Strange Fruit Makes a Comback

  Strange Fruit Makes a Comeback

His name was Trey Reed. He was 21 years old and a student at Delta State University in Mississippi. Last September he was found hanging near the campus. Authorities called it suicide.

Juliana Nzita, 16, was a young immigrant from a country in Africa. She too was found hanging from a tree in May.

To’Nea Nicole Miller, age 27, was found hanging from a tree in June this year, near Miami. Her death was also called a suicide.

Justice Kai James, 21, was found hanged outside a building in Georgia, also in June. Another “suicide.”

Jay Jackson, an Illinois resident who traveled to Michigan to attend a festival, went missing and was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area near the festival on June 30th. State police called it a suicide. He was 28 years old.

Tasia Fortune, the mother of four children, was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned house on August 3rd in Jackson, Mississippi. The police department there still has an open investigation at this writing, but one thing is certain. No Black mother hangs herself and leaves four kids alone.

And no Black people hang themselves. It’s a cruel and insane claim to make. What’s happening now is a continuation of a long history of lynching.

As the NAACP notes, “Lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past continues to this day. In 1998, James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men charged with killing Arbery claimed he was trespassing. The killing of George Floyd was also a lynching.”

Ida B. Wells must be turning in her grave. Known as a fearless investigative reporter and anti-lynching crusader in the late 19th and early 10th centuries, she risked her life to expose the horrors of racial violence in the south and helped found the NAACP. She then traveled to other parts of the country documenting hundreds of lynchings beyond the south and the eastern seaboard.

In 1892 she lost three friends to lynching. They were owners of a grocery story in Memphis and white men, likely KKK, who thought they were threatening local white grocers. That led to her intensive researching of lynching which she reported in her published pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which described how lynch mobs were formed and exposed the excuses white officials used to justify mob rule.

Later, Billie Holiday, noted Black jazz singer, recorded a song in 1939, called “Strange Fruit.” It exposed what became called “the window to the soul of white supremacy,” The title referred to lynching. It’s first verse was this: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Holiday didn’t write the lyrics. They were written as a poem by a schoolteacher who used a metaphor of fruit hanging from a tree to describe the brutality of lynchings. Her rendition of the poem became the first anti-racism protest song, and a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Why is there no coverage of the new wave of lynchings.  That is likely a rhetorical question, but it’s staggering to know that lynchings are happening in this moment of racism writ large. It should stun each of us that a veritable epidemic of lynching is being ignored by the media. Surely people of conscience should be made aware of what’s been happening, which is obviously why I am writing about it.

Historical data is available and outrageous but data about lynchings in the recent past are hard to find, and as Axios reports, "The moment a case is ruled a suicide, it's no longer investigated as a potential homicide." 

Wells described lynching as the "national crime" of the United States, highlighting that it was “a systematic, brutal violence rather than a random outburst.” That is still relevant.

Rosa Parks remembered the pervasive fear and violence of her time, describing the terror of hearing about the Klan as well as learning about lynchings as a child.  And Martin Luther King Jr. pleaded for legal protection.

As other leaders have noted, lynching is central to understanding racial inequality in America. It cannot be ignored or overlooked at this crucial time in our history. It provides critical context to present day racism. Shining a light on the tragedy of lynchings is deeply important if we are ever to heal as a nation. Telling the stories of what is happening, and saying the names of victims would be a good start.

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 Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

The Demise of Education Priorities

“In America, one of its most characteristic and suggestive aspects is the recurring crisis in education that, during the last decade at least, has become a political problem of the first magnitude.” Philosopher and social critic Hannah Arendt wrote that in 1954 in an essay called “The Crisis in Education.”

She wasn’t the first to criticize educational failures and policies. Plato also pondered the place of education in society. In giving us the Socratic method which rests on asking questions that lead to enlightenment, he encouraged a view of education that goes beyond perception and opinions. In his famous “Allegory of the Cave” he focused on justice and morality.

Others throughout history like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Mary McCleon Bethune, to name a few, are joined by contemporary advocates like Malala Yousafzai who works internationally for better educational systems that meet the needs of all students and learners. 

But none of them has faced what we are experiencing now when it comes to educational policy.

We are in our own “crisis in education” as the Trump administration continues to demolish the Department of Education.

In his campaign the president promised to abolish the Department and quickly appointed Linda McMahon, a billionaire and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, who has no background in education, to head the Department shutdown.  The agency’s layoffs have now reached at least 1,400.  And with the help of SCOTUS, which has allowed Trump and McMahon to continue dismantling the federal agency’s work, things are looking bad.

It should be noted that only Congress has the authority to close the Education Department, although some elected members of Congress have supported the aim to delegate programs to other governmental agencies. For example, Trump wanted to move student loan program to the Small Business Administration, but it is now expected to be in the Treasury Department. That would mean they would have to handle a $1.6 trillion portfolio affecting 43 million borrowers, among other things.

Further, the DOE is outsourcing several grantmaking programs for workforce training and adult education to the Department of Labor. And the agency plans to move special education and civil rights out of the Education Department. According to AP News, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services wilk move to the Department of Health and Human Services, which as we know is run by RFK, Jr. Advocates agree that “special education doesn’t belong in a health department that treats disabilities as conditions to manage, instead of differences in how children learn.” And the Office for Civil Rights will move to the Justice Department, despite any concern for justice there.

As both a teacher and a parent, I’m no stranger to what all of this will mean. It’s a sickening abrogation of human rights and social justice in our current government.  The consequences of all this will be unimaginably destructive and take a long time to overturn. It will hurt multitudes of people, including the disabled, people with special needs, those who identify as alternative genders or transgender, and those who are discriminated and bullied in schools because of their race or national origin.

Already parents of kids with disabilities, and their teachers, have had to wait for the DOE to process their complaints of bullying or other discrimination. As one mother put it, “It’s to the point that I don’t even check in anymore with the attorney.” She filed a complaint in the spring of 2024 with the Office for Civil Rights, reporting that her daughter was bullied because she wears hearing aids. The case is  still unresolved.

And the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Service has already shrunk by a third in the last two years, and the Office for Civil Rights is 40 percent smaller, while in the DOJ the Education Opportunities Section has shrunk by 50 percent. 

These are staggering and deeply consequential reductions that we should all be concerned about. As Gaylynn Burroughs, vice president at the National Women’s Law Center notes, “Without enough staff and resources, students will face more barriers to educational opportunity and have fewer places to turn to when their rights are violated. This is part of a coordinated plan by the Trump administration to dismantle the federal government and roll back hard-won  civil rights protections.”

In her essay "The Crisis in Education" Hannah Arendt argued that the fundamental purpose of education was to introduce the young to the world so they can care for it and ultimately renew it. She believed that education is where society decides whether it loves the world enough to assume responsibility for it.

As the school year begins, we must all care for our communities, our kids, and our schools, especially after this nightmare ends. So too, as a society, we must love our country and its schools enough to revive our educational values and systems as we take responsibility for our collective future.  This is a fine time to start.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Reclaiming Our Time and Treasure

There is a new urgency in the air and it’s palpable. Grounded in collective anxiety and a plea for a return to a civil society free of fear, oppression, oligarchs, and megalomaniacs who defy laws and ignore the Constitution. We’ve had enough of the dystopian nightmare propagated by an authoritarian regime rife with abuse and massive corruption. The threat of creeping totalitarianism is glaringly obvious, and we are waking up to what that means.

The difference between civil societies and our governance today couldn’t be starker. Civil societies don’t have their highest court tilt so far right that they treat their country’s highest leader like a king with absolute power.  They have humane policies grounded in social justice so that people have basic human rights. They pass laws to provide housing, universal healthcare, childcare, quality education, and other issues that are poverty driven.

Supreme Court Justic Sonia Sotomayer made this clear in her compelling dissent in the recent SCOTUS decision that gave our president outrageous power in what is supposedly a democracy. She noted that the president and the policy-making people behind him disregard the Constitution along with settled precedent.  (It should be noted that three Supreme Court justices appointed by the current president committed perjury in their confirmation hearings when they said they would adhere to precedent and then proceeded to ignore or reverse it.)

Here is part of what Justice Sotomayer wrote. “The Court gave the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted. … “It also means respecting precedent…out of a recognition that, whatever our confidence is in the theories of the present moment, the wisdom of our founding document does not belong to today’s Justices alone.”

One example of precedent that has been battered is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. What civilized nation arrests and jails women who have suffered a miscarriage or lets them die for lack of urgently needed medical care. What parliamentarian would think that women who have abortions should be jailed or executed, both of which some rightwing legislators in the U.S have done!

According to Pregnancy Justice US over 400 prosecutions of women have taken place since the fall of Roe v. Wade. Charges include child neglect, endangerment, violation of abuse laws, and substance abuse during pregnancy. Every one of those charged suffered arrest, physical and psychological trauma instead of receiving the care they needed.

Eugenics is also making a comeback here. It’s like Hitler’s plan to have a completely Aryan race, which resulted in the Holocaust, and was based on discrimination against people he thought were inferior and shouldn’t be allowed to procreate. That was the basis of eugenics in the early 20th century. Followers believed in “planned breeding and racial improvement.” It resulted in involuntary sterilization, segregation, isolation, poverty and the “final solution.”

The idea led to baby breeding among German women who were rewarded for having lots of pregnancies. Today, we are seeing pronatalist propaganda fostered by politicians, White Supremacists and Christian Nationals. A group of rightwing women recently held their annual “Leadership Summit” in which they proclaimed that all women need to “normalize liking husbands again.”  Their playbook is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.  

How did we become a country that terrorizes and arrests thousands of innocent immigrants, legal residents, and citizens and physically, sexually and emotionally abuses them, deports them, and incarcerates them in our version of concentration camps, where they are separated from their children, denied healthcare, decent food, access to family, lawyers, or Congressional oversight. How civilized is that? These people have been called “vermin” and other ugly invectives by this administration which fails to understand how much immigrants contribute to our lives, our economy, and our cultural diversity. I suggest that those who are troubled by vermin need to look in their own closets.

