Weekly Progressive POPULIST

WHEN ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS JUST ISN'T ENOUGH Weekly news and commentary to supplement our printed edition Friday, December 5, 2025

NOTE: We have transitioned our newsprint edition to monthly publication and instead of the second printed issue per month, we are producing a weekly compilation of syndicated columns and features our subscribers wouldn’t otherwise see. You can find daily news via the links to Daily Kos and Common Dreams.

Trump’s Monument to Corruption

And one of the first things to do when sanity and legality are restored

By ROBERT REICH

Trump isn’t just destroying the White House to make room for a vanity ballroom — he’s selling it off to the highest bidders, who conveniently need favors from his regime.

The giant ballroom is Trump’s monument to corruption.

Google and Amazon are both chipping in with massive donations. They both just so happen to have massive antitrust lawsuits working their way through the courts. Amazon is also suing to get the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. But I’m sure their ballroom donations have nothing to do with that, right?

I suppose that Apple’s support for the ballroom isn’t related to its own legal problems — or its desire to remain exempt from Trump’s tariffs.

Oh, and Meta. It’s also involved in a major antitrust lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission right now. But I’m sure the company is just donating because Mark Zuckerberg is a patriot.

Surely it’s not because Meta and other Big Tech companies stand to gain handsomely if Trump maintains his corporate-friendly AI policy.

Other generous donors to the ballroom project include cryptocurrency players like Coinbase, Ripple, and even the Winklevoss twins.

I’m sure the Winklevoss twins would be thrilled if Trump kept up his crypto-friendly policies, which he’s also cashing in on.

And Coinbase’s donation probably has nothing to do with the company’s being under an active regulatory investigation, right?

Another donor: The railroad giant Union Pacific, which is eyeing a $72 billion megamerger that needs approval from federal regulators.

Another: Comcast, which needs government approval for the mergers and acquisitions it pursues.

As does billionaire private equity executive Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone.

Companies that survive on government contacts are also chipping in, including Palantir and Lockheed Martin. How kind of them.

The Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of “bribery” to the point where a specific favor has to be demanded in advance of payment. So we can’t say this is bribery … exactly.

But the writing’s on the wall — perhaps literally. These donors are likely to get their names etched into the new White House building itself.

Could there be a more fitting monument to the Trump presidency?

That’s because in Trump’s White House, everything is for sale — even the building itself.

Memo to all of us: One of the first things to be done when sanity and legality are restored to Washington — demolition of Trump’s ballroom memorial to corruption.

See the linked version, including video, at

Trump’s Monument to Corruption

Hegseth’s Second Strike Didn’t Render the First One Less Murderous

And making light of the carnage is ghoulish

By SABRINA HAAKE

The Nov. 26 South Park episode nailed it: When “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth gets wind of a small Colorado town’s annual holiday race, he declares it an “Antifa uprising” and calls out the troops to crush it. While armed forces assemble their AK-47s, Hegseth struts around filming himself for muscular social media content, unaware that his trademark obsession with ‘lethality’ looks unhinged.

South Park’s point, previewed during Hegseth’s shameful speech at Quantico, and his sophomoric tome championing war without rules, is that Trump has reduced the US military to an absurdist prop so grotesque it raises fair questions of insanity.

After a series of unilateral US strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean killed 83 people suspected of trafficking drugs, strikes widely assessed as murder, Congress and the media are finally alarmed, with bipartisan members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees beginning investigations.

The Trump administration cannot justify the strikes under existing law

Nov. 30, two days after the Washington Post first reported that Hegseth issued a command to “Kill them all” in a September attack on the high seas, which led to a second strike that killed survivors, Hegseth posted a juvenile cartoon making light of his own crime. Hegseth’s post, shown above, depicts a chubby American turtle standing on helicopter skids, either grinning or laughing as he fires a bazooka close-range at boats bearing visible drugs, each boat guarded by armed men who are not chubby, friendly, or smiling.

Aside from depicting the slaughter of humans as a cartoon or children’s war game, Hegseth’s post also perpetuates a lie: Neither drugs, nor rifles, nor weapons of any kind have appeared in any of the snuff videos Hegseth and Trump keep posting to brag about the killings. To date, the administration has offered no intelligence or evidence whatsoever, other than Trump’s personal opinion, to supports the claim that the destroyed boats were carrying drugs, arms, or illicit cargo of any kind. Even if they were, military law requires interdiction, seizure and process, not unilateral, on-the-spot executions.

Bolstering his comic strip defense, Hegseth has also claimed that the strikes are in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, and “approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

Except there weren’t any top lawyers left ‘up and down the chain of command,’ after Hegseth fired them. In February, Hegseth fired the top Judge Advocates General (JAGs) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force as his first order of business.

Hegseth’s JAGS come back to haunt him

The JAGS didn’t slink away quietly. After Hegseth fired them, they formed a watchdog Working Group now warning that Hegseth’s orders on the high seas “constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” Their letter to Congress requesting an investigation echoes the warnings from six Democratic lawmakers that servicemembers have a duty to disobey patently illegal orders. “Since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are patently illegal,” their letter states, “anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”

After Hegseth and Trump appeared to throw commanding officer Frank Bradley under the bus, blaming Bradley, not Hegseth, for the second strike that killed the survivors, press secretary Karoline Leavitt read a statement that Bradley’s conduct was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement.”

