Progressive Political News

Jimmy Carter’s Light Exposes Donald Trump’s Darkness

You’re not fooling me, Jimmy Carter. You did that on purpose! Dying when you did, I mean.

You chose late December to grab the global political spotlight, hoping to once more make a statement with the only earthly move you had left: checking out. What better way to make people ponder the state of political integrity in America than to reflect on Carter just as the kakistocracy of Donald Trump is moving its arrogant billionaires, corporate grifters, and ideological tyrants into our White House?

Sure enough, media coverage of Carter’s death highlighted his modest life in Plains, Georgia, and the personal values of fairness and honesty that led him to a lifetime of roll-up-your-sleeves humanitarian efforts. What a damning contrast to the tawdry greedfest on display at Mar-a-Lago, with supposedly respectable corporate executives flocking to “get theirs” in Trump’s sell-off of government favors and public offices.

And how amazed Carter must have been to see the gilded Trumpers flagrantly rejecting any pretense that theirs is to be a government of, by, and for the people. He even saw Elon Musk—the prancing prince of plutocratic pomposity—practically move into Trump’s Florida mansion to shape the new government. To put a gloss of legitimacy on Musk’s self-serving role, Trump grandly named him head of an imaginary federal office he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency.” This “DOGE” should be pronounced “dodgy,” for it doesn’t actually exist and has no authority. But Musk is nonetheless flitting about, officiously announcing that he will eliminate major programs that benefit people, while increasing government funding for—surprise!—corporations like his.

Even in death, the light of Jimmy Carter’s public integrity exposes the public corruption coming from Trump’s darkness.

Making Work Work for Workers

As a writer, I get stuck every so often straining for the right words to tell my story. Over the years, though, I’ve learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction, instead stepping back and rethinking where my story is going.

This process is similar to what millions of working families in the United States are going through this year, as record numbers of them are shocking bosses, politicians, and economists by stepping back and declaring: “We quit!”

Most of the quits are tied to very real abuses that have become ingrained in our workplaces over the past couple of decades: poverty paychecks, no health care, unpredictable schedules, no child care, understaffing, forced overtime, unsafe jobs, sexist and racist managers, tolerance of aggressively rude customers, and so much more.

Specific grievances abound, but at the core of each is a deep, inherently destructive executive-suite malignancy: disrespect. The corporate system has cheapened employees from being valuable human assets worthy of being nurtured and converted them to a bookkeeping expense that must be steadily eliminated. It’s not just about paychecks; it’s about feeling valued, feeling that the hierarchy gives a damn about the people doing the work.

Yet, corporate America is going out of its way to show that it doesn’t care—and, of course, workers are noticing. So unionization is on the rise, millions who were laid off by the pandemic are refusing to rush back to the same old grind, and now millions who have jobs are quitting. This is much more than an unusual unemployment statistic—it’s a sea change in people’s attitude about work itself, and life.

People are rethinking where their story is going and how they can take it in a better direction. Yes, nearly everyone will eventually return to work, but workers themselves have begun redefining the job and rebalancing it with life.

A record 59 percent of Democratic voters say they sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump peddled a false conspiracy theory that voters voicing anger toward Republican lawmakers at town hall events were being paid by Democrats. In recent weeks, numerous videos have gone viral of angry voters confronting Republican lawmakers at town halls across the country, expressing their opposition to potential cuts to Medicaid,…

After the 2008 financial crash threw millions of Americans out of their homes, Congress created a new agency—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—to protect families from predatory financial firms. 

Now President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are “winding down” this agency and planning to fire nearly all of its 1,700 employees. 

This is a seriously unwise and misguided thing to do. During its fourteen-year history, the CFPB has won more than $21 billion in compensation for victims of financial fraud and abuse. And its rules to promote access to affordable mortgages have helped countless families hold on to their homes. 

One of these people was the client of an attorney in our network at the National Consumer Law Center, where I also work. He and his elderly parents came to the brink of foreclosure, but were able to remain in their family home thanks to the CFPB. To protect his privacy, I’ll keep his identity anonymous. 

The son purchased his parents’ home in rural Maine, so they would have a guaranteed place to live out the rest of their lives. He would also reside there and provide care for them. But due to medical problems and subsequent job loss, he lost the income he and his aging parents relied on. 

And so the son cut back on everything he could—groceries, heat, hot water, gifts, and going out—but he still fell behind on the mortgage. He was overcome with guilt that he could not make the payments and suffered from depression. His mother also experienced anxiety around losing the home, exacerbating his shame. 

When the son asked for mortgage help, his loan company steered him into an impossibly expensive plan instead of the affordable one that the company’s policies required. Under CFPB rules, when families hit a bump in the road, companies are required to work with them to find an affordable solution whenever possible. Instead, this company set the family up for failure. 

With an initial payment of 200 percent of the son’s monthly income, and monthly payments greater than his total monthly income after that, the plan was simply infeasible. At first, the family members pooled their resources and tried to maintain the payments, but they were unable to keep this up. 

The emotional toll became even heavier after the mother passed away and the son became the primary caregiver for his father, who had dementia.

But then, an attorney in our network worked with the family to enforce the CFPB’s rules for mortgage companies, which require them to review all available options for homeowners facing hardship. A new arrangement was struck that allowed the family to keep its home—an outcome that should have occurred years earlier.

What will happen to families like this one if the CFPB is dismantled? 

If the Trump Administration has its way, families will no longer be able to rely on this consumer watchdog for help. Already, the administration has dropped pending lawsuits against a number of financial firms accused of serious wrong-doing. 

Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, for example, was facing claims that it had ignored red flags and pushed families into unaffordable mobile home loans. When loans became delinquent, they hit some borrowers with additional penalties and fees, resulting in many of them losing their homes. The CFPB sought restitution for these homeowners, as well as financial penalties for the company. Now, since the lawsuit was dropped, Vanderbilt is off the hook.

Without the CFPB, companies will revert to exploiting consumers through predatory payday loans, gouging them with excessive overdraft fees and ruining their credit by reporting medical debt to credit bureaus. 

To protect American families from corporate abuse, we need to demand that this consumer champion remains viable, independent, and strong.  

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

In the aftermath of President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last Friday, a number of United States lawmakers, world leaders, and political commentators have expressed outrage at their defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as their victim-blaming rhetoric toward Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian resistance effort.

Their stance, however, is not unique: For decades, the United States has held similar positions regarding military conquests and occupations by Morocco and Israel. 

The critical response to Trump’s willingness to allow Russia to annex parts of Ukraine has centered on the dangerous precedent of allowing a country to hold onto lands seized by military force. Former President Joe Biden, citing the “rules-based international order,” repeatedly noted the illegitimacy of any nation unilaterally changing international boundaries and expanding territories by force during his presidency. But in practice, the United States has not only tolerated similar illegal irredentism by allied governments, but has formally supported them.

Trump’s insistence that it was in fact the Ukrainians who started the war with Russia, and that the fighting would end if they simply gave up, echoes the long-standing position of both U.S. political parties toward Palestine. And every presidential administration since 1993 has insisted that the Palestinian Authority allow Israel to annex large swathes of the West Bank territory seized in the 1967 war as part of any potential peace agreement, and has then blamed the Palestinians for their alleged failure to compromise. 

During the first Trump Administration, the U.S. also became the first and only country to formally recognize Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights—which had been condemned and declared “null and void” by the U.N. Security Council—as part of Israel, in a decision that Biden later upheld. In the past few months, Israel has seized additional Syrian territory and has vowed to remain there, and has maintained occupation forces in southern Lebanon in defiance of its ceasefire agreement.

Similarly, in 2020, the United States became the first country to formally recognize Morocco’s annexation of the entire nation of Western Sahara, a full member state of the African Union, in defiance of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice in 1975. Biden upheld that decision as well. 

During the Biden Administration, these endorsements of illegal annexations by Israel and Morocco hurt the U.S.’s credibility in marshalling support for Ukraine, particularly among the Global South. At the United Nations, the U.S. was repeatedly called out over its support for Morocco and Israel’s takeovers by critics who argued that the U.S. opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine out of geopolitical interests rather than principle, in a move they called hypocritical. Now, the U.S. is showing consistent support for territorial conquests, including those of Russia.

Opposition to ongoing U.S. military support for Ukraine is not limited to Kremlin apologists, however. Pacifists, neorealist international relations experts, and others have argued that while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unjustified, the prospect of extending a potentially unwinnable war of attrition in the hopes of recovering the 19 percent of Ukrainian territory under Russian control is simply not worth the human and financial costs. The likely possibility of additional casualties in the tens of thousands—and the risk, however remote, of nuclear exchange—has led even some of the most bitter critics of Russia’s actions to call for a negotiated settlement.

The strongest argument against such a compromise is that it would reward Russia’s aggression and tempt Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in further territorial expansion, endangering the Baltic Republics and other areas once controlled by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. However, given how the U.S. has formally recognized illegal annexations of territories seized by force by Morocco and Israel, allowing Russia’s illegal expansionism to remain in place, at least temporarily, would not establish a precedent: the precedent has already been set. And like Russia, Israel and Morocco have expressed expansionist ambitions beyond their current occupied territories as well.

In any case,  Trump’s opposition to supporting Ukraine is neither pacifist nor utilitarian. He is supporting Putin and blaming Ukraine for the war. He is siding with an authoritarian aggressor against a democracy fighting for its very survival. The backlash against Trump’s support for Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory is therefore quite appropriate.

The denial of agency to the Ukrainians, including the false charge that the 2014 Maidan uprising was a U.S. coup and that Ukrainians are simply fighting a proxy war rather than defending their nation from a foreign invasion, runs parallel to claims that Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian resistance to the Israeli occupations is a proxy war on behalf of Iran and that the Western Sahara struggle against the Moroccan occupation is a proxy war on behalf of Algeria. No one under foreign military occupation needs to be forced by a foreign power to defend their homeland.

In addition to his consistent support for the occupying forces of Israel, Morocco, and now Russia, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire for the United States to become an occupying power in its own right, as exemplified by his plan to forcibly relocate all remaining Palestinians in Gaza and annex it as U.S. territory. Similarly, his recent threats to seize Greenland, Panama, and even Canada harken back to the U.S. expansionism of the late nineteenth century. 

In certain respects, Trump’s support for Russia’s war and occupation creates an opportunity for those who believe that Palestinians, Syrians, and Western Saharans have as much right to resist foreign conquest as Ukrainians to advocate for the self-determination of all occupied peoples. To allow any of these illegal occupations to become permanent puts the entire post-World War II international legal order in jeopardy and seriously threatens international peace and security. Uniting the international community to force an end to these occupations, preferably through nonviolent means, is imperative. The “rules-based international order” must be upheld regardless of the geopolitical orientation of the parties involved.

There are also at least 3,400 families with only one surviving member, Palestinian officials have said.

On Tuesdays voters across the state of Vermont passed a number of non-binding resolutions declaring their towns and cities “apartheid-free communities.” The effort, organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), passed in Brattleboro, Winooski, Newfane, Plainfield, and Thetford. The question appeared on nine ballots on Town Meeting Day. Vermont is the first state in…

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“I’m willing to suffer whatever punishment is available to me,” Green said earlier this week.