Could Elon Musk Actually Destroy Social Security as We Know It?

The DOGE boys are already moving in that direction.

By Sam Pizzigati

March 24, 2025

Source: Inequality.org



Why is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, hyperventilating about Social Security? Why is he inventing unhinged tales about “fraudulent” hordes of Social Security grifters? Why is his “DOGE” chopping away staffers at the already understaffed Social Security Administration?

Let’s start with the political reality that most Americans see Social Security as absolutely essential to their future financial security. These average Americans, Musk and his like-minded super wealthy fear, are eventually going to start demanding that America’s rich pay a far bigger share of the revenue Social Security so desperately needs.

What are these rich paying now into Social Security? Peanuts.

Social Security’s basic math: Employees currently pay 6.2 percent of the money they make into the Social Security system. Their employers match that 6.2 percent. Self-employed Americans, for their part, pay 12.4 percent.

But this funding set-up comes with two incredibly consequential catches that royally benefit our nation’s highest earners.

The first: Only paycheck income faces a Social Security tax levy. Most Americans get the vast bulk of their income from their paychecks. Rich people don’t. Our richest get most of their income from the investments they make with their wealth. This investment income — everything from the profits the rich make selling assets to the stock dividends they collect — faces no Social Security tax.

The second catch: Top corporate executives and other Americans with hefty paychecks only pay Social Security tax on a fraction of their pay. In 2025, all paycheck income over $176,100 will face not a penny of Social Security tax.

The savings our most affluent reap from both these two loopholes can run staggeringly high. Here in 2025, the economist Teresa Ghilarducci points out, at least 229 corporate and banking honchos making above $50 million per year will have essentially “paid all their Social Security taxes for the entire year” before the end of the year’s first morning!

How long can Social Security’s financing continue to go on like this? Not long. Up until recent years, we’ve had many more Americans contributing into Social Security than collecting from it. Today, with seniors making up an ever larger share of our nation’s population, the old ratios are breaking down.

In 2021, as the Social Security Board of Trustees reported last May, the Social Security system’s total annual costs started running higher than the program’s annual income. Come 2035, the trustees would go on to warn, America’s seniors will be collecting only 83 percent of the benefits due them unless Congress acts to set Social Security on a much more sustainable course

The simple solution to this demographic and fiscal challenge? We could move to once and for all end the special Social Security privileges that America’s most affluent continue to enjoy.

Elon Musk and his fellow deep pockets oppose, naturally, this simple solution. Their alternative? Squeeze the Social Security Administration. Cut the agency’s staff. Shut down Social Security offices and limit the services that aging and disabled Social Security recipients can easily access.

Create, in other words, a public Social Security system that no longer works. And, in the meantime, let billionaire-bankrolled politicians push schemes that position privatizing Social Security as the only way to “fix” what ails it.

This gameplan has already begun unfolding.

In late February, DOGE-inspired cutbacks eliminated 7,000 jobs from Social Security’s already depleted ranks. Other cuts are canceling the leases of some 800 Social Security field offices. Last week, the under-the-Musk-gun agency announced new policies that will force elderly and disabled people who’ve been able to verify their ID by phone to visit the distant field offices that remain open.

“The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system,” reflects Max Richtman, the president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“One has to ask,” adda Richtman, “why the world’s richest man — who has received in the tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts — is targeting the agency that helps so many Americans keep their heads above water financially.”

Right-wing lawmakers in Congress, meanwhile, are backing moves to increase the age seniors have to reach to access, without penalties, Social Security retirement benefits. Other right-wingers are laying the groundwork for privatizing Social Security outright.

Can right-wingers succeed with this brazen assault on the financial security of America’s working people? Maybe. President Trump is giving Musk and his gang all the political cover they need, claiming, on the one hand, that nothing about Social Security is going to change while — at the same time — letting Team Musk continue its attack on both Social Security’s image and infrastructure.

But Social Security does still remain — at least for now — the “third rail” of American politics. You mess with Social Security, as the conventional political wisdom goes, you’re going to feel a shock. The task today for Social Security’s defenders: to make that shock for Trump and Musk as sharp as possible.

Equally as crucial: ending the “free pass” on Social Security funding that America’s most affluent have long been enjoying. The dollars that this free pass is costing Social Security have been soaring just as spectacularly as America’s income and wealth has been concentrating.

In 2023, the most recent year with full stats available, some 6 percent of U.S. income earners took home incomes higher than that year’s Social Security tax cap. That 6 percent, economist Teresa Ghilarducci noted earlier this year, would have contributed over $388 billion more into Social Security’s coffers if that tax cap had not been in place.

Those rich who pocketed over $50 million in 2023 paychecks, Ghilarducci also notes, would have paid $3.6 billion in Social Security tax without that tax cap in existence, a payout into Social Security that would have been greater than the total Social Security tax that Americans making under $57,000 — 77 percent of working Americans overall — actually paid that year.

How can we bring some semblance of fairness into how we fund Social Security? We have choices.

