Progressive Political News

Natural disasters have a way of throwing the inequality faced by people with disabilities into sharp focus. Several stories in the media about people with disabilities who have been victims of the wildfires in the Los Angeles area have illustrated this.

The Guardian reported the story of Galen, a full-time motorized wheelchair user. Galen and his wife of twenty-eight years were ordered to evacuate their home near Pasadena as the raging Eaton wildfire was closing in. But the accessible van that Galen usually uses to get around was in the repair shop. He couldn’t ride with his wife, who is not a wheelchair user, because her car wasn’t wheelchair accessible. So Galen drove his wheelchair a long way through dark streets—alone—until he eventually reunited with his wife outside of the evacuation zone. The couple then had to go to three hotels before they could finally find one that had an available room that was accessible enough to accommodate him.

But Galen seems to be one of the lucky ones—he survived. The Los Angeles Times reported the story of Anthony Mitchell Sr. of Altadena. He was an amputee and his son Justin had cerebral palsy. They died while huddled together, trying to shield themselves from the Eaton wildfire. Mitchell’s eldest son told the L.A. Times that Anthony and Justin, who didn’t have the ability to flee the evacuation zone by themselves, died waiting for assistance that never came. “I’m angry at what happened to my father because it shouldn’t have happened. The institutions let him down,” the junior Mitchell told the L.A. Times.

Both of these stories point to the reality that any time there is a natural disaster that requires the activation of a response plan to save lives, there will always be people with disabilities in the area who need to be rescued, too. But we may well need more assistance to get out of harm’s way than the hypothetical average Joe that most existing plans are designed to serve. And at a time when we need help the most, we’re often abandoned, left to fend for ourselves.

This isn’t new. During the 2017 California wildfire season, for example, which displaced more than 100,000 people, caused $12 billion in damages, and took forty-seven lives, “people with disabilities struggled to receive evacuation information and find adequate transportation and shelter,” according to a 2023 report from the National Council on Disability (NCD). What’s more, “professional caregivers were ordered to evacuate and unable to work.” And, as I reported in my column for the December 2024/January 2025 magazine issue of The Progressive, this problem isn’t going away anytime soon as we see more and more climate disasters. 

“During an emergency or major disaster, people who live with physical, sensory, mental, or cognitive disabilities are disproportionately affected,” The NCD report states. “When an emergency occurs, people with disabilities typically have fewer reserves to draw upon, their options for housing and health care are more limited, and it can be harder to recover once the immediate emergency has passed. The increased prevalence of extreme weather events will further destroy these reserves and further hinder people with disabilities’ ability to ‘rebound’ after an extreme weather event.”

What if evacuation vehicles and temporary housing for displaced people are not wheelchair accessible? What if deaf people cannot hear the emergency information that is being broadcast? 

The federal Americans with Disabilities Act requires government agencies and emergency planners to provide people with disabilities with access to emergency programs, services, activities, and facilities. But that obligation appears to be routinely ignored by emergency planners.

When emergency plans and the people that are supposed to implement them aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the additional needs of people with disabilities, we become even more likely to be left behind. Our loved ones who can escape more easily than we can will be faced with the excruciating choice of either abandoning us or sticking with us and endangering their own lives.

In a culture where everyone’s life is truly valued and equally considered to be worthy of saving, situations like that would never occur.

While it may have seemed that a second Trump Administration couldn’t possibly enact policies toward Israel and Palestine that are worse than those of former President Joe Biden, early signs indicate that Trump intends to even more forcefully aid and abet Israel’s actions in the region. But the extreme rightwing nature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda may open the door to finally changing U.S. policy towards the conflict—or at least force establishment Democrats to reckon with the potential consequences of failing to oppose him on this issue.

Under Biden, the United States was an international outlier in its support for Israel’s devastating war on the civilian population of Gaza. Biden refused to apply his considerable leverage on the Israeli government to end the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, or to condition military aid to Israel on the state ending its illegal occupation of the West Bank and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state. The former President repeatedly blocked efforts by the United Nations to impose a ceasefire and vetoed an otherwise unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution recognizing Palestine, while dismissing the United Nations’s support for a two-state solution, insisting that a Palestinian state could only emerge on terms to which Israel would voluntarily agree. Biden upheld four of Trump’s controversial initiatives during his first term: recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights (which the U.N. Security Council unanimously declared “null and void”), maintaining the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem (making the U.S. the only major country to do so), refusing to reopen the U.S. Consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, and refusing to allow the Palestinian diplomatic office in Washington to reopen. He even spoke out against nonviolent civil society movements against the occupation, denouncing calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.

