Mounting economic costs of India’s killer smog

By AFP
November 23, 2024

New Delhi is choked every year in noxious smog that authorities appear powerless to bring under control - Copyright AFP Money SHARMA

Arunabh SAIKIA

Noxious smog smothering the plains of north India is not only choking the lungs of residents and killing millions, but also slowing the country’s economic growth.

India’s capital New Delhi frequently ranks among the world’s most polluted cities. Each winter, vehicle and factory emissions couple with farm fires from surrounding states to blanket the city in a dystopian haze.

Acrid smog this month contains more than 50 times the World Health Organization recommended limit of fine particulate matter — dangerous cancer-causing microparticles known as PM2.5 pollutants, that enter the bloodstream through the lungs.

Experts say India’s worsening air pollution is having a ruinous impact on its economy — with one study estimating losses to the tune of $95 billion annually, or roughly three percent of the country’s GDP.

The true extent of the economic price India is paying could be even greater.

“The externality costs are huge and you can’t assign a value to it,” said Vibhuti Garg, of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Bhargav Krishna of the Delhi-based research collective Sustainable Futures Collaborative said “costs add up in every phase”.

“From missing a day at work to developing chronic illness, the health costs associated with that, to premature death and the impact that has on the family of the person,” Krishna told AFP.



– ‘Health and wealth hazard’-



Still, several studies have tried to quantify the damage.

One by the global consultancy firm Dalberg concluded that in 2019, air pollution cost Indian businesses $95 billion due to “reduced productivity, work absences and premature death”.

The amount is nearly three percent of India’s budget, and roughly twice its annual public health expenditure.

“India lost 3.8 billion working days in 2019, costing $44 billion to air pollution caused by deaths,” according to the study which calculated that toxic air “contributes to 18 percent of all deaths in India”.

Pollution has also had a debilitating impact on the consumer economy because of direct health-related eventualities, the study said, reducing footfall and causing annual losses of $22 billion.

The numbers are even more staggering for Delhi, the epicentre of the crisis, with the capital province losing as much as six percent of its GDP annually to air pollution.

Restaurateur Sandeep Anand Goyle called the smog a “health and wealth hazard”.

“People who are health conscious avoid stepping out so we suffer,” said Goyle, who heads the Delhi chapter of the National Restaurant Association of India.

Tourism has also been impacted, as the smog season coincides with the period when foreigners traditionally visit northern India — too hot for many during the blisteringly hot summers.

“The smog is giving a bad name to India’s image,” said Rajiv Mehra of the Indian Association of Tour Operators.

Delhi faces an average 275 days of unhealthy air a year, according to monitors.

– ‘Premature deaths’ –

Piecemeal initiatives by the government — — that critics call half-hearted — have failed to adequately address the problem.

Academic research indicates that its detrimental impact on the Indian economy is adding up.

A 2023 World Bank paper said that air pollution’s “micro-level” impacts on the economy translate to “macro-level effects that can be observed in year-to-year changes in GDP”.

The paper estimates that India’s GDP would have been 4.5 percent higher at the end of 2023, had the country managed to curb pollution by half in the previous 25 years.

Another study published in the Lancet health journal on the direct health impacts of air pollution in 2019 estimated an annual GDP deceleration of 1.36 percent due to “lost output from premature deaths and morbidity”.

Desperate emergency curbs — such as shuttering schools to reduce traffic emissions as well as banning construction — come with their own economic costs.

“Stopping work for weeks on end every winter makes our schedules go awry, and we end up overshooting budgets,” said Sanjeev Bansal, the chairman of the Delhi unit of the Builders Association of India.

Pollution’s impact on the Indian economy is likely to get worse if action is not taken.

With India’s median age expected to rise to 32 by 2030, the Dalberg study predicts that “susceptibility to air pollution will increase, as will the impact on mortality”.

Why is it still so hard to breathe in India and Pakistan?

The world’s worst air pollution is getting worse, but there are concrete ways to fix it.


by Umair Irfan

Nov 22, 2024

VOX

Commuters step out in a foggy winter morning amid rising air pollution, on November 19, 2024 on the outskirts of Delhi in India. 

Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.


Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

We’re still not getting the full picture of the dangers of air pollution

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors — delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers — the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

Related:The Air Quality Index and how to use it, explained

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

Lahore, Pakistan, on a day when the air quality index was 37 (left) and on a day when the air quality index was 496 (right). Dawar Hameed Butt/Nature


However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”



IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.


Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.


Schroeder noted however that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources — like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions — then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Politics lies at the core of the air pollution problem


Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances — between neighborhoods or even street by street — and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.


Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.


Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.


The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Related:The law that’s helping fuel Delhi’s deadly air pollution


Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.


Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution — and could also be the key to solving it.


When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

Traders and customers gathered at a wholesale fish market engulfed in smog in Lahore, Pakistan, on November 21, 2024.

 Arif Ali/AFP via Getty Images


The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, India is asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

The unexpected place that could become an immigration flashpoint under Trump

Trump’s immigration crackdown could extend to the US-Canada border.


by Nicole Narea

Nov 23, 2024

VOX

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with Donald Trump during the G7 official welcome at Le Manoir Richelieu on June 8, 2018 in Quebec City, Canada.