Except, of course, it wasn’t. None of Hegseth’s orders to execute people based on suspicion alone comports with federal or military law, and no one from Trump’s administration has been able to articulate a plausible legal justification for any of the strikes—first strike, second, or otherwise. The administration seems to be arguing that the strikes are lawful, despite Hegseth not knowing the identities of anyone onboard, because Trump has “determined” that the US is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, but Congress has not declared any such war, and one-sided orders to execute suspects do not constitute an ‘armed conflict’ under any military code.The State Department’s designation of Tren de Aragua—or any cartel— as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” does not provide legal authority to use lethal force against non-combatants, even if they are engaged in drug running.

Even if there were evidence of drugs on the destroyed ships, executing non-combatants violates the “imminent threat” rule where the military can only use lethal force against an imminent, ie, immediate, threat to life. Trump/Hegseth’s assumption that these small boats: 1. are carrying drugs; 2. are destined for the US; 3. will make it that far; 4. without sufficient fuel; 5. will eventually cause deaths; 6. of some Americans; 7. who choose to use the drugs, does not support an “imminent threat” analysis under any law, for reasons that should be obvious from the string-along assumptions listed.

Guilt (and execution) by association

After the first boat strike on Sept. 2, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the military could have interdicted the vessel, which is how the Coast Guard normally responds to drug vessels, but chose instead to destroy the vessel and to kill everyone on board because Trump wanted to “send a message.” Hegseth continues to parrot Trump’s “message,” posting recently that, “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” adding two minutes later that, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

Whether victims die in the first, second, or third strike matters little. Trump’s legally suspect campaign of executing people based on a suspicion that they are smuggling drugs didn’t start with Hegseth’s order to “Kill them all,” it started with Trump’s assumption that he alone gets to be judge, jury and executioner.

Legal authorities rejecting Trump’s assumption include the Dept. of Defense’s own Law of War Manual; the Hague Regulations; the US 1863 Lieber Code; the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act; the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibiting extrajudicial killings; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and state and federal statutes prohibiting murder.

People disinclined to read legal treatises but inclined to think the government can execute people suspected of committing a crime should ask themselves: If a police officer thinks I am going to beat my wife when I get home, should he be allowed to shoot me in the face before I get there?

Sabrina Haake is a left-of-center policy wonk and trial lawyer in Chicago specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes at SabrinaHaake.substack.com.

Secretary-on-the-Defensive Pete Hegseth’s Dept. of War (Crimes)

By AMY GOODMAN

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat following U.S. missile strikes on Sept.2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the operation called a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody.” These actions, along with at least 20 additional lethal boat strikes that followed, are widely considered by legal and military experts to be war crimes.

President Donald Trump has declared, without proof, that these targeted people are narcotics traffickers and thus “terrorists” with whom the U.S. is at war.

“This entire operation, from the outset, is illegal,” David Cole, Georgetown University law professor, said on the *Democracy Now!* news hour. “It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. … They’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood.”

The Intercept’s Nick Turse first reported the killing of the survivors, a week after the attack happened. In that report, Turse wrote:

“A high-ranking Pentagon official … said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year.”

Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends on Sept, 3, boasting of the boat strike: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.”

The Washington Post’s report provoked bipartisan concern in Congress and investigations into the strikes as potential war crimes. On Sunday, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the strike, saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”

Hegseth got the message, apparently, stating in a December 2 cabinet meeting, seated next to Trump, “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around.”

The decision to kill the survivors, he said, came from the operation’s commanding officer, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.

In Trump’s Air Force One comments, he added detail to his boat strike policy that bears mention: “Just look at the numbers … each boat, on average, is responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.”

As with every aspect of this murderous policy, Trump offered no evidence to back up his math. We know next to nothing about these boats, whether they are engaged in criminal activity, are fishing boats, or something else. Dominican Republic officials reported that one ton, or 1,000 kilograms, of cocaine was recovered from the wreckage of one of the boats the U.S. bombed.

That amount, if accurate, highlights the hypocrisy of Trump’s policies. He just granted a pardon to a convicted cocaine trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. He had spent just over a year of his 46-year sentence in a U.S. prison. In 2024, Hernandez was found guilty of flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine. That’s enough to fill over 400 of the alleged “narco-trafficker” boats Trump and Hegseth have been blowing up. Thus, using Trump’s math, Hernandez’s prolific cocaine smuggling would have killed over 10 million Americans.

So why pardon the convicted felon?

Trump announced the pardon days before Honduras’ national elections. Just before releasing Hernández on Monday, Dec. 1, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the presidential candidate from Hernández’s right-wing party, hoping to gain another Trump-allied Latin American leader. By Dec. 4, the centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla was leading Asfura with 80% of the votes counted. Trump, seeing his preferred candidate losing, claimed fraud.

Meanwhile, the largest U.S. military buildup in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban missile crisis is underway in the Caribbean, as Trump escalates U.S. threats against Venezuela. He has again invoked the pretext of narco-trafficking, claiming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs a cocaine cartel, offering a $50 million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Trump recently pledged that strikes on Venezuelan land would begin “very soon.” In response, a bipartisan group of senators including Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky have put forth Senate Joint Resolution 98, barring U.S. military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization.

Meanwhile, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina has filed a complaint against the U.S. with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging the U.S. illegally killed him in his boat on September 15.

“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth bragged on Dec. 2. Hopefully, a war crimes inquiry against Hegseth will be beginning soon as well.

Denis Moynihan cowrote this column. Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 radio and TV stations. Her sixth book, co-authored with Moynihan and David Goodman, is “Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America.”

Sarah Beckstrom Died for Trump’s Optics, a Casualty of His Vainglorious Foolery

Her blood is on his hands. As if he cares.

