There’s a question I get more and more frequently–during an after-speech Q and A, at lunch or dinner with friends, and on this platform: do I think the American experiment over? Is America going the way of Orban’s Hungary, or (even worse) Hitler’s Germany? Will the immense damage being done every day by Trump’s corrupt clown car of an administration prove to be irreversible?
There are obviously good reasons to expect the worst. I even have friends who are leaving the U.S.–heading for countries with competent governments (and national health care systems).
But I remain convinced that we will emerge from the current nightmare–that We the People will defeat the cranks, bigots and White Christian nationalists who currently exercise and abuse power.
I agree wholeheartedly with a recent newsletter from Robert Hubbell, in which he pointed to the incredible courage and effectiveness of the people of Minnesota. He pointed to the “Stop ICE for Good” campaign that he says has stiffened the spines of Democratic lawmakers and raised the anxiety levels of “mid-term wary Republicans.”
Trump tried to intimidate the people of Minnesota by unleashing a secret police force that had been told “the Constitution does not apply” and “you have absolute immunity” from state prosecution. But the people of Minnesota refused to be intimidated. Instead, they formed the equivalent of a citizens ’ mutual aid society, protesting, ride-sharing, grocery shopping, and serving as the community’s eyes and ears, watching and listening for the roving gangs of paramilitary thugs. The people of Minnesota made their stand in the coldest months of the year, braving temperatures that sometimes dipped to 30 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit).
In the end, the citizens of Minnesota won their battle with Trump’s Gestapo. As Hubbell acknowledges, that victory is not complete–but it is evidence that resistance is ultimately more powerful than autocrats understand. The magnificent effort mounted by ordinary Americans in Minnesota should encourage all of us–and it should also prompt each of us to do whatever we can to bring this increasingly ugly time to a close.
That brings me to a widely-cited eulogy delivered at Jesse Jackson’s funeral by former President Obama, in which he counseled us not to lose hope–not to give in to despair, despite the extent of the assaults we currently face. Obama has always been a powerful speaker, and there’s a reason so many outlets have quoted his remarks, especially the following paragraphs.
We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope. Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all. Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength, we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards. Every single day we see that, and it’s hard to hope in those moments. So it may be tempting to get discouraged, to give into cynicism. It may be tempting for some to compromise with power, and grab what you can, or even for good people to maybe just put your head down and wait for the storm to pass.
But Jackson’s life inspires us to take a harder path. His voice calls on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope…. Wherever we have a chance to make an impact, whether it’s in our school or our workplaces or our neighborhoods or our cities, not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose, because it aligns with what our faith tells us God demands, and because if we don’t step up, no one else will.
The citizens of Minnesota stepped up. And by stepping up, they showed the rest of us what We the People can accomplish when–as a popular protest sign reminds us– enough of us say no.
This is a very difficult post for me to write, but I think it’s necessary.
When I was younger, I saw no conflict between being a patriotic American and wholeheartedly supporting the state of Israel. My father fought in the Second World War, and I lived through the horrifying disclosures that emerged in its aftermath–the pictures from the concentration camps, the “Black Book” detailing Nazi atrocities that my mother cried over…It was painfully obvious that Jews needed a country where they would be safe from the persistent and often deadly anti-Semitism that had followed us since biblical times. When my mother put her dimes and quarters in one of those ubiquitous “blue boxes” or sent dollars to plant trees in Israel, I saw no conflict between that support and a deep and abiding allegiance to my own country.
Benjamin Netanyahu has exploded that confidence. Worse, his regime has increased anti-Semitism against American Jews–and for that matter, Jews globally.
Substantial numbers of Israelis are opposed to Netanyahu, and I certainly don’t want to join the chorus of those painting all Israelis as culpable, just as a majority of Americans cannot be held responsible for Donald Trump. (Reams of polling confirm that a majority of us vehemently oppose the venality and stupidity of America’s current leadership.)
American Jews are currently re-examining what has been our reflexive support for Israel in the light of that country’s recent actions. If survey research is to be believed, a majority of us strongly disapprove of the Netanyahu government –especially what we view as a wildly disproportionate response to the horrific savagery of October 7th. Several American Jewish organizations publicly support the Palestinian cause and a two-state solution.