 Leon Neal/Getty Images

The US-Mexico border isn’t the only place where the impact of President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies is likely to be keenly felt. Major changes are likely to come to the US-Canada border, as well.

Tom Homan, who Trump recently named his “border czar,” has sought to sound the alarm about immigrants entering the US without authorization via the Canadian border, and has outlined plans to make entering the US through its northern border more difficult. Canada is also bracing for a potential influx of immigrants if Trump moves forward with his plans for mass deportations and to end temporary protections for more than 1 million immigrants in the United States.

The Canadian border isn’t often a focus of the US political debate over immigration, but policy discussions on both sides of the border suggest that may change in the next Trump administration. That could both strain normally friendly US-Canada relations and reshape domestic Canadian politics on immigration.

Changes are already underway in Canada. After Trump’s election, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reestablished a special Cabinet committee on relations between the two countries that will reportedly have a major immigration focus. Trudeau will now not only have to contend with Trump’s policies but also a Canadian public that has become increasingly resistant to accepting asylum seekers and refugees in the last four years.

Though it receives less attention than the US-Mexico border, the US-Canada border has become a flashpoint in the past. During his first administration, Trump sought to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a set of legal protections for citizens of certain countries experiencing upheaval. As a result, thousands of immigrants flocked to the northern border in 2018 to seek refuge in Canada.

In 2023, a dirt road in upstate New York also became an informal gateway for some 40,000 immigrants crossing over to Canada to seek asylum, most from Latin America but some coming from as far as Asia. The Canadian government eventually closed the crossing in 2023. Now, the border may again become a priority in US-Canada diplomacy.

Trump’s plans for the northern border

Trump himself has not outlined his plans for the Canadian border, but Homan has been clear on his recommendations.

Homan said in an interview with a local TV station in New York earlier this month that the northern border constitutes an “extreme national security vulnerability,” citing increasing numbers of migrant encounters in recent years, including of hundreds of people on the US terror watchlist. Border agents recorded almost 199,000 encounters along the northern border in fiscal year 2024, which ended in October, compared to about 110,000 just two years before.

Canada “can’t be a gateway to terrorists coming to the United States,” Homan said in the interview.

He added that he intends to tackle the pace of migration once at the White House by deploying more immigration enforcement agents to the northern border and encouraging Trump to negotiate with Trudeau to increase enforcement on the Canadian side.

Homan also suggested that a version of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy could be implemented in Canada. It’s not clear exactly what that might look like or whether Trudeau’s government would acquiesce to such a policy, but the original version forced tens of thousands of migrants to await decisions on their US immigration cases in Mexico for months. President Joe Biden ended the policy on the Mexican border, but Trump has signaled he intends to revive it.

Canada is bracing for an influx of immigrants from the US

Canadian authorities are reportedly preparing for a wave of immigrants arriving from the US under a second Trump presidency, just as they saw beginning in his first. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police recorded an increase in irregular border crossings between 2016 and 2023 — from only a few hundred arrivals in a three-month period to over 14,000 at their peak — resulting in part from Trump’s immigration policies.

The most direct example of that was Haitians who claimed asylum in Canada when Trump ended their TPS status, which had been in place since a devastating 2010 earthquake from which their home country never fully recovered. They arrived on foot and crossed the border between checkpoints.

There are reportedly concerns among some Canadian officials that Trump’s mass deportations policy and targeting of TPS and other programs shielding immigrants from deportation will drive people to the Canadian border. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Canadian authorities are “drawing up plans to add patrols, buy new vehicles and set up emergency reception facilities at the border between New York State and the province of Quebec.”

These resources might help prevent tragedies like a 2022 case in which a family, aided by smugglers, froze to death on the Canadian side of the border while trying to enter the United States

The Canadian government also reportedly intends to enforce its so-called “Safe Third Country” agreement with the US, which states Canada has the right to deport asylum seekers who travel through the US before trying to claim asylum in Canada. Those migrants would then have to apply for asylum in the US. Homan has indicated that the Trump administration intends to detain them for the duration of their court proceedings in the US. Currently, most migrants are released into the US while awaiting their court proceedings.


Canada’s plans mark a departure from Trudeau’s previously open-arms approach to immigrants during the first Trump administration, one that reflects a broader change in Canadians’ feelings about immigration.


“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you,” Trudeau tweeted in 2017, just after Trump implemented his travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.


Seven years later, he said in a video statement that his government had “made some mistakes” on immigration in the post-pandemic era.


“We could have acted quicker and turned off the taps [of immigration] faster,” he said.

Nicole Narea covers politics and society for Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic.

Georgia Fires Entire Maternal Mortality Panel After Reporting on Abortion Ban Deaths

"This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm," said one journalist. "Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."


Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey answers questions during a press conference at the State Capitol on April 27, 2020 in Atlanta.
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 21, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Georgia officials fired everyone on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee after ProPublicareported that the panel found the deaths of two women whose care was restricted by the state's abortion ban were preventable, the news outlet revealed Thursday.

