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Netanyahu pitched the war as a repeat of Israel’s apparent ‘audacious feat’ of smashing Hezbollah. The US president should have noted instead Israel’s moral and strategic defeat in Gaza Jonathan Cook Substack [First published by Middle East Eye] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much […]

Nearly 30% of all new heavy trucks sold in the country last year were electric.

Amid dozens of allegations of sexual abuse and pedophilia, César Chávez’s name is being scrubbed from history, and César Chávez Day (March 31) is being renamed Farmworkers Day. I’ve never seen lawmakers act this quickly.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. The war between the United States and Israel and Iran has now lasted a month. The Trump administration is negotiating with Iran to end the war, but also threatening a major escalation if no agreement is reached. Ishaan Tharoor, a veteran foreign affairs journalist, says that the U.S. may now be in a “quagmire.” It will be hard for President Trump to accomplish what seemed to be his goals at the start of the conflict, ensuring a more American-friendly leadership runs Iran and completely eliminating any chance that Iran could maintain a nuclear weapons program. There is now a new complication in the war, according to Tharoor: America’s and Israel’s interests are no longer aligned. Tharoor says Israel would probably be fine with continuing the current conflict for months. But Trump never intended to fight an extended war with Iran, particularly one that involves ground troops. And the war is deeply unpopular and dragging down his already dismal poll numbers. Tharoor says that this war may be a turning point in world affairs: the moment that crystallizes for people abroad that not only is the United States not a force for good in the world but that it actively makes things worse. Tharoor invoked the idea of the United States as a “predatory hegemon,” borrowing from a recent essay written by foreign affairs expert Stephen Walt.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by Ishaan Tharoor. He’s a foreign affairs writer, until recently at The Washington Post, where he wrote a great column called “World Views”—a daily take and analysis of what was happening in foreign policy. Ishaan, welcome.Ishaan Tharoor: Thanks for having me, Perry. Good to be with you.Bacon: He’s written some pieces for The New Yorker that you should check out, including one I think published today.... What’s the title of it?Tharoor: It’s “Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez.” It’s a look at the Suez crisis in 1956 and the very real and interesting echoes of that in the current moment.Bacon: I’m going to start back at the beginning here. We’re a month into this. Talk about broad perspective: Anything surprised you about where this war is, from the beginning to now?Tharoor: Stepping back—I was at The Washington Post for the past 12 years. Every one of those years was a year where at some point I was writing a piece about a potential American war on Iran, whatever the context, whatever the president. This is something we’ve been thinking about in Washington for a long time. It’s been a strange scenario, because you always assumed—and everyone who thinks about this in any deep way ... knows—that this is an incredibly complicated thing to do, that Iran is a huge country, a very sophisticated nation with a regime that is entrenched and far more capable than many of its neighbors. A war with Iran, you would have assumed, would have required a drumbeat, a set of legitimacy, and a kind of international structure. None of that seems to have happened this time around.What we saw—especially in the wake of whatever Trump feels he accomplished with Venezuela—is this off-the-cuff mission, obviously done with a lot of Israeli coordination and probably a lot of goading from the Israelis to get involved.It’s been astonishing, because yes, you’ve eliminated a top rank of leadership—not to any particularly important effect. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was 86 years old; on his proverbial way out anyway, spoke lots of being martyred in his speeches. So this is not exactly the greatest success on that front.Now we’re in this moment where it’s patently obvious there’s a huge strategic muddle. Trump doesn’t know exactly which way to go—his options are not great on either side. He has Gulf partners who have a degree of influence over the White House ... who are both incensed that this war happened and, some of them, quite keen that Iran gets completely neutered at this point, because what Iran has done to the Gulf region in its reprisal attacks has been a huge part of the story. We could have predicted it, but we always assumed that because of this possibility the Americans wouldn’t act the way they did. But they have. The Americans did act this way because, for whatever reason, Trump thought it would be a much easier exercise than it’s turned out to be.Going into this week, there is a real conversation about ground troops being deployed. The direction of travel in terms of what the Trump administration is doing points to deeper engagement, a further slip into the quagmire, and further escalation. You have an Iranian regime on the other side that it’s not really clear to any of us is acting all that rationally—that they’re able to break free from this spiral of escalation themselves. They have probably calculated that they can survive this and make it costly for the U.S.