Public policy experts at the Brookings Institution last month advanced an approach to overhauling Social Security “intended to appeal to Republicans and Democrats alike.” Their proposal would stabilize Social Security’s finances by increasing the cap on earnings subject to Social Security tax. The new cap would subject 90 percent of all paycheck earnings to that tax and shut down the loophole that lets some business owners now totally escape the Social Security payroll levy.

The Brookings reform would also increase the retirement age for high earners and “strengthen child benefits and protections for Americans with disabilities and the survivors of workers who die.”

Other reformers like Rep. John Larson, a long-time congressional champion of Social Security from Connecticut, are emphasizing the importance of expanding both Social Security’s benefits and tax base. The pending “Social Security Expansion Act” — introduced in the Senate by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — speaks to both those goals.

If enacted, notes the bill’s co-sponsor Rep. Val Hoyle from Oregon, this legislation “would expand Social Security benefits by $2,400 a year and ensure Social Security is fully funded for the next 75 years by applying the Social Security payroll tax on all income above $250,000.”

What’s going to happen next in the congressional Social Security debate? Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill appear likely to become ever more nervous. Elon Musk’s maniacal — and ongoing — attacks on Social Security already have these Republicans exceptionally ill at ease.

“Going after the United States Institute of Peace is one thing, going after Social Security is something entirely different,” notes Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker. “The ironies of a person of such immense wealth targeting a program that provides a modest benefit to ordinary people has the worst possible aura about it.”

But Musk’s hundreds of billions have the power to buff up any aura. Stopping his assault on Social Security is going to take a national groundswell every bit as sweeping as the 1930s grassroots ferment that created Social Security in the first place.



Sam Pizzigati an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has written widely on income and wealth concentration, with op-eds and articles in publications ranging from the New York Times to Le Monde Diplomatique. He co-edits Inequality.org Among his books: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press). His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing publishing at America’s largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association.

Decades of Media Myths Made Social Security Vulnerable to Political Attack

By Paul Hedreen

March 23, 2025

Source: FAIR

As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.

‘If nothing changes’

The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.

An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”

Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.

These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.

It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.

As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.

In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.

Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:

There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.

The easy and popular option is not an option

A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.

There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficit hawks at the Post.

But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.

In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.

To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”

Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.

Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.

Useful misinformation

Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):

Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.

Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.

Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.

The Limits of Basic Income

Providing people with cash payments has benefits, but guaranteed employment and public services are a better option for transforming our economy.

By Jason Hickel

March 23, 2025

Source: Current Affairs





Universal basic income (UBI) has captured the attention of many progressives over the past several years. Simply put, it’s the idea that every citizen should receive an unconditional transfer of money on a regular basis, ideally sufficient to meet their basic needs. UBI has been promoted by a range of prominent figures, from Thomas Piketty to Pope Francis, and featured as a central plank in Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign in the United States. Many of the core principles of basic income are strong, including the idea that everyone rightfully deserves a share of what we collectively produce. And small-scale experiments have demonstrated encouraging results when it comes to alleviating poverty. But basic income also suffers from several critical limitations—and a crippling lack of popularity—that make it unsuitable as a primary vehicle for achieving the radical economic transformation we need.

The key thing to understand is that UBI considers the economy, and problems with the economy, in terms of generic income and consumption—in other words, without regard to any specific goods and services. It seeks to ensure that everyone has a certain minimum quantity of purchasing power over the stuff the country already produces. (Yang, for instance, wanted everyone in the United States to receive $1,000 per month.)

But UBI fails to transform anything about the underlying system of production. It accepts the existing system on its own terms: it does nothing to change who controls production, what kinds of goods and services are produced, under what conditions, and for whose benefit. This is one of the reasons that plenty of neoliberal capitalists, including Milton Friedman, have been perfectly comfortable with the idea. But ignoring the system of production is a problem, because the system we presently have—capitalism—is profoundly destructive and cannot address the multiple crises we face.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally undemocratic. Yes, many of us live in electoral political systems, where we select political leaders from time to time. But when it comes to the system of production, where we spend most of our waking lives, there is little or no democracy. Under capitalism, production is controlled primarily by capital: large corporations, major financial firms, and the 1 percent of wealthy individuals who own the majority of investable assets. They decide what we produce, and how our massive productive capacities—our labor and our planet’s resources—should be used. And for capital, the primary purpose of production is not to meet human needs or to achieve obvious social and ecological goals, but to maximize and accumulate profits. That is the overriding objective.

So we get perverse forms of production. Capital mobilizes our labor and resources to produce things like SUVs, fast fashion, fossil fuels, cruise ships, weapons and industrial beef—which are both unnecessary and ecologically destructive—because they are profitable to capital. But we suffer critical shortages of urgent and socially necessary things like high-quality public housing, public healthcare, public transit, renewable energy, healthy food produced under ecologically regenerative conditions, and so on, because these are less profitable to capital or not profitable at all.