ProPublica first exposed the committee's findings for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in September, sparking a flood of criticism directed at abortion care restrictions and the primarily Republican politicians who impose them. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for the White House, even traveled to Atlanta to pay tribute to the two women.

"They didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."

Thurman and Miller's stories, as the news outlet acknowledged Thursday, "became a central discussion" in not only the presidential contest—ultimately won by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has bragged about the role he played in reversing Roe v. Wade—but also ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in 10 states, seven of which succeeded.

In a November 8 letter obtained by ProPublica, Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey wrote that an "investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information" despite state law and confidential agreements signed by panel members barring such disclosures.

Toomey explained that the committee was immediately "disbanded," a replacement panel will be formed through a new application process, and additional procedures are under consideration regarding confidentiality, oversight, and organizational structure.



ProPublica reported that the office of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp—who appointed Toomey—declined to comment and referred questions to the health department, whose spokesperson also declined to comment, saying that the letter, "speaks for itself."

As the outlet detailed:
Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia's decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee's work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women's deaths if it could be politically sensitive.

"They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them," said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia's abortion ban in court. "To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?"

Other reproductive rights advocates and journalists were similarly critical in response to the new reporting from ProPublica—which has also covered the deaths of two women in Texas: Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain.

"Women died because they received no life-saving care as they were having miscarriages in Georgia and the state responded by simply eradicating the committee that investigated deaths of pregnant women," declared writer and organizer Hannah Riley.

The National Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group, asserted that "when anti-abortion politicians find FACTS inconvenient, they dismantle the systems meant to hold them accountable."



New York magazine senior correspondent Irin Carmon, whose forthcoming book is about pregnancy in the United States, similarly said: "This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm. Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."

Jessica Valenti, author of the newsletterAbortion, Every Day and the bookAbortion, also argued that Georgia officials fired the panel members because "they didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."

"I wrote about this in my book—this is how they cover up our deaths," Valenti continued. "In Idaho, they disbanded the Maternal Mortality Review Committee altogether; in Texas, they put a well-known anti-abortion activist on there to skew the data."

"I guarantee you that when Georgia replaces those seats on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee, they're going to put anti-abortion activists on there," she added. "Just watch."

UN Program's 2025 Outlook Warns 343 Million Acutely Food Insecure

"Global humanitarian needs are rising, fueled by devastating conflicts, more frequent climate disasters, and extensive economic turmoil," said WFP executive director Cindy McCain. "Yet funding is failing to keep pace."


Palestinian child is seen with a pot as he waits to receive the food distributed by charitable organizations to those who fled Israeli attacks and took refuge in Khan Younis, Gaza on October 28, 2024.
(Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Nov 22, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

The World Food Program offered a stark warning for the coming year Friday in its assessment of the escalating global hunger crisis: Due to climate catastrophe and violent conflicts around the world, without adequate funding, "2025 will be a year of unrelenting crises" that drive more people into food insecurity and starvation.

In the WFP 2025 Global Outlook, the agency emphasized that protecting more than 100 million people from devastating hunger in the coming year would require a relatively small investment—$16.9 billion, "roughly what the world spends on coffee in just two weeks."

That amount is a fraction of what the world's wealthiest countries—particularly the United States—put toward military spending in a year.

In total, the WFP found that 343 million people in 74 countries are acutely food insecure—a 10% increase from last year.

"Global humanitarian needs are rising, fueled by devastating conflicts, more frequent climate disasters, and extensive economic turmoil. Yet funding is failing to keep pace," said Cindy McCain, WFP executive director.

With $16.9 billion, the WFP said it could assist 123 million people who are most vulnerable to extreme hunger.

Among those are 1.9 million people who "are on the brink of famine," including those in Gaza, where access to food has been decimated in the last 13 months by Israel's near-total humanitarian aid blockade, repeated forced displacements, and U.S.-backed bombardment of the enclave. Many people in Gaza are now eating just one meal per day, and the United Nations this week warned of a "stark increase" in the number of households facing severe hunger in the southern and central parts of the territory.

More than 90% of people in Gaza are now "acutely food insecure," with 16% living in "catastrophic conditions," according to the United Nations.

"We urgently need financial and diplomatic support from the international community: to reverse the rising tide of global needs, and help vulnerable communities build long-term resilience against food insecurity."

People in Haiti and the sub-Saharan African countries of Mali, Sudan, and South Sudan were also identified as being most at risk for extreme hunger, with the region called "ground zero" for the humanitarian crisis.

Over 170 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are "acutely" food insecure, said the WFP. The region "accounts for 50% of WFP's projected funding needs in 2025," driven by climate extremes as well as violent conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Sahel region.

The U.N. Famine Review Committee in August declared that famine had taken hold in a camp where hundreds of thousands of people live in North Darfur, Sudan, after being forcibly displaced by the civil war there.

The U.N. also reported on Thursday that 25.6 million people in the DRC—or 1 in 4—now suffer from "crisis or worse" levels of hunger, driven partially by fighting between armed groups.

"In such a fragile context, the cost of inaction is truly unthinkable," said Peter Musoko, WFP country director and representative for DRC. "Together, we need to work with the government and the humanitarian community to increase resources for this neglected crisis."