By DICK POLMAN

When Donald Trump launched his first regime in 2017, I warned - cinch prediction - that he will “get a lot of people killed.” Since nobody seems to be keeping track, I’ll cite The Lancet, a top medical journal, which concluded in 2021 that Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid.” The journal said that roughly 40 percent of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided had he respected science; in translation, he bears some responsibility for the deaths of 180,000.

But hey, remember what Stalin reputedly said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

Yes, stats can numb the mind. So let’s talk instead about the tragedy of one - as evidenced by what happened the other day in Washington, where a 20-year-old National Guard woman forfeited her flesh and blood for Trump. She did not die for a noble cause larger than herself; she died for the smallest of men, for a mentally desiccating narcissist who’s using Guard troops as pawns for purposes of performative spectacle.

Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia should not have been in Washington, period. But she was, thanks to Trump, and now she’s dead. Her blood is on his hands.

Something like this — a bad actor walking up and firing bullets — was bound to happen. National Guard commanders feared so, in a memo back on Aug. 28. When it became clear that Trump was bent on deploying NG troops to cities that he hated, starting with Washington, even though NG troops were not trained in law enforcement and crime prevention, the commanders warned the rank and file that their presence on the streets would be “a target of opportunity” in a “heightened threat environment,“ exposing them to “criminals, violent extremists, issue-motivated groups and lone actors to advance their interests.”

In other words, sitting ducks.

When the city of Washington sued the Trump regime, seeking to remove the troops, it cited the commanders’ memo. But when the Justice Department’s MAGA lawyers saw the memo, they dismissed it as merely “speculative.” Presumably they think otherwise now, unless they’ve been cult-trained to believe that picking up street trash and taking selfies with tourists are missions worth the shedding of blood.

Juliet Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says: “The National Guard is stranded somewhere on the battlefield of partisan politics. They’re not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.” But, of course, “we” never asked them at all. The convicted criminal gave that order. And now we’ve learned, thanks to a Nov. 21 federal court ruling, that his order was illegal. I know you’re shocked.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded that Trump had stolen congressional powers and violated other stuff, but I’ll let Cobb tell it: “At its core, Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon when defendants (the ruling MAGATs) approve, in excess of their statutory authority, the deployment of National Guard troops to the District.” In addition, the District “suffers a distinct injury from the presence of out-of-state National Guard units,” because “the Constitution placed the District exclusively under Congress’s authority to prevent individual states from exerting any influence over the nation’s capital.”

But ever since Nov. 21, Sarah Beckstrom and her fellow troopers - including Andrew Wolfe, who’s currently clinging to life — continued to be “targets of opportunity” because Cobb’s ruling has been in limbo thanks to Trump’s appeal. If he’d bowed to the ruling and ordered the troops out, Beckstrom would be alive and Wolfe would be healthy.

Which brings me to the Saturday editorial in The New York Times. This paragraph was astounding (italics are mine): “There will be Americans who note that this tragedy could have been averted if Ms. Beckstrom and Mr. Wolfe had not been needlessly deployed to Washington in August on the order of President Trump. No one, including the president, is responsible for this tragedy, except for its perpetrator. It should be possible to understand both that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard has been outrageous and that the use did not cause this shooting.”

Huh?

I won’t cancel my subscription, but I gotta ask: Is it really so hard to connect Dot A to Dot B and thus conclude that Beckstrom is dead as a consequence of what The Times itself calls Trump’s “outrageous” use of the troops?

And, predictably, Trump’s response to the shootings has been even more outrageous - ordering more troops into the District, thus creating even more “targets of opportunity.” This guy confirms something that Groucho Marx once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

To me, it’s demonstrably obvious that Beckstrom was sacrificed to the optics of MAGA theater, that she’s a tragic casualty of a fake war ginned up by a classic sociopath - someone who’s callous and narcissistic in the extreme, someone devoid of empathy. Am I being too harsh? Check out the exchange Trump had with a reporter the other day.

Q: “Do you plan to attend Sarah’s funeral?”

A: “I haven’t thought about it … I haven’t given it any thought … I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

I rest my case.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist, alumni of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.substack.com and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

Want To Be a True Patriot? Study the Nation’s Origin Story — the American Revolution

By MARY SANCHEZ

In defense of President Donald Trump, most of us know scant details about the life of George Washington. Yet that didn’t stop him from invoking our first president to call for the death penalty against a group of Democrats who recently irked him.

Here’s Trump’s post on Truth Social: “HANG THEM, GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!” (The president wisely walked back the death penalty part in recent days.)

But he stuck with the call for punishment: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.”

Here’s what got the president’s goat: Six members of Congress, all with military service records, reminded active service members of this fact via a video: They can refuse unlawful orders of military commanders.

Our military takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. They don’t take an oath to a dictator.

Nevertheless, Trump wants the Pentagon to find a way to court martial the ringleader of this perceived transgression, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy Captain.

Others beholden to Trump are claiming that the six members of Congress are guilty of sedition. The charge is being made through lots of politically-tinged, verbal saber-rattling.

All of this back and forth is teeing up a perfect pitch for Ken Burns’ latest PBS series, a six-part deep look at the American Revolution. Burns has gone to great lengths in interviews not to speak in partisan terms about the series. He’s highly aware of our current political divides and tensions.

Burns and his co-directors know the importance of their project, coming on the eve of the nation’s 250 th anniversary.

Myths and half-truths about the nation’s founding are firmly embedded into American culture and our politics.

For most people, streaming even one segment of the series would be humbling. There is so much to absorb.