These days, it is quite possible to be pro-Jewish and anti-Zionist–at least, anti what Zionism has become–and that posture has become increasingly common.
It is also, obviously, possible to be pro-Zionist and profoundly anti-Semitic. Donald Trump is a pre-eminent example.
Too many Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) have suggested that this is the time to get behind the war effort and not to ask questions. But to say that Americans should not ask questions about the relationship between Israel and the United States because it might raise antisemitic conspiracy theories means handing over the tools of democratic accountability. That is too high a price.
A few days ago, I shared a post in which I distinguished between patriotism and nationalism. The position being taken by the ADL mistakes a nationalist reaction for a patriotic one. Genuinely patriotic Jews in Israel have argued against the actions of the Netanyahu government, and American organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and JStreet have opposed those actions as well. It is possible to be pro-American and anti-MAGA, and it is equally possible to be pro-Israel and anti-Netanyahu. Indeed, I’d argue that being pro-America requires one to be anti-MAGA, and that being pro-Israel requires opposing Netanyahu.
As the Guardian article noted, there are plenty of people who have never needed a pretext to hate Jews, and in the wake of the attacks on Iran, “social media has been awash in the language of “puppet masters”, “dual loyalties” and insinuations that Jewish money bought American blood.” Far-right influencers increasingly echo Nazi propaganda. “This is the dual-edged reality of a political moment in which criticism of Israel has become newly acceptable across the American political spectrum.”
A healthy critique of the Israeli government is entirely appropriate, but it is different from–and does not and cannot excuse– anti-Semitism.
It’s hard to disagree with the Guardian article’s observation that “it is valuable and necessary to ask questions about Israel’s role in US foreign policy. It is not defensible to praise Holocaust revisionists or to blame the Jews for killing Jesus. And the fact that the same figures can go from one to the other is part of why this moment is so dangerous, and so fraught.”
The way to fight anti-semitism is not to stop criticizing Israeli policy. It is to distinguish between that policy and Jewish identity. Benjamin Netanyahu’s legacy will be that he has enabled anti-Semites to ignore that distinction–imperilling both Israel and the Jewish people.
Yesterday, I delivered a keynote to a meeting of IU’s social work alumni, titled “The Importance of Social Work to a Functioning Polity.” I’m sharing it today, with the warning that it is considerably longer than my usual daily rants….
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The word “polity” is shorthand for citizens of the organized political entity we call a state.
In order to function in harmony with the structure of the state in which they find themselves, members of a polity will from time to time require the services of people whose job it is to address the inevitable “hiccups” that come from living with other people– situations where the behavior of individuals becomes detrimental to themselves or others, or is inconsistent with the expectations of their society or the mandates of their government, or other situations that arise when individuals find themselves unable to cope with their society’s legal or social requirements.
A variety of professions deal with different aspects of those “hiccups.” Lawyers and social workers are two of them.
“Back in the day” I was a lawyer (I have since recovered). When I began to work on this talk—and especially when I read your code of ethics and some of your profession’s history—I recognized a significant number of common concerns—a number of what we might call similar preoccupations.
It turns out that lawyers and social workers are actually two “social service” professions, and that while we focus on different aspects of the services society requires, we have many things in common—especially when it comes to healing those social “hiccups,” the inevitable conflicts that arise between individual citizens and the structures of the society in which they find themselves.
Both law and social work are grounded in the fundamental truth of an old African proverb that may at first blush seem unconnected, the ancient adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Both professions deal with the important– and all too frequently overlooked– issues raised by that proverb: What should our village look like? What is the common good? What is the nature of mutual social obligation? What rules, social arrangements and ethical commitments are most likely to promote what Aristotle called “human flourishing”?
In other words, what is social justice, and how should we facilitate it within the boundaries of the legal and ethical regimes in which we find ourselves? It’s a question that is foundational to the legal profession and rule of law regimes, and– as I learned over my twenty-one years of working with colleagues on IU’s social work faculty– it is equally foundational to social work.
Every profession operates within the context and framework of the larger society in which it is embedded, and that’s certainly true of both the legal and social work professions. In the United States, lawyers and social workers use our professional skills to serve the inhabitants of an increasingly diverse society—a society defined and held together by what I have called “The American Idea.”
Allow me to suggest that there has never been a better time to revisit that “American Idea,” and to remind ourselves of its essential elements.