—and already the costs are spiking and mounting.Bacon: Today the president on [Truth Social] basically threatened to destroy the oil fields of Iran unless they agree to some kind of end to the war. Is that realistic? Is that possible? I guess it probably is.Tharoor: Look, if he tries to do that, the Iranian reprisals on its neighbors are going to get worse. We’re talking about a huge percentage of the world’s oil and gas flowing out of this region—critical to economies everywhere, critical to supply chains. And it’s not just oil and gas needs directly; its downstream things like plastics and fertilizers. You already have a scenario now where people are worried about harvest and crop planting cycles in the developing world, because fertilizer factories that need ammonia and gas and stuff like that are being shut down in South Asia and other parts of the world. That’s a huge effect that doesn’t necessarily compute in the mind of someone in the Trump administration or the average American, but it’s astonishing.I was in India a few weeks ago and I saw, in my grandmother’s neighborhood, in the city of Kolkata, lines for natural gas cylinders for cooking gas. There are some huge global effects already in motion. The Trump administration seems to think that’s fine. I don’t think other U.S. governments would necessarily have been willing to entertain this kind of blowback. But it does seem that Trump really believes the ideal scenario is a Venezuela-style situation where they’ve decapitated an element of the regime but can make accommodation with the rest. He has said repeatedly that Iranian oil should be what we get. It’s almost a twenty-first-century colonial conquest. How realistic that is, especially now, when you’re threatening to destroy that infrastructure—I think it’s quite delusional.Meanwhile, while all these threats are being proffered and there’s all this bluster and a lot of smokescreens, the reality is that Iran is making more money from its oil than it ever has before, because the U.S. has had to unsanction a tranche of Iranian oil. The Russians are making more money off oil shipments than ... in recent times. It’s a completely confused and muddled mess.Bacon: You’ve mentioned Venezuela a couple of times already. Is that how we should think about this—Trump over-learned from what happened in Venezuela? Like, It was so easy that I would do it again.I assume, Marco Rubio ... there are people around [Trump] ... who are not dumb. So ... did Trump expect this? Did his team expect that this would be like Venezuela, where we install someone we like better in ten seconds?Tharoor: I think there’s a coterie of people around him whispering to him at Mar-a-Lago who genuinely want thorough regime change in Iran. Rubio would probably be one of them. Lindsey Graham is definitely one of them. And of course his Israeli interlocutors would be happy with that. To a certain extent, there are probably some Gulf interlocutors who, in their heart of hearts, have no love for the Iranian regime and would love to see it go—whether they would have counseled this kind of action, probably not. But now that we’re here, a month in, nobody has any love for the regime that’s in place there. I think Trump was goaded into this by people who really wanted regime change and probably told him: We can do it quickly, we can do it simply, à la Venezuela—where you don’t have regime change, really, but you have this easy success story to tell.He is trying very hard to tell the success story all the time now, and nobody buys it. You’ve traded one Khamenei for another—his son is still there. The Iranians have inflicted all sorts of damage on the oil infrastructure of critical U.S. partners in the region, and on civilian infrastructure as well. You have a scenario now where the Iranian regime is going to be more repressive at home—it’s entrenched, it doesn’t look like it’s losing that much of its capacity to control its own populace. There’s no uprising on the cards at this moment. Trump’s delusional idea that we would support Iranian Kurdish militias operating out of Iraq has been shot down by other regional partners—the Turks have been furious about that—and that’s another Pandora’s box that people don’t want Trump to open.So how Trump actually achieves regime change is a very difficult, tall order. It’s probably going to require American boots on the ground and a significant loss of American life. We don’t even know the full extent to which the Iranians have actually hurt American interests and military assets in the region—we have to scrape from satellite imagery and all that. Just in the last day or so they hit an American base in Saudi Arabia with incredible precision and efficacy. The costs are still [mounting].There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening in Iran, given the lack of access there—the communication barriers, the internet blackouts. But we also don’t know the extent to which Iran has hit other places. The Israelis control information about what targets get hit there. The Gulf states are very secretive about the extent to which they have suffered certain losses and damage. We don’t have a full picture of what American bases have gone through. We know that some had to be evacuated—which really raises a huge question: If you have all these bases in the Middle East and you can’t even adequately man them, what is the point of having this footprint? What is the point of doing any of this?It’s a really fascinating moment for America’s place in the region. And most of the signs point to Trump doubling down, tripling down, and deepening the American commitment and engagement in a pretty damaging war.Bacon: Talk about the Israeli