Across Asia and the Pacific, WFP said the hunger crisis facing 88 million people is caused largely by "increasingly frequent climate disasters."

In Afghanistan, approximately 12.4 million people faced acute food insecurity last month, linked to the "devastation caused by heavy rainfall and flooding."

The severe impact of Typhoon Yagi in Myanmar led to "even more displacement" and food insecurity, compounding the effects of an escalating civil war, and nearly 6 million people in eastern Bangladesh were also affected by severe flooding this year.


"At WFP, we are dedicated to achieving a world without hunger," said McCain. "But to get there, we urgently need financial and diplomatic support from the international community: to reverse the rising tide of global needs, and help vulnerable communities build long-term resilience against food insecurity."

US Plutocrats $276 Billion Richer Since Trump Win—And GOP Wants to Give Them Even More

"The tax fight is starting now," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "Will we sign our names to more giveaways to President-elect Trump's billionaire buddies, or will we fight for tax fairness for the American people?"

Jake Johnson
Nov 21, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

An analysis released Wednesday showed that the United States' 815 billionaires have seen their combined wealth surge by roughly $280 billion since Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election earlier this month, a finding that came as Republicans continued to lay the groundwork for another massive tax giveaway for the rich.

Citing Forbes data, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) noted that the collective net worth of the nation's billionaires jumped $276 billion between November 4—the day before Election Day—and November 12. Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest man and a Trump confidant, accounted for 20% of the total billionaire wealth surge, with his net worth growing by $57 billion in just a week.


ATF found that U.S. billionaire wealth is now at an all-time high of $6.7 trillion—a fact that hasn't deterred Republican lawmakers from pursuing additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which they want to pay for in part by slashing Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.

"Among the tax handouts the GOP hopes to offer America's plutocrats is a weakening or elimination of the estate tax, the federal government's only curb on dynastic wealth," ATF noted. "As proof of the party's intent, the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate has chosen as its next leader the chamber's main champion of estate-tax repeal, John Thune (R-S.D.)."

The group observed that scrapping the estate tax would save billionaire households an estimated $2.7 trillion while depriving "working Americans of the exact same amount of funding for vital public services like Medicare, childcare, education, and housing."





Since the highly regressive 2017 Trump-GOP tax cut that Republicans are looking to extend and expand, U.S. billionaire wealth has risen by $3.8 trillion—over 131%—according to ATF.

"Instead of addressing the nation's growing economic inequality and the growing shortfall in federal revenue, President Trump and congressional Republicans plan to make the situation even worse by enacting a new tax cut package that gives billionaires tax breaks on the backs of working people," the group said Wednesday. "This Republican tax plan will start with extending all the expiring provisions in the 2017 Trump law—which alone will balloon the federal debt by $5 trillion over the next decade—but will likely include new handouts to the very wealthy, such as elimination of the estate tax."

During a hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) voiced similar concerns about the Trump-GOP tax agenda, which also includes cutting the statutory corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%.

"President-elect Trump has proposed making every single 2017 tax cut for the wealthy permanent," Warren said during the Senate hearing. "In fact, he plans to go further by cutting the corporate tax rate even more, so that giant corporations making record profits off struggling Americans can shovel even more cash to their rich executives and shareholders."

"The tax fight is starting now, and every person in the United States, every person in the Senate, needs to show the American people what side we stand on," said Warren. "Will we sign our names to more giveaways to President-elect Trump's billionaire buddies, or will we fight for tax fairness for the American people?"

Nearly 300 Green Groups Urge Biden to Block LNG Expansion Ahead of Trump

"As we prepare to resist Donald Trump and his promises to unleash U.S. LNG on the world, you must use the remaining days of your presidency to lock in as much climate progress as possible," the groups wrote.

Two demonstrators hold up signs protesting the export of liquefied natural gas in this undated photo.
(Photo: John Smith/VIEWpress)

Olivia Rosane
Nov 21, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan draws to a close and the second presidency of Donald Trump approaches, nearly 300 organizations from almost 40 countries are calling on the Biden administration to do everything in its power to stop the buildout of liquefied natural gas infrastructure.

The 282 groups, which included the Sunrise Movement, Oil Change International, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Center for Biological Diversity, and several branches of 350.org and Friends of the Earth, sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday outlining several steps he and his administration could take to use "the time it has left" to scupper the LNG expansion ahead of Trump's second term.

"As we prepare to resist Donald Trump and his promises to unleash U.S. LNG on the world, you must use the remaining days of your presidency to lock in as much climate progress as possible," they wrote.

"Now is the time to safeguard communities and the climate against the threat of growing LNG exports, which the administration can do by putting a stop any more risky buildouts from Big Oil."

In particular, the letter writers outlined four main actions Biden could take:Finalize an ongoing review of the studies that the Department of Energy (DOE) will use to determine whether or not LNG exports are in the public interest, using the latest information on the climate risks of LNG as well as the harms it poses to frontline communities and U.S. consumers;
Order the DOE to reject all six permits for new LNG facilities awaiting approval, including Venture Global's "carbon bomb" Calcasieu Pass 2, which is vocally opposed by local Louisiana communities;
Reach an agreement with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to end export credit agencies' backing of fossil fuels abroad; and
Cancel all U.S. government funding of foreign LNG infrastructure and revoke the more than $5 billion earmarked by the from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and U.S. International Development Finance Corporation for an LNG project in Mozambique.

