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The juxtaposition of today’s holiday dedicated to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the re-inauguration of President Donald Trump could not offer a more compelling contrast or irony.
Our country and our species stand at the precipice of a future that offers any number of reasons for fear, yet at least a few issues have emerged offering encouraging possibilities.
Our most meaningful national holiday
America’s holidays tend to reflect on histories that remain relatively settled. But today’s, commemorating the life of an American prophet and socialist visionary driven to an early grave by his advocacy and organizing [ [link removed] ] for civil rights and an end to America’s predatory militarism [ [link removed] ], offers a continuing relevance that remains lost on most observers.
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I wrote in 2023 to explore Dr. King’s profound legacy, including his forgotten message to the liberal establishment [ [link removed] ] and his prescient identification of capitalism, militarism, and racism as “intersecting evils” [ [link removed] ] poised to destroy America’s soul.
Had more Americans grappled with his words and their continuing significance [ [link removed] ], rather than lionizing him as a martyr for a struggle they imagined to have been victorious [ [link removed] ], the social crises that today threaten the future we all share could have been averted.
One area in which few journalists, historians, or academics have recognized the applicability of King’s prescient warnings relates to the mounting global climate catastrophe. While it itself was not the particular of King’s stated concerns, he identified [ [link removed] ] the social factors that enabled it—only to be ignored, assassinated, and then reduced to a pale shadow of his true legacy despite being lauded as a national (and even international) hero.
A turn to the past obscures some rare good news from Washington
Today’s inauguration of Donald Trump as our nation’s 47th president is, with a view towards history, effectively a day of national mourning. The weather in Washington is so severe that it forced the inauguration indoors—ironically, to one of the very same spaces occupied during the January 6 2021 attack on the capitol.
It feels like a meteorological reflection of the misery that today portends for the future.
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Across the country, communities share a terrified anticipation of Trump’s return to Washington after winning the popular vote. Many of us fear an impending crackdown on immigrant workers and their families [ [link removed] ]. Similarly, the wholesale of abandonment of any pretense for climate justice [ [link removed] ] is predictable under the new administration.
These fears grew only sharper upon the spectacle of Elon Musk, while speaking from the podium at the inauguration, issuing what appeared to be a full-fledged Nazi salute [ [link removed] ]—twice. The shamelessness and insensitivity of the gesture can not possibly be overemphasized. Despite Trump’s overt pledges to cultivate autocracy, few expected the new administration’s support for fascism to appear both so overt and so immediate.
Despite the gloom shared by nostalgists for the era of neoliberalism and those who challenged it from the Left, there are at least a few less disturbing surprises to consider. Two, in particular, offer encouraging signs of (even if unlikely) progress. One relates to government transparency, and another to food, health, and public safety.
Agriculture, food safety, and the crisis in rural America
The appointment of Joel Salatin [ [link removed] ] as an Advisor to the Secretary of the USDA may reflect the emerging influence of a transpartisan movement united by food safety and public health. It scored a recent victory on the eve of the presidential transition, when the FDA finally banned the use of red dye No. 3 in foods [ [link removed] ], decades after it had been banned from cosmetics in recognition of its carcinogenic properties.
On the one hand, advisors lack formal authority, and can at best offer ideas or insight that appointed agency officials remain at liberty to modify, water down, or ignore entirely.
On the other hand, Salatin has a long history as a pioneer of biodynamic farming, and could be poised in his new role to help challenge the factory farming paradigm [ [link removed] ] to which a corrupted Congress committed our country decades ago. If nothing else, there will be a voice in the proverbial room that has never been there before.
Dominated by policymakers representing farmbelt states, Congress has repeatedly lavished subsidies [ [link removed] ] encouraging not only the overproduction of goods from grains to livestock, but also some of the most environmentally destructive ways to do it.
Ironically, the constituents—and supposed beneficiaries—of those policymakers have suffered more than most consumers. The struggles to maintain family farms have driven most of them out of business [ [link removed] ] and into the arms of predatory banks. Suicide rates among farmers [ [link removed] ] are among the highest of any profession.
Rural disaffection with farm consolidation is one lens through which to explain [ [link removed] ] Trump’s victory in last November’s election (although there are others [ [link removed] ]). While in office, Democrats did little to address the plight of working Americans as their policies enabled a relentless siphon of our society’s wealth [ [link removed] ]into the hands of financiers and the entrepreneurs they lionize. Farmers got abandoned, along with the rest of us.