role here. There’s been some debate from the beginning—some people argue we’re the biggest country in the world, we have the biggest military, we’re the superpower, we decide our own policy. Others say we were goaded into this. I’m not sure it matters that much, but it does get into the motivations of how we got here. Do you view us as having been pushed into a war by Netanyahu, or not quite, or something in between?Tharoor: Prime Minister Netanyahu has been pushing for this for the better part of three decades. He has been staunchly opposed to this regime. A big part of his political pitch domestically is that he is the statesman who can confront Israel’s preeminent regional nemesis. He has spent a lot of time politically trying to focus the global conversation on Israel’s rivalry with Iran and the threats Iran poses to Israel, rather than the real question in Israeli politics, which is: What do we do about the Palestinians? What do we do about the West Bank and Gaza and the lack of self-determination there for Palestinians? He has for many years prioritized the Iran question to effectively obscure the Palestinian question. This has been part of Netanyahu’s political modus operandi for a very long time.It is surprising to me the extent to which the Israeli line has been picked up by people within the Trump administration—that this had to happen now. Supposedly, almost a year ago, last summer, when the U.S. went in for the so-called 12-day war, which was very neatly wrapped up, relatively speaking, the U.S. had degraded Iran’s nuclear capacities in such a way that we wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of threat. But of course not. The easiest way to reckon with Iran’s nuclear capacities was the nuclear deal that existed—which Trump, with a huge amount of Israeli support, unilaterally scrapped. Then that triggered Iran’s rush to enrich again, at levels that would give it the fissile material necessary to make a weapon. Of course, Iran has maintained throughout that it doesn’t want to make a weapon, but this is geopolitical leverage that the Iranian regime thinks it needs. And from a rational point of view, you can understand why.The Israeli role here—it’s interesting. Going into this conflict, yes, the U.S. and Israel are fully aligned in wanting to degrade this destabilizing, problematic Iranian regime. There is a very keen desire in Washington and in Jerusalem that we have different political dispensation in Tehran. They would love to see regime change. But at a certain point U.S. and Israeli interests diverge, and it’s really important that we start recognizing that now—and I think we are, now. For the Israelis, it doesn’t really matter what happens next. They just want a more enfeebled, weakened Iran. If they feel threatened by it, they will go in again. The very chilling euphemism that is used constantly is that they “mow the lawn.” They feel some threat and they hit targets in Lebanon, in Syria, within the Palestinian territories, and now in Iran. They will be very happy to do that again. They don’t really care if the Iranian state disintegrates into some Libya-style mess. They don’t really care if the regime remains and represses its own people, frankly, because they can just keep hitting it.Whereas for the U.S., there’s a huge risk. There’s a debate about whether we care about prestige, but this is another potentially Iraq War–style debacle.Bacon: Our public is more against it than the Israeli public is, I would assume.Tharoor: Yes, for sure. I haven’t seen the recent Israeli polling, but the U.S. public is massively against it. This also contravenes—I’m sure you’ve had a lot of conversations about this—the internal MAGA narratives around using American power on the world stage. The internal right-wing discussion about this is going to be interesting in the months to come. JD Vance is bending himself into a pretzel trying to figure out how to justify this. It could lead to fissures within the Trumpist MAGA world in the weeks to come.Also for Trump, there’s the relationship with the Gulf powers and the Gulf states—he cares so much about his ties to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar especially. Those countries—it’s complicated, because there are different positions in each country and different sets of interests—but they are all incredibly scarred by what’s happened so far. The very rosy visions of what they represent in the world, as these oases for development, prosperity, global trade, tourism, have really taken a huge credibility blow. It’s in America’s interest—not just Trump’s interest—to have productive relationships with these countries. It’s in America’s interest not to have Iran disintegrate and have an even more unstable mess there. It’s less in Israel’s interest. Israel could care less. Israel enjoys this stature it now has as a kind of regional hegemon—it can functionally do what it wants, when it wants, undergirded by a U.S. that does nothing to restrain it.Bacon: My concern is ... I don’t see the path out of this. Trump has to win everything, and there’s no easy path to defeating Iran except through massive casualties.Tharoor: We’ll see what kind of negotiation process gets underway—the Pakistanis are now the ones holding the baton for this. The sense we’re getting is that there’s a huge gulf—metaphorical—between the Iranian and American positions. The Iranian calculation is that Trump is more desperate for an off-ramp than they are. What kind of arrangement that leads to, we’ll see. It can go many ways, and I’m not one to feel confident speculating about this. You could see