Unlike other societies in other times, citizenship in America has never depended upon conquest, rank or faith—we were never a “blood and soil” country. We were and are Americans because we bring our diverse identities, beliefs and backgrounds to a metaphorical communal table built upon the aspirational philosophies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
American citizenship has never been based upon ethnicity or religion or even a static geography—it has always been based upon adherence to an Idea—or, perhaps more accurately, allegiance to a governing philosophy.
Both social work and the law are committed to the protection of individual rights and civic equality within the context of that philosophy—that “American Idea.” We work to enlarge individual liberty and self-realization within the necessary restrictions imposed by the needs and common good of the overall society. It is not an easily achieved balance, and its realization requires a familiarity with the history of our country—the good, the bad and the ugly.
When I look at the Social Work Code of Ethics, I see important parallels to the philosophy of America’s constituent documents. As the preamble to your code of ethics puts it, “social work begins with the belief that every individual has the right and potential to lead a productive and fulfilling life, and the belief that each person in a society has dignity and worth.” That belief requires practitioners to respect individual and cultural differences—an undertaking that is mirrored by language in both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to America’s Constitution.
Read organically, the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Religion clauses require government to respect the integrity of each citizen’s individual conscience. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment requires government actors to treat equally situated citizens equally.
Legal and social work professionals work to enhance our clients’ capacities for self-determination, and to do so in a manner that recognizes a dual responsibility to the individual client and to the broader society.
Today, both professions face unprecedented challenges. Lawyers are currently facing a ferocious assault on the rule of law; in the past few years, Supreme Court decisions have upended and discarded long-settled judicial precedents, decisions apparently based upon the majority Justices’ ideological and theological commitments rather than upon principled legal reasoning. The current challenges to social work in the U.S. are different—and arguably even more formidable. You face ongoing and persistent efforts to erode an already insufficient social safety net, and—more recently and along with lawyers– accelerating efforts to roll back progress toward racial and gender equality, efforts to return America to a time when straight White Christian males were –as Orwell’s pigs put it in Animal Farm—”more equal than others.”
The challenges faced by America’s lawyers and social workers are different in kind from the challenges faced by lawyers and social workers in other first world countries. That isn’t a new phenomenon—it has always been the case. It’s a truism that all of us work within the context of a given society, and that means that in America, law and social work differ significantly from law and social work elsewhere. For social workers, as those of you in this audience know all too well, some of those differences create tension and stress.
For one thing, America’s patchwork social safety net comes into conflict with deeply-held principles of social work. You practice in what might be called a “residual” welfare system—a system where social welfare benefits are available mainly when markets and families fail, unlike the case in countries with more universal systems. That means that many American social workers must function as gatekeepers to scarce benefits, screening eligibility and enforcing programmatic rules. Add to that the chronic underfunding of a patchwork system in which different programs have different eligibility requirements and rules, and American social work inevitably becomes focused on crisis rather than prevention.
In countries with universal or near-universal systems, where benefits are entitlements rather than means-tested interventions, social workers tend to function more as intermediaries coordinating services. They are thus able to focus more on preventing problems through early interventions.
Those differences also mean that America’s social workers are more clinically oriented than the more community-oriented social workers elsewhere. (If you watch detective shows on Britbox or Acorn, for example, you’ll note the detectives’ frequent referrals to family support, child protection and other social services—something you don’t see on American shows like Law and Order or NCIS. On those British shows, the detective who is investigating the murder or disappearance of a family member will call in a “family liaison” or other social work service that is evidently a routine part of that nation’s support system.)
Other first-world countries also tend to have nationalized systems. In the United States, federalism—whatever its other benefits– has led to professional fragmentation, with different states having different rules governing licensure and liability. Among other things, that makes it more difficult for social workers to relocate—a problem you share with many other professions, from law to real estate brokerages to cosmetology.
When I was doing research for this address, a social worker I spoke to summed up her frustrations by comparing your code of ethics to the realities of practice. As she explained it to me, your code of ethics strongly emphasizes social justice and the issues that flow from structural inequality and social oppression, but in practice, many if not most social workers spend hours navigating bureaucracies, enforcing eligibility rules and trying to manage or at least ameliorate the multiple crises caused by poverty. Others I spoke to underscored the tension between social work values and what existing systems and rules actually allow practitioners to do.
