The Left, Labour Unions and Mass Organizations

From Historical Necessity to Questions of Renewal in the Countries of the South (Iraq as a Model)

By Rezgar Akrawi

May 28, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Iraqi Post/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

Most countries of the Middle East and the Global South operating under authoritarian regimes share a single structural crisis, one whose substance is the acute and chronic fragmentation and weakness that afflicts mass organisations, trade unions, feminist movements and student bodies, extending further to undermine coordination among the forces of the left themselves. This is not a purely Iraqi predicament; it is a recurring phenomenon in comparable contexts, one that finds in the Iraqi experience its most transparent expression.

Authoritarian regimes generated oppressive conditions that pushed the forces of the left to adopt tightly centralised organisational forms under the weight of repression and persecution, producing an approach built on constructing clandestine and sometimes semi-public trade unions and mass organisations closely bound to political formations, at the expense of their independence and their capacity to embrace broader social constituencies.

Fairness demands acknowledgement that this approach was not mistaken in all circumstances; it played a pivotal and undeniable role in specific historical phases, when organisational centralisation was a necessity imposed by the repressive reality. Yet time has changed fundamentally in the era of the digital revolution.

The masses today, and especially the new generations raised on a culture of instant access to information, horizontal organising and direct participation in decision-making, are no longer willing to serve as material for mobilisation in the service of a predetermined party agenda. It is for this reason that the present paper seeks to open a serious debate around the revision of the model of the affiliated union and the loyalist mass organisation, and to explore an alternative model.

From Organic Affiliation to Independence

After 2003, most left-wing formations were keen to maintain and establish their own unions, federations and organisations, giving rise to a mass landscape characterised by dispersed energies, a proliferation of names and a dwindling of actual effectiveness.

A union bound to a particular organisation finds genuine difficulty in embracing manual and intellectual workers in all their intellectual, ethnic and religious diversity. A feminist organisation tied to a specific party finds difficulty in attracting women from different political backgrounds. A student union gradually transforms into an arena for inter-party manoeuvring.

A personal experience I lived through in the summer of 1992 reveals the depth of this predicament, when we gathered with comrades from the left and the unemployed to build a union for the unemployed in the Kurdistan Region. Some comrades proposed a statement saturated with ideological language, and I disagreed with them, arguing that what we were striving for was the construction of a union for all the unemployed, of every persuasion and orientation. That fundamental question, raised in the summer of 1992, remains at the heart of the very predicament we are discussing today.

The Weakness of Coordination and Its Repercussions

There is a painful paradox worthy of reflection: the left raises the slogan of unity among the labouring masses, yet this organisational approach has inadvertently led to the dispersal of efforts and the weakening of the trade union and mass movement on the ground.

The mass fragmentation we observe in the union landscape reflects in part a prior political fragmentation, manifested in the multiplicity of left-wing formations and the divergence of their positions, a divergence that is natural and legitimate in itself, since the complex Iraqi, regional and global situation accommodates different left-wing interpretations.

Yet when this divergence transforms into conflict and resentment that weakens joint work, it casts its heavy shadow over the entire mass arena and redirects the left’s energies away from building popular strength toward squandering them in internal battles that serve no one but the enemies of change.

The absence of coordination has also produced a pattern of competition within the same mass circle rather than expansion toward new social constituencies. The mass map has remained limited in scope despite the multiplicity of organisations, because this multiplicity did not always lead to a division of labour and an address to different segments of society; rather, it led to overlap and repetition within the same territory.

Lessons from Effective Union Experiences

Historical experience reveals that effective independent progressive unions were a pivotal factor in social and political change, and that their strength derived from their rootedness in their working-class base rather than from their affiliation with one party or another.

In Tunisia, the Tunisian General Labour Union played a pivotal role in the overthrow of the dictatorship in 2011. In South Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Unions demonstrated that a strong independent union can serve as a front for the defence of labour rights without dissolving into any party.

In Brazil, an independent union movement developed and gave rise to the Workers’ Party, which reached power. In Denmark, left-wing parties work within existing independent unions, acquiring deeper social influence.

