How Far Would I Go to Protect Children? by Jean-Marie Kauth

Figure 1: Katherine undergoing her first bone-marrow transplant – I was sure there was a better picture. This issue is personal. This book is personal. This blog is personal. Recently, I was talking with Robin Coleman, my editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, about promoting the book, and even though I am a private person, I found myself saying that I would tell my story however painful, that I would plaster billboards all over town with pictures of Katherine dead if it meant that one child did not suffer what she – and we – have suffered. Parents of children killed in mass shootings have weighed doing just that. Some parents and journalists believe publishing crime-scene photos could trigger change. Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp tried to represent the magnitude of loss by capturing the bedrooms of young victims. Mom Jada Scruggs insisted on her daughter Haillie’s existence, “She was real. She was here.” The Washington Post wrote about the physical aftermath inflicted on children by rampant shootings, fostered in this country by weak gun laws and a violent culture. The article, titled “The Blast Effect: How Bullets from an AR-15 Blow the Body Apart,” demonstrated this not with bloody pictures of what a high-velocity bullet does to a tiny body, but with schematics, detailed descriptions of post-mortems, and accounts from doctors who have had to try to repair the damage. The authors were trying to make it real for people – in hopes that more will call for commonsense gun laws. Already, most Americans support stricter legislation. But the gun industry does not, and so the politicians to whom they contribute revolting amounts of money fail to protect us. Political science research affirms the hunch that most politicians vote not with their constituents, but with their largest donors. While some parents feel ready to share pictures of their dead children, journalists hesitate to publish them. Public images could scar families further. They could motivate trolls to persecute them, as was the case with the notorious Alex Jones-Sandy Hook debacle. They could normalize or even motivate violence. Then why would any parent, why would I think about doing such a horrendous thing? Maybe it’s simple. That is what gets people’s attention. The journalism trope that “if it bleeds, it leads,” is not for nothing. Gaper delays are reliably built into accident management. People are fascinated with others’ suffering, others’ deaths – in stories, movies, and real life. The bloody mangled display of a dead Emmett Till that his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, bravely chose to show to the world was key in the fight against racist violence. Figure 2: Mamie Till-Mobley at Her Son’s Funeral Is viewing photographs like this just voyeurism? Just cathartic release – the relief that at least this time, it’s not me? Not all such displays are viewed like snuff films. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been Catholic all my life and grew up contemplating Christ on the Cross at the front of the church, the agony of Mary gazing up at Jesus suffering, the bleeding sacred heart, but I don’t think so. I remember enduring the out-of-body agony of Katherine’s funeral and gazing upon the cross just to feel connection with some other suffering human – God or mortal almost didn’t matter. I can’t help but wonder if this natural tendency humans have to witness suffering is actually empathy – at least for some. Strange to say, but grotesque tech billionaires like Elon Musk argue that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western society,” our Achilles heel. Marc Andreessen argues that introspection is dumb because “it causes emotional disorders.” I am not the person I once was, but I cannot imagine being so far gone that I believed that compassion – one of the greatest of virtues, a feeling rooted in love – could be seen as a flaw. I guess that is the difference between someone who only weighs strength against weakness, not virtue against sin. Whose emptiness can only be filled up by transitory dollar signs and world-destroying wealth. Who believes only in triumph, not in redemption. I would not be that person or envy those riches for anything. Evolutionary theory once posited that altruism in nature was paradoxical. That if creatures actually put others’ good before their own, they would be eliminated in the struggle for life. Therefore, to this way of thinking, all goodness or consideration of others is either an illusion or a fatal weakness to be eliminated. It worries me to hear this in current culture – particularly among the manosphere. More recent science shows that actually, evolutionarily, our empathy, community, and ability to care for one another is our greatest strength – and is the reason for our success, much more than our big brains. Likewise, dogs succeeded not because they had bigger teeth or fiercer dispositions but precisely because they have a talent for love. Wolves in early stages of domestication cooperated with humans, and both humans and dogs have prospered in the process. So coming back to the question of what is right for me to share about my daughter’s suffering: I think there is a balance. To be clear, Katherine’s last wish was to be remembered. Robin agreed not everything would be right for the book, but that more might make for an engaging interview. He thinks people may listen to our story and that of others. The science on environmental health is all there and has been for decades. What has been missing is people witnessing the impacts of losing a child this way. Yes, there are St. Jude’s Commercials, but they are all focused on cures, not causes. There is no whisper that these children might never have become sick if it weren’t for the petrochemical industry poisoning our children. When there is a gory car accident on the road or a bloody shooting in a school, with pitifully shattered bodies piled up on the highways or in the hallways, there is no doubt what caused it. But the more extended, tenuous, hidden chains of causation from slow poisoning can be difficult to register. Our brains were built over eons more to protect us from immediate, visible harms like saber-tooth tigers, less from long-term threats to health. But the infiltration of our entire world with invisible poisons is causing more death than shootings, shark attacks, and accidents combined. Hundreds of millions die every year from cancer, cardiovascular disease, birth defects, autoimmune and metabolic disease, and many other chronic diseases caused by toxic chemicals. Perhaps it would be wrong to share our suffering if it were only to elicit pity, to call upon sympathy and support for years when others need help more in the present. But when cautionary tales can actually motivate people to make things better for all, that is fundamentally different. I will stop sharing our story and others’ once laws are passed that protect our children, once people are aware of the hazards they face going about their ordinary lives. Empathy is not only a human virtue that makes you a better person. It is also protective and adaptive. When you read a story about a person suffering and dying from something – or even witness it first-hand – you may feel compassion, you may extend a hand or a hug. But you may also strive to protect yourself and your own loved ones from those harms. As a literature professor, I have long entered into others’ suffering. What do we get out of this, Aristotle wondered in his Poetics? The answer is not, I would argue, simply catharsis. Empathy develops the ability to exist outside of oneself, in a sphere larger than between our own two ears, behind our own two eyes. It enlarges our experiences and expands our minds. And that has both tangible and intangible benefits. So, whatever it costs me, however much it hurts, I am prepared to share my sorrow and hers in the coming months, in hopes that doing so might change the world just slightly for the better. Thanks for reading. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. -Jean-Marie Kauth How Far Would I Go To Protect Children?