The result is that despite very high levels of production, and high levels of ecological impact, our economy still fails to meet many basic human needs. Deprivation is obviously most extreme in the global South, which is subject to longstanding dynamics of imperialist appropriation, and where billions of people do not have basic things like healthcare, sanitation systems, refrigerators, and clean cooking stoves. But it is also evident in the global North—in the richest countries in the world—where tens of millions of people live in substandard housing and do not have adequate healthcare or nutritious food.

It is not enough simply to redistribute purchasing power within this economy, when the economy itself—the objectives and content of production—must be transformed.

People can only buy what is being produced. Having a basic income does not enable people to buy good affordable housing or public healthcare if those things are not being made in the first place, or are not available in large enough quantities. Basic income will not help you access public transit if there’s not a public transit network in your city. Or, for a particularly striking example, take the climate crisis. We know we need to achieve a rapid transition to renewable energy, but capital does not invest in expanding renewable energy infrastructure and other green technologies at the required rates because it is not sufficiently profitable to do so. No amount of basic income will change this.

Basic income also does nothing to change who controls production, leaving it in the hands of undemocratic capital. It does not change the extent of commodification in our society—in other words, the extent to which a person’s access to essential goods and services is determined by prices, which may remain out of reach. And it does little to change the labor conditions under which production is carried out. Yes, a UBI may give workers the freedom to walk away from a job, and thus increase their leverage to demand improved wages and conditions—but on the other hand, employers may treat it like a wage subsidy and attempt to reduce wages accordingly.

Given the social and ecological crises we face, we need to mobilize labor and our productive forces to produce the necessary goods and services that are currently underproduced or not produced at all. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done, and it must be done quickly—particularly when it comes to addressing the climate emergency. Basic income alone cannot accomplish this. Yes, proponents of UBI have correctly pointed out that when people are liberated from the necessity of paid employment, they tend to use their time in socially useful ways. People want to contribute to creating a better society. But there are limits to what individuals can do by themselves. Even if we may want to build a transit system, or produce solar panels, or innovate more efficient appliances, we obviously cannot do these things alone. This sort of production requires training, coordination, machines, factories and materials.

These problems can be addressed by implementing a program of universal public services, together with an emancipatory public job guarantee. Such an approach would fundamentally change the nature of the economy, including production, in addition to ensuring sufficient income for all.

By universal services, I mean not only healthcare and education, but also housing, public transit, nutritious food, renewable energy, water, communications, recreational facilities and childcare: in short, all the necessities of human life. (I have described such a system in more detail here.) These should be attractive, high-quality, democratically managed, properly universal services, not the piecemeal and purposefully underfunded systems that we see in the U.S. and other neoliberal countries. This approach ensures that necessary goods and services are always produced in sufficient quantities and available to everyone. Provisioning these in a decommodified way also protects people against cost-of-living crises like the one that’s currently ravaging the United Kingdom, by literally reducing the cost of living.

A public job guarantee, for its part, would permanently end involuntary unemployment (something that capitalism cannot achieve). It would ensure that anyone who wants to can train to participate in the most important collective projects of our generation: expanding renewable energy capacity, regenerating ecosystems, improving public services, care work, and so on. People could do urgent, socially necessary work with living wages and workplace democracy.

Partisans of basic income sometimes dismiss the idea of a job guarantee as “make-work,” but in fact it’s exactly the opposite. Such a program would directly orient labor and production toward necessary social and ecological ends, rather than the bullshit jobs that proliferate under capitalism, or tasks that exist solely to help the rich get even richer. And this would not be about providing labor to private corporations, but rather mobilizing public works to achieve key social objectives that capital is unable or unwilling to do. There are many historical examples of this, including in the U.S. during the New Deal era, when the Roosevelt government spent about $4 billion directly employing people to build new roads and public buildings.

Crucially, another powerful benefit of a job guarantee program is that it can be used to set progressive standards for wages, working time, and workplace democracy across the whole economy, without needing to wait for piecemeal legislative changes. Whatever standards the job guarantee sets, private firms would quickly come under pressure to match them, or risk losing staff. After all, why would people continue to work for long hours at minimum wage doing things to maximize profits for shareholders, under demeaning hierarchical conditions, when they could instead work for dignified wages doing socially meaningful projects under conditions of workplace democracy?

This approach—universal public services and a job guarantee—can be funded with public finance. Instead of waiting for capital to make the necessary investments, which it will never do, governments that have sufficient monetary sovereignty can issue currency to do it directly. As Keynes pointed out: anything we can actually do, in terms of productive capacity, we can pay for. Of course, if all the new public production stretches the capacity of the economy (the available labor, energy, and materials), it would be competing with private firms for these resources and drive prices up. But this problem can be avoided quite easily by reducing demand elsewhere, such as by using taxation to cut the purchasing power of the rich, and by regulating commercial bank lending to discourage investments in destructive industries like fossil fuels and SUVs, which we need to scale down.