Then there’s the issue of gun violence that just keeps on growing and shocking people who live in civil societies.  Recently the Supreme Court struck down a law in Hawaii that barred gun owners from carrying handguns in public places. On June 30th they agreed to decide whether assault-style weapons like AR-15s can be banned in response to mass shootings.

Gabby Gifford, who was shot in the head while campaigning for her Congressional seat several years ago, has declared gun violence an American crisis.  Her organizations website reports that 46,000 Americans die annually from gun violence. That’s 125 a day.  What civilized nation would have people advocating for guns on the streets and in public places.

Giffords puts it this way. “Gun violence has become an inescapable fact of American Life. While families and communities across the country are regularly torn apart by bullets, the burden isn’t spread equally, particularly when it comes to the daily drumbeat of gun violence.”

All of this and more is why we must reclaim our time and treasure and rejoin the civilized countries of the world whose values and policies are commendable, achievable, humane, and compassionate before it’s too late.  The time has come for us to recapture our better selves, and to restore our values which are demonstrated in personal acts, and policies, that bring back the history, meaning, and brilliance of the Constitution. 

We know what we must do come November.

An Epidemic of Evil

 On May 19th a pregnant woman and her four-year old son arrived at Dulles International Airport coming from Ghana., She had a valid tourist visa to bring her son to the U.S. for medical treatment, but something unexpected happened when they landed.  U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents questioned the purpose of her trip, and for unknown reasons, locked her and her son in a windowless room at the airport with only a single bed, toilet, and sink. They spent ten days there until a federal judge ordered they be released immediately, after ACLU intervened.

The ACLU lawyer said, “She’s just one of a number of pregnant people who’ve been detained in shocking numbers in the wake of President Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship.” In another tragic incident a woman who was being deported to Honduras pleaded with authorities to allow her toddler to come with her, but they refused.  That child ended up dead after being given to an abusive relative. There are many stories like this, and they speak directly to the abundant evil that has become endemic in this country, and elsewhere.

In another horrific example, there are several state legislators who have sponsored or supported bills and amendments to classify abortion as homicide.  Four of them are from southern states where some women who suffered miscarriages have been imprisoned for assumed abortions. Women whose pregnancies are non-viable are frequently forced to wait until they are critically ill or die before medical intervention.

The brutal actions of ICE and its colluders make that kind of cruelty clear, as the videos we see prove, including the murders of innocent people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Take what has been happening in so-called detention centers like Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where there is abundant evidence of abuse. When Rep. Dan Goldman was allowed to visit that dreadful place, he heard about worms and maggots in food, no clean drinking water, overflowing sewage, and reports of sexual abuse. It’s a common story in victim testimonies from all ICE facilities. One protester at Delaney said seven ambulances came to the facility in four hours, perhaps connected to the routine beating of detainees he cited.

“How can this many people work at this facility and watch what happens inside these walls and say nothing?”  he asked. It’s a good question and one that leads us to a larger discussion about the nature of evil and why it’s growing.

How indeed did so many men in high places involve themselves in Jeffrey Epstein’s monstrous cruelty and evil abuse of women and girls. Why don’t we know the full extent of his unimaginable crimes, and others like it. Why are judges allowing young sexual abusers to get away with their crimes? How are so many legislators allowing children diagnosed with cancer to suffer and die when ongoing scientific research is having an impact on incidence, prevalence and prevention of diseases that are on the brink of amelioration or cure for all of us? How does a government with bundles of money for personal gain and vanity projects do such things as ending food assistance, housing help, and access to healthcare?

White America has always had a predilection for doing evil things to certain groups of people. Slavery and the abuse suffered by Native Americans are just two examples. But the exacerbation of what we are witnessing now is stunning.

The propensity for evil is not just an American problem. We only need to witness the genocide happening at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu in Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond. A recent New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof called “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” based on survivor testimonies, reveals what happens to prisoners, male, female, or child, and it is unfathomable. Described as “utter savagery” in a United Nations report called “More Than a Human Can Bear” unthinkable depravity is cited. Just one example:  it exposes the use of “trained dogs for raping Palestinian prisoners.”

So what are we to make of such depravity and evil?  Are we mutating as a species devoid of humanity and compassion? Is political narcissism to blame? Is the Internet depersonalizing us?

The philosopher Hannah Ahrent, who coined the term “the banality of evil,” may help us deconstruct the preponderance of evil thoughts, proclivities, and actions.

Ahrendt attended the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She was also one of the first people to discover what had happened in the camps, which she called “corpse factories.” When she watched the Nuremberg trials, she thought the Nazis had “exploded the limits of law,” adding, “We’re never going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle.”

Eichman, she said, was banal, pompous, thoughtless, and self-important (sound familiar?). He made the evil he perpetrated and symbolizes more difficult to counter, Ahrendt posited. Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor of Humanities and Human rights in England, adds to that. She points out that Eichman was a lot like Trump. “He couldn’t grasp the world that was full of plural, different people, so he determined to eliminate certain peoples.” Ahrendt said that his thoughtless evil “got into culture and spread like fungus.”  

Ending the brutality we face as we try to rid ourselves of individual people and organized entities that choose to engage in evil acts won’t be easy, but it’s been done before. Perhaps in this moment the words of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, will guide us as we “hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed, and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.”   It’s a start.     

A Healthcare Deficit Looms Large

The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”  Mahatma Ghandi said that. 

His words strike the heart of a question we need to be asking, and indeed demanding: Where is humanity in our current state of healthcare? In a time that lacks compassion and empathy that is an omission that is dangerous, and depraved, because it causes people to suffer and even die.

It should be clear that humanity in healthcare is essential to the quality of life as well as survival. Every one of us has a stake in this objective, which doesn’t ask much; it simply means offering respect, dignity, and help to people who are ill and need help. Humanity calls for caring about people’s cultures, values, lifestyles and lives, things the current and administration lacks. Simply put, a humanistic approach to patient care and people’s healthcare needs underscores the civility of a country and its leaders. It’s sad that we don’t have that right now.

Instead, we face shocking and terrifying cuts to healthcare agencies, organizations, and scientific research on the threshold of new treatments and survival possibilities. We also have curtailed programs that serve the less fortunate among us, discriminate against sectors of society, and ignore the fact that morbidity and mortality among Americans is going to soar because of the ignorance and cruelty of powerful but ignorant people.  (Do they really think they won’t receive a terminal diagnosis, or their kids won’t succumb to measles or other diseases, or the women they love won’t die for lack of reproductive healthcare?)

These statistics and facts speak for themselves.  About half of adults in this country can’t afford health care costs, with people of color and young adults along with the uninsured are more likely succumb to treatable maladies because they can’t afford needed care. People are being forced to skip or postpone seeking healthcare because of the cost. Prescription drugs also prevent about 43 percent of adults in the U.S. from taking their medication as prescribed. Others are in deep debt because of .medical bills.

According to a New York Times article last month by Dr. Zack Cooper, a physician and professor at the Yale School of Public Health, “premiums for a family health plan can exceed $27,00 a year even as patients routinely get care denied.”  This denial is related to insurers’ restrictions on care and hospital costs, Cooper said.

Interestingly, just after I read that article a physician I know shared something relevant with me. She works for a private organization that hires healthcare professionals to assess whether a diagnosis or procedure is warranted and should be paid for by insurers. She often feels that insurers should be paying at least part of a medical bill, but she and her colleagues are pressured to deny coverage.  This is what she told me.  “It’s a form of factory driven healthcare that is irrational and inhumane. In a way it feels like they are asking us to collaborate with Health Maintenance and Managed Care Organizations. It’s a kind of passive scam that is devoid of ethics and morality. It feels like coerced collaboration.”

In his NYT article, Dr. Cooper noted that insurance premiums have escalated exponentially since the year 2000 with hospital prices growing three times as fast as inflation and twice as fast as prescription drugs and doctor visit. He also stated that” hospital prices are so high because they have market power, which brings them more bargaining heft when they negotiate prices with insurers,” which he says are in the business of making money.

It’s blatantly obvious that healthcare has become a profit-making industry devoid of any semblance of humanity. The corporate mindset coupled with an alarming absence of morality, ethics and kindness has clearly violated the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm,” which profiteers and policymakers ignore and some providers overlook.

Luckily, there are physician writers and nurse poets, including Chekov, William Carlos Williams, Danielle Ofri, Abraham Verghese, Atul Gawande, Courtney Davis, and Judy Schaeffer, along with others whose work addresses humanity in healthcare in their work, and often focus on the doctor-patient relationship, emotional labor, and the art of medicine, bridging the gap between clinical data and patient experience. They emphasize empathy and the moral imperative of compassionate care.

Through their narratives, essays, stories and personal experience we are enlightened about the significance of humanity at the heart of healthcare.  Some doctors, like Daniel Ofri, teach medical students and they require that they read and discuss some of these authors and poets. That gives us hope that when these budding physicians and healthcare administrators rise to positions of authority, they will move us to a more humane future.

But right now, we need the courage to demand that those in governance grow a conscience, a heart, and a plan for healthcare that equals those in countries with universal healthcare as a human right, not a profitmaking outfit. 

As the Dalai Lama said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”  You might want to share that quote with your legislators.

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 Elayne Clift has a masters degree in Health Communication and teaches a class on Humanity at the Heart of Healthcare.  

Living with a Chinese Curse

It is believed that the phrase “May you live in interesting times” originated in China. But it didn’t start there. It likely happened when a British diplomat in the 1930s described that time as an era of turbulence, danger, and chaotic change.