"The Biden administration has mere weeks to protect the planet from the threat of more LNG infrastructure, and the growing LNG boom under his watch is something we cannot afford," Raena Garcia, senior energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth U.S., said in a statement. "Now is the time to safeguard communities and the climate against the threat of growing LNG exports, which the administration can do by putting a stop any more risky buildouts from Big Oil."

Under Biden, the U.S. became the world's leading exporter of LNG, even as new research shows that the fuel could be as bad as coal for the climate, or even worse.

"The explosion of LNG exports from the U.S. represents an extreme grab of the limited carbon budget remaining to constrain global temperature rise," the letter writers, who come from more than 37 countries, argued. "This is especially egregious considering that the United States has already consumed far more than its fair share of the remaining carbon budget."

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the expansion in U.S. LNG exports was partly sold as a way for it to help its allies in Europe gain energy independence from Russia and survive an immediate wartime shortage of Russian gas. However, most of the new projects pushed by the industry in both the U.S. and Europe would not begin operating until 2026 and therefore were more about locking in reliance on gas than meeting an immediate need.

"The energy crisis in Europe is over," said Constantin Zerger, head of energy and climate protection at Deutsche Umwelthilfe. "There is no need for additional gas supplies from the United States for Europe. Instead of expanding already harmful fossil infrastructure, we need to turn the tide and accelerate the buildout of renewable energy. We must prioritize protecting climate targets and human rights over a second lifetime for a dirty industry."

The letter comes as Trump, whom the writers called "an impending nightmare for people and the planet," has promised to expand fossil fuel production and infrastructure and lift environmental regulations. His pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has pledged to work toward "U.S. energy dominance" and his choice to lead the DOE, Chris Wright, is a fracking CEO who claims that "there is no climate crisis."

The environmental groups urged Biden to do "damage control."

"The next four years will test the limits of global resistance against fossil fuels," they concluded. "The next two months should be spent doing all that we can to protect communities in the U.S., the Global South, and throughout the world. We implore you to not act as though your climate presidency ended on November 5."

Trump’s Pick for Education Secretary Faces Lawsuit Over Alleged Mishandling Child Sexual Abuse While Poised to Overhaul Title IX




WASHINGTON - Today, Accountable.US issued a sharp rebuke of President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education. McMahon, who is being sued by former WWE employees for allegedly knowing sexual abuse was occurring under her leadership, is poised to oversee reforms to Title IX—a federal law critical for preventing sexual violence and discrimination in schools—and will spearhead the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education as outlined in Project 2025. “

Donald Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education is indefensible,” said Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable.US. “This is someone accused of ignoring rampant sexual abuse under her watch. Putting her in charge of Title IX protections is like handing keys to an arsonist to run the fire department—it’s an insult to survivors and a blatant attack on the safety of students nationwide.”

The lawsuit, filed in October 2024, alleges that McMahon and other WWE executives knowingly allowed a ringside announcer, Mel Phillips, to groom and sexually abuse boys as young as 12. The plaintiffs, all survivors of this abuse, claim WWE leadership failed to intervene despite being aware of Phillips’s actions. The suit describes the abuse as “open and rampant,” facilitated by promises of access to wrestling stars.

“McMahon and her colleagues were reportedly aware of abuse happening right under their noses—and they did nothing,” Ciccone added. “Now she’s been chosen to oversee, and likely overhaul, the very protections designed to stop this kind of harm? The Senate must put an end to this sham of a nomination. She lacks the experience, the judgment, and the track record to protect students from harm. Our students need a champion who will uphold Title IX—not someone who has allegedly turned a blind eye to abuse”

McMahon’s nomination also threatens the progress made under the Biden administration, which expanded Title IX protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Trump’s agenda would roll back these vital safeguards, leaving LGBTQ+ students and survivors of campus sexual violence even more vulnerable.

In addition to her troubling record on abuse, McMahon has little experience in education. Her short tenure on Connecticut’s State Board of Education was marked by criticism over her lack of qualifications, and she resigned after less than a year to pursue an unsuccessful Senate campaign.

Accountable.US is calling on senators to reject McMahon’s confirmation and demand a nominee who will prioritize the safety and well-being of America’s students.

Musk and Ramaswamy: The Smartest Most Clueless Guys in the Room

Is DOGE just short for greedy libertarian billionaire dipshits?

Jeff Ruch
Nov 23, 2024

Common Dreams

This week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-directors of a non-existent Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), authored a Wall Street Journalop-ed outlining their vision for restructuring the entire federal government. The piece, entitled “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government," is notable for the combination of its breadth in scope and utter cluelessness.

As a key point, the duo decries “millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants” within an “ever-growing bureaucracy [which] represents an existential threat to our republic.” In fact, there are currently a total of less than 3 million federal civilian employees. This workforce is smaller than the same total in 1990. It is also smaller than the federal civilian workforce at the end of World War II, some 80 years ago.