I think those frustrations are particularly acute right now, because social work—much like public interest law– is a “woke” profession, and we are living at a time of backlash to any and all values that might be characterized as “woke.” Pointing out that those values are quintessentially American simply infuriates the reactionaries who are determined to turn back the clock to a time when only a select cohort enjoyed social and legal dominance.
As discouraging as that backlash is and has been, we are beginning to see signs that it has run its course. The extremists and the out-and-proud bigots who have led the charge against fair play and inclusion have never been in the majority, and we shouldn’t confuse being loud with being numerous. These unhappy folks have always been a part of our national landscape, our polity—the difference this time around is the Internet and social media, and the algorithms that keep us glued to various platforms by emphasizing and highlighting the latest outrages.
When this ugly time subsides—and I am growing more confident that it will—both lawyers and social workers will need to turn our attention to the necessary legal and policy repairs, and that is a process that will benefit enormously from your participation, because as social workers, you’ve seen the problems up close and personal.
Times of turmoil are difficult to experience, but we need to remind ourselves that their aftermath is often a time of renewal and innovation.
As you know, this talk was titled “the importance of social work to a functioning polity.” It’s a title suggesting an important question: what would a truly functioning polity look like?
We live in a time when we all need to be thinking hard about what comes next—thinking about how we can “build back better” as former President Biden put it.
What should an improved American social safety net look like? What changes to legal rules and practices would really promote fair play for all members of society? What changes to the social work profession and the legal and structural system within which you practice might ameliorate the tensions many of you have described? What changes would be most likely to address misogyny and racial and religious discrimination? What systemic changes would ease the problems of the working poor? What policies might restore America’s once-vibrant middle class?
We could begin with national health care. As we all know, the United States spends far more per capita on health care—and gets far less—than countries with national health systems. Perhaps the fiscal benefits of a national health care system will finally appeal to the people who don’t seem to be concerned about the waste and multiple drawbacks of a market approach to medical care. Given the costs, upheavals and multiple failures of coverage we increasingly experience, I do hold out a forlorn hope that we may finally be ready to enact Medicare for All or something similar. A national system would be an enormous benefit to the many Americans who are foregoing necessary care or struggling with medical debt.
Beyond health care, we should look carefully at the wide variety of approaches to social welfare systems that work well elsewhere, and both social workers and lawyers should advocate for the adoption of those that are most likely to work well here, and not so incidentally, most likely to knit together our fractured and polarized polity. Reforming our approach to social welfare would have the added benefit of allowing more social workers to practice the profession in a manner consistent with its ethics and values.
I’ve long obsessed about what an updated social contract might look like, and whether it’s possible to craft a governing structure that respects individual liberty and choice while providing basic material security. My periodic musings revolve around two issues: whether anyone is truly free who struggles daily just to survive, and whether better government safety-net policies might help to unify a diverse and increasingly fragmented population.
I think the Greeks had it right when they advocated for a “golden mean” between extremes. The importance of hard work and individual talent shouldn’t be minimized, but neither should it be exaggerated. When the focus is entirely upon the individual, when successes and failures are attributed solely to individual effort and merit, we fail to recognize the immense influence of social and legal structures that operate to privilege some groups and impede others.
When we ignore systemic barriers, or pretend they don’t exist, we feed stereotypes and harden tribal affiliations. That’s why I think the first priority of a social contract should be to nurture what scholars call “social solidarity,” the ability of diverse citizens to see ourselves as different parts of an over-arching, inclusive American community.
Any workable social contract connects citizens to a larger community in which they have equal membership and from which they receive equal support. The challenge is to achieve a healthy balance—to create a society that genuinely respects individual liberty within a renewed emphasis on the common good, a society that both rewards individual effort and talent, and nurtures the equal expression of those talents irrespective of tribal identity.
As I have frequently argued, public policies can either increase or reduce polarization. Policies intended to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion. Think about widespread public attitudes about welfare programs aimed at poor people and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming approval of and support for Social Security and Medicare.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary, significant numbers of Americans stubbornly believe laziness and lack of motivation are major causes of poverty, and that welfare programs breed dependence. Social Security and Medicare are viewed differently, primarily because they’re universal programs; virtually everyone contributes to them and everyone who lives long enough benefits from them. Such programs avoid stigma.