Structural Challenges

To the foregoing must be added deeper structural challenges, most prominent among them the rentier nature of the Iraqi economy. Oil accounts for approximately 90 percent of general budget revenues, making the majority of workers government employees bound to the state by a relationship of direct dependence that constrains the margin for their independent organisation. This was clearly evident during the October 2019 protests, when unions were unable to convert the momentum of the street into organised strikes.

Added to this is the role of some international donor bodies in reinforcing models of civil society that marginalise progressive trade unions, along with the reinforcement of the phenomenon of personalisation, which makes the continuity of an organisation hostage to particular individuals.

Towards a Renewed Popular Left

The absence of strong and independent unions and organisations has weakened the left in ways that go beyond what is visible, as it found itself in a painful organisational vacuum when decisive moments of protest arrived.

The digital revolution has redrawn the map of power and influence, and protest movements have revealed that flexible horizontal organising is capable of generating vast mobilising energy that structures of excessive centralisation are unable to produce.

The path to genuine unity passes through two complementary tracks. The first is collective participation in building independent and strong progressive trade unions and mass organisations that bring everyone together regardless of their intellectual, ethnic, religious or party affiliations. The second is coordination and joint work at the political level through diverse alliance frameworks as gradual steps toward building a broad and unified progressive left framework.

The true strength of the left lies not only in its intellectual propositions, but in its capacity to build independent progressive institutions rooted in the daily lives of the people, and to transform their social energies into a genuine force for change that opens the road toward the democratic socialist alternative.Email

Rezgar Akrawi

Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist researcher specializing in issues of technology and the left, working in the field of systems development and e-governance.

Greenhouse Civil Society: How the Western Development Industry Has Produced — and Continues to Produce — Colonial Dependency

By Majid Maleki Meighani

May 27, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Photo from US Embassy New Zealand (Flickr, Public domain)

In mid-May 2026, an article by Mohammad Altaf Afridi, a former USAID program director in Pakistan, published in The Guardian attracted considerable attention. Afridi, who spent more than two decades managing millions of dollars in foreign aid, made a striking admission: what the West has built for years under the banner of “strengthening civil society” in countries of the Global South has often not been deeply rooted popular institutions, but rather networks of professionalized, project-based organizations structurally dependent on foreign funding — institutions more accountable to embassies, foundations, and Western donors than to the people they claim to represent.

His account of a mechanic’s market in Islamabad — where workers and shopkeepers had organized collectively to defend their interests without receiving a single dollar of foreign aid — was more than a personal anecdote. It exposed the profound gap between “real society” and a class of professional activists who speak in the name of the people while depending for their survival on the uninterrupted flow of external funding.

What has emerged across much of the periphery over the past three decades is not simply a handful of corrupt NGOs or failed development projects. Rather, it is a global industry of civil-society production: an industry that transforms social protest, human suffering, and even political resistance into projects, grants, financial reports, and evaluation metrics. Within this global marketplace, it is not the most radical forces that survive, but the most manageable ones — those capable of speaking the language of Western institutions, employing donor-approved vocabulary, and translating social anger into forms, presentations, and policy frameworks.

This is precisely where the critiques advanced by thinkers such as Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson become essential. Decades ago, they warned that “development” is not merely an economic project but a technology of power: a mechanism for managing peripheral societies, containing radicalism, and reproducing the global capitalist order.

Within this framework, poverty is no longer understood as the product of global capital accumulation, historical colonialism, or structural inequality. Instead, it is reframed as a technical or managerial problem. Consequently, the proposed solutions are no longer structural transformation or redistribution, but “capacity building,” “resilience,” and “good governance” — neutral, technocratic terms that conceal class conflict, exploitation, and imperial domination.

Afghanistan may be the clearest example of this historical failure. Following the 2001 occupation by NATO and the United States, billions of dollars in foreign aid flooded the country. Officially, the objective was to build democracy, women’s rights, and a modern civil society. In practice, however, a massive aid-driven economy emerged — one composed of security contractors, development consultants, NGO managers, international bureaucrats, and urban elites tied to Western money.

At its height, foreign assistance accounted for nearly 40 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. Thousands of organizations and projects were established whose survival depended not on genuine social participation but on the continuous injection of foreign capital. This structure remained stable only as long as the Western military and financial apparatus remained intact.