In the final year of his term, Biden took a few modest actions to limit Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians. In May of last year, he delayed a shipment of 3,500 bombs, including 2,000-pound unguided bunker busters that the Israeli military was using to blow up entire apartment blocks in Gaza. In November, he imposed sanctions such as freezing assets against nine far-right settler militia leaders and their organizations which have terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank with shootings, arson, and other attacks. Al Jazeera reported at that time that the Biden Administration had sanctioned 33 individuals and entities in total over the preceding ten months.

But Biden’s actions did little to curb settler violence overall: More than 1,400 settler attacks took place in the eleven months after he first imposed the sanctions, and he refused to condition military aid to the Israeli armed forces, which openly collaborated with the settler militias, on stopping the terrorism. In this way, his approach toward Israel and Palestine resembled former President Ronald Regan’s approach to the Salvadoran Civil War, during which administration officials condemned far-right death squads and denied visas to some of their leaders while also enabling further killings by insisting on continuing U.S. support for the death squad’s Salvadoran military backers.

There is no question that Trump’s policies for Israel and Palestine will be even more devastating for Palestinians. He recently proposed a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, suggesting that Palestinians should leave the Gaza Strip to “clean out” the region in order to make room for Israeli development in a territory he has described as a “phenomenal location, on the sea” with “the best weather.” 

His appointments of former Arkansas Governor Mike Hukabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel and U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations are similarly disturbing. During her confirmation hearings, Stefanik insisted that Israel has a Biblically endowed right to occupy the entire West Bank, while Huckabee has previously claimed that there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and “no such thing as a Palestinian.”

Trump has made clear that his support for Israeli expansionism and repression of Palestinians is not simply the work of powerful Zionist lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but part of a broader racist and imperialist agenda that aligns him with far-right Israeli officials who have called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

But his presidency may allow for the fuller emergence of a popular movement to more effectively challenge U.S. policy related to Israel-Palestine. Just as scores of Democratic Congresspeople who were unwilling to speak out against the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson was president became outspoken opponents of the war after Richard Nixon took office in 1969, we may hope to see a similar Democratic shift toward adamentally opposing Israel’s actions. 

Peace and human rights activists can now label Democrats who support the U.S.’s continued military support of Israel’s far-right government as “pro-Trump,” as they have chosen to back the president’s policies against the wishes of what polls show are the 77 percent of registered Democrats who oppose military aid to Israel. The same goes for those who support Trump’s attacks against the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other bodies which have attempted to support a universal application of international humanitarian law. 

Under the new Trump Administration, the U.S.’s status as an extreme outlier in the international community may bring renewed attention to many ways in which Trump continually breaks international legal norms and politically isolates the U.S.. Just like opposition movements against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, U.S. intervention in Central America, and the invasion of Iraq all eventually became mainstream liberal causes, so too could opposition to the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocidal violence in Palestine gain more mainstream public support under the Trump Administration. Trump’s presidency, devastating as it may be, provides us an opening to force a choice upon Democrats: Are you with the majority of Americans and the international community, or are you with Donald Trump?

Once upon a time in the United States of America, a plurality of voters decided to voluntarily hand over their democracy to an incestuous band of racist billionaires because they were worried about the price of eggs.

Donald Trump, the criminal son of a multimillionaire real estate tycoon, was re-elected as President, thanks in part to $250 million from Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, thereby cementing the fact that America is now officially a “broligarchy.”

Back in the day, those with extreme wealth had the good sense to pull the strings from behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz. Appearances, and the fiction of a representative democracy, had to be maintained for the sake of decorum and public relations. But members of the new broligarchy, with their capture and domination of social media companies, have realized they no longer need to perform the ruse. They won’t be punished or even admonished for flaunting their obscene influence via tweets and other means.

Before Christmas, Musk fired off several posts on X, the money-burning site he purchased to spread dangerous MAGA disinformation, platform white nationalists, and attack his critics. At 4:15 a.m., he tweeted that House Republicans must nuke the short-term bipartisan spending deal, orchestrated in part by U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, to keep the government open until March. Musk promised to target and primary any GOP defector who didn’t toe the line.

Trump, most likely roused from an evening of sloth and gluttony at Mar-a-Lago, quickly posted in support of Musk’s agenda, even though he had expressed no previous complaints about the bipartisan plan. Trump even went after U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a stalwart MAGA soldier from Texas who wasn’t bending the knee on this issue. These disturbing events made many Americans wonder, “Wait, who won the presidential election, Trump or Musk?”

You certainly couldn’t blame them for asking. After all, Trump had vowed to put Musk and another shady (almost) billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, in charge of “DOGE”—the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental entity tasked with streamlining the government and cutting unnecessary costs. Coincidentally, DOGE shares the name of a type of cryptocurrency.