While these programs must be funded by the currency issuer, they should be democratically managed at the appropriate level of locality. This ensures that decisions about production are geared toward meeting people’s actual real-life needs. The level would depend on the project: large undertakings like an inter-city rail system would require national-level coordination, but more local projects like a solar power installation, recreational facilities, or care work should be managed at the local level. The democracy aspect is critical here, as several studies have demonstrated that when people have democratic control over production they tend to prioritize human well-being and ecology.

A job guarantee has very strong advantages over basic income when it comes to the all-important question of political feasibility, too. In Europe, support for basic income is middling at best, ranging from 29 to 55 percent in seven EU countries. In the United States, a majority of people oppose it, which may help explain why Andrew Yang’s campaign was never able to break through. By contrast, a job guarantee is highly popular in polls. In the U.K., 72 percent of people support it. In the U.S., it’s 78 percent, and in France it’s 79 percent. There are few policies of any kind that enjoy such widespread support, and research shows a job guarantee can appeal strongly to working-class voters who otherwise feel alienated from the political process.

Of course, basic income can still play a role as a component of such a system. It can and should be made available as an unconditional alternative to anyone who cannot work, or who for whatever reason chooses not to (and there are many valid reasons one may wish to opt out of paid employment: to get a degree, to recover from an accident, to care for an ailing loved one, etc). This would protect a core value—freedom to walk away from paid employment—that proponents of basic income seek to establish.

An integrated approach along these lines would permanently abolish economic insecurity, ensure good lives for all, and enable us to achieve vital social and ecological objectives. It is more powerful toward these ends than a basic income alone, because while basic income ensures a certain monetary minimum, it does not guarantee access to the real goods and services that people need in order to live well (healthcare, housing, transit, clean energy, and so on). It cannot ensure they are produced and available at affordable prices. Universal public services and a job guarantee can accomplish this, while also democratizing production and radically transforming labor conditions.

Achieving this goal—abolishing economic insecurity—would have important additional effects. For one, it would break the political logjam over climate action. Right now it is politically impossible to take the steps necessary to achieve rapid decarbonization, including scaling down fossil fuels and other destructive industries, because people fear this will jeopardize jobs and exacerbate the insecurity they already suffer. These are real concerns that must urgently be addressed. Universal public services and a job guarantee would end this uncertainty, and provide an ironclad mechanism enabling people to transition seamlessly out of sectors like oil and gas production as they’re phased out. They would enable bold climate action to be pursued without anyone getting hurt. This is the bread and butter of a just transition.

Guaranteed public services and employment would also take the wind out of the sails of right-wing politics. Right-wing narratives play on people’s fears of economic insecurity—and the pervasive sense of competition for scarce jobs and resources that people experience under capitalism—to whip up hate toward immigrants and other minoritized groups in order to obtain support for reactionary political agendas. (This is a core component of Donald Trump’s politics, to name the most obvious example.) Universal public services and a job guarantee would not only help abolish people’s economic fears, it would also provide a mechanism for rapidly integrating all people—including immigrants—as active and equal participants in building a better society. Here too, this approach has strong benefits over basic income. One can imagine how the right would try to cast any proposed UBI as a “handout,” and accuse recipients of being a “drain” on society (a claim that basic income proponents have soundly rejected). But with a job guarantee—where people’s contributions to the betterment of the collective are clear for all to see—such claims would be impossible to sustain. Attempts to demonize immigrants and divide the working classes would fall flat, and new possibilities for working-class politics would emerge.

These policies can galvanize mass popular support for a transformative political agenda, and they have the power to radically improve any country where they’re implemented. They would address the real, material needs of working-class communities, ending societal evils like poverty and homelessness once and for all, and they would enable us to achieve elusive ecological goals, helping humanity overcome the threat of climate change that currently endangers our world. Indeed, this may well be the only approach capable of adequately addressing the urgent crises we face.



Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health. Jason's research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), which was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year.

 

Who Has Time To Think About Nuclear Weapons?

Nuclear weapons might be low on the list of concerns for Americans right now, but resisting them has never been more important.

By Frida Berrigan

March 23, 2025

Source: Waging Nonviolence

Anti-nuclear activists blocking the U.S. Mission to the UN in New York City on March 5. (WNV/Ed Hedemann)

“Pretty far from the pulse.” That was the comment someone on social media wrote below a photo of me getting arrested at an anti-nuclear protest near the United Nations earlier this month.

Despite being strangely immune to my winning smile and poo poo-ing someone else’s work and passion to perhaps feel a bit superior, that person wasn’t wrong.

After all, who has time to think about nuclear weapons when there’s so much else to worry about: Trump-Musk’s kleptocracy and government-busting, the daily fresh hell of Trump-Vance’s war on woke, the rise of white nationalists or even the price of eggs?

Nuclear weapons — the most powerful and destructive weapon in the world — are not even on most Americans’ list of top 10 fears or top 10 causes they care about. That is a shift from the height of the Cold War when kids in middle America cowered under their desks in nuclear attack drills and had nightmares about nuclear destruction. 