Yet following the U.S. withdrawal, and especially after the drastic reduction of USAID funding in 2025, this artificial structure rapidly collapsed. Hundreds of projects were shut down, thousands lost their jobs, and many organizations that had long been presented as “representatives of Afghan civil society” effectively disappeared. The sudden implosion of this network revealed that much of what had been called civil society was, in reality, an economy of dependency.

But the issue was not merely the failure of development. In Afghanistan, NGOs functioned as part of the architecture of occupation itself. Development projects frequently complemented military operations: pacifying social discontent, purchasing legitimacy for the new order, and cultivating a class of local elites aligned with Western interests. It is therefore unsurprising that with the collapse of military presence, the development order collapsed as well.

In Iran, although the political conditions differ significantly, the logic of dependency has taken another form. Over the past two decades, segments of the expatriate opposition media sphere and various organizations abroad have benefited from funding linked to institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and Western foundations. While these networks present themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights, they frequently operate within the broader geopolitical priorities of Western powers.

Structural financial dependency sooner or later produces political dependency. Any media outlet or organization whose economic survival relies on foreign donors inevitably adapts itself to their implicit red lines. For this reason, many Persian-language media outlets abroad are highly active when discussing state corruption, compulsory hijab, or cultural tensions, yet remain silent — or adopt deeply conservative positions — regarding economic sanctions, global financial capital, neoliberal privatization, or the destructive consequences of market-driven policies.

This process effectively reduces politics from a question of class and political economy to a series of cultural and identity-based disputes. Within this framework, workers, teachers, and retirees are pushed to the margins, replaced by “experts,” “professional activists,” and “project managers.”

By contrast, genuine social movements generally emerge outside this orbit. Labor strikes in Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Company, protests by steel workers in Ahvaz, demonstrations by teachers and pensioners, and the struggles of farmers in Isfahan over water rights were not products of foreign grants or Western think tanks. They arose directly from material crises: inflation, privatization, economic insecurity, and structural injustice. It is precisely this social rootedness that has given these movements durability and legitimacy.

Real civil society, unlike its greenhouse version, is always disorderly, contradictory, volatile, and unpredictable. It cannot be engineered through performance indicators, workshops, or evaluation forms. Genuine civil society emerges from the living contradictions of society itself, not from the glass offices of the development industry.

The experiences of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran point toward a common lesson: no society can be liberated through foreign dollars. In many cases, the Western development project has functioned not as an instrument of emancipation but as a mechanism for reproducing dependency. Rather than dismantling domination, it has often produced a softer, more managerial form of the same system of control.

If genuine liberation is to endure, it can only emerge from the independent organization of ordinary people, from rooted social institutions, and from authentic class struggle — a difficult, contradictory, and lengthy process that cannot be purchased, engineered, or imported.

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References

• Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
• James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
• Arundhati Roy, “NGO-ization of Resistance”
• Reports by SIGAR on corruption and structural aid dependency in Afghanistan
• World Bank reports on foreign aid and the Afghan economy
• Mohammad Altaf Afridi, article published in The Guardian, May 2026
• Media reports on the financial crises and structural changes affecting Persian-language broadcasters abroad, including Manoto TV and Iran InternationalEmail

Majid Maleki Meighani

Majid Maleki Meighani, (sometimes writing under the name Majid Maleki), is an Iranian political analyst, writer, and translator. He was imprisoned for his political activities. His work focuses on critical analysis of Iran’s labor movement, the political left, anti-imperialist critiques of geopolitics, and social movements in West Asia and the Global South. His analysis is grounded in direct fieldwork and interviews within local communities. He has translated into Persian Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and the collection Voices of the Arab Spring. He has been a contributor to ZNetwork, Tribune Zamane, and Akhbar-e Rooz. You can access his full body of work on his author page on ZNetwork.

We Need a Care Package!

We've built an economy that depends on unpaid and underpaid care, but penalizes the people who provide it.

By Nancy Folbre

May 28, 2026

Source: Dollars and Sense

Eighty years ago, an organization named CARE—which stands for Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere—responded to worldwide hunger in the aftermath of World War II by sending millions of packages of food. This post commemorates that effort.

A diverse group of researchers and policy advocates met recently at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to brainstorm and draft proposals for “game-changing” policies for the U.S. economy. As part of this larger effort, I led a small team asking a simple but profound question: what would our economy look like if we took seriously the work of caring for one another?