Speaking of crypto, Trump tapped another South African-born multimillionaire with a racist worldview, Musk’s friend David Sacks, to be the “Czar of AI and Crypto,” which is what a President who cares about the everyday challenges of American workers would naturally prioritize. Peter Thiel, the racist billionaire friend of Musk and Sacks, and who also spent his childhood in South Africa, didn’t acquire a role. Most likely, he was content to groom his former mentee J.D. Vance, another multimillionaire, to be Vice President.

One would hope the most wealthy, privileged, and influential men on earth would use their newfound access to political power to help the majority of Americans who are suffering from crippling health care debt, lowered life expectancy, stagnant wages, declining public education, and weekly mass shootings.

Sadly, no. Musk and Ramaswamy revealed that instead, they want to exercise their unelected power to end remote work; fire federal employees; cut pediatric cancer research; slash humanitarian aid; privatize the mail to enrich other millionaires; end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in education; eliminate the Internal Revenue Service; and dismantle the Federal Reserve. They did, however, express an interest in increasing defense spending. After all, billionaires hate government spending except when it’s in the form of subsidies for their own companies, such as Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla.

None of this should be surprising. America’s descent into a broligarchy was an inevitable, steady, and calculated takeover of the country’s wealth, Supreme Court, political parties, and presidency by a cabal of selfish billionaires seeking tax cuts, deregulation, and unfettered power. Long gone were the days of President Theodore Roosevelt, who went after the Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan monopolies. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have found a means to empower the 1 percent at the expense of the rest of us.

They began by chipping away at unions and weakening the labor movement. The GOP’s infamous “trickle-down” economics ensured that workers would become poorer, even as their productivity led to record-breaking profits and salaries for corporate chief executives. Income inequality widened, with the top 1 percent of earners enjoying 150 percent real income growth over the past forty years.

The number of billionaires in the United States has increased from thirteen in 1982 to more than 700 in 2023. Some of them, like Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, bought newspapers like The Washington Post. Others, like Mark Zuckerberg, invented social media sites like Facebook and then turned a blind eye while they were used to incite violence, lies, and hate. Both of these men donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and dined with Musk and Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Rightwing money also bought the Supreme Court, which, in turn, gave Trump “absolute immunity” for his numerous crimes. Billionaire Barre Seid pledged $1.6 billion to the architect of the Republican judicial takeover, Leonard Leo, to ensure he can continue grooming the next Supreme Court.

However, the avarice, corruption, and injustice did not go unnoticed. The righteous rage and fury of the masses started rising and spreading. Considering that the United States has the most mass shootings and guns of any country on Earth, it was perhaps inevitable that a vigilante would target and murder the CEO of a health insurance company that had denied 31 percent of health claims (with the help of artificial intelligence). Instead of being condemned, the suspect was celebrated as a hero by a disturbingly large number of Americans.

Others channeled their anger toward awareness, organizing, and movement-building. Amazon workers, fed up with atrocious working conditions, united to strike at seven sites across the country.

However, too many Americans remained overwhelmed, overworked, exhausted, distracted, and misinformed. The corporate media, consolidated and owned by billionaires, had them fighting over transgender rights and the undocumented immigrants who keep the economy churning by doing all the jobs no one else wants to do.

Meanwhile, the broligarchy enjoyed the chaos from their lofty perches, licking their fingers after sticking their hands in America’s cookie jar and eating every last crumb. Nothing is free in America, unless you’re a billionaire with access to a transactionally criminal President.

In America, it’s always good to be part of the broligarchy.

Whenever race is mentioned in a conversation and someone asks, “Why is everything about race?” or “Why must you always bring up race?” it’s an indicator that they’re ignorant of the role race has had in America’s founding and its continuance, as well as racism’s impact on people. It largely has to do with the refusal of many to acknowledge—much less teach in schools and society—the ugliness that is the history of the United States.

Much of the blame is on white people, conservatives and liberals alike. It’s on conservatives for refusing to acknowledge the sustaining injustices produced by whiteness to shield white people from guilt as they consolidate power as the nation becomes more diverse and the number of white people decreases. It’s on liberals because, while acknowledging what conservatives won’t, they’ve acquiesced to demands for reform and inclusion at home in exchange for allowing the country’s imperialist agenda to be carried out worldwide.

However, people of color deserve some blame as well.

Some in the African-American community have chosen reform over revolution; inclusion within rather than indictment of a political and economic framework built on and maintained by the exploitation of Black bodies; our labor for white profit and pleasure. Why? Because the goal for some was (and still is) citizenship and equality—not justice. Therefore, radical (Black) critique of the state is abandoned and shunned, even at the cost of BIPOC lives domestically and abroad.

An example is support for genocide in Gaza by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Additionally, some within other communities of color are guilty of choosing to assimilate into whiteness, both politically and psychologically, to achieve the “American Dream” for themselves; the economic and political “freedom” entitling them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—because all men are created equal.