That certainly suggests our own time of danger and chaos, caused by a regime that can only be called dangerous, chaotic, and crazy. It’s an unprecedent and frightening time that belies our history, our Constitution, and threatens our future, as well as the world’s.

It’s a time when our president is so mentally deranged that he attacks the Pope, uses ugly profanity in public, spews extreme vitriol aimed at anyone he sees as a threat, defies the Congress and the courts, and advances emotional and physical violence against women, immigrants, children, peaceful protesters, and even U.S. citizens.  He has a compulsion for self-adulation, the latest being the building of a huge arc de ’Trump that looks like the Brandenburg Gate, and a portrait of himself as Jesus Christ. On and on it goes.

No wonder Representative Jaime Raskin has introduced a bill to remove the president under Section 4 of the 25th amendment, which already has support from numerous members of Congress who signed as co-sponsors when he threatened to destroy “a whole civilization” on Truth Social. The challenge is to get most of the president’s cabinet to declare him unfit and to have two-thirds of the House and Senate to agree. It’s a long shot and some have said it won’t happen till Hell freezes over.  But it seems to me that it’s beginning to look like Hell has already frozen over.

Rep. Raskin has already demanded that the White House physician conduct an immediate, comprehensive evaluation of the president’s cognitive fitness, with full public disclosure of the result.

The impacts of the president’s policies are Draconian.  For example, cutting the budget for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had profound consequences for healthcare globally. The agency provides clinical guidelines, monitors infectious disease outbreaks, supports health worker training, and deploys staff to combat infectious diseases. The CDC also works with other countries to stop threats at their source. According to the CDC cuts in resources and staff have resulted in the departure of over 30% of its workforce while significant budget cuts have eroded expertise in epidemiology, lab science, and communication, diminishing the nation’s ability to respond to emergencies and leading to fears of increased preventable disease.

Further, cuts in vaccine development, medical research that could reduce the mortality rates for cancers, chronic diseases, and dementia, as well as healthy longevity means that people will experience illnesses that could have been treated or cured, and many of them will die prematurely.

Here’s another important example. The Trump administration has resulted in the dismantling and weakening of numerous environmental protections and public health standards because the administration is promoting coal production and relaxing regulations for the fossil fuel industry.  Under the EPA Administrator deregulatory efforts are ensuring “regulatory relief” to businesses enthralled with profits at the expense of clean water and clean air. The agency is also repealing prior legal actions that regulated gas emissions from cars and trucks, as it reverses climate policies that were put in place to decrease air pollution.

Further, the EPA is removing protections for millions of acres of wetlands that were in place under the Clean Water Act. The list goes on. The Interior Department has begun weakening regulations that controlled mining and oil drilling, including removing protections in place in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental research is also threatened with dissolved funds. 

FEMA is also a disaster itself due to prioritizing corporate profits over public health. Originally intended to support state and local responses in the event of climate change induced disasters, which are occurring more frequently, the Natural Resources Defense Council point out that “This is not reform, it is sabotage. There will be ”more suffering.

And the Forest Service, which controls 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands covering 193 million acres, is at risk. In a New Yorker magazine story environmentalist Bill McKibben shared this: “Sound science is anathema to the Trump Administration.”  He cites the shutting of the Service’s nine regional offices and the removal of its headquarters in Washington, D.C. to Utah, where Senator Mike Lee wants to sell huge tracts of lands to developers.  “Gutting the Forest Service couldn’t come at a worse time,” McKibbens said. “This winter was the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S. and that has left the mountains in the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which is linked to wildfire danger.”

There’s so much more one can cite, but here’s a final chilling one. At this writing, it seems a Supreme Court Justice may be retiring. That would give Donald Trump the chance to seat another conservative justice for a lifetime appointment.

If that doesn’t feel like a Chinese Curse, I don’t know what will. As a Chinese writer said in 1627, It might be "better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos." 

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro.

Why It's Time to End the Dangerous Lunacy

If you’re like me, you just can’t take it anymore.  Every day it’s another travesty, another insane, infuriating action, more posturing, evasion, and lies, more threats to a midterm election, along with a heightened possibility of expanding wars, a global economic crisis, increased likelihood of living in a full-blown fascist autocracy, and on a planet in doubt of survival.

Post-Greenland and Venezuela, fantasies of controlling Canada and Cuba keep appearing, while admired oligarchs see a window to controlling Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Add to that the copious fears of what is already happening here. Enormous ICE prison camps are about to exist in several states where increasing brutality and violence towards people of color, unwelcome religious beliefs, human rights violations - including withheld healthcare, wormy food, floor sleeping and bodily abuse are ubiquitous - as is denial of habeas corpus, and access to family or lawyers. A ramped up domestic police force drunk on power enjoys assaulting mostly innocent people and dragging them into unmarked vans heading for deportation airports and lockups.  

Along with that Senator Adam Schiff noted in a Facebook post last month that the buildup of lethal military weapons is happening on a “scale [that] is staggering and the intent is terrifying.”  

An alarming possibility is increased terror attacks by cells already in this country.  Historian Timothy Snyder raised this issue in a recent Substack post, quoting himself from his book On Tyranny.  “Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.” He adds “If we choose to be surprised, we co-create a moment that Trump will exploit to undo what remains of our democracy.”

All the while Republicans in Congress and incompetent sycophants who lack relevant experience in Trump’s Cabinet refuse to grow backbones or study the lessons of history, preferring to kiss their king’s gold ring to avoid being accountable so they can hold onto what little power they have. Meanwhile the king is happy to sign off on whatever Steven Miller and others present to him. He is too busy trying to build a ballroom, plaster his image on buildings, cultural centers, airports, and possibly currency, while arranging praise and parades, while blathering incoherently in public appearances and dragging out press briefings. It’s pure Stalinism, except perhaps for the incoherence.

Meanwhile we’ve already seen Americans suffering because of cuts to agencies like FEMA, NOAA, EPA, NIH, CDC, HHS, FAA, the Departments of Education and Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, CDC, HHS, Commerce, Energy, and USAID. Other vital organizations that keep us healthy and safe in times of crisis, often with the help of research funds, have had to cancel key programs that help avert disasters in almost every sector of society. Healthcare is a good example. So are environmental protective programs that obviously link to preventive measures related to health status.

  There aren’t enough column inches to talk about the disastrous impact of budget cuts the current administration has made but here’s a sampling.

Americans of every socioeconomic status or geographical location are feeling the pinch when it comes to healthcare. Families and individuals are skipping meals or forgoing filling their tanks, or they can’t afford childcare or help with elder care. A recent report by the Gallup Poll revealed that people are dropping their health insurance, skipping medications, and borrowing money to get by.

We know that maternal and child health is dramatically impacted by budget cuts that affect critical and preventive care for that vulnerable group. But there are other healthcare crises arising every day that we don’t think about. Take lung disease as just one example.

A report in The Guardian revealed that policies are likely to drive up rates of lung disease and premature death. It included an analysis done by The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine that examined policies adopted during Trump’s second term across 10 areas, including healthcare access, environmental regulation, workplace protections and vaccine  uptake.

The interconnections of various sectors including public health, environmental safety, agriculture, and disaster relief, for example, are clear. Over the past year, the Trump administration has reduced dozens of air pollution standards aimed at increased profits for companies even though they lead to more asthma cases and hospitalizations for respiratory illness.

The list goes on and on as the focus shifts to war and aggression. and is grounded in the way the president and his minions ignore the Constitution, the courts, public opinion and our former global partners who, along with institutional safeguards, raise serious concerns about the future. Added to that the president’s continual abuse and censoring of the free press, and people exercising their right to free speech, so vital to democracy, while applauding and emulating long time dictators. 

We cannot allow him to continue destroying our country. As the late John Lewis said, “We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.” This is clearly the time to “Make good trouble.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro,  Vt.

A Disburbing Dissonance

It was during the snowstorms in January when my family managed to meet up for a birthday celebration in sunny California where the temperatures were in the 60s and 70s and the sky was beautifully blue every day. The winter respite was lovely but sobering as well, because I knew we were lucky to be able to take the trip since we are what could be called, in economic terms, privileged. That alone made me feel guilty as we departed.

The guilt persisted as I watched children playing, skateboarding, and having fun in other ways on the beaches. I kept thinking of all the incarcerated children in what are called detention facilities, but which I view as concentration camps. Those kids are eating fowl food, sleeping on cold floors, being denied necessary healthcare, education, clean water, and fresh air. Worst of all they are often separated from their parents, even as infants and toddlers. The older ones draw pictures like the children starving and ill in Germany’s Holocaust camps did.  Others have written letters that are now surfacing in social media outlets. 

Here is an excerpt from a letter 14-year-old Ariana wrote after being detained for 45 days. “I have never felt so much fear as I feel here every day. I remind myself that once I go back to Honduras a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom. My younger siblings haven’t seen their mom in over a month. Since I got to this Center all I feel is sadness and depression. … It’s sad to hear that people’s cases are being denied and they are being sent back to countries where they escaped from looking for protection and safety. Serious situations happen here and the officers don’t take them seriously. They don’t care.”

The juxtaposition of exuberant kids and the continuing traumatic news of incarcerated children was entirely dissonant. How could these two simultaneous scenarios possibly make sense?

That dissonance was mirrored and magnified by watching people in museums, parks, restaurants and cafes enjoying themselves as if nothing was wrong or troubling. I felt like I was being jolted back to normal times when we all felt relatively safe, and random acts of violence were not something we had to fear every day. Yet how could we ignore what was going on in our world?

Just a brief glance at the news each morning and evening gave me pause and reminded me of the worries that seemed ever present and inescapable. I couldn’t stop feeling guilty for enjoying myself as day by day the dissonance became more disturbing.

All over the world, while we were enjoying our time together, devastating weather events were a serious sign of possibly unsolvable climate change that could mean global water shortages, droughts that would increase migration, and other events that would irretrievably alter our ways of life and threaten social and political stability.

