at us — that it hasn’t worked. For example:
— Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 37% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.
Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 44 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 44 years of Reaganomics, it now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.
— Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, wherever they wanted, it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.
“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill corrupt politicians. Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about American history to make guns more widely available.
Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. We regularly terrorize young people with active shooter drills; the number-one cause of death for American children (and only American children) is bullets tearing their bodies apart.
— Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools, purged our libraries of books, and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.
Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.
— Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus on science and math.
Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.” And forget about trying to explain to them the difference between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, and the modern-day governments of Russia, Hungary, and China. Or what Trump and his cronies are up to.
— Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.
Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families.
While students are underwater, the banksters who own Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable student loans, the consequence of legally paid-off legislators (because of Clarence Thomas‘s tie-breaking vote in Citizens United).
— Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and thus “more efficient.”
Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, inflation-causing price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s hard to find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many being sucked dry by hedge funds or private equity as we enter the cancer stage of capitalism. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants and the door to entrepreneurialism is largely closed to Zoomers.
— Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.
Stock buybacks used to be called felony stock manipulation, but Reagan legalized the practice in 1983. As a result, every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, communities, and even the businesses themselves suffer the loss.
— Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.
Now a small handful of billionaires and often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as young people will tell you, are generally absent.
— Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve for payment and which they’d reject. They said this “pre-approval” process would “lower costs and increase choice.”
Instead, in all of the entire developed world — all the 34 OECD countries on 4 continents — there are ~500,000 medical bankruptcies a year…and every single one of them is here in America. And now, as Republicans fight to prevent the renewal of Obamacare subsidies, millions — particularly young people working low-wage jobs — will simply be forced to drop health insurance altogether.
— Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.
As everybody can see, they lied. And are still lying as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization (around a third of us) we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment (now only a tenth of us have a union).
— Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.
There was an explosion all right; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were blown up, torn down, or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying union jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.
Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their wealthy donors in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.
The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. By purchasing the GOP, they succeeded in delaying action on global warming for at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.
— And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech and corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights.” Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.
It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by those five billionaire-bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.
— So now Donald Trump tells our young people that it’s time to make take the next big step — to reject democracy — as the logical outcome of the Reagan Revolution.
He says if we just abandon the rule of law and make him an uncountable emperor for life; punish with prison his political enemies; make women, Blacks, and Hispanics second-class citizens; end immigration for everybody except white South Africans; and forge alliances with dictators around the world, that life in America will become wonderful.
It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this GOP bullshit.
The bottom line is that we as a nation have now had the full Republican experience. We’ve done pretty much everything they suggested or demanded.
And as a result, young Americans are increasingly disgusted when they hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).
Or welfare (that the GOP damaged and then exploited).
Or even whatever these sanctimonious Republicans are calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and pre-teen girls to give birth against the threat of imprisonment, hiding Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell, or burning books.
Or having masked secret police kidnap people, including children, off the streets of our cities and throwing them into god-awful hellhole prisons.
Not to mention Donald Trump’s sinister “revenge” campaign against the Americans he sees as his “enemies,” his eliminating pollution controls that protected our environment in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel industry donations, and giving his billionaire donors another massive tax cut, to be paid for by the same next generation who’re protesting against him.
America’s young people are over it, Republicans, and they’re going to reboot this nation to fulfill its potential and promise.
A new, progressive America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and the GOP and its billionaire owners can’t stop it much longer.
Politico's senior law reporter called it "the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era."
A federal judge issued an emphatic ruling Tuesday that the Trump administration acted illegally when it targeted pro-Palestinian student activists for deportation, describing it as part of an effort to "strike fear" into protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.
In the 161-page ruling, US District Judge William Young, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, concluded that the Trump administration undertook illegal efforts "unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech."
He also launched a broadside against the Trump administration's entire authoritarian ethos, describing President Donald Trump's "palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains."
Politico's senior law reporter Kyle Cheney described the ruling as "the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era." Young himself called it the most important he's ever issued in over 30 years on the bench.
The first page immediately captures this gravity, containing a scan of an anonymous postcard Young received in June as a prologue: "Trump has pardons and tanks... what do you have?" the sender asked.
Young included his response: "Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People ... have our magnificent Constitution. Here's how that works out in a specific case."
The case was launched following a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which represent hundreds of college professors around the US who testified that they felt intimidated by what they described as "ideological deportations" by the Trump administration of students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.
Often without warning, the State Department revoked nearly 1,700 visas from lawful immigrants before targeting many of them for deportation under an executive order by Trump that allegedly responds to "antisemitism," but in practice extends far out to encompass any expressions of solidarity with Palestinians or criticisms of Israel.
During the trial, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that it determined who to target using an anonymously operated pro-Israel "doxxing" website known as the Canary Mission, which publishes dossiers on college students around the country who express unfavorable views about Israel.