An array of professional historians are quoted. Countless writings of the era are cited, bringing a rich range of perspectives. There’s a rolling cadence to the storylines, unraveling facts and dissecting the nuances of how our nation came to be.

Worried about holding his army together, Washington did order executions of those he deemed disloyal to the cause. Our first president seemed to command respect, literally as well – he was about 6’3” in a period when most men were 5’7”.

He didn’t initially understand artillery, having been away from battlefields for 16 years.

He was reserved, an excellent horseman and chosen to lead the Continental Army not only due to his prior leadership during the French and Indian War, but partly because he was rich and from Virginia.

Washington derived his wealth from the labor of enslaved people that he owned, many of them through his marriage to the previously widowed Martha Washington.

Here are a few more snippets from the PBS series: Washington didn’t first see himself as a revolutionary. It’s a role that he grew toward as the battles progressed, as tensions with Britain escalated and hope faded for the colonists to win respect from England’s King George III.

And yet, our vision of who Washington was, moreover who qualifies as a patriot, has grown increasingly divided and often delusional in recent generations.

People often miss the fact that the American Revolution was a global effort; with France and Spain playing crucial roles. It’s also important for people to understand the diverse peoples involved.

Some conservatives have tried to poke holes in the series, accusing it of stretching the role of indigenous nations, of women and Black people, both freed and enslaved.

That view would disregard the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy of six indigenous nations on Benjamin Franklin, who understood the confederacy’s power to unify differing groups toward the common cause.

Burns was right to correct the national narrative, the wishful thinking of some who continue to think of the Revolutionary War as often depicted in paintings: white male colonists fighting the British red coats.

The truth was far more complicated, more like a civil war at times and in later years, fought primarily by people with the least resources, access to land and other property.

And yet, the colonies did come together, around ideals of what this new nation could be.

Here are some words from the first 10 minutes of the series: “The American Revolution was not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would engage more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.”

We ought to be proud of this, not divided by it.

Yet today, racist, homophobic, and anti-government groups like to organize into militia groups, envisioning themselves as akin to modern versions of the troops that Washington led.

But it’s a fair bet that those people, as well as Trump, and the millions who protested him during the recent No Kings protests do not have a firm grasp of the facts explored in the series.

People pound out their views on social media, to their families and friends, about who is a loyal American and who is not.

The litmus tests they use vary. But a good place to learn these facts might be at the beginning of our story. Because really, how can someone proclaim their love for the nation, without understanding how and why it was founded in the first place?

Mary Sanchez is a syndicated columnist for Tribune Content Agency, formerly with the Kansas City Star. Email msanchezcolumn@gmail.com and follow on Twitter @msanchezcolumn.

Mr. I Alone Can Fix It Owns Economic Debacle

By JOHN YOUNG

The immense irony about what this president has done with the economy is that only the Supreme Court can save him — from himself.

He says a ruling by the Supremes against his willy-nilly, go-it-alone-meaning-by-me-myself-and-I tariffs would be “disaster for the economy.”

Run that assertion past shoppers, retailers, importers, manufacturers, farmers and just about any economist you choose.

In the face of the inflation it has caused, the White House’s vaunted “affordability initiatives” have the clang of “Infrastructure Week” on repeat.

The only game-changer, until this president is de-fanged by voters when they elect a new Congress, will be for the court to abolish his tariffs.

The tariffs are the disaster. They have roiled the world economy. They have set producers adrift in a sea of uncertainty. They have caused grocery costs to soar. They have negated the progress President Biden and the Fed achieved in battling the inflation they and we inherited from COVID.

Supposedly the whole idea of these tariffs was to supercharge American manufacturing. That’s happening exactly nowhere.

Recall what Biden did with infrastructure and investments in semiconductors and clean energy.

Forget that, say the shadow rulers of Big Carbon. Feed us, MAGA, though we are full to burst.

The administration is telling us it can’t release the newest figures about the GDP, blaming the shutdown. Convenient.

The president has always talked as if he has a plan for prosperity (see, “Health Care”). Mariana Mazzacuto, who runs the Institute of Public Innovation at University College London, calls what she sees an “idiosyncratic hodgepodge” where rhyme and reason are treated like, oh, diversity, equity and inclusion.

The president “isn’t asking ‘What are the problems that need to be solved and how can we have public investment to solve those problems?’” she tells Politico. He’s “just throwing tariffs around” and “dismantling things.”

One of the sorely un-emphasized stories of this moment in time is the brain drain of the public sector, the wave of retirements and accepted buyouts — 154,000 federal employees, an 18 percent surge from last year.

These are the people who are (or were) planning and maintaining our dams and canals, our interstates and bridges. They are (or were) at the forefront of the war on cancer and infectious diseases.

On the altar of false economy, this president has crippled this essential element of our economy. To what end?

This administration, says Mazzacuto, doesn’t exhibit any policy that “is future- and opportunity-oriented around innovation.”

Its trademark instead: “preventing stuff from happening.”

Back to the tariffs:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer writes in The Washington Post that she supports tariffs in a strategically limited fashion, but not blanket, punitive trade policies. She says they must be targeted at egregious global rivals, not neighbors and friends. Also, the money raised should go to build the industries hurt by unfair competition.

You’d think the tariffs would be cheered in automaking territory. Far from it. The University of Michigan calculates they’ve cost the state 13,000 jobs, part and parcel of over 1 million jobs the nation has lost over the last 10 months.

Why, you ask? Costs of materials are the biggest reason. But second on the list of concerns voiced by employers is uncertainty.