Added to these possibilities, and exacerbating threats and dangers we now face, is the lack of political will to do what is urgently needed while we still may have time. Given that science is seriously under attack, access to healthcare and public health preventive measures, no matter how sick people are, weaponized education mandates, while shutting down environmental protection via the EPA, disaster relief by FEMA, along with the absence of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which all rely on scientific experts across all sectors

 is a recipe for disaster.

As The Other 98% noted in a Facebook post in December, “What’s being spun as bureaucratic reshuffling is actually a brazen assault on research that keeps people safe and economies functioning in a world facing escalating climate chaos.”  The Facebook post which focused on relevant issues and pending crises that require scientific research and activity concluded with this warning: “It’s about whether we choose to prepare for the world we are living in. …This is our planet on the line, and our  democracy too.”

To expand upon this focus on the threatening absence of research I would add that the travesties we’ve witnessed and worried about, ranging from ICE murders to the threat of a cancelled election, all because of our current inept and inhumane powerbrokers in government who are acting in collusion with their financially privileged and deeply corrupt cronies.

 Since I am by nature a worrier, I have sleepless nights about all of this, but it’s something we all need respite from, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about how and where we find it. I’m trying to drop the guilt while recognizing the disturbing dissonance we are living with in these dark days. I hope others are seeing that as well.

Returning home from my respite there was plenty of ice, but it wasn’t unexpected or alarming. It’s ICE, and everything it represents, that gives me restless nights, along with the deep and disturbing dissonance that prevails.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Mourning the People's House

It was bad enough when the White House Oval Office was suddenly transformed into a fire sale of faux gold decorations dripping from the mantlepiece and every other available space. Before that it was an elegant room in the White House, lovingly called the People’s House, which has always been recognized as a national historic site. The “Oval” was a warm and elegant place where serious, important decisions were discussed by dignified, respected leaders and advisors with strong portfolios who realized the magnitude of the issues being addressed.  Today, sadly, it looks like a third-rate setting for a Moliere comedy.

Now comes the devastation of the East Wing. Photos of the desecration of that much loved part of the White House are a sickening metaphor for the destruction of democracy we are witnessing.  In addition to the building disappearing, some of us can’t stop wondering what happened to the artwork, furnishings, historic references and more that were housed in the East Wing.  Was it treated as debris, or simply looted before the demolition, as other dictators have done? 

Critics have compared the demolition of the historic building to “slashing a ”Rembrandt.” One of them called the East Wing “the heartbeat for more than 100 years” as first ladies worked from their offices there on important issues ranging from drug abuse to boosting literacy and preserving the White House itself. 

In an opinion editorial in Architect’s Newsletter, a columnist noted that “The East Wing historically housed the Office of the First Lady. [Now] it seems nothing was done to protect the history of women’s contributions to the presidency. By bulldozing the structure, Trump is effectively erasing women from the history of the White House.”

Roslyn Carter was the original First Lady to have an office in the East Wing. She wanted a private place to go to work where she “didn’t have to dress up and put on makeup,” she wrote in her memoir. Hillary Clinton became the determined First Lady to insist that her office be in the West Wing because she felt that her staff needed to be “integrated physically” with the president’s team. Michelle Obama worked to support military families and promote higher education for girls in poor countries from the East Wing and set a standard as a global role model. And Jill Biden, who continued teaching while serving as First Lady, advocated for cancer research and women’s health.

Historically notable, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the White House movie theater in 1942 by converting a cloakroom in the East Terrace into a screening room so that he could watch newsreels during World War II. Other presidents used the theater to rehearse important speeches including the State of the Union.

The East Wing was originally known as the East Terrace in 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt was president. FDR created the East Wing as we have known it in 1942 to have more workspace during the war, and to conceal an underground bunker for the president and staff. Today some people posit that the bunker is the reason the current president wants to obscure it with a massive ballroom which, unsurprisingly, will be named The Donald J. Trump Ballroom. They suggest that the ever-paranoid president wants the bunker to be a safe, well-equipped space for him to indulge the ultra-right-wing fascist fantasies that he clings to, along with his sycophants who can be directed by their leader as he advances his autocratic regime.

 The idea of a massive ballroom, whether it is being built as camouflage or not where the beautiful East Wing once was, is obscene. It’s not only likely to be illegal, having ignored proper approvals from the National Park Service and the National Capital Planning Commission. It’s an especially heinous Gilded Age insult and anomaly in face of a government shutdown that will affect millions of Americans in numerous and terrible ways. It smacks of robber barons and “Let them eat cake.”  It’s clearly a corrupt moneymaker, an eyesore in the landscape of Washington, and a symbol of the narcissism that is tearing us apart.

No wonder historians, preservationists, art lovers, architects, and ordinary Americans are distraught, not only for the loss of this historical building, but for the lack of transparency, the lying about funding, the underlying corruption, and its implications – all of which the president chooses to call “manufactured outrage.”  The travesty of such narcissism is stunning.

 The bottom line is that a ballroom monument to oneself has no place in the People’s House, now or ever. It’s time to insist that such acts of ego be stopped.

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 Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com/blog

Why Gen Z Gives Me Hope

 While researching what Gen Z means, I had to understand the generation that was born between the 1990s and 2010.  I learned that they succeed Millennials and precedes Gen A (Alpha). Thankfully there’s a quote for every generation. This one, which originated with Walt Disney, seemed illustrative of Gen Z: “The Way to Get Started is to Quit Talking and Begin Doing.” Gen Zers want to act vs. eternally debating or studying issues related to governance.

I became interested in understanding this cohort because they seem to be showing up everywhere in political studies and generational discourse. What I learned gave me hope. For example, a study conducted this year by Tufts University about Gen Z Americans and democracy was enlightening.

The study explained that “Young Americans represent both the present and future of political leadership and participation in the United States, despite the current dissatisfaction with democracy in the United States. There is an overwhelming consensus among young people that democracy itself is fundamentally valuable; a majority have strong commitments to its core principles.”

The study points out that Gen Zers have grown up during a troubling time, and not just in American life. They have experienced a global pandemic, economic instability, major political shifts, increases in school shootings, activist movements related to racism, climate change, and the rise of social media and digital platforms as means of primary communication. 

Those factors don’t mean that people born between 1990 and 2010 are a monolithic generation. But their diversity, digital connection, education, and aspirations provide them with a collaborative identity, similar experience, and often an agreed upon ideology that informs the unique ways that they approach democracy.

AI helped me understand this generation. On my first search for more information the first thing to pop up online was a helpful list of key differences between Gen Z and prior generations. They include such facts as these: Gen Zers are “Digital Natives,” having never lived in a world without the internet. They are more cautious about economic matters with a view to securing their futures. They are prone to anxiety and stress given the pressures of daily life and political uncertainty. They also value authenticity, transparency and interpersonal relationships and feel globally connected in ways that helps them explore interesting career paths. To be succinct, they live in a uniquely modern world involving innovation, participation, and engagement in entirely new ways.

I wanted to write about Gen Z, not only because they show promise for the future when our current political nightmare ends, but because there are signs that this generation is already capable of making the world a better place for everyone, no matter what country they live in.

Recently, examples have been written about Gen Z efforts and actions in other countries that reveal a commitment to social justice, humanitarian governance, and  competent, compassionate, humane leadership by politically astute emerging leaders ready to work for the principles upon which our own country was built. The countries where activism is happening, and working are diverse and widespread.

In a string of articles showcased by apnews.com Gen Z activity in several countries, including Madagascar, where young protesters took to the streets to demonstrate for safe, reliable water and electricity across the country, and an end to corruption. Their actions led to the president dissolving the government. In a public speech he declared that the protesters’ demands were heard, as part of an apology for the failure of his government. Talk is cheap, but the protests clearly had an impact.

In Morocco, over a dozen cities saw young people using social media to mount a movement aimed at improvements in public health and education systems that authorities couldn’t ignore. Again, corruption was an umbrella theme aimed at political parties. In Kenya GenZ protests against police brutality and poor governance erupted throughout the country commemorating similar protests a year ago to oppose tax hikes. Current unrest in Peru was focused on the country’s pension system, and other youth movements took place in Indonesia and the Philippines.   

These examples are not just about idealistic youthful protests that will go nowhere. They are a distinct sign that a generation of young people have had enough political abuse and corruption worldwide. They are ready and willing as one protester said, “to get our nation[s] back.”

Historian Timothy Snyder, wrote a recent Substack post about “Youth Protest in Serbia” especially for. American readers.  In it he states that “Protests have to do with a basic concern with the rule of law. This is why it’s so annoying when photos in our media are tagged as ‘anti-government protests.’ People in Serbia are protesting for good government!”

He points out that the protests there were student-led but coordinated with the public. They included various actions that needed to be taken and articulated specific demands.  Community and sectoral coordination were important while people were urged to participate in governance. In other words, the protests were strategic, important, and productive, not random acts of ire.

It seems to me that Gen Z is learning, preparing, and waiting to take us into a sensible, sane, democratic future. It won’t be soon, or easy, but there is promise in their protests. Gen Zer Greta Thunberg helps sound an optimistic note.  “Being young is a great advantage, since we see the world from a new perspective and we are not afraid to make radical changes.”  I welcome her enthusiasm, courage, and world view.

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Can Democracy Prevail and Thrive?

Two centuries ago, an obscure Scotsman named Alexander Fraser Tyler observed that “a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.” Yet here we are, nearly 250 years into America’s experiment with a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in his Gettysburg address. Sadly, now Tyler’s idea that democracy fails when “the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury,” is upon us.

I’ve been pondering how we got here so quickly and asking myself some questions. Is democracy failing in America and in many other countries because of corruption for personal gain? (Looks like it.) Can democracy survive, thrive and prevail anywhere? What does democracy depend upon? Is the idea of democracy a misconception or myth? How is it so easily overthrown? Why are threats to democracy growing?