“There is something deeply wrong with him..."

 

At 3:43 p.m. local time in Turkey, the President of the United States grabbed the stairs to his plane with his swollen right hand while his bruised left hand hung motionless at his side. This was not the plane he had arrived on; his newly refurbished Qatari Air Force One, but instead the older presidential aircraft he had used before. 

The change was sudden and unexpected, and multiple reports indicated it was related to security concerns with Iran, even as Trump denied that was the reason while simultaneously contradicting himself, telling reporters traveling with him, that they are “on a dangerous flight,” and, “I’m number one on their list, before you,” before adding, “But if I go, you go. Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

This was just a few minutes in Donald Trump’s Day. By the time the day was over, he had confused world leaders and countries. Sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier in the day, Trump mistakenly referred to him as “President Putin.” And while discussing the conflict with Iran, he declared, “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan.” 

He had also, once again, signaled his determination to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally, and told more easily verifiable lies than perhaps any sitting president in American history. It was another reminder to the world that the most powerful office on Earth is now occupied by a man whose physical and mental condition appears to be deteriorating at an alarming speed, leaving the entire planet in harm’s way. The NATO summit was supposed to project strength and unity among the Western alliance. Instead, it became a stage for one man’s unraveling. 

Trump opened his morning by sitting beside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and declaring, in front of the international press, that he was “very upset with NATO.” He called Spain “a terrible partner” and “a wasted cause,” then turned to his Treasury Secretary and ordered him, on camera, to “cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.” He added, “Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless, bad people.”

He then renewed his demand that the United States take control of Greenland, a territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark. “Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark,” he said, before invoking the Nazi occupation: “When Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day, Hitler beat them out in one day, took over, they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded by saying her country was “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” and that Greenland is “not for sale.”

But the most consequential moment of the day had nothing to do with alliances or defense spending. It had to do with war. Just three weeks after celebrating the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles, a deal he had called a triumph of his personal diplomacy, Trump declared that the agreement was “over.” 

He called Iranian leaders “scum” and “sick people.” He said continuing to negotiate was “a waste of time.” And he announced that U.S. forces had struck more than eighty targets inside Iran overnight, with more likely coming. “We hit them very hard last night,” he said. “Probably hit them hard again tonight.” Oil surged more than six percent. The Dow dropped six hundred points.

In the same stretch of remarks, while discussing his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he suddenly blurted out, “You know who’s No. 1 on Tic Tac (sic)? I am. I’m number one on TikTok. And all I talk about is how bad communism is.” He claimed to have “like 4 billion views or something like that.” In reality, Trump has roughly sixteen million TikTok followers, which does not place him in the top fifty accounts on the platform. And when some reporters expressed concern about TikTok’s influence, he waved them off: 

“People have to get their priorities straight.” That is the sentence that captured the entire day. While ordering strikes on a nation that shares a border with the country he was standing in, while threatening to destroy civilian water and electricity systems, while demanding territory from an ally, the President of the United States bragged about his social media following. He then told the rest of us to get our priorities straight, because we are not sufficiently impressed by his follower count on an app he cannot correctly pronounce.