One of those students was Mahmoud Khalil, an activist at Columbia who held a green card, who was whisked away from his address in the middle of the night by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent to a detention facility for months. As Young acknowledged in his ruling, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of homeland security, stated plainly in an interview that the effort to deport Khalil was because of "basically pro-Palestinian activity." After a federal judge ordered Khalil's release, the Trump administration began efforts to deport him to Algeria or Syria.
ICE agents also snatched Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, off the street in broad daylight after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her university to divest from companies participating in Israel's genocidal war in Gaza. Although the administration acknowledged that Öztürk, who had a legal student visa, committed no crime, she remained in an ICE detention facility for more than six weeks before a judge ordered her release.
Young said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials, such as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees ICE, "acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech."
He refuted the professors' contention that the administration had waged an "ideological deportation policy," which he said "could have raised a major outcry." Instead, Young said, their intentions were "more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated noncitizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome."
To strip visas "solely on the basis of political speech, and with the intent of chilling such speech," Young said, "is not only unconstitutional, but a thing virtually unknown to our constitutional tradition." The First Amendment of that Constitution, he added, "does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens."
Young did not order any changes to Trump administration policy with his ruling, but only because Trump "poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech" as a whole, and further proceedings would be necessary in order to rein in those abuses more comprehensively.
He specifically identified the use of masks by ICE agents during arrests, which he described as "disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable."
"ICE goes masked for a single reason: to terrorize Americans into quiescence," Young said. "In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed, masked secret police."
The final 12 pages of the ruling, which American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick described as "truly remarkable," focus on "the nature of our president himself," who Young said "simply ignores" rulings he dislikes.
Young concluded that the courts, which he described as one of the few remaining bulwarks to Trump's excesses, needed to do more than issue nonbinding cease-and-desist orders, but instead issue permanent injunctions that can result in contempt charges if the administration refuses to stop illegal policies.
Trump, he said, is not "entirely lawless," but "has learned that—at least on the civil side of our courts—neither our Constitution nor our laws enforce themselves and he can do most anything until an aggrieved person or entity will stand up to him and say 'Nay.'"
Young also put the responsibility of resistance on the institutions that have capitulated to Trump's demands.
"Our bastions of independent, unbiased free speech–those entities we once thought unassailable—have proven all too often to have only Quaker guns," he warned. "Behold, President Trump’s successes in limiting free speech—law firms cower, institutional leaders in higher education meekly appease the president, media outlets from huge conglomerates to small niche magazines mind the bottom line rather than the ethics of journalism."
"I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected," he wrote in conclusion. "Is he correct?"
The Trump agenda in Latin America is about protecting US economic and financial interests, just as it was under Kirkpatrick’s reign of terror-for-profit.
In August 1981, US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick traveled to Santiago to meet with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, eight years after he seized power in a military coup. Kirkpatrick cheeringly described their talk as “most pleasant” and announced that the Reagan administration would fully normalize relations and resume arms sales—support that Pinochet quickly used to claim renewed legitimacy and crack down on opponents.
The episode crystallized what became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine: the notion that the US government should embrace any autocrat who aligned with Washington’s anti-communist agenda while working to undermine, sanction, or topple any left-wing leader who refused to “play ball,” even if they were democratically elected (and popular). Protecting American economic interests was the lodestar, and just about anything was permissible in service of that goal.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine shaped US Cold War policy across Latin America under President Ronald Reagan. It was invoked to justify participation in Operation Condor, a transnational repression system that coordinated dictatorships’ assassinations and torture chambers. It was used to rationalize funneling weapons and training to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and to support Brazil’s military junta and its anti-communist crusade.
And it explained why Washington turned a blind eye to the Argentine junta’s Dirty War, which disappeared tens of thousands of citizens while receiving US diplomatic cover. In Kirkpatrick’s view, these horrors were an acceptable price for preserving American hegemony and global “liberalism.” Kirkpatrick is still hailed as a “True American Hero” by conservatives, knowing full well the horrors she committed.
This imperialist view was not entirely new. US foreign policy had long operated on behalf of economic interests. The “Banana Wars” and “Banana Republics” of the early 20th century and the invasions of the Philippines and Caribbean islands were justified in the same way. What changed under Reagan was the sheer arrogance and brazenness of American evil. Washington packaged its hyper-capitalist, immoral backing of tyrants and terrorists under the banner of freedom, insisting to the world that the US was a “shining city upon a hill.” It was nonsense, but the message resonated at home.
The main architect of this approach was Jeane Kirkpatrick. Long discredited after the Cold War ended, her ideas seemed destined for the dustbin. Yet under US President Donald Trump, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s ghost has come hauling back. It is now a cornerstone of foreign policy in conservative circles.
Human rights, democracy, and human progress are expendable when they collide with American profits and hegemony.