Contrary to the impression that federal employment is spiraling out of control, overall, the total federal workforce has remained largely static, despite steady population growth over the decades. In addition, well more than one-third of all federal civilian employees now work in just three agencies: Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. These departments are hardly hotbeds of what they are calling “illicit regulations.”

Their assumption, prior to any analysis, is that thousands of federal workers should be fired. Their thesis does not allow for the possibility that some federal agencies are significantly understaffed. Also unmentioned are government contractor jobs, such as those at Musk’s Space X, estimated to number well more than double the total of all federal civilian employees who are supposed to manage this ever-growing stream of funding with fewer people.

To guide these reductions, they propose that the “number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified.” What, if anything, does that mean for agencies such as the National Park Service, Social Security Administration, or the State Department—agencies with big workforces but little regulatory footprint?

Contrary to the impression that federal employment is spiraling out of control, overall, the total federal workforce has remained largely static, despite steady population growth over the decades.

Even more striking is that these two themselves concede they do not have any concrete idea of what needs to be changed. That is because, as they profess, they are “entrepreneurs” with no expertise in this field. Instead, this effort will rely upon a yet-to-be-assembled “lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America.”

Presumably, these "sharpest minds" will want to be paid a salary commensurate with their market value. Consequently, this hiring spree would be a curious first step in an effort to cut costs and reduce federal payrolls.

Despite pledging to cutback agency staffing, Musk and Ramaswamy say they will be working “with experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology” to compile a “list of regulations” for President Trump to suspend enforcement or “initiate the process for review and rescission.” Notably, these embedded, apparently otherwise unoccupied “experts” resemble the very people this duo wants to fire on day one.

Moreover, the idea that “advanced technology” would serve as a magic wand to analyze the need for regulations sounds somewhat fanciful. Presumably, in this world of regulation by chatbots, AI would need a detailed orientation before being effectively unleashed government-wide.


Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump greets U.S. entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy while speaking during a campaign rally at the Atkinson Country Club on January 16, 2024 in Atkinson, New Hampshire. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Image)

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising part of their essay is their vow to stand up to the “entrenched interests in Washington” who benefit from unjustified government largesse. Yet, one of the most favored special interests, in terms of billions in subsidies consumed, is the oil and gas industry. This is the same industry that Candidate Trump has promised behind closed doors to protect in return for their campaign contributions. This is one promise he can be expected to keep.

In addition, despite portraying themselves as disinterested “volunteers” guided only by the U.S. Constitution as their "North Star," Mr. Musk has substantial business dealings with the federal government. Presumably, the billions NASA spends on Space X contracts will be spared DOGE's harshest scrutiny.

One of the very few specific examples the pair cites is the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon, which cannot pass an agency-wide audit. However, to manage this fiscal behemoth, President-elect Trump has tapped Pete Hegseth, a person with no discernible management experience whatsoever.

Nor is it a promising sign that the House of Representatives is creating a new subcommittee to liaison with DOGE to be headed by one Marjorie Taylor Greene. This would appear to illustrate the widely held belief that cluelessness is not a quality improved by doubling down.''

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Jeff Ruch is the former Executive Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and now serves as its Pacific Director.
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Why Elon Musk can never balance the budget, in one chart

Elon Musk wants to slash trillions in “waste.” Good luck, buddy!


by Dylan Matthews

Nov 24, 2024

VOX


US President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas. 

Brandon Bell/Getty Images


Two. Trillion. Dollars.

That’s how much Elon Musk, co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, has said he can cut out of the annual federal budget. Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy have suggested that they can achieve this through “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” by cracking down on spending “unauthorized” by Congress, and “large-scale audits” of federal contracts. Their target wouldn’t be entitlement programs “like Medicare and Medicaid,” they say, but “waste, fraud, and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.”


If you could actually cut this much, it would wipe out the US’s $1.9 trillion deficit and put the country into surplus for the first time since the 2001 fiscal year. But let’s be clear: There is no way in hell Musk and Ramaswamy are going to be able to identify $2 trillion in annual spending to cut, and they certainly will not get anywhere near that number without congressional action.


To see why, consult this simple chart of projected federal spending in fiscal year 2025, which began on October 1:




I’m using the current fiscal year, but you’ll see something similar in any given year. The biggest single program is Social Security (which I’ve grouped here with its companion program, Supplemental Security Income). Trump has promised he will not cut 1 cent from Social Security, so that’s roughly $1.6 trillion out of the $7 trillion budget off the table.


The next-largest is interest payments on federal debt, accumulated from prior deficits. Musk’s America PAC has bafflingly listed this as a form of government waste, but failing to pay interest on past debt would constitute a US default and likely lead to a national, and probably global, financial crisis and recession. While we can reduce future deficits and pay less interest in the future, we’re obligated to pay interest on debt we’ve already accumulated.



So there’s nothing to save here either. Already we’ve ruled out over a third of total spending.


Next up is defense spending. Musk and Ramaswamy highlighted wasteful Pentagon spending in their Wall Street Journal op-ed, so this money could face some cuts. But Trump massively increased defense spending in his first years in office, and his congressional allies, like incoming Senate Armed Services chair Roger Wicker (R-MS), have proposed trillions in additional spending to counter China. Trump’s attitude toward the defense budget, as with his attitude on so many things, vacillated wildly during his first term, so perhaps he will side with Musk and Ramaswamy and seek to lower defense spending. But that’s far from guaranteed.