Indeed, reports Politico, the costs and disruptions associated with tariffs threaten to counteract the generous corporate tax breaks Congress authorized with the Horrible Very Bad Debt-Increasing Bill.

We shouldn’t even be having this discussion. Tariffs are the Congress’s job except in dire moments. The Constitution did not authorize one person, on a whim, to throw the world’s economy into chaos,

The Supreme Court might come to our – and, yes, the MAGA king’s — rescue by rolling back this misadventure.

Then again, the concretized core of right-wingers on the court, having disavowed any notion of checks and balances, just might say, “He’s the boss of us. Democracy be damned.”

John Young is a longtime newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

Women: The People Who Stand Up to Trump

By JAMIE STIEHM

Reader, who are the people who have stood up to President Donald Trump and confronted him, face to his furious face?

Answer: Women, and only women, have done so publicly.

Running for president, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris put Trump’s misogyny on public display in 2016 and 2024, but that’s not what I mean. His break with the former MAGA House mouthpiece, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (”a traitor”) is not what I mean, either.

Which other women have challenged Trump to bring him to a boiling point?

Leading the list is the House speaker emerita, who crossed swords with Trump and bloodied him every time. The governor of Maine refused to take presidential orders. And the Episcopal bishop invited (or implored) Trump to show “mercy” toward immigrants at a service early this year at the Washington National Cathedral.

Remember?

These yearbook scenes and memories were sparked by Trump’s recent outlandish outbursts toward several women White House correspondents who dared to ask hard questions. His rough-cut rage toward each woman erupted like a volcano and silenced their colleagues. These are signs in plain sight the president is escalating his ferocious wrath toward women, especially, of all people. By the way, chivalry is dead in the White House Correspondents’ Association.

“Quiet, piggy,” Trump said to a Bloomberg White House reporter who asked about the Epstein files. “You’re a stupid person,” he told a CBS News correspondent who brought up Afghan resettlement. He scolded an ABC News member of the press, calling her a “terrible reporter” when she asked why he was hosting the Saudi Arabian crown prince, a leader suspected of directing a journalist’s murder. He labeled a New York Times reporter who wrote on his waning health “ugly.”

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is the most dramatic example, when she defiantly tore apart his State of the Union speech in the House of Representatives. But don’t forget Pelosi scolding Trump in a White House meeting in a picture that went viral. At the center of the room, she told Trump: “All roads lead to Putin.”

Those were riveting moments of political theater and nonviolent resistance. Of course, Pelosi also led two Trump impeachments successfully. If the Senate had followed suit and convicted him in either trial, he could not have run for president again.

In a winter White House gathering of governors, Maine Gov. Janet Mills was told by Trump to “comply” with a new ban on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Mills replied, “See you in court.” Trump then and there threatened the state with no federal funding and predicted her political career would soon be over. But she did not back down. In fact, she is favored to run in next year’s Senate race. Mainers tend to be ruggedly independent.

In the National Cathedral service, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde had the rare chance to address Trump, and she seized the moment. In a voice gentle and low, she pleaded for a mission of mercy.

“I ask you to have mercy upon people in our country who are scared,” Budde said, mentioning immigrants who work on farms and in meatpacking plants, office buildings and hospitals. Yet the roundups and deportations had already begun.

Budde also prayed for compassion for gay, lesbian and transgender youth in heightened despair, with suicide crisis lines jammed.

Trump sat not even 15 feet away from Budde and glared at her. He was on the hook, having to listen to a woman’s words in a sacred space, lined with stained-glass windows. In front of a nation’s eyes, her appeal was a cardinal sin.

So mercy did not win the day, needless to say, and in typical fashion, Trump demanded an apology. Yet Trump did grant clemency, a pardon, to nearly 1,600 Capitol rioters who stormed our marble temple on Jan. 6, 2021. The Capitol was another sacred space that could not be breached, or so we thought.

On a long phone call, Trump demanded Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederikson to hand over Greenland. She resisted the onslaught.

Pelosi is the champion in speaking truth to Trump’s face. Some WHCA women are profiles in courage *and* canaries in the coal mine -- revealing the rage rising like a river in Trump’s head.

Jamie Stiehm is a former assignment editor at CBS News in London, reporter at The Hill, metro reporter at the Baltimore Sun and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is author of a new play, “Across the River,” on Aaron Burr. See JamieStiehm.com.

White House Beef Tariffs Make Hash Out of Cattle Markets

By ALAN GUEBERT

To truly experience the Trump tariff rollercoaster, hop on the ear-popping ride American cattlemen, meatpackers, and U.S. beef eaters have been on over the past few months.

In mid-August, the White House raised import tariffs on Brazilian beef to 50% because, it explained, the nation was conducting a “politically motivated persecution, intimidation … and prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.”

Bolsonaro, in fact, was convicted by a jury for attempting to overthrow Brazil’s newly elected government. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

But Brazil is a leading exporter of “beef trim,” beef “blended” into U.S. ground beef, so cattle futures prices soared on the new import hurdle. The U.S. imported 1.1 billion pounds. of Brazilian beef in the 12 months prior to the announcement. After it, every ounce had to pay a 50% ransom to enter the U.S.

That news came after the Administration closed the U.S.border to Mexican feeder cattle due to an outbreak of screwworm. That stopped the flood of 1.2 million head of Mexican cattle per year–or about 25,000 per week–into the U.S. With U.S. cattle numbers at a 70-year low, the closure was huge news.

The two actions propelled U.S. cattle futures prices from $210 per hundredweight (cwt) to $250 per cwt, adding $400 or so in value per head of slaughter cattle.