The fact that universal policies unify is an important and usually overlooked argument favoring a Universal Basic Income, even while multiplying pilot programs continue to highlight numerous other positive consequences of no-strings cash stipends.
America currently has a patchwork of state and federal programs, with costly bureaucratic barriers and means testing that operate to exclude most of the working poor. Welfare recipients are routinely stigmatized by moralizing lawmakers pursuing punitive measures aimed at imagined “Welfare Queens.” Meanwhile, current anti-poverty policies haven’t made an appreciable impact on poverty.
A Universal Basic Income is a cash grant sufficient to ensure basic sustenance–but unlike welfare, a UBI has no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information.
Support for the concept isn’t limited to progressives. Milton Friedman proposed a “negative income tax,” and conservative icon F.A. Hayek wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.”
In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, described the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, which raises worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.
Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important in today’s work world—a world characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and a growing “gig economy.” With a UBI and single payer health coverage, workers would have freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales.
A UBI might not level the playing field, but it sure would reduce the tilt.
A UBI would also have much the same positive effect on economic growth as a higher minimum wage. When poor people get money, they spend it, increasing demand—and increased demand is what fuels job creation. (If nobody is buying your widgets, you aren’t going to be hiring people to produce more of them.)
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, a significant body of research supports the importance of a robust social safety net to market economies. As Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center has written, the political Left fails to appreciate the important role of markets in producing abundance, and the political Right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in buffering the socially destructive consequences of insecurity.
I have previously written about the salutary effects of a UBI–effects that several studies and pilot projects have confirmed. I have also suggested budgetary adjustments that could pay for it.
I first made those arguments in 2017, when it became likely that AI and autonomous cars would lead to dramatically increased unemployment. Needless to say, the U.S. hasn’t advanced in the direction I was promoting…
Bottom line: We the People need to elect lawmakers who will work to solve real-world problems rather than engaging in culture wars while pursuing personal aggrandizement. Political leadership that respects evidence and expertise can change the destructive trajectory we’ve been on for the past several years.
America has the resources to create a nurturing “village” in which to raise our children—a village that can enrich our connections and imbue our diverse polity with a sense of community. It will take considerable effort, but we can—and must– usher in a society that will allow lawyers and social workers to take our fingers out of the metaphorical dike and employ our respective professional talents in more productive ways.
I know a lot of social workers, so I know that most of you in this virtual meeting are working toward that day and that society–and I salute you.
Thank you so much for inviting me here this morning.
A new, major disclosure in the slow but inexorable emergence of evidence against Jeffrey Epstein has arguably prompted the madman in the Oval Office to bomb Iran–without bothering to request the required authorization from Congress.
As Heather Cox Richardson, among others, has reported, it turns out that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been running a parallel investigation of Epstein and several other people, not for the sex trafficking that is the subject of the Epstein files, but for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.
That investigation began under the Obama administration in 2010, and it was still underway in 2015. It came to light because a heavily redacted document that was found in the files came from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). That document referenced DEA reporting that “the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.”
Senator Ron Wyden has described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” According to reports, OCDETF targeted dangerous drug cartels, the Russian mafia and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.
The Trump administration abruptly dismantled OCDETF last year, and required the agency to shut down all operations by September of 2025.
Wyden has been focusing on the finances that facilitated Epstein’s organization–following the money. When he found that JPMorgan Chase had “neglected” to report some $4 billion dollars in suspicious financial transactions that were linked to Epstein, he sought additional records from the Treasury Department.
Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, refused to produce them.
Wyden has now introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act. (The Epstein Files Transparency Act didn’t cover Treasury records.) He is quoted as saying that “following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”
As Heather Cox Richardson has reported, Wyden has written to the administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”
Epstein and his fourteen co-conspirators were never charged with drug trafficking or financial crimes. It now appears that the DEA and DOJ during Trump’s first administration simply terminated the investigation. Wyden has pointed out that the heavy redactions in the recently uncovered document go “far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” For that matter, the document wasn’t classified, so there was “no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.”
Wyden has asked the DEA to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, including an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, evidence about what had originally triggered the investigation, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.
The very next day after these revelations became public, Trump bombed Iran. The New York Times reported that “The United States, joined by Israel, launched an attack on major cities in Iran, as President Trump called on Iranians to overthrow the government.”