If defense spending is off the table, we’ve ruled out more than half the budget.


So what would they likely cut? They might look first to Medicare and Medicaid, which are responsible for over $1.5 trillion. Musk and Ramaswamy insisted that these are not their targets, but it’s hard to see how they’d avoid that. For one thing, there are places where Medicare in particular overspends where policymakers in both parties want to crack down; its practice of paying more for care in hospitals than at smaller facilities is a prime example. For another, Trump proposed massive cuts to Medicaid last term.


Then there’s non-defense discretionary spending, a grab-bag category that includes all spending authorized through annual appropriations bills rather than mandated by other legislation. The biggest category is transportation, which pays for things like air traffic control and national highways. Next up is veterans’ care and benefits. Support for science, public health/research, law enforcement, and education (including federal support for K–12 schools) each receive around or a little over $100 billion annually. This category has been cut to the bone since the 2010s as it is, and it’s hard to imagine Musk and Ramaswamy going up against veterans or cops.


Finally, there’s other mandatory spending, not broken out in the above chart but including a wide array of safety net programs:

Huge chunks of this feel politically and practically off-limits. Military retirement and veterans’ benefits (which fall under both the non-defense discretionary and mandatory parts of the budget) seem politically impossible to cut, and even civilian employee retirements would be difficult to cut back given that employees have paid into those accounts themselves for years.


The Children’s Health Insurance Program and foster care have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Trump and JD Vance have proposed expanding the child tax credit, making savings there unlikely.


That leaves programs like food stamps, the Affordable Care Act health insurance credits, and unemployment insurance.


Let’s suppose that Musk and Ramaswamy decide to really go for it. They’re going to cut non-defense discretionary spending in half, maybe by shutting down all scientific and health research and K–12 school aid. They’re slashing Medicare and Medicaid by a quarter, and they’re eliminating food stamps, ACA credits, and unemployment insurance entirely. These, to be clear, are all cuts that would require congressional approval and that Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump could not achieve through executive action alone. Furthermore, they’re cuts that seem politically impossible to push through. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose this is the package.


Doing the math, even this unbelievably ambitious package would amount to a little over $1.1 trillion annually. It’s barely halfway to Musk’s stated goal.


The notion that the federal government is hopelessly bloated due to waste that every reasonable person wants to eliminate is an appealing myth, but it’s a myth. Government spending overwhelmingly goes to wildly popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and the defense budget. You can’t make much of a dent in it without touching those areas, and once you touch them, you’re going to get immense backlash.

Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

Trump’s Victory Is a Despicable Reflection of the American Character

More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Dan Dinello
Nov 21, 2024

Informed Comment

Reelecting the Insurrectionist who provoked the January 6 attack is a monumental dereliction of civic duty by the American people. Donald Trump was provided a plurality mandate—enough of a match for him to burn America down.

The electorate affirmed that the worst human being to hold the presidency deserves a second turn in the job. Despite Trump being eight years older and obviously losing his mind; despite the fact that he ran a corrosive campaign on naked malevolence; and despite his having promised to mass arrest, cage, and deport immigrants, Americans rewarded him with ultimate power.

Toward the end of the 2024 election, the candidates made their closing arguments. Trump painted the United States as a dark, terrifying and infested place, festering with pet-eating immigrants, violent criminals, and deviant trans people. America was a savage hellscape where good, “normal” Americans were forgotten as their white, heterosexual world was reshaped by Democrats into something alien and repulsive.

In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us.

Trump stoked conspiracy theories and promised vengeance. He mused about reporters being shot, mimed oral sex with a microphone, spewed racist lies, and threatened to order the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself. None of this prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; it may have even facilitated his success.

Vice President Kamala Harris articulated a hopeful future. Positioning herself as a moderate, Harris expressed a willingness to work with her political opponents. She embraced diversity and promised to better the lives of all Americans. The electorate was offered a choice between a mainstream Democrat and a candidate running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president. They chose the latter.

Voters who cast their ballots for Trump engaged in contemptible behavior, turning amoral, unserious about governing, and proving themselves undeserving of our constitutional legacy. More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of 100,000 voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.

Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: If only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.

Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.

Many thought women would rise up in defense of bodily autonomy. And they did, but not enough. Abortion was less of a key issue than expected. Harris did win the support of 54% of women, lower than President Joe Biden’s 57% in 2020. No group of voters was more loyal to Trump than white men. He managed to drive up what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base. Male voters—terrified or resentful of women—bought into Trump’s regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.

Despite enthusiastic crowds and the endorsement of high profile celebrities, antagonism or apathy undermined Harris: Over 7 million Biden voters did not vote for her. Trump likely won as a result. Currently, Harris has received 74 million votes, while Biden obtained over 81 million votes. Some may have even voted for Trump, who increased his 2020 vote total by over 2 million, up to 76 million. The anti-Trump coalition failed to sustain their 2020 outrage. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Julia Roberts lost to Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Joe Rogan.