Unfortunately, this lack of interest doesn’t mean that nuclear weapons have somehow auto-disarmed or rehabilitated themselves like some has-been TikTok-famous person. Quite the contrary: There are more nuclear powers, more nuclear weapons and more national resources devoted to nuclear weapons than ever before.

Thankfully, there is a serious, militant and ever burgeoning international movement — mostly from the Global South — that is working toward nuclear abolition. Long at the forefront have been Japan’s hibakusha, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic survivors and their children. There are only a handful of them left, but the organization that unites them and their clarion call for nuclear abolition, Nihon Hidankyo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

More than a dozen other Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded to organizations and individuals committed to the work of nuclear abolition over the years. The most recent recipient was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, which received the award in 2017 for its work developing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It’s a clear, smart and achievable international treaty that prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possession, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Seems pretty comprehensive, right? It goes even further, prohibiting nations from allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits nations from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.

The treaty is so comprehensive, in part, because earlier efforts to curb or reduce nuclear weapons were couched in strategic ambiguity, which has been exploited by the nuclear powers and the nations that enjoy their protection. This treaty is smarter because it did not come from the nuclear hegemons or the U.N. Security Council, which replicates the nuclear hierarchy power dynamics by giving the permanent five members veto power.

Instead the treaty came out of grassroots organizing initiated by the nations most affected by nuclear weapons every day. These activists know all too well that even if another bomb is never detonated, people living where uranium and plutonium is mined, people living where the nuclear powers tested their devices and people living where the nuclear powers dump the nuclear waste are also the people who suffer the illnesses, deaths, the degradation of land and water, as well as the theft of their way of life and livelihoods. It should come as no surprise that all over the world these are Indigenous communities, pushed to the margins by colonialism and forced to contend with nuclear waste and wanton disregard. It should come as no surprise that many of these nations are also suffering the consequences of a rapidly warming planet, with sea level rises, uber-storms, protracted droughts and species extinction.

These are powerful, resilient, creative people networking, weaving their stories and experiences together, sharing their Indigenous knowledge, and using the United Nations framework to create something new out of decades of big power entrenchment on nuclear abolition. It is no small feat that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed and ratified by half the world’s population. Sadly (but not surprisingly), the United States — the world’s largest nuclear power and only country to use nuclear weapons in war — has yet to sign on.

Frida Berrigan getting arrested near the United Nations on March after blocking traffic to protest nuclear weapons. (WNV/Ellen Grady)

And that’s the reason I was in New York City on March 5, standing on First Avenue and 45th Street, with my hands behind my back in metal handcuffs. While parties to the treaty were meeting inside the United Nations, protesters convened by the Atlantic Life Community and War Resisters League were standing outside, calling on a recalcitrant United States to send someone from the U.S. Mission to attend.

The picture that caught me smiling was taken at a moment of genuine happiness. It hadn’t been the easiest action to pull off — and yet, we had mostly succeeded. The goal was to block traffic in front of the United Nations, ostensibly making it easier for the U.S. delegation to get to the meeting. 

At our planning session the day before, however, we were too focused on getting all the banners and props finished to spend much time on the flow of the action. The long banners — which we were to carry into the street with us — were too big to practice with inside our meeting space. It was hard to see how all the pieces were going to fit together, and that made me hold off on deciding whether to participate in the blockade. 

Then, we got a late start the morning of the action. It being the holy day of Ash Wednesday, we waited for Archbishop John Wester, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to bless our group with ashes — the symbol of our commitment to atone through the 40 days of Lent. It was worth waiting for — Archbishop Wester authored a singularly important 2022 “Pastoral Letter on Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace” in which he called for serious work to chart a “new path to nuclear disarmament.” Feeling the ashes on my forehead, I decided to risk arrest.

As we prepared to block traffic, I grabbed onto the banner imploring the U.S. to join the treaty. It was 40 feet long, made of taped strips of paper, and extremely fragile and slippery. Holding onto it in the late winter wind took so much concentration that I forgot to be fearful as I stepped into traffic. A block away, another team carried a banner saying “Ban nuclear weapons which are illegal and immoral.”

In the end, 17 of us were arrested. Although we didn’t convince the U.S. to send anyone to the treaty meeting, we did make a pretty big stink  — and a team from our group wheatpasted the text of the treaty onto the ground in front of the U.S. Mission.

As an American, as a white person, as someone from the nuclear-dependent community of New London, Connecticut, and as a Catholic, this Lenten action seemed like one small way to signal my atonement for the sin of nuclearism — and to announce that I am fasting from nuclear weapons for the next 40 days. In this fast, I align myself with all the economic boycotts that are seeking to counter the Trump regime’s slash and burn of every aspect of American governance.

So, going back to that person who commented “pretty far from the pulse” on the photo of my arrest, I’ll say this: The pulse is the resistance — and it is inside the resister. It gets bigger when we resist together, it helps us overcome fear and stay connected. In actions large or small, individual acts or mass movements, photographed or unnoticed, the pulse is there in the resistance. We couldn’t be closer to the pulse, because it is inside of us! 