America deploying ground troops in some kind of operation that really escalates things. You can see Trump still figure—Bacon: It’s more destruction of Iranian infrastructure and oil fields? That’s more likely what we’re seeing than killing people? Go ahead.Tharoor: Look, people are being killed. Schools are being hit. Civilians are dying. Hundreds of civilians have already died because of U.S. and Israeli strikes—that’s already on us. You have to not lose sight of that. The Iranians have also hit civilian infrastructure in other parts of the region. People are dying. Lives are being completely thrown into chaos. People in countries far away who have nothing to do with the U.S. or Iran are suffering much more than the average American. All of that should be front of mind—as human beings, you should be thinking about all that.Bacon: I’m glad you said that.Tharoor: But if the U.S. goes in, there are going to be body bags. There are going to be troops coming back draped in flags. Whether Trump is willing to eat that—it’s been put to me by some that he is not able to countenance that—but I have a hard time imagining how you have any effective strategic campaign without that risk. The question is: At what point has Trump shown any actual strategic acumen in any of this? I don’t think he really has. It’s very hard to tell.Bacon: Last question: We talk about America losing standing in the world. That might be true. But does that mean anything to you? Trump doesn’t care what the world thinks. Should the rest of us care what the world [thinks]? The world does not like this war. European countries do not want to join in. The prime minister of Spain is really attacking it. The Canadian prime minister doesn’t want to defend it. The world does not agree with us. Does that matter?Tharoor: It depends on your opinion, and whether you care about the rest of the world. You can see the Trump presidency—especially the second term—as this rolling “emperor has no clothes” moment, where the scales have fallen from the eyes of even the closest U.S. allies about what the U.S. represents on the world stage. We’ve talked so much about the rules-based order, the international liberal order, the postwar order—I’ve written so many obituaries for it.This is a moment now—I write about this in my New Yorker piece—where some of the U.S.’s closest friends—forget about the adversaries, forget about what the Chinese are saying or what the Russians are saying—some of the U.S.’s closest friends now see the U.S. as a revisionist power, a disruptive force on the world stage, and one of the leading accelerants to a broader erosion and collapse of the international system, such as it was. Whether we’re OK with that depends on your political persuasion and what you think about the U.S.’s place in the world and what you want for the world more broadly.But this is a profound moment. The Suez crisis in 1956, which I wrote about, was this moment where: The British and French resent a nationalist Egyptian government nationalizing the Suez Canal. They go in with Israeli support. The Egyptians block the canal, create an economic crisis—and then you have both the Soviet Union and the United States under Eisenhower coming down really hard on the Brits and the French.It’s this moment of humiliation, for the Brits especially, and the French, this moment of reckoning with their loss of empire, their loss of prestige—and a bookend to a certain historical chapter of close to two centuries of European colonial dominance.Obviously there are huge reasons why that’s not the case now—there is no external Eisenhower to mediate against Trump. But this may be recognized in the years to come as a bookend for a certain idea of American power on the world stage. Or the opening of a new idea of American power on the world stage—which is, as the political scientist Stephen Walt has put it, a more overt predatory hegemon. That phrase definitely applies to the way Trump talks about things: his desire for natural resources, his disinterest in the United Nations, his contempt for international processes—Bacon: “Predatory hegemon?”Tharoor: Yeah. It’s in a Foreign Affairs essay—your folks should check it out.Bacon: When Biden came into the presidency he kept [saying], “America’s back,” and so on. But without predicting who’s going to win, it’s going to be hard for President Newsom, Whitmer, Buttigieg to say [the same thing]. Having two terms like this—one, you could say it was an aberration, but the second, you have to say maybe this is where we are now. The rest of the world has to evaluate us based on that we’ve now had two terms of this kind of foreign policy.Tharoor: This is the interesting thing to watch in the months to come when it comes to the Democratic conversation. There’s a great temptation to do Restoration 2.0—to go to Munich, go to Davos, go wherever, and say: America’s back, we’re with you, we’ve never really left you. But the rest of the world doesn’t care anymore. The rest of the world doesn’t want to hear that. The rest of the world—including the U.S.’s genuinely closest allies, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, et cetera—is eager for a different dispensation in Washington. But they are never not going to hedge against what Trump did and what Trump has done in terms of changing their own strategic calculations, impacting their economies, and disrupting their politics. That is not going to change. This is the brave new world we’re all in now.Bacon: We’ll end there. Ishaan, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Thanks to everybody who tuned in.Tharoor: Thank you, Perry.