Voting in 2020 was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Though Joe Biden provoked little passion, his campaign felt like the culmination of a liberation movement. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, was blunted for Harris. In a 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen wrote, “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock and outrage,” otherwise apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the weather.

Defusing Trump outrage and hanging over the election was the festering political wound that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The slaughter and starvation of Palestinians—funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media—has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, some voted for Jill Stein, many stayed home.

Harris loyally lined up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of Biden, which demoralized the party’s base and threatened its chances in Michigan. As the carnage continued and expanded, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking, winning margin in Dearborn, the largest majority Arab-American city.

Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. It’s no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported Trump over Kamala Harris. He held off on any cease-fire deal that might help Harris. Trump supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in both Lebanon and Gaza and told his buddy Netanyahu ”do what you have to do.” As a “gift” to the incoming Trump administration, Netanyahu is preparing a cease-fire plan regarding its bombing of Lebanon.

Along with recriminations about Harris’s failure to at least express more remorse about the suffering in Gaza, a profusion of Democratic self-flagellation began immediately after the brutal loss. The party was too woke. Harris—the candidate who had been a magnet for joyful enthusiasm—was disparaged. She was too centrist, too un-primaried, too female, and laughed too often. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration.

Democrats whined further: If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage.” Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.

Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios—available in about 20 flavors—hit $5.29 at the grocery store?

Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office—even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.

As president, Trump will likely issue shock and awe executive orders that will activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of a nationwide mass kidnapping of millions of “illegals,” who are “poisoning the blood” of America are unclear. Trump confirmed last Monday that his plan for mass deportations will involve a national emergency declaration and the military. If street protests are mobilized, the regime—with a bloated strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act—will deploy troops. The worst-case scenarios, including razor-wired concentration camps in the desert, are beyond horrifying.

Our country has been deliberately set on fire by fellow Americans. Aside from mass deportations and contempt for climate change, human rights, and gun control, Trump will appoint a more reactionary federal judiciary and assault the press. On day one, Trump will pardon the J6ers, creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium and include a federal government stocked with fools and jesters whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.

Trump has already initiated a cabinet reminiscent of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist film about an evil hypnotist who brainwashes automatons to commit murders for him. Trump’s lackeys and loyalists include a propagandist for Russia—Tulsi Gabbard—as director of national intelligence, a Fox News host and subject of sexual assault charges—Pete Hegseth—as secretary of defense, an End Times Christian Zionist—Mike Huckabee—as ambassador to Israel, and an accused statutory rapist—Matt Gaetz—as attorney general.

Somehow topping all these MAGA freaks is the anti-vaxxer—Robert F. Kennedy—nominated to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy recently commented that on its first day in power, the Trump regime will ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite target of paranoid anti-communist conspiracists dating to the 1950s. In Stanley Kubrick’s vicious satireDr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper explains that he avoids fluoridated water because it’s a communist plot that will sap his “precious bodily fluids.”

Trump’s nominations are meant to bolster his effort to lay waste to the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or purse strings. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt. Trump’s cabinet offers a deliberate negation or mockery of the government functions they’re supposed to administer. They are his shock troops.

Trump wants to force Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves by confirming these unqualified toadies. Republicans will not try to stop this Trump travesty or any other. On the contrary, they’ll say—and are already saying it—that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.

Having lived through the circus of Trump 1.0, the voters also affirm that they’d prefer to plunge the country back into that embarrassing prior horror: blatant corruption, blathering of state secrets, the turbo-obnoxious Trump family, freak-show personnel choices, blue-state retribution, government-by-impulse, and policy-by-tweet. Trump 2.0 will likely involve more overt and impeachable crises, like flouting court orders or the Constitution. Trump’s voters are plainly willing to run the risk. Knowing now what a Trump show-presidency looks like, they’ve voted for a sequel.

The public has chosen malevolent leadership. The only consolation for the enemies within is clarity—the moral clarity of the voter’s decision is crystalline: Trump will regard his slim plurality vote margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We hope that many of the ideas on Trump’s demented wish list will not actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand this sociopath and the lunatics who surround him. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Trump has over his cult, now joined by a plurality of Americans.

Over the past decade, opinion polls have shown Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. The United States will become a different kind of country. The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. They elected a president who has never read it and who, by his behavior, holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, in contempt. Like the counter-culture hippies and anti-Vietnam radicals of the 1960s, the enemies within are rebels—strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us no longer feel fully part of.

In the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Richard Nixon won a huge and depressing landslide reelection in 1972. In a stunning shift, this dark history was overturned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Change is always possible, but we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us. Acknowledging this is not surrender but a realization that the fights ahead will be formidable, but that anything is possible.




© 2023 Juan Cole

Dan Dinello is the author of Children of Men, a critical analysis of Alfonso Cuarón's visionary dystopian science fiction film masterpiece. His other books include Finding Fela: My Strange Journey to Meet the AfroBeat King—a memoir of his 1983 trip to Lagos, Nigeria, to film African musical legend Fela Kuti—and Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Dan has also contributed chapters to books about Avatar, Westworld, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Ridley Scott, and Star Trek among others.
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