Farmers Of La Via Campesina: We Globalise Struggles and Hope!

By Jean Thévenot, 

Degrowth.info Editorial Team

March 21, 202

Source: degrowth





What is it like to farm in the EU? What are the forces at stake behind liberal farming policies? Where do the narratives of right and left farmers’ unions intersect and diverge? What is the current state of debates on fair prices, food sovereignty, EU regulations, protest rights? On December 5th 2024, Jean Thévenot, a small-scale farmer member of the international farmers’ network La Via Campesina, shared his eye-opening perspective with degrowth.info.

degrowth.info: Hi Jean, can you start by introducing yourself and telling us about your job and your daily reality?

Jean Thévenot: Hello, my name is Jean Thévenot, I am a small-scale farmer in the North part of the Basque Country, producing organic seeds and seedlings for home gardeners and vegetable farmers. Together with my business partner, we created our farm in 2022, in a remote, mountainous area. Since starting the farm, I’ve been involved politically with the French farmers’ union Confédération Paysanne (Conf), which defends small- and medium-scale farmers and peasant-based, agro-ecological models.

Conf is part of the international farmers’ network La Via Campesina (La Via), which is one of the biggest social movements on the planet, with more than 200 million farmers on all continents. La Via’s key struggle is for food sovereignty: the aim is to allow each territory to access fair, healthy and sustainable food, by deciding themselves what they grow and how they grow it, in a logic of solidarity between people and the planet. Even if the term has been used by different far-right actors, food sovereignty has nothing to do with nationalism or fascism.

I am a delegate of Conf in La Via – it means I work mostly at the European and international levels. Working on a farm is a big workload and finding time for political activity is not always easy. But at La Via we are all farmers talking from the field which gives us a lot of legitimacy.

degrowth.info: The western rural world is often portrayed as dominantly right wing, if not far-right. Does your lived reality confirm this? If so, why do you think right and far-right narratives take the lead?

Jean Thévenot: Rural areas, at least in France, are indeed more conservative. They tend to revolve around values such as work or traditions, but there is a lot of solidarity and non-commodified exchanges too. In the last twenty years, we’ve however seen that the base of far-right parties has expanded from poor cities and banlieues (suburbs) into rural areas. Political tendencies also depend a lot on each territory, their socio-economic contexts, their historical legacies.

Far-right parties actually often arrive in places where the situation is bad. Places where farmers used to be able to maintain acceptable living standards, and where now things are getting complex and tense because of free trade agreements, inflation, wars etc. People want quick and easy solutions. That’s precisely what the far-right offers: they come and claim to act directly on the problems and gain more and more influence. For instance, the French farmers’ union Coordination Rurale (CR) has right wing, almost fascist, positions in a lot of debates. They use the fact that people are angry and desperate and turn it into a political force to win elections without offering well thought-through solutions. Let’s be honest: CR is really good in communication, in TV, in shows, in pretending they are doing something. In Lot-et-Garonne, where CR has been leading the Chambre d’Agriculture for decades, even organic farmers admit that CR leaders will reliably defend all farmers, small or industrial, against administration, regulations, neighbours, or anything that might be making their work harder. But they do it in violent ways, creating oppositions between different parts of society: rural vs urban, migrants vs natives, ecologists vs farmers etc.

degrowth.info: In recent demonstrations throughout Europe we’ve sometimes seen small farmers protesting alongside industrial and far-right unions. How does that make sense? Can you expand on the dichotomy between right- and left-wing farmer’s unions?

Jean Thévenot: Right unions such as the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA) and Jeunes Agriculteurs, far-right unions such as CR, and left-wing unions like Conf or La Via all start from a similar analysis that unfair global competition is the main origin of most of their problems. The difference lies in the solutions: we at La Via and Conf offer solidarity as the core philosophy, and propose solutions that are complex and long to implement, for example market regulations and public stockpiling, public intervention on prices etc. Whereas conservative and far-right unions offer nationalist approaches and falsely simple solutions. CR is even quite sceptical about climate change. One concrete example: at La Via we say that if a pesticide is forbidden in Europe, it should be forbidden everywhere on the planet, and it’s completely horrible that Europe is still producing and exporting it. Right and far-right unions argue that if a pesticide is still being produced and used elsewhere, then we should re-authorise it in Europe, on the false ground of fair competition. So La Via pushes farming standards upwards to be more respectful of human rights and of the environment; right and far-right unions want to lower environmental and social standards to “align” with other countries.

With the unpopular free trade agreement with the Mercosur, it’s a little strange. La Via and Conf have been the only ones fighting against it for the past ten years. Now suddenly, we’ll be electing delegates at the Chambre d’Agriculture in January 2025, and we see that FNSEA is taking the streets with violent and powerful actions against this free trade agreement. But after the elections, let me tell you that they’ll be less vocal about it, as they’ve been in favour of every free trade agreement in the past 20 years.

degrowth.info: Speaking of protests: just yesterday the French riot police was arresting five unionists from Conf at a gathering, whereas they consistently let FNSEA demonstrate violently. Is there a double standard for small and big unions, and if so, why?