A year of disruptive and sometimes deadly deployments of ICE and other federal agents to cities around the country, paired with relatively indiscriminate and clearly racist detentions of people with and without legal status (even including U.S. citizens), has managed to turn public opinion on its head: Once the strongest issue for Donald Trump and the Republicans writ large, immigration is politically up for grabs. Voters now loathe ICE and have a newfound appreciation for immigration. The Democrats have attempted to capitalize on this shift in public opinion by holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security over demands for some basic constraints on ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But some political operators see a greater opportunity here for the party to stake out a position on immigration that’s entirely distinct from MAGA’s poisonous vision. In truth, the moment for that was years ago, but the next best time is now. The problem is, these folks are still—even after everything that’s happened this past year—overcorrecting for Donald Trump’s electoral success. The new would-be populist Democratic think tank Searchlight—founded by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman—recently released an immigration policy brief that is not a departure so much as a return to what hasn’t worked. Titled “No More Back Doors” and written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under President Biden, the paper urges Democrats to seize the moment by “recapturing the public’s trust on immigration.” It gestures at centrist orthodoxy like limited paths to citizenship for Dreamers and other limited groups, while ticking off right-wing wish-list items like building more border wall, deploying surveillance technology, sending migrants to third countries, and “no interior release for those waiting—even for families.”Searchlight’s basic premise is that a posture of heavy enforcement is the new normal and Democrats should do the sane version of it. If the Democrats follow these recommendations, they will have failed yet again to understand that public opinion on this issue is mutable. They will also squander what is—and here I agree with Searchlight—a golden opportunity to stake out a new path. I just happen to believe in a path that’s both humane and popular. A month before the 2024 election, I wrote at TNR that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and other party leaders were making a significant political error in responding to the Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant depravations by insisting that they would be just as effective at restricting immigration flows. She lost, of course, but to this day it’s a broadly accepted narrative that her loss was in part because the Biden administration was hounded by the left wing into backing open borders—something Biden did not actually do but that is accepted as fact not only by Republicans but by moderate Democratic policymakers and centrist pundits like The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.One of Biden’s first big immigration decisions was leaving in place Stephen Miller’s most wide-ranging border restriction, Title 42, which for years was used to shut down asylum claims at the border using the pretext of the Covid pandemic (despite the fact that by the time the restrictions were issued, the United States was already the global epicenter). When that policy was finally wound down, the administration turned to another Miller-devised restriction: refusing to consider asylum claims from immigrants unless they’d already sought asylum in another country they’d passed through on their way to the U.S. The fiction that Biden did away with border enforcement was driven in large part by a real growth in border encounters at the start of his term, but this had more to do with the lifting of many Covid restrictions and social instability in Central and Latin America than it did with Biden’s border policies. (Title 42 itself also incentivized repeat crossing attempts that were counted each as a new encounter.) Near the end of Biden’s term, just prior to the 2024 election, border encounters had fallen back to levels lower than at the end of Trump’s first term. Yet ask any given voter, and they’re liable to tell you that Biden rolled out the welcome mat to undocumented immigrants. This public narrative solidified because it’s much easier to fill an empty cup. Democrats, lacking any cohesive alternate vision on immigration, limited themselves to saying they’d simply be better at enforcement than Trump. Voters, unsurprisingly, did not find that to be a credible message. Of course, they turned out to hate Trump’s immigration policies—they either didn’t pay attention to his campaign platform or didn’t believe him—but this stove touching now gives Democrats the chance to put forward a contrasting approach.The Democrats cannot define themselves merely in opposition to Trump, though. The public’s turn against Republicans on immigration is a rejection of overreach, sure, but it is also a moment of recognition that most people actually do want and value immigration—not only in a theoretical sense but in the tangible ways that it affects their lives and communities.A fully separate and cohesive vision of immigration will ultimately get into a lot of granularities, but for the benefit of policymakers and consultants seeking a clean and repeatable message, it all flows downstream from a single guiding principle: Mass immigration is good, socially and economically; is the single most significant factor in America’s current position as the global locus of commerce and culture; we’ve been lucky to have it; and we should want more. The fact that this well-supported and easily defensible position would trigger anaphylaxis among a huge swath of elected Democrats in Washington is frankly an embarrassment and a symptom of a deep dearth of political imagination.To be an effective message, it has to be forceful and stand-alone, not caveated. That doesn’t mean it can’t be linked to, say, the party’s flagship message of making life more affordable. In this low-hire, low-fire environment, most job growth is coming from the health care sector, which shows no signs of slowing as the population ages (a related issue that promises to stall economic growth and cultural vibrancy). Perhaps it’s worth noting, then, that immigrants account for more than one in four physicians at U.S. hospitals and are broadly seeded throughout the health care workforce in a load-bearing capacity. If Democrats want to build more housing, expand renewable energy, and promote the nation’s food security, that all requires both manpower and expertise—the sort that won’t soon be automated away, and which depends on people from all around the world. As for the fascination with the idea of people seeking asylum—as is their lawful right—at the border, let’s just say it plainly: The equivalent