According to the United Nations the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism has more than doubled in recent years as polarization increases “to toxic levels” while pluralism declines and autocratic leaders take control of countries by fostering misinformation, media censorship, and increasingly repressive civil and human rights. Why has that been happening? This led to my remembering the history of democracy and then to considering another form of governance that seems to work better than ours.

As I learned in school democracy is rooted in ancient Greece followed and altered by the Roman Republic. Both systems led to changes that grew complicated. In Greece democracy fostered the idea of citizen participation in governance but limited it to free men. The Romans went a bit further, adding limited election of representatives.  Later, in medieval times, institutions added more liberal ideas like the English parliament’s Magna Carta in 1215, which limited the power of monarchs and gave some rights to various classes of people. That led to the idea that citizens should have certain rights when it came to how they were governed. When the American and French revolutions occurred the idea of human rights, though still limited, became widespread, and began to include more people in the working class, including women.

The idea of democracy relies on two principles: Individual autonomy and Equality. These two values resonated and made democracy popular, but putting those two ideas into practice proved to be complicated.  Ultimately it led to the idea of majority rule. Today the idea of “representative democracy” is a framework that offers “freedom of thought, expression, religion, and peaceful assembly.”

Social democracies take these rights further. They call for governments to provide social and economic rights to all, including education, healthcare, fair pay, and pensions. Proponents of this ideology, which have been successful in Scandinavian countries and some constitutional democracies in Europe, have proven to respect the fundamental ideas of autonomy, equality, and human rights.  It’s a system that has been proven to work well. Citizens are happy with such a humane form of governance and leaders are respected, trusted, and appreciated. It’s important to emphasize here that democratic socialism is not communism, a frequent trope that conservative and powerful elected leaders and their followers employ to convince others that it’s a dangerous system of governance.  In reality it’s a system that works and keeps countries safe and sane.

Our Constitution, written in 1789, begins with “We the People,” meant to capture the foundational principles that the government derives its power from the consent of the governed, ”for whom it serves. But democracy is not guaranteed. As some scholars say, it is still an experiment.  In 1947 Winston Churchill noted that “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have tried from time to time.”

This brief history is important because we urgently need to recognize and resist our current and evolving system of government under the current administration, which is far from upholding the Constitution, the rule of law, human rights, and a viable and compassionate worldview. We are clearly living in a growing state of fear, shock, and illegal maneuvers that defy and threaten democracy while rapidly becoming a totalitarian state ruled by oligarchs and a dictator.

Unless you’ve escaped that or witnessed it, it’s hard to imagine what it is like, but a look at the Nazi playbook in Germany reveals the horror of those regimes.

Globally autocracies are growing exponentially. In some instances, they move to dictatorships by developing and refining techniques, including lies and propaganda, censorship, blackmail, and co-optation of entities including universities, media, the law, corporations, institutions and organizations that work toward and protect democracy.  Increasing, new methods of repression, indignity and humiliation are employed (e.g., Alligator Auschwitz and ICE detention centers) and strategic alliances manipulate information threatening elections.  Sound familiar?

I can’t answer the questions I’ve asked myself and I don’t know how we will emerge from this terrifying time, or how democracy can be restored and improved for the future. But I know the time has come for each of us to understand the situation, to act in our own and others’ interests, and to recognize the looming threat to our way of life. We must not only observe it, but act upon it if democracy is to prevail and thrive. We must ask ourselves hard questions in the hope that they lead us to a new and sustainable social democracy.

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 Elayne Clift writes and worries in Brattleboro, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com    

Pushing Back: Brava to Women Warriors Who Stand Up to Bullies

"The days of sweeping this under the rug are over. We survivors say no more. [We are] no longer weak, [we are] no longer powerless and [we are] no longer alone.”

When Anouska De Georgiou, a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s bottomless abuse, stepped to the podium at the U.S. Capital on a hot day in September and spoke those words, supported by a sisterhood of women who told their stories, the decades of silence gave way to the truth about unimaginable crimes.  Undeterred by a flyover meant to obscure what they were saying didn’t phase them.  Nor did the fear of retribution.  They were on a mission, and nothing was going to stop them. 

It was a milestone event that illustrated the power of women who stand up to bullies with courage and conviction. The women who spoke and rebutted the accusation that the event was “a hoax,” modeled with great dignity and oration that the time has come when women in all walks of life have had enough. In speaking truth to power they deserve our respect and gratitude.

They are part of a larger sisterhood that is spreading throughout every corner and sector of society “fired up and ready to go.”  They form a choir of voices that insist on truth, accountability, and consequences when called for. They will not stop pushing back against the bullies who demean them, discard them, and disavow their rights.

They are in good and inspiring company. They stand on the shoulders of slaves, suffragists, and lots of other women who told the truth about their lives.  Sojourner Truth was one of them. Her speech “Ain’t I a Woman,” delivered to a room full of 19th century misogynist men, rocked the room with her oratory. Alice Paul and her suffragist friends modeled speaking truth to power to get the vote, and writers like Virginia Woolf, Audrey Lorde, and Carolyn Heilbrunn are just a few examples of women who used their literary voices to support women who refused to be ignored or silenced.

In this moment there are women in every sector of society who refuse to be quiet. Among them are three women on the Supreme Court who fire back at their conservative colleagues when they empower a wannabe dictator. Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown stands out among them. Known for choosing her words carefully she doesn’t mince words. She has accused the  majority of favoring “the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes,” adding that the majority poses a “profound “danger to the country.” Her colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are no wallflowers either. Neither are the judges in lower courts who have tried their best to keep the House of Trump in check.

Among them are Roberta Kaplan who helped E. Jean Carroll win a huge victory over the president for sexual abuse, Letetia James, the attorney general of New York who is standing up to Donald Trump, and Tanya Chutkin, who serves as a U. S. district judge for the District of Columbia. She vigorously refuted the president’s attempt to be shielded from prosecution when he argued that his actions fell within his duties as commander-in-chief.

Then there are the women warriors in Congress, past and present, who never failed to speak truth to power in amazing ways. Barbara Mikulski (D- MD), Pat Schroeder (D-CO) and Corie Bush (D-MO) were among them, and of course Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) have made their mark. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) are also among the sisterhood making a difference.

Women at the state level are equally vociferous. Ever watch the Attorney General of Colorado, Jena Griswold?  Or the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, along with the mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu. The governor of Maine, Janet Mills, is someone to watch, along with the two women running for governor of their states, Mikie Sherill (NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (VA).

Some of the best women warriors remain nameless but wonderfully effective. There are multitudes of women who organize marches or sit-ins, fight like fury for gun control, quit good jobs, run for local office, and speak out at town halls because they won’t accept corruption or political chicanery.

Women journalists, historians, writers, artists, social justice organizers and advocates like Tarana Burke, founder of the Me-Too movement, are also women who speak truth to power.  Ida Tarbell wrote about corporate greed in the early 20th century, Ida B. Wells exposed the evils of slavery, and Nellie Bly, went underground to expose what happened to women in asylums.  More contemporary women writers and artists continue to expose the truth of women’s lives, enabling others like those who stood on the Capital steps to release their rage and translate it into action.

Today’s women are as committed and courageous as those who bore witness at the Capital and demanded accountability and reform.  Brava to every one of them, and to those they have inspired to speak their truth and to continue using their voices until justice prevails.

We owe them all a debt of gratitude.

Food for Thought as the School Year Begins

I remember the days when school was about to begin for another year.  Kids went to the Five-and-Dime store to buy new pencil holders, good erasers, and tablets, before carefully covering their new schoolbooks with brown paper bags from the grocery store. Sometimes we got new saddle shoes too. It was exciting, and thankfully our parents didn’t have to worry about funding cuts that would affect our school district.

What a far cry from now, when deep and damaging cuts to essential school-based programs that would affect millions of people. The recently proposed cuts were unimaginable and cruel, but not surprising given this administration’s priorities and policies.

The pending crisis in education became obvious when Mr. Trump appointed Linda Marie McMahon as Secretary of Education, with Congressional approval. A former professional wrestling promoter with a bachelor’s degree in teaching French, McMahon has  no relevant experience that qualified her for a job running a massive organization that requires management, fiscal, organizational, and policymaking expertise. She has none of those skills and appears to have no interest in education and less interest in the people who need and benefit from educational objectives, programs, and sufficiently prioritized budgets.

The trouble started when the Trump administration took steps to dramatically reduce the size of the Department of Education by firing DOE employees. When a federal judge tried to have the fired employees returned to their jobs, the Supreme Court majority blocked the order with a temporary pause.

Justice Sonia Sotomayer was joined in a 19-page opinion by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.  In it they called the court’s decision “indefensible” and wrote that it “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naïve, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of power is "grave.”

In June the Trump administration announced a seven billion dollar cut to state and local schools. Sixteen state attorneys general reacted to that cut by suing the administration for “unconstitutionally” ending over a billion dollars in mental health related grants created to help after mass school shootings.

The $7 billion in federal spending cuts for education included five important grants that fund summer and after-school programs serving millions of students nationwide. Other impacted programs included almost $4 million for migrant education, over $2 billion for professional development, almost $9 million for English-learner services, and over a billion dollars for before-and.-afterschool programs.

National education Association president Becky Pringle reacted with shock. “Withholding billions in promised federal education funding that students need, and states had planned to use to support children in their states, is a cruel betrayal of students, especially those who rely on critical support services,” adding that “Schools are already grappling with severe teacher shortages, burnout, and under-resourced classrooms.” The fact that teachers would be expected to fill the gaps in teacher shortages and classroom supplies and would be denied training is an outrage. 