Few are likely aware the phrase “all men are created equal” was not in all drafts of the Declaration of Independence. An earlier draft stated: “All men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life, liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Why the change to the text we have? Enslavers believed the original wording of the text encouraged both rebellion by Africans and abolition of slavery in general. Thomas Jefferson reworked the wording to no longer reflect freedom as an entitlement for African people. The Framers applied the same logic to the Constitution with the insurrection, three-fifths, and fugitive slave clauses.

For the next seventy-five years, a series of debates and compromises would take place to maintain race-based chattel enslavement, which made the United States a dominant economic power. It was during this time that the United States continued its policy of white settler colonialism, with its genocide of Indigenous peoples in order to take their land and assimilate their people and launched a war on the country of Mexico, taking land that makes up a part or the whole of nine states.

The same settler colonialism, whiteness, capitalist racism, and anti-Black racism that established antebellum America followed the country’s agenda into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with apartheid, state-sponsored terrorism, and miscegenation laws domestically, and the extraction of resources from nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia by imperialist measures. This became the superexploitation (similar to enslavement) of racialized workers around the globe, satisfying both the white man’s burden and the white man’s lust for what he’s always competed for and sought to control, according to John Henrik Clark: land, people, and resources.

For the everyday American, specifically white people, American imperialism—“democratizing” wayward lands, establishing military strength, and building the economy and anti-Blackness domestically—fomented a false sense of security and superiority and an even greater desire to consume. According to Charisse Burden-Stelly, citing W.E.B. Du Bois: “This superexploitation allowed white workers to get a share, however pitiful, of ‘wealth, power, and luxury . . . on a scale the world never saw before’ and to benefit from the ‘new wealth’ accumulated from the ‘darker nations of the world’ through cross-class consent ‘for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them’—a consensus solidified through the doctrine of ‘the natural inferiority of most men to the few.’ ”

In other words, as the capitalist class got richer, the white consumers got fat and happy, all at the expense of Black people at home and people of color around the globe. But the white worker, whom politicos and “experts” have insisted is the key to recent elections, is disgruntled economically. This is due to crumbling infrastructure, rising health care costs, and the outsourcing of jobs.

Their anger is justified. That same anger can be found in Black and brown communities also.

Wages continue to remain stagnant as the price of consumer goods rises and the benefits of public goods are reduced in profit-making or austerity measures. Simultaneously, American tax dollars leave this country to fund wars around the globe. Yet many blame “wokeness.” They blame migrants, they blame affirmative action, they blame diversity, equity, and inclusion. But a root cause of society’s precarity and persistent economic insecurity is neoliberalism, and a root of neoliberalism is racism.

Yet many of these white workers found their solution to these matters in a second Trump presidency. According to 2024 exit polling data, Donald Trump was trusted more than Kamala Harris to handle the economy, and among Trump voters, the only issue more important than the economy was immigration. These folks want a return to the “good ole days” when they got a share of wealth, power, and luxury, however pitiful.

A vote for Trump was a vote for the good ole days at the expense of Black and brown people in the hopes of making America great again. Trump’s election means mass deportations, as well as political, economic, and possibly physical violence against Black people and other persons of color, regardless of gender identity, class status, or religious beliefs.

Gil Scott-Heron once said that America wants nostalgia; “they want to go back as far as they can—even if it’s only as far as last week—not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” Sadly, folks don’t want to face backward enough to learn from history. They’d rather lie—and force teachers to lie—because nostalgia feels good; learning hard lessons does not.

Learning hard lessons requires a change in one’s behavior. There is no call for the redistribution of wealth, no call for reparations for Black people, no call for universal income, no call for universal health care, and no call for a truly multiracial democracy because not enough people want it. Apparently, the evidence from 248 years of whiteness, settler colonialism, genocide, anti-Black and capitalist racism, isn’t enough of a deterrent.

Many believed that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency meant America had turned a corner. That, in 2008, the Obama victory meant the dawn of a new morning in America; a post-racial morning where once and for all racialized people would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

A morning where the use of the word colorblindness wasn’t justification for ignoring the stigma and injustices attached to one with more melanin in their skin.

A morning where, for once, African Americans, particularly those Langston Hughes called the “low-down folks,” believed they would be heard, not simply tolerated.

Sadly, that morning never came.

Rather, it was simply morning again in America. The same was true after the election of 2024. It was a morning all too familiar to the souls of Black folk and the souls of other folk subject to the wages of whiteness. Too many people remain fast asleep because they’ve been told to reject wokeness. I suspect the next four years will show us if America will wake up or if it will die in its sleep. But the writers within this issue of The Progressive, including myself, are hopeful it will assist with a new great awakening. 

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