of one-third of a percent of the U.S. population annually arriving at the border and being allowed to live and work while undergoing a full adjudication of their case is not an emergency. It never was, and these numbers could easily be accommodated with relatively minimal investment, certainly far less than we’re spending on detention. For Democrats who are perennially worried about losing voters in depressed postindustrial communities, immigration is once again a winning message. Buffalo, New York, is an oft-cited example of how a city with a declining population and a stagnating economy received a much-needed injection of talent and labor from refugee and other immigrant arrivals over the last 20 years. It’s not the only example; there’s plenty of evidence that immigration has been a net boon from Phoenix to the Great Lakes. Even recent surges in so-called unauthorized immigration fueled gross domestic product growth while having no upward effect on inflation, according to the radicals at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Over and over, serious and careful research has put the lie to the notion that restricting immigration is bad for domestic workers.This narrative being false does not seem to have stopped mainstream Democratic elites from seeing it as a land mine to avoid, but this is a self-reinforcing cycle; the narrative is potent because it is the only one on offer. It is not the job of the party to draw its own positions around the falsehoods promulgated by its opposition—it is the party’s job to have a unified and assertive message that exists counter to that. And it’s not true that general support for immigration cannot coexist with otherwise moderate or even conservative politics. Just look at my recent report on Utah, a state whose cherry-red legislature has overwhelmingly approved pro-refugee measures in recent years. Or consider President Ronald Reagan, who said in a 1984 presidential debate, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally”—and then, in 1986, signed a bill allowing some 2.7 million to obtain status. Nationally, regularizing Dreamers is extremely popular, but that covers only a tiny fraction of “those who have put down roots” since the Reagan era, and things like “We will streamline requirements for H-2A processing” are unintelligible to the general population. Democrats should say, “We will reinstate the full ability to seek asylum, a shining example of this nation’s fundamental ideals, and provide a path to regularization for the millions of people who have lived and raised families in the United States without incident for years”—which effectively was the policy of the United States during the half-century that most people consider its golden age. The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the basic framework of all of our immigration law, was passed in 1965, four years before the moon landing, at a time when the U.S. population was around 40 percent smaller and manufacturing was still the dominant economic sector. It’s time to start over—lift nonsensical caps on annual family and employment green cards, reformulate visas entirely (how about a health care–specific visa?) and wrest back control from the executive branch, which is invoking obscure provisions to rewrite immigration law on the fly. Oh, and get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, the creation of which was one of the worst decisions in the panicked wake of 9/11. It is an optimal moment to do so now because the public at large is as close as it’s ever been to welcoming this message. There are countless “I thought he would be going after the criminals!” stories from Trump voters who have seen friends, co-workers, neighbors, even spouses lose status or be detained and deported. The effects of MAGA’s all-or-nothing immigration approach are being viscerally seen and felt around the country, and many people otherwise tuned out of politics are watching as their social and economic fabric unravels amid a brutal immigration crackdown. They’re as primed as they’ll ever be for a new, positive vision of immigration in America. Can Democrats finally summon the courage to give it to them?

Donald Trump has spent much of his second term using the U.S. presidency as a giant ATM for himself, his family, and his cronies. Now he’s devised a way for the cryptocurrency and private equity industries to do the same—while further lining his own pockets and putting Americans’ nest eggs at risk. The Trump administration on Monday announced plans to open 401(k) retirement plans to investments like crypto and private equity that are subject to far fewer safeguards than publicly traded assets like stocks and bonds. Critics warn the move threatens the retirement savings of millions of Americans while delivering a massive windfall for crypto and private equity moguls. The stakes are enormous: If Americans collectively shifted just 1 percent of their 401(k) assets into crypto and private equity, those industries would be flooded with more than $100 billion in new capital. Free-market zealots have long wanted to gamble with the retirement savings of Americans. Republicans regularly fantasize about privatizing Social Security, handing over a wildly popular pillar of the social safety net to the whims of Wall Street. But the public strongly opposes the idea, so the president has turned to the next best thing. It’s the latest brazen example of Trump socializing risk and privatizing profit through his own pitiless brand of market capitalism—and yet another opportunity for him to haul off with loot on the backs of the American people. It should shock no one that Trump is delivering a giant gift to the crypto industry. He and his family own billions of dollars’ worth of crypto and related investments, and will personally benefit as swarms of new buyers push up the price of those assets. The newly departed head of the White House crypto working group, which wrote the administration’s crypto policy, was a pro-crypto billionaire. And Trump’s minions have dramatically reduced regulatory oversight of the industry while acting as its de facto marketing arm.