Jean Thévenot: At the international and European level, there is indeed a representation issue. Copa*Cogeca (the biggest farmers’ union present at the EU level that largely defends the interests of industrial farming) and other agribusiness actors get more attention from institutions than La Via, particularly in the EU. In France there is a huge difference. FNSEA was created in 1946 from the ashes of a WWII fascist union. At that time it was the only national farming union, and it was compulsory to join to get subsidies or services from the government. Only in the 1980’s did the French government open the possibility to create other national unions. Conf was created in 1987 (although regional branches already existed before that), and CR in 1992.

This historical proximity between the state and FNSEA left a legacy. FNSEA has a huge influence in policy-making and direct links with the French agriculture minister. The agriculture minister will never be able to do anything if not FNSEA-approved. FNSEA was until recently still in charge of collecting some state taxes. FNSEA and the government work together and defend the same neoliberal, industrialisation ideals. To give an example, Conf recently sent a delegation to a public event on farming to meet the agriculture minister. When the Conf delegation stepped into the meeting room, they saw the minister was accompanied by two other men. Colleagues, counsellors, secretaries? No, no! The minister answered they were the local FNSEA delegates, as if it was perfectly natural that they should be present. After the meeting, the minister stood up, thanked the Conf delegation, and went to dinner with the two FNSEA guys. It is not a detail: it means that FNSEA is the French agriculture ministry. Anywhere the agriculture minister goes, in any part of the country, they’ll be accompanied by FNSEA. Everything they’ll say and think will be recorded and checked by the local FNSEA.

Since the government sees FNSEA as an extension of itself, it will never make any repression against it. With other unions it is different. The government views Conf as dangerous, diverse leftists. We are denouncing their policies, so they want to shut us up and that’s why repression is so strong. CR endures more repression than FNSEA, with some members also arrested in demonstrations – but less than Conf. Even if CR has violent actions and methods, they remain a bunch of white, French, straight men, so they are not perceived as frightening.

degrowth.info: Small-scale farmers, especially organic ones, are famously not working along the model encouraged by (neo)liberal states. As a small-scale farmer, can one still make a living in today’s world?

Jean Thévenot: The main issue is that people who want to farm in a more sustainable and healthy way have to sell their products at a higher price and end up feeding the rich. That’s a big concern for La Via and Conf. Everywhere in the world current food prices make it nearly impossible for farmers and peasants (I’m not talking about agro-industrial farm managers here) to make any living. At the same time most of the European population, especially lower classes, simply cannot afford to double or triple their food budget. People are losing on both ends, and those benefiting are, as usual, transnational companies, retailers, transformers, who buy farmers’ production at a low price, sell bad quality food, and make big profits. In a liberal system there is no solution to this problem.

At La Via food is considered a basic human need that has to be safeguarded by the state – not a commodity. With this vision we can have at the same time farmers making a good living, and poor people accessing good food. In France one of the best policy proposals is the sécurité sociale de l’alimentation (food social insurance). The idea is a publicly-managed system where anybody can access good food, and to which people contribute based on their revenue – just like with health care. We are also in favour of supply management policies and quota systems, so as to avoid over-production, export, and the disruption of markets in Africa or elsewhere. Of course all this goes completely against the liberal logic. But it is possible, and environmentally and socially sustainable! Brazil had an interesting policy of buying food from small-scale farmers to distribute to poor people. India has a similar system, which impressively covers well over half a billion people. There are examples in the Global North too: Canada is self-sufficient for dairy, its production is controlled publicly, farmers and consumers receive and pay a fair price for their products.

degrowth.info: Looking more specifically at France where you’re based, how was it setting up your farm? What state support did you, and do you still, get?

Jean Thévenot: In France one might get the impression that everything is wrong. But it currently has one of the best policies for young farmers, with fairly high subsidies for young farmers compared to other EU countries, mostly thanks to Conf advocacy. These subsidies allowed my business partner and me to buy materials and machinery when we set up our farm, and even to get some extra money during the first months when we couldn’t make a living from the farm yet.

Most subsidies in Europe are paid per hectare. That’s a problem because the more land you have the more money you get, which explains why farms are getting bigger and bigger. It’s also a problem for generational renewal. But for the first time in 2023 Conf managed to change things on one specific Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidy for youth: the subsidy is paid per person instead of per hectare. It’s two of us on my farm, so we got this subsidy twice. Even if CAP is an EU policy, most payments are decided nationally, so this unfortunately only applies to France.

degrowth.info: What methods do you have at hand to influence and change national and international laws and regulations that frame your work?

Jean Thévenot: Maybe the best example of what La Via does at the international level is the 2018 UNDROP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas). La Via was deeply involved in the drafting and the voting of this text. In the coming years we will work on pressuring countries and governments to nationally implement this international declaration.