The short answer: not like what we have. 

In the United States, we rely on a patchwork of underfunded programs, unpaid labor (mostly by women), and heroic improvisation by families trying to hold things together. We treat care as a private burden rather than a public good. And then we act surprised when the system produces stress, inequality, and declining confidence in the future.

Three bold, interconnected proposals—universal child care, paid family and medical leave plus long-term care support, and a monthly child allowance—would transform life for American families. Together, they form a coherent package that addresses caregiving at every stage of life: from infancy through old age. Other wealthy nations have already figured this out. It’s long past time the United States did too.

These proposals would work together to give families the flexibility they need. They build on policies that have already been put in place by individual states or experimented with at the federal level. They are game-changers because they are all conceived as free, universal benefits that would be funded by taxes on income from capital, rather than from labor (stay tuned for further reports from the Game-Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America project).  

Free Child Care for Every Family

Let’s start with the basics: raising children costs money, and right now, most of that cost falls squarely on parents. Child care alone can run tens of thousands of dollars a year. The United States currently spends less than half as much of its GDP on early childhood programs as comparable wealthy nations do—a startling gap that has real consequences. One recent study put the cost of inadequate child care at $122 billion in lost earnings and productivity every year.

The proposal here is simple: fully universal, federally funded child care and early education services for all children from birth through school age. Not a voucher program. Not a means-tested subsidy that phases out just when families need it most. A real public system, the way we have public schools—because, as the proposal puts it, parents are “raising the next generation of workers and taxpayers,” and society has a stake in that.

This isn’t a fantasy. New Mexico launched free universal child care in 2025. The program, which evolved from an earlier expansion of child-care assistance begun in 2022, is funded largely through revenues connected to the state’s oil and gas wealth and the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund. Parents and teachers joined forces to make it happen.  

The U.S. military has run a high-quality subsidized child care system for decades. France, Denmark, Sweden—country after country has also made this work. Several American cities, including New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., are already investing in public child care on their own.

What would a federal program like this cost? Based on earlier estimates, somewhere in the range of $150–$200 billion annually. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the proposed $1.5 trillion “defense” budget for next fiscal year. 

Time to Care—Without Losing Your Job or Going Broke

Free child care services alone aren’t enough, because not all care can—or should—be outsourced.

We all need time to care for newborns, recover from illness, or support aging parents. Yet the United States remains a global outlier in failing to provide paid family and medical leave. The result is a quiet crisis: people skipping needed care, leaving jobs, or absorbing significant financial hardship.

State-level programs show a better path. A growing number of states now offer paid leave funded through social insurance—essentially pooling risk so that individuals aren’t left to fend for themselves. These programs improve health, strengthen employment continuity, and even reduce reliance on more expensive forms of care like nursing homes.

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed unpaid leave for workers at larger employers. But for many families, unpaid leave is no leave at all because they cannot afford to forgo wages. Among the lowest-wage workers, only 6% have access to paid family leave through their employers.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have already fixed this on their own, establishing paid family and medical leave programs financed through small payroll contributions—essentially a form of social insurance, like unemployment. The evidence from these states is clear: paid leave improves infant health, boosts maternal well-being, increases fathers’ involvement in child care, and even reduces nursing home admissions. It works.

We should bring this policy to the national level, building on the best state models and adding something most state programs lack: a “use it or lose it” period reserved specifically for fathers. Research shows this is the single most effective way to increase paternal caregiving—which, in turn, improves outcomes for children, mothers, and families as a whole. Nordic countries have been doing this for decades with considerable success. 

The same logic extends to long-term care. More than 70% of Americans who reach the age of 65 will eventually need sustained assistance—help with bathing, eating, or getting around. Right now, the primary system for supporting this is Medicaid, available only after you’ve spent down nearly all your assets. Washington State has pioneered a different approach: a small mandatory payroll tax that builds a universal long-term care insurance benefit, available to the whole middle class, not just the poor. Starting in 2026, eligible workers—including family members—can access up to $36,500 in lifetime benefits for in-home care, equipment, and support. Other states are watching closely.

A federal mandate to bring both paid leave and long-term care insurance to all states would mean that no American family faces bankruptcy—or forces a loved one into a nursing home—simply because of a caregiving crisis.