Every smiling cowboy, however, lost his humor three months later when the tariff-wielding President Trump cancelled most of his tariffs on Brazilian beef and quadrupled the level of Argentine beef imports to the U.S. The reasons, again, were political: election results in both the U.S. and Argentina.

Cattle futures prices plunged. Coupled with a mid-October decline, the swoon meant “live cattle saw a $30 correction from the (summer highs) and feeder cattle futures set back nearly $70” per cwt. Here’s how one of the sector’s leading publications, Drovers Journal, characterized the crack-up:

“The cattle market chaos wasn’t tied to fundamentals but liquidation by speculative traders on fear of policy changes by the administration as President Donald Trump announced a plan to lower beef prices for consumers.”

The day after the tariff-reduction news slapped the market, the President–again reading the political tea leaves–announced the Department of Justice (DOJ) would “launch an investigation into meatpacking companies,” noted Politico, “which he accused of illegally manipulating beef prices at the expense of beef farmers and consumers.”

Any day the DOJ investigates meatpackers is a good day. But that day was needed 30 years ago before packers became virtually untouchable by any court.

And that’s not just my view; it’s what the American Action Forum, a Washington, D.C. think tank that leans so far right it defies gravity, noted recently in a lengthy piece titled “Unpacking Trump’s Meat Packing (sic) Allegations.”

While the industry is “highly concentrated, dominated by four firms,” it explained, “... the four-firm concentration ratio has not materially changed over the past 30 years.”

Moreover, it continued, market data shows that “packers margins were -$170.00 per head during the week ending Nov. 1, 2025, a slight improvement from the -$253.28 in the prior week … [and] that meat packer margins will average -$165.96 per head in 2025.”

Which strongly suggests that the Trump administration threw badly bleeding packers a lifeline by opening U.S. markets to enormous, unlabeled supplies of South American beef to cut their losses — not to trim soaring retail prices paid by American eaters.

And then it dropped the curtain of a meaningless DOJ investigation of meatpackers around it to deflect any inquiries.

That’s not a recipe to help either American cattlemen or the beef-buying public. It will, however, make some fine, Grade A baloney.

Alan Guebert is an agricultural journalist who was raised on an Illinois dairy farm and worked as a writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine and is now a contributing editor to Farm Journal magazine. See past columns, supporting documents, and contact information at farmandfoodfile.com

Watching the Storm Roll In

By ART CULLEN

We were waiting on Snowmageddon to dump on Storm Lake, Iowa, the morning after Thanksgiving. Forecasters hyperventilated. Plans were cancelled to gather with the extended family for supper in the happy din of a small gym. Our regrets. Iowa played Nebraska. Hunker down.

Eight, 10 inches, heck maybe a foot or more could blow our way before Sunday. Look for a good multi-fool pileup at Ankeny. Winter will be upon us. Don the long johns until Easter.

The proverbial calm. Peer out the window. Those clouds are dark.

The legislature will convene in January. It should be awful. It’s the last dance for Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is not running for re-election. She vows to do something about property taxes as her swan song. She again implied further erosion of schools and everything else. I keep writing about it because she keeps talking about it. She is scary. Watch out for her medical reform with service hubs that cannot be healthy for Sac City or Pocahontas. And worse. Much damage can be done in a short time.

Legislators face a deficit of $1 billion that they are papering over with dwindling cash reserves.

This is the last hurrah before the November 2026 midterm elections. Republicans running things in Des Moines will have to get even more extreme to fire up a dispirited base. They have no idea what to do about property taxes rising by double digits annually. They punted last session and for now stutter and stammer and slide on thin ice.

This is one big reason Reynolds is bailing after nine years on a mission to drag Iowa backwards. She could see this fiscal train wreck coming, relentlessly cutting income taxes while the Republicans spend money like drunken socialists.

The billion-dollar problem is only going to get worse once the Grassleys set their minds to it. No telling how long it will take to dig out. Your knees know it’s coming. The governor is charting her agenda, which began in the wake of Terry Branstad with income tax cuts and gutting Medicaid, and will end with property tax cuts and gutting public education. She has already warned that schools eat up nearly half the property tax bill.

Meantime, the Iowa economy is listing. Net farm income is eroding. State revenues follow.

What a gift to State Auditor Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor.

This is how the Branstad era ends.

“If you want everything to stay the same, then it’s probably going to be very hard to reduce your property tax burden,” Reynolds said to the Quad City Times as she popped out from one of her closed-door sessions selling her hokum to local business leaders. “Is there ways that we can provide centers of service?”

If you like even more rural consolidation and loss, Reynolds signals the way forward. Sorry, Ida Grove. Get on Hwy. 20 to Sioux City for that, if it isn’t drifting in too bad.

So far, they’re talking about a tax freeze. It usually turns to slush. Local officials can’t pay themselves enough, and the road lobby gets restless, and that freeze never stood a chance when Gov. Branstad tried it before. He, too, talked about reform but could only come up with slush and mediocrity.

Branstad did not face a structural deficit of $1 billion. That is beyond mediocre. It is a manure storm. That just doesn’t go away with a property tax freeze for senior citizens and veterans.

It demands fewer EMS crews, rural school attendance centers, small-town courthouses, and ultimately fewer people standing in the way of more corporate hogs.

“Do we need a huge fire station in every single town?” Reynolds asks.

Maybe not. Or a school. Or a library. A jail becomes a luxury for Sac City. Listen to her again: “If you’re a small community and you don’t want to change any of that, then it’s going to be really hard for your property taxes to be reduced. That’s why it’s hard.”