To put a human face on these cuts, imagine being a migrant child who has been in school for years and now wants to graduate from high school but can’t pass the necessary academic standards. How would you like to be an educator who wants to help student achievement by furthering your training, but you are denied that opportunity. Wouldn’t you like your child’s school to have upgraded technologies like computers?  How about having literacy and other educational services available during non-school hours via after school or summer programs, particularly if you live in a rural area where schools have low performance records. These educational benefits, and necessities, help kids reach their potential and shape their futures.

Keeping children safe and cared for outside of routine school or summer hours is another benefit derived from educational programs. It’s not hyperbole to say that investing in educational opportunities and programs make a ton of difference for families, communities, and this country’s future. 

Interestingly, the Education Department released $1.3 million in previously held grant money for after-school programs just days after ten Republican senators sent a letter begging the Trump administration to allow frozen money to be sent to states. Withholding those funds would have meant some school districts and nonprofit organizations would have had to close or drastically scale back their educational programs this fall.

In addition to the released funds paying for programs before and after the summer the release of those funds will provide childcare for low income working parents or provide childcare options in rural areas. Beyond that, children can receive help with reading and math, as well as in science and art.

In July the remaining $5.5 billion cut was restored due to growing pressure on the administration from the public and professionals. Let’s hope that continuing pressure by parents, teachers, education administrators, and others will impact the administration, and Linda McMahon, enough to care about our kids, and  realize that education in all forms is  critical for all of us.

On this and other urgent matters, we need to keep the pressure up. It obviously works!

SCOTUS Ignores the Law and Trades Compassion for Cruelty

Only three of them remain. They are women with integrity, refined intellect, a belief in human rights and a deep knowledge of the law. Now they mourn the betrayal of six colleagues on the Supreme Court who fail to respect the oaths they took to protect and preserve a 250-year-old document upon which our country was founded.  

One of those women is Justice Sonia Sotomayor who recently wrote, “The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law…free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. … By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines the foundational principles of [ the Constitution].”

Another is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who added to Justice Sotomayor’s statement regarding the migrant crisis. “The government’s so-called ‘urgency’ about gaining this access [to due process] is the mere fact it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes. Once again, this court dons its emergency responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”

 Along with Justice Elena Kagan, these women have spoken judicial truth to power.

As blogger Thom Hartmann wrote, “The American people got a taste of authoritarianism wrapped in judicial robes” when in June the Court allowed the Trump administration to deport masses of immigrants to random countries from which there is no hope of return. “The Government made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law … By rewarding lawlessness, the Court again undermines [a] foundational principle.”  … “The decision means that a future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off” -- to places that feel like Hell without due process – which was the law of the land before this administration.

Shame on the Supreme Court for dealing a death blow to democracy by handing the would-be-king his crown.  How are we to understand such cruelty and judicial prejudice in the Supreme Court as it destroys the rule of law, the Constitution, human rights, and the essential elements of democracy?

As all of this was happening SCOTUS limited the ability of federal judges to pause Mr. Trump’s executive orders (largely written by Stephen Miller). It considered ending birthright citizenship, which violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of such citizenship, stating that anyone born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen. The Court sycophants pleased the president who gleefully exclaimed that “Our country should be very proud of the Supreme Court.” This issue may be revisited in the fall.

Other SCOTUS decisions have reduced the ability of lower courts to keep the White house in check.  Now everything is at stake, from shutting down Planned Parenthood to Medicaid and SNAP cuts that can’t be challenged legally while the entire judicial system breaks down. That’s how dictatorships take hold and never let go.

All of this was foreshadowed when the ACLU challenged the power of the president in the Supreme Court last year after the Court ruled that President Trump is immune from criminal liability for a set of “core” acts and decisions, including his attempt to use the Justice Department to obstruct the results of  the election.

As ACLU pointed out in its argument against that ruling, SCOTUS left to the lower courts a good deal of the work required to determine which acts and decisions were or would be immune and which would not. That opened the door for the president, or others who follow, to engage in criminal acts free of accountability. The ACLU quickly cited the Constitution’s principle that no one is above the law in the United States, including the president.  The Court found that when the president acts as an individual s/he is not immune, but it held that presidents have immunity for their official actions, even when undertaken for personal ends and criminal purposes.

 A document called “How Do Dictators Destroy Judicial Independence,” written last year by several legal scholars, underscores how dictators consolidate power to control every facet of governance.  “Dictators often target the judiciary as a key institution to manipulate. The independence of the judiciary is a cornerstone of any democratic system, serving as a check on executive power and ensuring that laws are applied fairly and impartially. Dictators see an independent judiciary as a threat and potential obstacle to their ambitions. By systematically dismantling judicial independence, they transform the courts into tools of repression, allowing them to suppress opposition, evade accountability, and entrench their rule.”

As Adam Liptak noted in a New York Times essay last month, the three women justices cited here wrote a 19-page dissent to the Court’s use of the “Emergence Docket” applied to recent Court decisions, in which they stated that, “The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naïve but either way the threat to our constitution’s separation of power is grave.”

The betrayals of SCOTUS with respect to the Constitution, and the future, are clear. The abandonment of fundamental rulings and rights that made this country unique is a terrible, heartbreaking blow that demands reform. Dare we hope for that reform in time to preserve our way of life?

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, VT  www.elayne-clift.com

Baby Bribery: The Height of Hypocrisy

Remember the political phrase some years ago endorsed by Republicans who called themselves “the moral majority” while critics’ responded that they were neither? Or the Democratic crie de coeur that Republicans only cared about children from conception to birth?  Well, the time has come to recall those responses.

It’s clear that the Trump administration is embracing a pronatalist position taken straight out of the Hitler playbook. Adolf rewarded women who birthed lots of Aryan children, and Donald is now embracing the idea of incentivizing women to have at least six children.

At the same time as the president blathers on about “traditional family values,” he’s on a diabolical mission to convince women to have more babies – at least six of them. If they meet that goal (and what woman would want to?) he would reward them with a $5,000 “baby bonus” – get this – reserve some scholarships for mothers who are married with children.  But wait a minute: What mother of six would have the time or energy required in the marketplace, the academy, corporations, factories, farms or elsewhere other than the kitchen and laundry room. To top off this amazing offer, he would also give them “motherhood metals.”  Who could resist that?

To support baby making he would also bump up financial support for more IVF because he claims to be the “fertilization president” and the “king of IVF.”  This delusion at the same time that women are going to jail for miscarriage and dying from lack of pre-natal and birthing care.

The fact is that laws relating to miscarriage in many states have proliferated since Roe v. Wade was overturned, despite the statistic that about 30 to 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. That’s a lot of women who are at risk of criminal prosecution.

The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. The faux IVF maven and his gang of goons are simultaneously slashing every program that helps children and their families, including cuts to maternal and child health programs, the Head Start program for low-income families, childcare support, paid maternity leave, and daycare, as well as Medicaid. It’s relatively easy to increase the fertility rate, but where does protecting our progeny fit into this Draconian plan?

So much for family values. In March the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut $500 million from the Emergency Food Assistance Program and cut more than $1 billion from two programs that help food banks and school meal programs, including $660 million for schoolchildren because, they said, it was “nonessential.” Hundreds of school systems and food banks are not facing rising food prices along with food insecurity, according to a .Stateline report.

As the 19th century clergyman, Frederick William Robertson, said, “There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy: Hypocrisy, fraud and tyranny. “

This White House fits that sentiment along with being amazingly inept in making moral decisions, understanding connections or caring about them, as it continues its insane tyranny over safety nets and vital resources.  Schools, for example, are taking a big hit when it comes to government support for all the babies it wants to see born.  Fewer financial resources for schools, from early education programs through higher education, impact how those babies will grow and develop in the best possible ways.

Minnesota based Walden University, which specializes in programs related to education, cites the results of fewer resources available to schools, especially those with ill-funded school budgets. Students in these schools don’t perform as well as they could because schools can’t buy updated textbooks in a variety of fields, and updated educational technology takes a hard hit when funds are cut, along with art supplies, extracurricular activities, and transportation. Larger classrooms stand to see dozens of students with one teacher, making individualized assistance unlikely.

As educator John Dewey noted, “Education is Life Itself.”  Would that this administration realized that and valued our children enough to act like grownups in the room.  

In the health sector, the impact of Medicaid cuts on children is alarming. They can lead to fewer providers, longer waiting times, and limited access to essential services, especially for special- needs children. Support services like school-based programs or important in-home care will be curtailed, and rural communities will be hit hard by cuts that lead to health disparities. Children with disabilities will suffer reduced interventions and therapies, which will compromise their physical development and mental health. These cuts are grounded in the fact that children are often overlooked in budget debates because they have no political voice.

As Nelson Mandela said, “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday life of children.”  And history will also judge this administration for its hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny along with its lack of compassion, humanity, and lack of morality.

As for bribes for babies, I wouldn’t start making any motherhood medals. 

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

A New Eugenics Wave: Trying to Make Disability and Disease Disappear

Back in the 1980s when I was a budding journalist publishing articles related to women and health while working as Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network, I had the privilege of interviewing Judy Heumann and her collaborator Ed Roberts. Judy was known by then as the Mother of the Disability Movement and Ed was called the Father of Independent Living.

Judy, who died in 2023, had contracted polio as a child who then spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.  She was denied the right to attend school because she was considered a fire hazard at the age of five. That was the seed that led to her life’s work. Determined to work with other disabled people, she helped found the Berkeley Center for Independent Living and the World Institute on Disability with Ed, who also had polio at the age of fourteen. It left him completely paralyzed and on a respirator for the rest of his life.  Undeterred, Ed fought to attend UC Berkeley, and ultimately became the first student to use a wheelchair there, let alone a respirator.

Their stories opened my mind to justice issues as no one else had. Together Judy and Ed changed the lives of all disabled people by helping to institute laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and much more. They weren’t afraid of shocking people, and they knew how to mobilize the media. In 1990 they led a demonstration in which thousands of activists abandoned their wheelchairs and mobility aids, many of them crawling up the eighty-three steps of the U.S. Capital building. The youngest one among them was eight years old.