A Monthly Check for Every Child

We also need a universal basic income for children, which could take the form of a monthly family allowance. A monthly cash payment—around $426 per child in today’s dollars—could be delivered by the Social Security Administration to every family with a child under 18, regardless of income or employment status. The End Child Poverty Act provides the basis for our recommendations here, with extensive background provided by the People’s Policy Project.

We already know this approach works. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit temporarily made the U.S. child benefit nearly universal and raised payments to $3,000–$3,600 per child per year, delivered monthly. The result? Child poverty fell to 5.2%—the lowest rate ever recorded. Three to four million children were lifted out of poverty every single month the program ran. Black child poverty dropped by over 40%. Hispanic child poverty plummeted from 30% to 8% over a decade, with much of that drop driven by the 2021 expansion.

Then Congress let the expansion expire at the end of 2021, and child poverty shot back up. It was a policy choice—not an inevitability.

Germany pays a flat monthly child benefit of about $295 per child, no strings attached. Canada’s federal benefit runs nearly $500 per month for lower-income families. Most of the world’s wealthy democracies have concluded that raising children is a social good, that all children deserve a basic floor of material security, and that monthly cash payments are one of the most effective ways to deliver it. The United States remains a glaring outlier.

A universal child allowance isn’t charity—it’s an acknowledgment that parenting is productive work, that children are society’s future, and that the costs of raising them shouldn’t fall entirely on those who directly care for them. 

The Case for the Whole Package

Together these policy proposals address a fundamental design flaw in the American system: we’ve built an economy that depends on unpaid and underpaid care and then penalizes the people who provide it. The hidden costs show up everywhere—in women’s lower lifetime earnings, in stressed families, in high rates of child poverty, and in elderly people who are isolated and without help.

The critics will say we can’t afford it. But we’re already paying—in lost productivity, in worse health outcomes, in the sheer human cost of a system that leaves people to fend for themselves. We can’t afford to keep pretending that the status quo works.

America needs this care package. Let’s deliver it. 

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This article was originally published by Dollars and Sense; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Nancy Folbre

Nancy Folbre is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate editor of the journal Feminist Economics. She is the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford University Press).

Reviewing “The Boroughs”

Seth Sandronsky
May 29, 2026



Logo for the television series The Boroughs – Fair Use

Set in New Mexico, “The Boroughs” is a sci-fi miniseries. The cast members are Baby Boomers who live in a spotless retirement community. All is not peaceful though. A monster hunts the Boomers, as they confront their mortality with a mix of humor, grief and regret. Why motivates the hunt? Time is one answer.

On a related note, the setting for “The Boroughs” is New Mexico, the U.S. state that hosted perhaps the biggest monstrosity in human history: nuclear weapons production beginning in 1943, via the Manhattan Project. New Mexico is now in part a nuclear stockpile site. But I digress.

The stellar cast of “The Boroughs” features Al Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, Jena Malone, Carlos Miranda, Seth Numrich, Dee Wallace, Jane Kaczmarek, Rafael Casal, Denis O’Hare and Eric Edelstein. They bring decades of acting experience to their craft. Woodard, Molina, Peters and Davis shine especially bright, delivering authenticity and sincerity.

The writing is sharp and witty. Special effects add to the story line. The production sets with cathode ray tube televisions with their heft took me back to that time before the digital age.

As the episodes, eight in total, unfold in “The Boroughs,” characters perish, hardly an unusual occurrence, given their ages. On further inspection, questions involving the demise of characters emerge. Despite or because of what caused death, it shapes the lives of the living, a dialectical process that infuses this sci-fi miniseries, streaming on Netflix now.

In the case of the characters who Pullman and Woodard portray, marital infidelity is the particular lens that amplifies a survivor’s curiosity. That and Woodard’s character is a retired reporter put out to pasture before she’s ready, a not uncommon fate for experienced journalists.

Spoiler alert: the monster withdraws a vital bodily fluid from residents of “The Buroughs,” a metaphor for capitalism’s laws of motion: constant extraction and exploitation. These extractions in “The “Boroughs” reveal one way the system monetizes human bodies.

Meanwhile, a Fountain of Youth motive propels the story line. This is a New Age take on the legend of Spanish colonist Ponce de Leon and his quest for eternal life six centuries ago in what is Florida today.



