Global
US President Donald Trum’'s state visit to China will go down in history as the day the United States finally acknowledged Beijing’s ascendancy as a global superpower. That acknowledgment does not need to be articulated in a formal statement; it can be clearly read in the subtext of diplomatic behavior, global perception, and shifting media coverage.
During the summit, Trump’s delegation—accompanied by prominent American corporate leaders—engaged with President Xi Jinping not from a position of absolute global dictation, but through a lens of defensive pragmatism. This transactional approach focused on securing bilateral trade commitments and preventing catastrophic economic friction.
The recent resurgence of monarchist politics around Reza Pahlavi—son of the former shah of Iran—particularly following the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, has intensified debates about the future of political opposition to the Islamic Republic. For many Iranians, opposition to the current system has long been rooted in demands for democracy, political pluralism, social justice, and freedom from authoritarian rule. The central question, therefore, is not simply how to oppose the Islamic Republic, but what kind of political order should replace it.
For more than four decades, Iranians have resisted a deeply repressive state through labor organizing, feminist movements, student activism, minority struggles, journalism, and mass protest movements. Thousands have been imprisoned, tortured, killed, or forced into exile for demanding political freedoms and democratic accountability. Many critics of the monarchist revival argue that these struggles were never intended to culminate in the restoration of another centralized and hereditary political order. As an Iranian proverb suggests, it is like escaping one pit only to fall into another.
I was in graduate school in Los Angeles, a city with a sizeable Latino/a population when I heard the news that the Cuban government had shot down two aircraft killing four U.S. nationals. These Cubans reportedly comprised a humanitarian group called Brothers to the Rescue, an organization that canvassed the waters off the coast of Florida seeking to aid and assist Cuban migrants using make-shift rafts and other flimsy vessels to flee to America. A third airplane evaded attack that day and made it safely back to Miami. That was on February 24,1996.
On a campus as diverse as the University of Southern California, conversations about this development forced professors in some classes – especially political science, public policy, international relations and comparative politics – to put aside their lesson plans, at least for part of their classes and allow space for discussion of this news story. Cuban officials claimed the pilots violated Cuban airspace, while the International Civil Aviation Organization argued differently, maintaining that the airplanes were shot down in international air space.
Exactly thirty years ago on May 15th,1996, the New York Times published a front-page lead to a report of a boom in Ritalin production and use in children which was raising ethical questions in some quarters. The story was based upon an article I had published earlier that month in the Hastings Center Report (a bioethics journal).
At this week’s GREEP Zoom we greet the extraordinary California Congressman RO KHANNA with a critical talk on green energy, Ukraine and the future of American democracy.
Introduced by ALAN MINSKY & MIKE HERSH, with crucial input on Ukraine from HOWIE HAWKINS & CHRIS SIMPSON, with major points from DOROTHY REIK & MARION EDEY, the Congressman helps us cover the field in a beleaguered democracy and the need to shut the Diablo Canyon nuclear power reactors.
Activists HANIEH JODAT & HARTZELL GREY give us the latest grassroots reports from Kansas City, Mo.
Our favorite Alabama Doctor RUTH STRAUSS and election expert RAY LUTZ plumb the depths of the 2026 election & the challenges we face to survive the era of Donald Trump.
Then Big-Time media legend DAVID SALTMAN asks and answers the critical questions about the new path taken by Stephen Colbert & the demise of the once-great CBS News.
With producer/engineer STEVE CARUSO we join Ohio energy activist MYRIA WILLIAMS to forge a new path to the sun through the wilderness of Ohio.
“In the 21st century, the United States has spent almost $8 trillion on foreign wars, with nearly 5 million lives lost.”
And we’re only a quarter of the way into the century. Are we aiming for 20 million dead civilians by 2100? Here’s a recent Truth Social post from the current president: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.”
There’s a moral insanity to these words, hiding behind a ho-hum collective shrug. People either brush it off as “just talk” or, even more ominously, nod their heads and smile in agreement. Yeah, he’s keeping us safe. War, the planet’s great, lethal abstraction, is necessary. It keeps us safe. It eliminates evil. Yada, yada. No matter it does none of those things – indeed, does just the opposite. Public acceptance of the inevitability and necessity of war has been expanding throughout my lifetime.
Historians have ranked Trump as the worst present ever. According to Factually, “recent expert surveys commonly place Donald Trump and James Buchanan among the lowest-rated presidents… with Trump ranked last in several 2024 specialist polls (https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/worst-us-president-historians-ranking-6854f1).
There is considerable evidence that documents the appropriateness of this ranking. Here are some examples.
#1 – A president of “lost opportunities.” E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes on Trump’s “lost opportunities” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/opinion/trump-lost-opportunities.html). Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer. He has done damage “to the rule of law, to the United States’ standing in the world, to the constraints on corruption and self-dealing we once took for granted.”
He offers a general summary in two paragraphs of his detailed article.