Sac County buries its head in the snowbank with Kim Reynolds and Randy Feenstra while the school in Early closes.

What if the Lake City hospital can’t stand the strangling of Medicaid? Will Calhoun County understand it is the price of progress if the hospital is lost? What if it is not one of the governor’s health hubs? Fort Dodge will do, right?

This is the nest Republicans feathered. Year after year of income tax cuts. Where did the income go? Now, how do you prevent property tax increases in an election year? How do you avoid the pain when the rainy day funds run dry?

It is inevitable as a blizzard in Northwest Iowa. Comfort must be taken in the cold of winter that you will survive, and that this dark period of Iowa history will fade away in the squall. We look for that silver lining of change in the offing. Ben McCollum could win the Big Ten title, Iowa beat Nebraska in football, and the tuition won’t be so bad if you own a bank or inherited 1,000 acres. Wake us up when the sun comes out.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland, ” released by Viking Press in 2018, and “Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World,” released by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa, in September. Email times@stormlake.com.

Who Even Remembers Why We Should Dress Respectfully?

By FROMA HARROP

Sean Duffy’s entreaty to “dress with respect” on airplanes rapidly ran into some turbulence. The transportation secretary’s request had a bumpy touchdown, landing so close to Donald Trump boorishly telling a female reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet, Piggy.”

Duffy’s boss often struggles to maintain the thinnest veneer of courtliness -- a failing no amount of fine tailoring can disguise. Nonetheless, Duffy noting “a degradation of civility” among air travelers is on the mark, and so is his contention that flying would be more pleasant if grown-ups behaved better, which would include not wearing pajamas on flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration reported 1,240 unruly passenger cases last year. That doesn’t include uncountable incidents of mere rudeness or simply playing the eyesore in dirty sweatpants.

Testy reactions to Duffy’s plea centered on anger at the declining quality of today’s commercial air travel. One passionate defense of ditching a dress code appeared in, of all places, Vogue Magazine.

The article titled, “I Will Start Dressing Respectfully When Airlines Start Respecting Me,” took on a Karen-esque air. “The concept of being shamed out of dressing for comfort in this moment,” the writer complained bitterly, “feels beyond the pale.”

First off, it’s not about you personally. And the notion that one must dress down to be comfortable is patently phony. No one is suggesting that this writer wear a taffeta dress and high heels on her next cross-Pacific flight. Neat pants and a clean top will fill the “dress with respect” bill.

Dear Vogue Magazine, you know what you are peddling on your pages. Sure, you are catering to a less formal readership than the “Come Fly With Me” generations, but hey, why don’t you throw in a bone for your advertisers?

Numerous critics of Duffy’s campaign cite cramped seating, canceled flights and other perceived declines in quality of service as excuses for their acting out -- though many may not even link smelling bad to behavior. Thing is, none of the above causes for displeasure has any idea what you’re wearing. Sticking one’s tongue out at executives who don’t see you also has no effect. Furthermore, bad weather is sometimes at fault.

What completely misses the point is that we dress respectfully for other people -- for fellow passengers, for airline workers trying to perform a tough job. The personnel that take the biggest brunt of passenger disrespect are the poor flight attendants.

And herein lies a story:

I knew an old guy, somewhere in his 80s, who was decidedly not rich. Frank always flew steerage class. But whenever he took a flight, he would wear his blazer, a pressed shirt and a tie. He was shaved, and whatever hair he had left stayed neatly combed.

During one flight, Frank wanted another ginger ale, and so he walked to the back of the plane where refreshments lived and the flight attendants gathered. Frank was gone a long time, and because of his age I began worrying. It turns out that the attendants, mainly women, were fussing over the gentleman, telling him how nicely he was dressed and how they wished other male passengers would do likewise. Frank returned to his seat bearing several cans of ginger ale.

Complaints that airlines stuff passengers into cramped seats, cancel flights and charge for stale sandwiches have merit. But such causes for discontent will go unheeded as long as passengers agree to keep paying for the service they receive -- and in many cases, choose it for being the cheapest option.

Going back to where we started, there’s no escaping the dissonance of leaders at the highest level delighting in crude behavior. But low standards are something to rise above, not copy.

Froma Harrop is a columnist with Creators Syndicate, formerly with the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Follow her on Twitter @fromaharrop. Email fharrop@gmail.com.

JIM HIGHTOWER

AI Bots Aren’t Taking Our Jobs — Corporate Profiteers Are

Look out -- the corporate cat is out of the bag!

This particular “cat” is the fast-metastasizing software technology called “artificial intelligence.” A cadre of multibillion-dollar high-tech giants has surreptitiously been advancing AI for a couple of decades, literally creating a new, autonomous species of thinking beings. These are computer-powered humanoid bots, increasingly able to do the intellectual, creative, managerial and other complex jobs that millions of human beings now do.

The billionaire pushers of this brave new bot economy know that this amounts to placing a neutron bomb in the American workplace, so they have intentionally lied about its job-obliterating impact. However, after years of hush-hush development, the AI technology is now so advanced and the corporate investment in it is so gargantuan that the perpetrators no longer care what the public thinks.

This year, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and other Silicon Valley oligarchs have been feverishly dumping hundreds of billions of dollars each into a global corporate gold rush to supplant humans with AI bots in practically every economic sector. They expect to automate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. And one Silicon Valley outfit (bluntly named “Mechanize”) calculates that its plan “to fully automate work” can be achieved within 30 years. Indeed, BotWorld is now urging today’s AI technology to create super-intelligent systems that can out-think humans. Yes -- bots themselves are working to produce more powerful bots to speed up AI’s bot takeover of work.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... If you think that, surely, this isn’t really happening, note that President Donald Trump’s GOP Congress recently imposed a 10-year ban on any state laws attempting to regulate AI. Just unleash the bots ... and see what happens.