Don’t hate the players, hate the game. Speaking of haters, I fingered the unctuous CEO of “The Buroughs” as a bad actor early on in the miniseries. How? His hairdo and surface charm gave him away. Plus, the CEO character’s wife drips with danger, giving off a femme fatale aura.

The soundtrack of “The Boroughs “ is a hit parade of tunes from the 1970s and 1980s. “Thunder Road” & “Born to Run” – Bruce Springsteen; “Shining Star” – Earth, Wind & Fire; “Night Moves” – Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band; “Ex-Factor” – Ms. Lauryn Hill; “Lovely Day” – Bill Withers; “I Can’t Stand the Rain” – Tina Turner; and “Barracuda” – Heart.

There’s a certain kind of narrative power derived from the Scooby Doo animated movies and series propelling “The Boroughs.” It’s a device that strengthens a new twist on an old story. That’s mortal beings facing time’s limits, pushing some of them to seek immortality. It’s a mortal temptation, and coming to grips with mortality isn’t easy, a conceit that animates “The Boroughs.”


Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

The Need for US Supreme Court Reform is Clearer Than Ever

Paul Gordon

 May 29, 2026

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Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair

To preserve our democracy, we must reform the Supreme Court.

In its recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, the Court’s Republican majority completed its years-long campaign to neuter the Voting Rights Act. Not coincidentally, they dramatically tilted the electoral playing field in Republicans’ favor.

The case came in the context of drawing congressional districts. The Court “interpreted” the Voting Rights Act to let legislators openly target minority communities and dilute their political influence if they do it for “partisan” reasons.

Before the ink was dry, Republican politicians in Southern states went into action. In Louisiana and Alabama, they cancelled congressional primary elections that had already started so that they could redraw the lines and get rid of majority-Black congressional districts. Tennessee split up the state’s only majority-Black congressional district (Memphis).

South Carolina also held a special session to target that state’s Black voters in time for this year’s midterm elections. Though the effort ultimately didn’t succeed, the lead sponsor openly admitted that the purpose was to ensure that national Republicans retain their majority in the House of Representatives.

The Callais decision was a political gift to Donald Trump, whose popularity is plummeting.

Before Callais, political observers expected Trump’s party to lose the House of Representatives.

Republicans still appear likely to do poorly in the midterm elections. But now, it could take a much larger supermajority of Americans for the congressional results to reflect the will of the people and actually vote them out of power.

It gets worse. Callais empowers Republicans to decimate Black representation and undermine democracy in state legislatures, city councils, and school boards, not just Congress. The justices have undermined decades of work to enfranchise people who had been locked out of power.

This is a red-alert moment for our democracy. And it goes far beyond this latest ruling.

This Court let corporations spend unlimited money buying our elections. They took away women’s access to safe abortion care. They let big companies force you to sign away your right to sue them when they cheat you or find other ways to violate your legal rights. They made it harder for working people to organize for better wages and benefits.

Again and again, this Court has given the most powerful people in our country even more power over the rest of us. And they make it harder for us to do anything about it. The far-right majority has broken our democracy so their friends and allies can take money and power from us with impunity.

Here are three ways to fight back.

Amazingly, the most powerful federal court in the land is the only one without a binding code of ethics. So Justice Alito can fly a flag associated with Trump’s “stop the steal” movement after the 2021 insurrection, then sit on cases involving Trump’s role in that insurrection. And Clarence Thomas can get away with voting for Trump’s position in January 6 cases even though his wife Ginni had urged Trump not to concede the 2020 election.

Congress should make the justices adopt a binding code of ethics.

Second, having justices routinely stay in office for decades is not what the nation’s founders intended. Some presidents don’t appoint any justices during a four-year term, while others appoint two or three. Too much depends on random events such as an unexpected death, or carefully timed retirements to ensure replacement by a like-minded justice.

The Court has become wildly imbalanced. The Constitution lets Congress set term limits for justices. It should do so.

Finally, the next time there is a pro-democracy president, Congress should expand the number of justices. Otherwise, no law that Congress passes to protect our rights is safe from being neutered or completely struck down by the current rogue Supreme Court majority.

Because ultimately, the power in this country belongs to us.

Paul Gordon is People For the American Way’s senior legislative counsel.