There is often a big debate in activist movements about acting from inside or outside the system. The vision of La Via is that we have two legs and need both to go onwards. At La Via we are big enough to both influence institutions from within and pressure them from the outside. We demonstrate in the streets, block huge companies’ facilities, and at the same time we have people negotiating with institutions. Two weeks ago I was in the DG AGRI in Brussels with a delegation of five farmers, negotiating with the director-general. At the same time, we had roughly a hundred farmers demonstrating against the Mercosur free trade agreement just down the road. That changes the power balance!

degrowth.info: You’ve mentioned “generational renewal” earlier, and we hear a lot about it at the EU level. Could you tell us what it is about?

Jean Thévenot: The logic of capitalism and neoliberalism transforms rural areas into territories of exploitation – mines, oil, industrial food production. All feeding into cities. As a result, people don’t want to stay in, or come to, rural areas. Looking at data: the average age of farmers in Europe is 57; we lost millions of farms in the past two decades. And everybody – Conf, FNSEA, CR, the French government, the EU Commission – agrees: generational renewal is internationally the main issue in farming at the moment.

Again, the difference is about the solutions we propose. Many actors push for digitalisation, basically arguing that we should replace people with robots, machines, GMOs and New Genomic Techniques. That’s the European Commission’s vision. At the same time the Commission understands that one needs people to manage all that digitalisation, so we still need young people to go into farming, and generational renewal remains a priority. The new European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food created youth councils on generational renewal in which La Via, Copa*Cogeca and all the farmers’ unions will participate. Participants will meet regularly in the coming two years and the conversations will inform European policies. That’s a good entry point and a bit of hope in all this panorama.

Copa*Cogeca’s model is based on exploitation and leaves little space for young people. La Via on the contrary has plenty to propose. First we need public services, schools, doctors etc. The question of revenue is very important: if one cannot make a fair living from one’s work, young people will not be willing to go into farming – so we need fair prices, and we need to stop free trade agreements. We need high environmental standards. We also need access to land, and if we want that then the CAP per-hectare subsidies need to change. Everything in La Via’s food sovereignty vision fits in the generational renewal conversation.

degrowth.info: How does La Via make this struggle for generational renewal into an intersectional one?

Jean Thévenot: In the past people farmed from generation to generation. Now people arriving into farming often don’t come from a farming background and start farming in a new way. There are more collective farms where farmers share the production, support each other, can take holidays etc. But there is also a very strong image of rural areas being white, straight and racist. If we want generational renewal to be possible we need to make rural areas welcoming to all people willing to farm, in all their diversity. That’s why intersectionality is important.

In my case, I’m part of the LGBTQIA+ community. In the valley where I live I was accepted as such, but in a lot of rural areas prejudices against this community are deterring people from coming. Another example is that of migrant workers. A lot of people arrive in Europe with a farming background. They have knowledge and competencies, and a lot of them want to keep farming. It’s difficult to make a living in cities, whereas rural areas desperately lack workforce, so Conf works with an association whose aim is to integrate migrant people in rural areas. It is also a way of fighting the far-right: if someone who could be racist hires someone from a foreign country, gets to know this person through work, through sharing tasks and everyday life, and discovers that this person knows farming – well this is how you fight racism!

degrowth.info: To wrap up this conversation, would you like to share your thoughts on potential synergies between La Via’s struggle and the degrowth movement?

Jean Thévenot: We have to change our view on liberty and on autonomy. For a very long time we have defined freedom as having no responsibility and no task. If we think of freedom like that, the majority of humanity will never be free so a minority can be free. I think we should replace this concept of freedom with another based on autonomy: freedom is the ability to fulfil your needs by yourself – not in an individualistic, survivalist logic, but rather in a collective way. This autonomy gives strength, legitimacy, and well-being. If we want to degrow the current agri-food system towards a more ecological one, we need to put millions of people back in the fields, and we need everyone to be at some point involved in the basic survival of their community. It’s unavoidable.

All the people I meet who quit their classic city-supermaket life to come to the countryside say that it was the best decision in their life. But they are not the majority, and come mostly from privileged backgrounds. How do we get from the current system to the desired one? How do we influence people to change their way of life so they engage again with practical activities linked with their own needs? How do we not target just privileged people but also people from popular classes? Degrowthers should engage in sociological research, try to tackle these questions, and harness the advocacy branch of the movement to foster change.

This article is part of a series on movements for social and environmental justice worldwide. Find out more and read the other pieces of the series here.



Jean Thévenot  is a young farmer producing organic seedlings in the Basque Country, working with a wide range of varieties of veggies, flowers and aromatics using local seeds for gardeners and producers. He belongs to Confédération Paysanne in France and is active in the international network La Via Campesina (200 millions + farmers!). Jean works on various issues from labour conditions in european agriculture to defence of LGBTQIA+ rights, as well as the promotion of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). Peasant-based agroecology in a food sovereignty framework is the best way towards the future!