Permit me to point out that Trump ran on promises to keep America out of wars, that one of his most embarrassing self-owns has been his shameless campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, and that one of his purported reasons for demanding “regime change” in Iran–the regime’s crackdown on dissenters–is, shall we say, inconsistent with his own deployment of ICE thugs in America’s cities.
It’s a real-life re-enactment of a 1997 American political satire–“Wag the Dog,” a black comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, in which a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. In a real-world example of life imitating art, the film President was caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office; recent disclosures strongly suggest that–in addition to shutting down investigations of Epstein, and persistently lying about the extent and duration of his “friendship” with Epstein and their connections to Russia –Trump once raped a thirteen-year-old girl.
How many Americans and others will be killed in this real life effort to wag the dog?
We all experience repeated echoes from our childhoods, and some of those echoes are apt for our time. If my grandmother were still alive, for example, I can picture her reacting to the ongoing damage being done by RNK, Jr. and the rest of Trump’s clown car by shaking her head and saying “a wellness it isn’t.”
She would be so right. Some recent confirmation:
On CBS’ Sunday Morning, the network’s chief medical correspondent had a lengthy interview with David Oshinsky, author of “Polio: An American Story.” He also interviewed violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio as a child. The segment can be found on YouTube, and is worth watching if you missed it. It included heartbreaking pictures of hundreds of children in iron lungs, and showed the long lines of children waiting for shots with their grateful parents when a vaccine became available. While we contemporary folks like to think that polio has been entirely eradicated, it is still crippling people elsewhere on the globe–and experts warn that RNK, Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign–a campaign that has consumed too many parents in the U.S.– threatens to invite that dread disease back.
The New York Times tells us that Kennedy’s insane war on effective, life-saving vaccines is curtailing research into these vital protections. The consequences of his war on science, medicine and public health expertise are being felt throughout the industry. Investors are described as “hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington,” and manufacturers are seeing declining sales. Pfizer’s chief executive has been quoted as saying that the anti-vaccine animus is “almost like a religion.” Asked what needs to change, he said, “the health secretary” characterizing Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”
Indeed. As Lincoln Square recently noted, “certainty has sunk its teeth into his brain, like so many brainworms before it.” The article recounted Kennedy’s efforts to support stem cell treatments, which have not been medically vetted, are not FDA-approved and “have been shown to cause really, really adverse effects. Blindness. Death. Chronic pain.” But RFK, Jr. has “done some reading, found that lots of people say it’s great, and has concluded that the lack of FDA approval isn’t based on a dearth of evidence–he’s convinced that it’s part of the FDA’s war on non-traditional medical treatments.
Who needs pesky evidence?
Rolling Stone conducted an investigation into the growing number of ethical breaches at the CDC, including cases in which appointees allied with Kennedy have approved grant proposals that had not gone through a typical review process. And a complaint filed with the World Health Network details numerous violations of CDC guidelines in the agency’s revisions of recommendations for isolation.
Corruption can take many forms; at HHS, that corruption appears to be an outgrowth of Kennedy’s obsessions–his evident belief that he knows better than doctors and scientists, and his willingness to rely upon “evidence” that confirms his prejudices while ignoring evidence that rebuts them. Trump’s corruption, on the other hand, is entirely transactional and open to bribery.
A recent example: one of Trump’s innumerable Executive Orders will boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate. As the linked article from Reuters reports, the executive order “invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure the domestic supply of phosphorus and glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller at the center of tens of thousands of lawsuits by plaintiffs claiming it causes cancer.” Trump’s order came after Bayer, which acquired Monsanto and is the only U.S. company that produces glyphosate, proposed a $7.25 billion legal settlement to address tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its glyphosate weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” citing evidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in studies of exposed workers.
The Executive Order also purports to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides. That immunity undoubtedly made the folks at Bayer very happy, and we can only wonder what Bayer promised Trump to persuade him to issue the order, which has infuriated the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement. (Even RNK,Jr. doesn’t defend Roundup…)
It’s all part of this administration’s corrupt war on science and evidence, and its willingness to sell its laws and regulations to the “highest bidder”–the corporate fat-cats and others willing to “bend the knee” and “comply in advance” with the destruction of democracy and the rule of law.