Big Oil’s Slick Attempt to Greenwash Its Massive Plastic Pollution

Let’s all sing the holiday classic: “All I want for Christmas ... Is Something Not Made of Plastic.”

Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water ... and us. And don’t forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It’s a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe’s top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil’s lobbyists assure us that gabillions of plastic bags, bottles and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except... they’re lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today -- Big Oil knows that 94% of U.S. plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can’t be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: “Advanced Recycling.” They say it’s a magical process dubbed “pyrolysis.” Only ... it doesn’t work, it’s inordinately expensive and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that’s not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year --and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

Jim Hightower is a former *Texas Observer* editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.

The Grove That Shows Why Holly Trees Still Captivate Us

By BONNIE JEAN FELDKAMP

Like the song says, it’s time for mistletoe and holly. The holly tree has been a winter favorite throughout human history, but the genus, which includes hundreds of species, goes back much further than that. The oldest holly tree fossil came from Victoria, Australia. It lived alongside dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period more than 90 million years ago.

Humans have used holly in rituals and spiritual celebrations since the time of the Druids, when holly sprigs and branches were brought indoors during winter to ward off evil and shelter fairies. It was also considered the preferred wood for crafting magic wands. The Romans’ December festival honoring the god Saturn featured decorations with holly inside and out. Gifts were given with a sprig of holly tied to them. From Norse mythology and Scottish folklore to Christianity, holly trees have gotten the spotlight for wintertime celebrations. For Christians, the prickly holly is said to represent Jesus’ crown of thorns and the berries a reminder of his bloodshed.

Native Americans consider the yaupon holly one of their most sacred plants. It is North America’s only native caffeinated plant. After boiling the leaves, Timucua warriors drank what was called “black drink” for strength and energy before a hunt or battle.

The diverse and longtime love of the holly tree in all its varieties is why I wanted to learn more from Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest’s horticulture manager, Drew Combs, and plant records coordinator, Hannah Hunt. Bernheim is home to one of largest cultivated holly tree collections in North America and it just so happens to be just 30 miles south of where I live.

The collection exists thanks to Bernheim’s first horticulture director, Clarence E. “Buddy” Hubbuch. In 1970, Buddy transformed a section of Bernheim that had been overrun with honeysuckle and other debris into a beautiful holly tree grove. Why holly trees and not some other tree? “Buddy liked hollies,” Hannah and Drew told me. Buddy even introduced a new holly tree variety to the market, a fine-textured evergreen holly with striking red-orange fruit that he named “Marylin” for his wife.

Walking through the grove and seeing different examples of holly side by side, I was amazed by the variety. Bernheim has over 400. Some species are tall and triangular like a Christmas tree; others are short and stout, looking more like shrubbery. The berries also vary. Some are red, while others are yellow or orange and the male trees have none at all. Some trees have spiked leaves and others not so much. But the vibrant green with bright contrast of the berries on the female trees is so beautiful.

Beyond aesthetics and lore, the holly is an important tree for the ecosystem. The American Holly is the host plant for Henry’s Elfin butterfly, and it provides crucial winter food for birds and mammals. The tree skirts grow close to the ground which also helps shelter wildlife in harsh storms as well as protect them from predation.

At Bernheim, they don’t prune holly trees for aesthetics, so the skirts remain low. It’s great for wildlife, but Hannah explained that it’s also “because part of the purpose is that if you planted this in your yard, that’s what it would look like.”

Drew added that visiting Bernheim is a great way to see what is possible at home. “That’s the point of a botanic garden,” Drew said. “If we can grow it here, you can certainly grow it at your house.”

It’s no wonder that through the ages, holly trees have stayed a part of our winter tradition. I love watching birds visit my feeders in winter, and now I think a pair of holly trees would make a great addition to my yard.

“From an arboretum perspective,” Drew said of Bernheim, “this is a tree museum, that’s how we think about it. So these are living pieces of art and we’re stewards of them.”

Holly trees of every species have earned their place in our winter celebrations and our hearts for thousands of years. And oh, by gosh by golly, Buddy Hubboch was right to feature them at Bernheim in a splendid collection that we may all cherish.

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is a wife, mother and former opinion editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal. Find her on social media @WriterBonnie, or email her at Bonnie@WriterBonnie.com. Check out her weekly YouTube videos at https://www.youtube.com/bonniejeanfeldkamp.

Young Americans Want a Reboot: Can They Build a Majority Big Enough to Overrule Big Money?

)

See Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American at

See more progressive news at https://www.dailykos.com/

and

https://www.commondreams.org/

Help The Progressive Populist Sustainability Fund

As the costs of publishing and distributing newsmagazines continue to rise, please help us shore up our financial reserves so we can keep The Progressive Populist affordable for readers with limited funds.

Send a check to The Progressive Populist, PO Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588. Or donate to The Progressive Populist account at PayPal (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=3DVZ48972B368) or GoFundMe.com (https://gofund.me/be389e3a). Thanks.

Copyright © 2025 The Progressive Populist

The Progressive Populist is edited by Jim Cullen. Email progpop@gmail.com.

See selections from the current issue of The Progressive Populist at

http://www.populist.com

> and The Progressive Populist blog at <

http://progressivepopulist.blogspot.com/

>.