And all of that happened before he boarded the plane. Aboard Air Force One, after the press had to keep their blinds drawn and the plane shut off their transponder, Trump walked to the press cabin and spoke for fourteen minutes. What came out was a flood of fabrications so constant and so detached from reality that it became difficult to track where one lie ended and the next began.

He told reporters that “probably billions of votes” had disappeared in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. California has roughly twenty-three million registered voters. The entire population of Earth is eight billion. And this is the same man who demands voter ID to protect the integrity of our elections.

He claimed that prescription drug prices had come down “four hundred to five hundred to six hundred percent” under his leadership. A price cannot decline more than one hundred percent. One hundred percent means the price is zero.

Maybe the most telling moment was when he was talking about the conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Trump said, “I settled after fourteen years and about fifteen million people had their heads chopped off.”

Fifteen million people did not have their heads chopped off. Not in Rwanda. Not in Congo. Not anywhere on Earth, in any era of recorded history. Fifteen million is roughly the entire current population of Rwanda. The broader Congo conflicts, spanning three decades, killed an estimated five to six million people, overwhelmingly from disease, displacement, and starvation. And he called it a settled war, even though his own administration acknowledged in March that the conflict is still ongoing.

I can’t stop thinking about what it means for us as a society when the President of the United States invents fifteen million beheadings and says billions of votes vanished. These are lies. And they are coming from the man who controls our nuclear arsenal, commands our military, and is actively waging a war without consideration for his allies or permission from Congress. And what makes all of it worse, what makes it dangerous instead of just absurd, is that it is not only dishonesty; it is showcasing how quickly his decline is accelerating.

Today, at a NATO summit, on the world stage, the President of the United States called Iran “Japan.” He called Zelenskyy “Putin.” He called TikTok “Tic Tac.” He called the JCPOA the “JCPOC.” He called Erdogan the leader of a “great company.” He stumbled over the word ‘denuclearization,’ first calling it ‘d-nuking’ before finding the actual word. 

His feet were so swollen that his ankles spilled over the sides of his shoes. His left hand, bruised and covered in makeup, hung limp at his side as he climbed the stairs until it jerked backward in an unnatural motion that was caught on video and circulated around the world. He is eighty years old. And when the White House was asked about all of it, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement calling his performance “marathon” and “high-energy,” claiming the president “commanded every room.”

He did not command any room. He alarmed every room he entered. Retired Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said what so many are thinking: “There is something deeply wrong with him. His friends know it; his critics know it. His staff, I’m sure, knows it. The world knows it. World leaders know it. And most importantly, our enemies know it, which is why they don’t take him seriously.” Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh called for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Senator Chuck Schumer called it “an embarrassment to our country on the world stage.”

And still, no one around him acts. No one in his inner circle intervenes. No one invokes the constitutional mechanisms that exist for exactly this moment. Because what we are witnessing is not just a president in decline. It is the most significant cover-up and the deepest corruption our government has ever faced at this level. 

There is nothing in modern American history that compares. Every person propping him up knows exactly what we are all watching. Every enabler who stands behind him in that room. Every cabinet member who clears the press when he begins to lose coherence. Every Republican in Congress who looks the other way. They know. And they do it anyway, because they want to stay in power. That is the entire reason. They are not acting out of patriotism or principle. They are anti-American in the most fundamental sense of the word. They allow and enable all of this to stay close to power and profit.

And while they cover for him, he is destroying the architecture that has kept this country and its allies safe for generations. In a year and a half, he has shattered alliances that took nearly a century to build. Alliances that matter. Alliances that were forged on the graves of people who died to protect them. He called Spain’s people “hopeless” and ordered his Treasury Secretary to cut off all trade. 

He demanded Greenland from Denmark by invoking the Nazi occupation. He posted a mocking image of the Italian Prime Minister days before sitting across from her. He told the world he only attended this summit because his friend, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, was hosting it. He said he does not need NATO’s help. And he keeps saying it, over and over, that we are “far away” from the rest of the world, that “we have an ocean separating” us from danger.

We were not so far away when Pearl Harbor happened. We were not so far away when the towers fell. Things do not stay within imaginary borders. They never have. And what he is doing right now in Iran is not making us safer. He is attacking a country instead of helping its citizens free themselves from a regime that oppresses them. He is threatening to bomb infrastructure that provides water and electricity to ordinary people. 