A recent article in The Guardian noted that the day after Donald Trump was sworn for a second term was the day that the accessibility page and all assisted living content was removed from the White House website. Live interpretation (ASL) was removed from the White House and various federal agencies too.

Additionally, words like “diversity,” “women,” “accessibility” and “disability” were listed as reason to reject grant applications at the National Science Foundation, scaring other agencies and research institutions. That was followed by the order to dismantle the Department of Education, with over 1300 employees fired, and seven regional offices were closed. Special education and rehabilitation services along with the department’s office of civil rights were affected – after Linda McMahon, Trump’s Secretary of Education, promised that those programs would not be affected.

As the Guardian pointed out, early intervention programs and post-high school transition programs, including those that help with employment for disabled workers, are being slashed. They even went so far as to scrub the Special Olympics.  Services like speech, physical and occupational therapy have been cut. So were funds for ramps and braille materials, along with the idea of preferential seating and more. Some have called the treatment of disabled people “the canary in the coal mine.”  After all, Hitler started his elimination campaigns with disabled people. 

What’s happening here now smacks of Eugenics, which was first passed in the U.S. in 1907 in Indiana. Eugenics laws targeted disabled people in schools, institutions, and jails.  Sterilization was mandated for “criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” in the state. Another law passed that year called for compulsory sterilization for those with “heredity diseases, which included deafness, blindness, epilepsy, and a lot of other conditions. In 1930s Germany mandatory abortions were also required if a parent had one of the identified conditions.

In the U.S. it remains legal in at least 31 states and Washington, D.C. to forcibly sterilize people because of a 1927 SCOTUS decision that upheld sterilization in Virginia. That decision has never been overturned.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and horror stories. It’s a shameful piece of American history, and a frightening example of what can happen when dictators and oligarchs take over a country and massacre their laws, ignore their courts, and extort institutions of learning, law, and civil rights. It’s beyond Draconian and Dystopian.  It’s just plain evil.

Alongside these travesties it bears illuminating what is happening at the same time in the health sector.  An April post on Bluesky by someone named Josh Marshall made the case that “most of the country has little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the U.S.” Marshall reminds us that cancer research has been put back decades along with other research about treatments and cures for other illnesses that lead to disability or death.

“It’s real, and it’s happened so quickly that most of the country doesn’t know it yet [including] the biomedical research world outside of NIH. … The prospect of more lifesaving cures and treatments [is] bleak,” Marshall says. So is life for disabled or otherwise comprised Americans, including children, elders, and those with chronic illnesses or disease, all because of political extremism led by totally incompetent people with no relevant experience or an ounce of empathy.

The canaries in the coal mines are sounding alarms. We must stay alert and actively resist in whatever ways we can. Our lives and our loved ones depend on us.  As Dylan Thomas famously said, “Do not go gently into the night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

The Power and Promise of Resistance

It’s become clear that the time to act against political evil is now because this is an extraordinary moment in our history: We stand to lose the democracy we have taken for granted. Luckily, we are not new to resistance. We’ve done it before, and we’ve learned lessons from the past. But there are new lessons to be learned.

As Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, points out, we have a history of resisting authoritarianism. Pro-independence colonists organized campaigns refusing to buy British goods and refused to abide by laws that required colonists to export raw materials to Britain. They defied other orders from Britain when they mounted the Boston Tea Party and undertook other  rebellious acts

More recently we have realized success by resisting modern travesties. The civil rights movement achieved desegregation with noncooperation campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, strikes, business boycotts, marches, demonstrations and the power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory along with legal action. The women’s movement of the 1960s that continues today changed social norms and misogynist legislation, and organized resistance helped end the Vietnam War.

Lessons from the past are instructive. For example, Plato wrote that Socrates risked “all consequences in preference to becoming a partner in their iniquitous deeds.” Perhaps that inspired him to write The Republic in 380 BC in which he envisioned a just society in which “The best and most just of all rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, while the worst and most unjust are those who are most eager. “

            Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, a play in which the women of Athens occupied the Acropolis and went on a sex strike until the men agreed to make peace. Lysistrata stated that even if I was born a woman, don't hold it against me if I manage to suggest something better than what we've got now."

             Gandhi’s Quit India campaign, a unifying rallying cry for civil disobedience spread quickly and culminated in his 1930 Salt March which inspired the march on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery march two years later. “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt”, King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which included his famous statement that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

             There are many ways to resist, and literature, music, and art have played their part. A strong artistic protest against injustice occurred in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH in the 1920s when Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco painted frescoes that depict the history of the American continent from the immigration of native peoples in prehistoric times to the arrival of the Europeans and their impact on native civilization.  Diego Rivera also used murals as a way to resist tyranny.  He called Orozco the conscience of his generation because of his intentional speaking out about things without fear of the consequences.  

            Music also rails against injustice. The Beatles, Arlo Guthrie, Helen Reddy, and many more recognized the importance of resistance through protest songs which still resonate today.

              American writers wrote books of resistance about political and social issues, mobilizing public opinion, advocating for the persecuted and marginalized, celebrating resisters, making space for direct action, aimed at a way forward. Protest literature made its mark with books like John Hersey's Hiroshima, a masterful anti-war book. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring woke people up to environmental issues, and James Baldwin’s essays in The Fire Next Time explored the American civil rights movement while Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee chronicled the violence of America's systemic destruction of Native America’s indigenous peoples and their culture.

            This cultural context is enlightening but as Erica Chenoweth points out “today’s political terrain calls for a more muscular movement strategy” centered on economic resistance given that our future elections are at risk. She agrees with other strategists that withholding labor and purchasing power along with strikes or slowdowns, are both effective methods of resistance.

I personally advocate for a national strike day, and a Project 2028 document (which needn’t be 900 pages long) that blasts Project 2025 and states specifically what new leadership would do to roll back Trump travesties and makes clear what antidotes will restore civil and human rights.

Another resistance tool for pressuring policy makers is employing a proven communication strategy aimed at raising awareness, increasing knowledge of what’s at stake, addressing attitudes, practices and beliefs and conveying a visionary, achievable future. Such a strategy calls for acting vs. reacting and focusing on “target audiences” by meeting them where they are and hearing what they say and think.

When stories are localized and opinion leaders and trusted change agents are in partnership with the media the results can be amazing.  I know because I worked internationally on a successful communication project that involved media advocacy methods vs. political public relations. It saved lives. Sadly, our politicians have not realized the potential and efficacy of well-researched and designed messages that rely on multiple ways to convey information and inspire action.

Add that to the mix and Erica Chenweth could be right. “Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science, and potency of noncooperation, combined with a robust protest capacity and legal action, [that suggests] resistance against Trump’s agenda in America is not only alive and well. It is savvy, diversifying and probably just getting started.”

Let’s hope she’s right.

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

The Shock and Awe of Immigrant Deportations

They left Colombia to escape violence hoping to legally apply for asylum in the United States. Tthey were among the first to be deported by the Trump administration. It happened after five flights returned hundreds of Colombian migrants to their home country in the waning days of January, the Washington Post reported on Instagram.

As the new administration got into full swing, applying for asylum instantly became increasingly difficult. One way to halt applications was cutting off established and future appointments with CBP One, a mobile app that offered migrants a legal pathway to apply. Without that option still available, the Colombian family turned themselves in at the border hoping they could keep their scheduled appointment. Within days they were deported.

Another family, profiled on Instagram by Occupy Democrats last month involved three generations, a three-year-old child, her mother, and her grandmother, all American citizens from Puerto Rico who spoke fluent English when they were shopping in a Milwaukee store. Denied the chance to talk to an official they were taken to a detention center where the child was separated from her mother. When presented with birth certificates an officer released them.

An immigrant daughter who graduated from an Ivy League college and later earned a law degree, told a cable TV reporter that she received a call to bring her father to a government office because his green card was pending. He had lived in the U.S. for dozens of years, worked and paid taxes, and never been in trouble with the law so she had no reason to think he would encounter difficulties. But upon arrival the daughter was told to leave the room. When she refused, security escorted her out. When she returned, her father was gone – deported. 

Errors, cruel separations, and  entrapment is happening in many places. Children are separated from their mothers. People are followed home in their cars by ICE, identified perhaps by a woman wearing hijab or a dark-skinned man spotted in a grocery store. People who contribute to their communities, are vital to our economy, and never disobey the law are dragged away in front of their families. Many are victims of mistaken identity. Stories like these vary but they are similarly painful, heartbreaking and grievous.

Physician-writer Danielle Ofri, writing in The New York Times just after the January election, said that “Doctors and nurses [who are immigrants] should get ready for mass deportations. Patients are scared too. One patient who had multiple chronic health issues told Ofri that she was afraid of being picked up because she would not be allowed to take her medications “in the immigration camps.” She had stopped coming to the hospital for checkups because she was “scared ICE will be in train stations and bus stops.”

As horror stories mount individuals and families are going into hiding, clinging to their children who no longer go to school and who can’t seek healthcare. The price of eggs doesn’t compare to that kind of trauma.

Yet the Trump administration continues to cling to ideas that are built on myth, assumptions, stereotyping, racism and an appalling lack of understanding about what will happen if millions of hardworking, productive, honest, skilled and unskilled workers are forced out of the country.

Historical context is called for here. In 1980 Congress passed the Refuge Act which meant that people claiming political asylum had to meet a set of requirements to qualify for refuge or asylum.  But Ronald Reagan chose to view people fleeing political violence in Latin American as economic migrants, a designation that caused many applicants to be disqualified for asylum.

At about that time the government began resisting the sanctuary movement, especially in places of worship. In 1984 the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor to ICE, launched a full-scale investigation into the sanctuary movement and its leaders. Undercover agents were employed to collect evidence that religion was being used as a covert way to push a radical political agenda and to thus undermine immigration laws.