“What you see here is a continuation of the Trump administration’s fundamentally corrupted approach toward policy, which appears designed to benefit the financial backers of his campaign and his family investments,” said Todd H. Baker, a senior fellow at the Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia Business and Law Schools. “You have a major desire to boost the troubled crypto asset business, which is really a form of gambling unsupported by any productive economic activity.”Last month, Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman—former crypto industry lobbyist Paul Atkins—declared that most crypto assets, including the “meme coins” and other tokens that have generated a windfall for Trump and his family, are not securities and therefore not subject to SEC regulations protecting investors. That move set the stage for the Labor Department, which regulates employers, to propose a new rule on Monday—in the works since a Trump executive order last year—making it much easier for 401(k) plans to invest in crypto and private equity by shielding plan managers from investor lawsuits over excessive risk. (There is now a 60-day public comment period on the rule.) The timing could not be better for the crypto industry—or more bleakly illuminating for investors. Crypto asset prices have plunged by nearly 50 percent over the last six months, wiping out $1 trillion in wealth during this latest “crypto winter.” (It turns out there were fewer “greater fools” than expected.) By making crypto products more widely available to millions of Americans, Trump is delivering a desperately needed bailout to a battered industry in which he happens to be a major investor. What does the crypto industry actually produce? Highly speculative and volatile digital assets with zero intrinsic value that are traded in markets rife with con artists and engineered for insider trading and fraud. Now these assets will be available to tens of millions of workers through their retirement accounts—accounts designed and marketed to safely build long-term financial security. What could possibly go wrong? American workers collectively hold more than $10 trillion worth of investments in employer-matched 401(k) accounts. They’re the most common way that Americans plan for retirement, with some 100 million accounts nationwide, and they’re mostly made up of mutual and index funds that broadly track the stock and bond markets. Workers can tweak their risk exposure, but these accounts are purposefully designed to safely build long-term financial security—and historically they have. Federal law does not prohibit employers from offering crypto or private equity investments in 401(k) accounts, but plan managers have a legally required fiduciary duty to employees and can be sued for mismanagement or excessive fees, which is why they’ve been extremely reluctant to offer such risky products in the past. As part of the new Labor Department rule, the Trump administration wants to introduce a “safe harbor” shield making it much harder for employees to sue employer plan managers, giving them the green light to roll the dice on crypto and private investments. Like the crypto industry, private equity firms are salivating over the prospect of gaining access to Americans’ 401(k) plans, especially at a time when traditional investments from onetime cash cows like pensions and endowments are declining. In recent years, Wall Street private equity giants like Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo, which are famous for saddling struggling companies with debt and then strip-mining them with zero regard for workers, have mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign claiming that opening up retirement plans to their products will “democratize” finance by giving millions of workers access to greater returns than index funds.Many retirement investors are wary, for good reason. Private equity and credit markets are highly illiquid and lack transparency—not to mention strong regulatory oversight—making it difficult for investors to access funds, accurately value assets, and spot risks on the horizon. And there’s no guarantee that private investments, despite having much higher fees than index funds, will outperform them—in fact, there’s growing evidence to the contrary. Look no further than the troubled $2 trillion private credit market, which has suffered major losses as investors question the quality of private loans, particularly to software companies under threat from artificial intelligence. In a rare moment of candor, a top private equity executive recently warned that offering such products to individual investors “is not going to end well.”“This is a massive bailout for the struggling private equity and private credit industries,” said Jim Baker, executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a financial watchdog group (no relation to Todd). “Both private equity and private credit have been having challenges in raising money and in selling companies. So they turned to the Trump administration and got them to issue a rule that would provide substantially easier access for those private equity firms to your and my retirement savings.”Opening Americans’ 401(k) accounts to crypto and private assets means socializing the risks of opaque, often illiquid investments that are shrouded from public and regulatory view, while delivering outsize profits to a small number of wealthy private investors. If crypto and private investments outperform public markets—and that’s a big “if”—some workers may occasionally do somewhat better than if they had invested in index funds. But private equity firms newly flush with retirement cash will make out like bandits thanks to huge fees and deal commissions. And when the inevitable crash comes, everyday investors will suffer while Wall Street moguls, who are far better positioned to weather downturns, beg for taxpayer bailouts. Caveat emptor.

In 2012, in what The New York Times called “the biggest wave of job actions in the history of America’s fast-food industry,” workers in New York City walked off their jobs and held a protest demanding a $15 minimum wage. The so-called Fight for $15 was born, and over the next few years workers in cities around the country joined the protests, while the federal minimum wage continued to languish at $7.25 an hour, where it had been since 2009.It’s still stuck at $7.25, but 30 states and Washington, D.C., have since raised their own minimum wages—from $8.75 in West Virginia to $17.95 in D.C.—and 68 cities and counties have increased their minimums above their states’. There remain plenty of foot-draggers—20 states still abide by the federal minimum of $7.25—but the Fight for $15 continues to win converts: In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the state House passed a bill to raise the minimum to that very amount.To some activists, though, a $15 minimum is old news. At a rally last week in Oakland, California, workers and activists aligned with One Fair Wage, a nonprofit group that supports restaurant employees, launched a campaign for a $30 minimum wage in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and Berkeley. Workers have launched similar campaigns around the country, including those for $30 in Hawaii, New York City, and Los Angeles, and $25 in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, said at the rally that the push for a “Living Wage for All” was the new Fight for $15, and that the campaign was committed to showing that the minimum wage could be raised even further without sacrificing small businesses. “It’s not workers versus small businesses,” she said, then connected her campaign to the fight against inequality overall: “It’s all of us together