And in doing so, he is creating the next generation of extremists who will grow up knowing that America destroyed their homes and their families. We will be the ones to pay for that. Not him or his enablers. Us. Our children and grandchildren. Our service members. The people who will be sent to fight the wars that his recklessness and his impairment have set in motion.

Because that is the truth no one around him will say out loud. He cannot govern this country. He simply cannot do the job. And the people who are supposed to protect us from exactly this kind of danger have chosen instead to protect themselves.

We simply must take back both chambers in November. And when we do, here is what becomes possible. Real subpoena power returns. Not just letters or requests. Not strongly worded statements released to the press and forgotten by morning. Subpoenas with the full force of congressional authority behind them, aimed at every decision, every contract, every military order that was issued by or on behalf of a president who was not capable of making them himself.

Impeachment and removal become possible. And the mechanism is specific. We remove Vance first. We leave the vice presidency empty. Then we remove Trump. And when he goes, the cabinet structure that has been propping him up collapses with him.

And then come the investigations. Not just into this president, but into every member of Congress who made this possible. Even the ones who are no longer serving and the ones who get voted out in November. We need to understand why they did what they did. Were they being threatened? Were their families being threatened? 

Were they promised money, positions, or protection? Or are they simply terrible people who wanted access to power and did not care what it cost their country? We need those answers. Because what they did was not a difference of opinion. It was not politics as usual. It was the deliberate abandonment of their oath of office and the willing destruction of the country they swore to serve. There must be accountability. Without it, the next version of this will be worse. And there will be a next version, unless we build the precedent now that what they did can never be done again.

We are watching a man who is physically breaking down, mentally unraveling, and morally bankrupt try to hold together a presidency that is being operated, behind the scenes, by people who were never elected and who answer to no one. The only thing standing between them and the future of this country is the midterm election. We have to remember that every seat and every vote matters.

And if today felt like nothing but darkness, look at what happened while Trump was stumbling through his NATO performance. A federal judge ordered the release of five point eight million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the woman a jury found Trump sexually abused and defamed. Trump’s lawyers appealed within an hour. And then, hours later, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his request to block the payment. He lost twice on the same case in a single day. Every court that has touched this case, from the trial court to the appeals court to the Supreme Court, has ruled against him. The system held.

And in Florida, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act,” ruling that restrictions on how race and gender can be taught in public universities violate the First Amendment. The court called it “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.” And the judge who wrote that opinion was appointed by Donald Trump himself, during his first term. Even the judges he put on the bench are drawing the line.

On a day when his decline was visible to the entire world, when he embarrassed his country on the global stage, the courts back home still held firm. And that matters, because it sends a message to every loyalist, every enabler, every member of Congress who thinks they can ride this out and escape the consequences. He is not untouchable. And neither are they.

In November, they will be reminded that the power still belongs to the people. And that is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

-It's a Lovely Life

Why we don’t know what food is spreading the parasite sickening thousand

There’s a lag between when people consume the parasite and when symptoms appear, making it tough for those infected to remember what they ate to pinpoint the problem.

More than 2,000 Americans have been sickened this summer by a microscopic parasite that contaminates fresh produce and can cause days of diarrhea, creating an unusually large outbreak that, paradoxically, may give investigators their best chance to identify its source, public health officials said.

Cyclospora is one of the hardest foodborne pathogens to trace to its source. There’s a lag between when people consume the parasite that causes the illness and when symptoms appear, making it tough for those infected to remember what they ate to pinpoint the problem. Health officials are alarmed by the rapidly growing number of cases, which they say are likely undercounted because some people recover without medical care and are not tested.

Authorities have not yet identified a specific produce grower, supplier, or type of produce responsible for the latest outbreak. But this season’s unusually high number of illnesses, now reported in at least 21 states, means more information and more patients to help identify.

 

E. Jean Carroll is Going to Outlast Trump's Delay Game

 

The most annoying thing, from a legal perspective, about Donald Trump is how he plays the delay game, drawing cases out far longer than any other litigant could get away with. He relentlessly files borderline (and sometimes outright) frivolous motions and fights every step of the way, using every motion to reconsider and every other procedural tool available, even when it’s hopeless.

That’s how it felt today in the E. Jean Carroll case. We’ll get to what happened during the day in a minute, but first let’s start with how it ended, just after 10 p.m. ET. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s request to stay District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s order that it was time for Trump to pay Carroll the $5 million, plus post-judgment interest, that he owes her. The Second Circuit ruled just hours after Trump asked for the stay.

Trump, of course, isn’t done yet. Next, he’ll ask the Supreme Court for a stay. Prediction: It will be similarly unavailing. Stick a fork in this case. It’s done.