There has been plenty of talk about this being the new Monroe Doctrine. A Newsweek piece this week argued that Trump’s America First agenda in Latin America is a “MAGA Monroe Doctrine.” But there is a contemporary precedent to Trump’s kind of imperialist chest-thumping.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a handful of other Trump-aligned hawks have pushed for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine’s revival. The GOP, under Trump, has openly flirted with copying Reagan’s playbook in Latin America and making it clear the region is a no-go zone for foreign competitors. US military and economic power could, at any time, be deployed to bully Southern nations into protecting American profits, once again.
This thread runs through both Trump terms. In the first, neoconservatives like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams held sway. In the second, the torch has been picked up by figures like Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Rubio.
In just over four years, the US has shown itself willing to deploy military forces against “subversive forces,” allegedly support coups such as the Silvercorp operation in Venezuela or the Organization of American States-assisted 2019 ouster of socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia, and meddle in elections to achieve its preferred outcome.
It has protected and propped up leaders engaged in authoritarian wars on drugs and socialism—Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele—while punishing leftist leaders like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Lula, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with tariffs, sanctions, and economic warfare. It has also supported right-wing opposition figures across the continent, from son-of-Nazi-SS-lieutenant José Antonio Kast in Chile to oligarch María Corina Machado in Venezuela to far-right groups in Peru and Colombia.
The US has also supported paramilitary groups. Colombia is the clearest case. For decades Washington poured weapons, training, and billions of dollars into the Colombian military, mostly under the Plan Colombia program, all while it collaborated with right-wing paramilitary death squads that murdered tens of thousands of civilians.
The US participated in the “False Positives” scandal, where the Colombian Army, armed with US weapons, training, and equipment, killed thousands of civilians before claiming they were guerrilla fighters, often planting evidence to do so.
Similarly, police and military units engaged in war crimes and brutality have been given US weapons and training. In Brazil, most foreign weapons for the police and military are American, including the very snipers used to gun down children in favelas. Meanwhile, the US has sanctioned any Latin American country from purchasing Chinese and Russian weapons, equipment, and technology, to help feed the American military-industrial complex’s profits.
The doctrine also shows up in how the Trump administration uses pressure campaigns. In Venezuela, the “Maximum Pressure” campaign from the first term has escalated to outright military confrontation. Just last week, the US allegedly destroyed a fishing boat in Venezuelan national waters, killing 11 people. It claimed the boat was transporting drugs headed to the US, affiliated with Tren de Aragua.
There is no evidence for this claim, and even if there was, should drug traffickers be massacred without respect for sovereignty, due process, or congressional approval? Such a war crime could lead to full-on regime change or a new War on Drugs on Venezuelan shores.
This is all while ExxonMobil and Chevron have practically bought Washington’s Venezuela policy, and as the Venezuelan opposition, backed by the US, has said it would give oil rights to US corporations.
The underlying interests are clear. The US wants to maintain dominance over investment and markets, ensuring preferential treatment while shutting out competitors like China and Russia. This has meant pressuring governments not to buy BYD cars, threatening sanctions for buying Russian oil and weapons, strong-arming Panama to ditch Belt and Road projects, and trying to block Chinese banks from opening across the continent.
As South America becomes a breadbasket for the world, countries are turning to Brazilian, Russian, and Chinese fertilizers, cutting into US Big Agriculture’s profits. Oil and gas are front and center in Venezuela, where the largest proven reserves on Earth remain largely untapped.
Mining is increasingly important in the Andes, with lithium, copper, and other critical minerals needed for the global energy transition—and US firms want to be at the center of it, despite Chinese companies leading the way. This can help explain why the administration, particularly Marco Rubio, is so obsessed with supporting oil-rich Guyana, where ExxonMobil and Chevron have billions at stake.
The region is viewed as an extension of US dominance over global commerce—and measures to protect that dominance will be taken accordingly.
Locally, elites close to Trump are eager to profit from the US. They expect fatter contracts, looser regulations, and lower taxes under right-wing authoritarian governments backed by Washington. Brazilian business magnates, including real estate developers involved in building a Trump hotel in Rio de Janeiro that was shut down over corruption investigations, were key actors in pressuring Trump into putting 50% tariffs on Brazil, a move that has backfired massively.
The Trump administration has also pressured Latin American governments not to diversify away from the dollar, discouraging them from signing trade deals in yuan or joining BRICS currency initiatives. China’s opening of multiple bank branches across Latin America has also been a target of US pressure. Countries are now able to sign deals, both internationally and regionally, using foreign currencies like the yuan. This threatens dollar dominance, and the US simply cannot abide by a globally competitive system in “our hemisphere.”
The Trump agenda in Latin America is, most conveniently, about protecting US economic and financial interests, just as it was under Kirkpatrick’s reign of terror-for-profit. The rhetoric may change; today it is about fighting socialism, China, or “narco-terrorism” rather than communism; but the underlying logic is the same.
Human rights, democracy, and human progress are expendable when they collide with American profits and hegemony. Ironically, that very logic destroys US credibility, and may help bring about a truly multipolar system in a region long hurt by unipolar imperial control.