Soon, leaders of the sanctuary movement were charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to violate federal law. Not long afterwards, sanctuaries began spreading from churches to college campuses, local legislative bodies and state level protections and laws.

Now Donald Trump insists that sanctuary cities are havens of crime so overrun by dangerous immigrants that he needs to have an army of agents like ICE, the National Guard, and the military to control a plague of epic proportions perpetrated by people of color, poor people who have suffered unimaginable violence and persecution. That, of course, demands an expansion of “detention centers” which are, in reality, concentration camps where innocent people and families can languish for years.

“Many of these deportations threaten a range of fundamental human rights including the right to family unity, the right to seek asylum from persecution, the right to humane treatment in detention, the right to due process, and the rights of children,” Human Rights Watch points out.

These rights are being denied by an administration that is hell-bent on making America white again, run by cowards and oligarchs who suck up to and financially support a wannabe lifetime dictator.  But as Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Guardian, “The more we stand up, the harder it is for this authoritarian agenda to succeed, and the more uncomfortable we make it for those going along with the lies and cruelty, the harder it will be to persecute any single person who says what’s being done to immigrants is terrorism.

 Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Welcome to the Gilded Age

It’s déjà vu all over again. The robber barons are back. The wealthy have their cottages by the sea in the Hamptons, in international mansions, and at Mara Lago instead of Newport. Their yachts are shining and staffed while rivers of money flow from the coffers of billionaires who escape paying taxes and offer their obscene wealth in exchange for political favor and power. Clearly, we are once again a nation of prospering oligarchs and exploited paupers.

The glittering Gilded Age that reached its apex between 1880 and 1920 was a golden era of opulent architecture, extravagant fashion, expensive art, and expansive parties. Built on the economic growth that occurred following the Civil War and Reconstruction businessmen and bankers made out like bandits by investing in railroads, factories, and various industries that produced the raw materials needed for the development of innovative inventions that enabled mass production.

That led to “conspicuous consumption,” a term coined by a social critic at the time.  Mark Twain, who dubbed the era the “Gilden Age,” was among other critics troubled by the growing disparity between social classes.

While some in the monied class applied their wealth to building libraries, museums and public improvements in large cities (often prodded to do so by their wives), they overlooked the dark side of the needs of those who were on the other end of the social and economic spectrum. For example, they overlooked child labor, dangerous working conditions, and the exploitation of immigrant workers.

The Vanderbilts, Astors, and Carnegies looked the other way, ignoring life in the tenements of New York City and factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where the 1911 fire killed 146 trapped young women workers. Journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis brought the reality  of these travesties to light in stark photographs of slums, schools, factories, public health, and more in his photographic collection, How the Other Half lives housed at the Library of Congress.

Among today’s most recognized magnates and robber barons are three of the wealthiest and most morally corrupt men in America. Their enormous wealth and lack of social conscience makes their predecessors seem tame.

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns the Washington Post is heavily invested in Uber, AirBnB, and X has a net worth of US$ 236 billion, while Amazon employees earn about $15 an hour despite the physical demands of the job and expectations about productivity. Amazon also continues to ban unions and illegally fires workers for trying to organize them. He also has had workplaces patrolled for signs of unionizing activity.  It’s positively Dickensian.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is heavily invested in SpaceX, and owns X (formerly Twitter). He has Bezos beat in terms of net worth. According to Forbes, which tracks this kind of thing, Musk is worth over $420 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg is the third wealthiest man in America with a net worth of nearly $218 billion. He became a billionaire at the age of 23.  Owner of Meta, formerly Facebook, his latest travesty is ending fact checking on his social media platforms and that’s not the worst of it.  

Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are faux philanthropists who donate minimally to various pet organizations.  No libraries or museums for them. Just space capsules, AI, and a seat at high tables.

As Lasa Liberator points out, “they are often held up by the media as shining examples of philanthropists, but the reality is none of them has a foundation or philanthropic organization. By donating limited amounts of immense wealth, their public relations people argue they are changing the world for the better. That’s what they would like you to believe. While this philanthropy may seem generous from the outside, it is more often than not a ploy for the world’s wealthiest to dodge taxes, [or a way to]boost their public image, and increase their net worth, all while rarely doing that much actual good “along the way.

These newly anointed oligarchs, and others like them, are wedded to power, prestige, and political influence. They will do anything to curry favor. That makes them dangerous in ways that their forerunners were not, especially in a time of autocracy, patronage, and a good deal of pathology.

In this Gilden Age we are led into a different kind of conspicuous consumption. It’s one that consumes lies and clings to false narratives while ignoring history, facts, and good governance. It overlooks social justice issues like child labor which has made a comeback, as well as exploitive unsafe working conditions, especially for immigrants who mange not to be deported.

It burns the budgets that could help provide adequate housing, better schools, accessible healthcare and vital safety nets. It allows food and water to be contaminated because the ruling class doesn’t have to eat or drink what the lower classes do. It returns women to the Victorian age of silence and servitude.

Today’s robber barons and their elite political allies not only steal dignity and hope; they put us at great risk and conspire against anything that is fair and forward thinking while serving their own selfish purposes.  As Eugene Debs put it during the last Gilded Age, “"The time has come to regenerate society [while] we are on the eve of universal change."

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt. 

Health, Hunger, Housing: A Deadly Trifecta

As inauguration day approaches, trepidation and diverse emotions are running high.  In anticipation of what awaits us, given Donald Trump’s dubious appointments of unqualified sycophants, worries loom large about multiple possible dysfunctions. Among the sectors that are likely to be dramatically impacted are healthcare, hunger, and the housing crisis, each of which impacts the others.   

When it comes to growing fears about healthcare in a country already challenged by a broken system nothing speaks louder about how bad things could get than the lionization of Luigi Mangione, who killed the CEO of United Healthcare on a Manhattan street.

Three  New York Times columnists weighed in on what that event revealed about “the intense rage people feel toward insurance companies,” and what they said is important. As Zeynip Tufekci put it, “Dealing with health insurance companies when you’re vulnerable and knowing that a company is profiting off you is a visceral, enraging experience.” Tressie McMillan Cotton added, “every week there is a story about a well-informed, insured person fighting with their insurance company.” And Michelle Goldberg noted, “When you’re dealing with [insurance companies] you’re constantly reminded that decisions about your health and wellbeing are being made without any regard to your best interests. … It exemplifies the heartless precarity that underlies so much of American life.”

Add to this what Dr. Peter Hotez, Co-director for vaccine development at the Texas Children’s Hospital, said when asked what public health challenges the Trump administration will face on Day One.  “We’ve got some big-ticket concerns regarding infectious disease and pandemic threats. The new administration is not going to have the luxury of time to organize and think about it. They’re going to be confronted with this from the very beginning.”

Hotez cited concerns about avian flu, new strains of the Covid virus, and other potential outbreaks, like measles (and polio) if vaccines are no longer the norm. Juxtapose this with proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, and the power of insurance companies to decide what gets covered. As Andrew Witty ,the new CEO of United Health Group said recently, “We will continue to guard against ”unnecessary care.”

All this is added to the fact that we have extremely high costs already while the U.S. scores badly on many key health measures like life expectance, suicide rates and infant and maternal mortality. People already face disparities in the quality of care and many risk bankruptcy in times of medical crises and debt.

Heath care and hunger are closely connected issues because as access to quality health care diminishes, and costs rise in a time of reduced insurance coverage, “a growing number of families in America struggle to put food on the table,” as a report from the Food Research & Action Center points out. “Without greater investments in anti-poverty and anti-hunger programs, hunger in this country will continue to climb.”

The FRAC report reveals some startling statistics.  In 2023 one in seven households in America experienced hunger, especially in Latinx and Black communities. Many families have had to choose between buying food and other basic necessities, especially if they live in a single-parent household headed by a woman. Thirty-three percent of households with incomes well below the poverty threshold lived with food insecurity in 2023.

Among the food insecurity programs in the U.S. aimed at addressing poverty is SNAP, which helps provide resources to participants of the program to purchase food. But several legislators want to cut nearly $30 billion in SNAP benefits, despite the increase in food insecurity. A travesty in a time when our military budget for 2023 was $916 billion.

Congress is unlikely now to reinstate the Healthy School Meals for All available to all students introduced during the Covid pandemic. (Eight states have such policies.) “Congress must also pass a permanent expanded and inclusive Child Tax Credit to create a more prosperous, nourished, and equitable society,” FRAC says. It must also “tackle the root causes and structural racism and other forms of discrimination that exacerbate hunger.” One way to do that is to ensure fair wages, and “improved access to affordable housing, health care, and disability benefits” to end the cycle of poverty and hunger.

Recognizing the interconnections between healthcare, hunger and housing couldn’t be more important, as a 2023 report by the New York Times indicated.  Being homeless affects  people differently and addressing the facts and myths surrounding homelessness must be understood.  For example, the stereotype that homeless people are dangerous, unpredictable or violent is a prevalent myth. It’s the homeless that experience violence or hate crimes for the most part. They also suffer poor health and are subject to injury and disease, as Tracy Kidder’s book Rough Sleepers, revealed so movingly.

As Pathway to Housing notes, “Homelessness is a general term that describes someone who doesn’t have a permanent residence … it is not just an issue in urban areas. … [it] happens nationwide.” It’s also false to assume that people who sleep on the streets refuse help or shelter, which Pathway to Housing says is “rooted in paternalism.” It’s also a false assumption that all homeless people are addicts. “Homelessness is not a choice that people could avoid if they got a job. That idea derives from the judgement that homelessness is a moral failing instead of a set of circumstances and structural issues,” notes Pathway.

There is much more to say about these three interconnected problems. (See, for example, how Finland solved the problem of homelessness .)  Each one deserves attention, political will, and humanity. Dare we hope to find it?

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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.