against the one percent that has been hoarding the profits over the last many decades, many generations, to the point where all of us are struggling to survive.”These proposed minimum wages, which would be the highest in the country if any of them pass, have inspired dismissive ridicule from some conservative commenters. “It’s just crazy stuff. It’s socialist stuff,” Larry Kudlow said on Fox Business. But some economists too have been arguing since the Fight for $15 launched that some parts of country can’t handle such a hike. Those critiques will grow as Living Wage for All and similar campaigns become more popular. And that’s almost certain to happen because these campaigns are part and parcel of a broader fight, over inequality and the affordability crisis, that only becomes more urgent by the day.The federal minimum wage was first established during the New Deal, as part of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which also banned child labor and established the 40-hour workweek. The minimum wage at the time was 25 cents an hour, about $5.75 in today’s money. Even at the time, people warned setting a minimum wage could cost jobs. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day … tell you … that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”The minimum has been increased several times since then. In real terms, the high-water mark was 1968 at $1.60, which is a little over $15 an hour in today’s money. When the current rate was set in 2009, $7.25 would have had the spending power of $11.22 today, lower in real terms than it was 40 years earlier. Since then, costs of many necessities, like housing, have risen faster than inflation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculates living wages around the country, and the current federal minimum wage doesn’t pay for a basic quality of life anywhere. Even $15 an hour is not enough in many expensive cities. MIT calculates the cost of living in Alameda County at $32.31 for one adult with no children; in the New York City metro area, it’s $31.50.Indeed, when advocates began fighting for $15 in 2012, they’d planned for the minimum wage to grow with inflation and likely be higher than that now. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, who together first introduced a bill to raise the minimum to $15 in 2017, last year introduced legislation calling instead for $17 by 2030. But there’s little chance of that passing unless Democrats win a trifecta in 2028—and even then, it’s hardly a given.Are these numbers—$17, $25, $30 per hour—too high? Sari Pekkala Kerr, an economist and senior research scientist at Wellesley College who studies the minimum wage, says it’s impossible to know because we haven’t seen the federal minimum wage increase that much at once, even if it’s phased in over several years; they’ve historically been smaller increases. “If a small increase doesn’t have a large employment effect, it doesn’t mean that a large increase might not,” she said. “Prediction gets hard.”Raising the minimum wage doesn’t necessarily cost jobs, at least not right away. A bigger problem, as Pekkala Kerr sees it, is that employers might reduce worker hours, as a study found happened when Seattle raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $13 over a three-year period last decade. (It eventually went up to $15 after the study concluded.) So while workers might make more per hour, they won’t necessarily take home bigger paychecks. “They might stay flat,” Pekkala Kerr said. “Or you might have to add yet another job, and then commuting across multiple jobs definitely gets burdensome.” That potential consequence has led some to push for policies, alongside minimum wage hikes, that would guarantee workers more dependable hours and schedules.But evaluating a single minimum wage hike in isolation, over a limited period of time, ignores the dynamism of the economy, says Kathryn Edwards, an economist who also writes for Bloomberg Opinion. “I think the boogeyman [of job loss] is overblown,” she said of minimum wage hikes. “You don’t see massive layoffs or unemployment when you have a minimum wage increase.” Instead, some of the jobs below the new minimum wage might be eliminated, but they’re replaced with new jobs elsewhere, and overall unemployment doesn’t really rise. “Over a longer period in the U.S., the economy is growing and adding jobs.”Minimum wage increases are generally popular. They almost always pass when they’re ballot initiatives, and almost every Democratic candidate for president in 2020 promised to raise the federal minimum. Which makes it curious that it’s still a paltry $7.25. Alex Jacquez, the chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank in D.C., worked for Sanders when he tried to increase the federal minimum wage during the Biden years, and he said it has a lot to do with who pressures politicians when they’re weighing bills like Sanders’s.“They don’t get millions and millions of people making substandard wages calling their offices and talking to them,” he said. “They get businesses, and the Chamber of Commerce, and the Restaurant Association getting meetings with them, and kind of playing up, or making the arguments about why they shouldn’t have to pay higher wages,” he said. The failure to increase the minimum wage was a blow, he said. “Not being able to get it done, and with the Democratic trifecta, I think … is why some people maybe are skeptical of some of the commitments that politicians make.”Nearly all economic policy comes with risk. An ambitious minimum wage hike could cause workers to lose hours or even lose their jobs—but there’s also a cost, not only for workers but the federal government, to leaving the minimum wage at its miserably low level: When families can’t support themselves with a sub-living wage, they turn to the government to get by. In a 2021 hearing on the issue, Sanders pointed to a Government Accountability Office finding that nearly half of workers making less than $15 an hour rely on public assistance, and said taxpayers should not be “forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.”For Edwards, this debate is as much about our national values as it is about economic policy. “The question about the minimum wage is, how little do you think the least person deserves in our economy?” she said. “That’s a very different answer from, ‘Is it possible that there’s a low-wage retail employer that either goes out of business or demands less labor as a result of the minimum wage?’ I would expect that to happen. The question is, does that matter relative to having an economy worth $31 trillion that still has people making $7.25 an hour?”

By Edward Curtin “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”                                                        – George Orwell, Animal Farm As a professor of linguistics at one of the United States’ most elite universities, my life-long best friend, fearful […]