Of course, farmers aren’t the only people suffering under this paradigm. High-fructose corn syrup offers an expansive example.
High-fructose corn syrup is among many products manufactured from corn, which is vastly overproduced due to short-sighted government subsidies [ [link removed] ] enshrined by Congress. Those subsidies are the epitome of corporate welfare decried by conservatives, yet remain politically entrenched by the structural overrepresentation [ [link removed] ] of rural states in the Senate, coupled with the corporate corruption of elections [ [link removed] ] invited by Citizens United and painfully visible in every election cycle since then.
Since subsidies ensure that corn is abundant, uses for that corn had to be found—which is one reason high-fructose corn syrup has found its way into virtually every processed food, from sodas and snacks to fast food and even medicines [ [link removed] ]. Consumed by Americans in staggering quantities, it tends to predispose people who eat it to risks ranging from obesity to diabetes [ [link removed] ], and possibly even some forms of cancer [ [link removed] ].
The pattern exemplified by high-fructose corn syrup is visible across other products. It is also possible only under the industrial agribusiness sector entrenched by Washington’s longstanding (and thoroughly bipartisan) approach to farm subsidies.
In the context of this history, Saladin’s appointment was a surprise, and possibly a reflection of populist influence within the new administration.
Saladin is himself a farmer, and something of a spokesperson for the movement to dislodge the industrial agribusiness cartel and instead cultivate organic and regenerative agriculture. Even if his advisory influence proves limited, his appointment indicates possibilities under the new administration to expand an awareness of regenerative agriculture practices that could improve everything from public health to the prospects for rural communities going forward.
Spilling the tea
As an advocate for government transparency, I have long [ [link removed] ] (and repeatedly [ [link removed] ]) observed the frankly scandalous suppression of government reports about everything from the CIA‘s recent policy of torture, rape, and murder of military detainees [ [link removed] ] to the political assassinations of the 1960s [ [link removed] ].
How can a country claiming freedom and democracy suppress government reports about investigations of assassinations targeting figures as prolific as a sitting president, a major party’s presidential nominee, and a figure to whom a national holiday and monument were subsequently dedicated?
It is such a flagrant reflection of our country’s hypocrisy that it has long been difficult for me to overlook. Congress is supposed to be a body committed to transparency in the service of serving the American people. Yet it has repeatedly allowed the executive branch to hide its criminal trail.
When I was arrested in the U.S. Senate [ [link removed] ] in 2015, my “crime” was asking a question following the conclusion of a Senate hearing. It was this history I aimed to probe by inviting a powerful Democrat to explain why he was never charged with perjury despite lying to the Senate under oath. His lawyer had at least admitted (in an exchange broadcast by C-SPAN from a conference a few months before) that he had given his boss bad legal advice. But his boss declined to answer any questions, and walked out of the room with an entourage while I walked out in handcuffs.
A similar event happened recently, when journalist Sam Husseini was forcibly removed [ [link removed] ] from a press briefing with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in response for his critiques of the Biden administration’s flagrant hypocrisy and support [ [link removed] ] for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. I consider Sam a personal friend: when I worked in Washington in the early 2010s, I often appeared on radio programs that he advised.
On the one hand, Trump‘s promised to release the files about the assassination of JFK, RFK, and MLK won’t do much to necessarily challenge the contemporary surveillance state. But it could expose serious crimes committed in the past by agencies dedicated to what they call “national security,” which in fact represents a little more than the careers of various officials responsible for subverting the Bill of Rights.
In his first term, Trump made a lot of noise about the so-called deep state in Washington. It’s worth noting that it absolutely is a real concern: the three-letter agencies (eg, FBI, CIA, NSA) do seem to stand above the White House, and the militarism that defines U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years [ [link removed] ] suggests that presidents have a lot less influence than most Americans seem to think.
But as a president, Trump tended to allow the agencies carte blanche. He made that promise at the CIA headquarters in a significant speech soon after his first inauguration in 2021 [ [link removed] ], before a series [ [link removed] ] of attempted coups [ [link removed] ] unfolded across Latin America matching a long pattern visible across the CIA’s history [ [link removed] ].
Might Trump’s inclination to expose the agencies’ secrets extend beyond the limited historical context of the 1960s? Only time will tell.
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