You’ll recall it’s not actually Trump who has to pay up here. That’s because, as a condition of being able to appeal the judgment in Carroll’s favor in the first place, he had to deposit $5.5 million into the Court Registry Investment System (“CRIS”). He did that on June 28, 2023, shortly after Carroll won the case at trial. So Judge Kaplan’s order is actually directed to the Clerk of Court, who oversees the CRIS. The Judge wrote: “The Clerk is respectfully directed to disburse” $5 million in judgment plus interest to Carroll’s lawyers on her behalf.

Unlike other times when courts have granted Trump a stay pending appeal at the same time they issued an order, Judge Kaplan did not do that here. That forced Trump’s lawyers to file their notice of appeal and immediately ask the Second Circuit for a stay before the Clerk could disburse the funds. “The need for an administrative stay here is acute,” they wrote. “The district court’s order directs the Clerk to disburse the funds, and once entered that order may be executed at any time.”

Trump argued that once the funds are "distributed to third parties, they likely will not be recoverable—rendering any stay this Court might later grant, and any relief President Trump might later obtain on appeal, ineffective.” But that argument didn’t stick the landing for him.

Underneath it all is Trump’s effort to conflate Carroll’s two victories: this one, based on his defamation of Carroll after he left office, and the other case, involving statements he made while he was president. He has a tenuous argument that some form of immunity may apply in that case—an argument the Second Circuit rejected. But that case is not this case, and there is no reason to delay this one because of the other.

Now it’s up to the Supreme Court, which has already denied certiorari in this case, to enforce its own ruling. It has before it Trump’s motion to reconsider its refusal to hear the case, which it can deny at any moment, along with his motion for a stay of Judge Kaplan’s disbursement order. Unless Trump simply gives up and gives in to the inevitable by letting the money he deposited into the court’s fund go to Carroll, his lawyers will need to get an appeal and a stay application to the Supreme Court immediately. If the Court does not order a stay, the Clerk is free to disburse the funds at any time because a judge has ordered that they be disbursed, and no stay is in place.

In his deposition, Trump, who had said Carroll was “not my type,” identified her as his second wife, Marla Maples.

After her win in the $83.3 million defamation case, which is still on appeal, Carroll responded to a question about how she intended to spend the money like this: “I’d like to give the money to something Donald Trump hates. If it’ll cause him pain for me to give money to certain things, that’s my intent.”

How splendid. Sometimes justice happens. We’re close.

If you want to revisit some of our earlier columns on the two Carroll defamation cases, here are a few to start with:

May 22, 2023, Standing Up To The Bully, Again

January 18, 2024, Day Two

January 26, 2024, $83.3 Million

September 8, 2025, Affirmed: E Jean Carroll Case

May 29, 2026, E. Jean Carroll: Is DOJ investigating her, or not?

Trump has spent years using a delay game to win. Tonight, in E. Jean Carroll’s case, the courts moved fast, signaling that at least in this case, time’s up. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse for all of it! Your paid subscriptions make this newsletter possible.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Wall Street Wants to Change the Rules for Your 401(k): It Could Put Your Retirement at Risk

 

Financial firms want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America's 401(k) plans, and the Trump administration is planning a regulatory rollback to encourage less regulated and often riskier investments. 

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. But the Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. 

To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan.

Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments.

“What they have done is lower the standard for everything,” said Ali Khawar, a former senior official at the Department of Labor, which is charged with enforcing the federal law that governs retirement savings.

Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by.

When the 401(k) replaced pensions as the main way Americans fund their retirement, the investment risk shifted from employers to employees. Instead of the promise of a monthly check, the 401(k) participant gets a tax-sheltered account, usually with an employer matching their contributions, but with no guarantees of how that nest egg will grow. Traces of the old system remain, however. Employers are responsible for overseeing the company’s plan. They choose all the financial service providers and have the final say on what investment options are available to employees. But it’s typically workers who pay for those services out of their 401(k) savings. And it’s workers who suffer from diminished savings if the plan has poor options.

There are plenty of pitfalls for 401(k) savers. The “recordkeepers” that administer 401(k)s may attempt to steer workers to their own in-house funds, whether they are the best options or not. They may sell advisory services of questionable value. And then there are the investment fees, which are the main cost to participants. These are charged as a percentage of each investment. Roughly, a 1% fee for a $10,000 investment would result in a $100 yearly charge. Recordkeepers — companies like Fidelity, Principal, Vanguard and Empower —  and other service providers often receive a cut of these fees. This means that they have the incentive to recommend more-expensive options. 

If employers are lax in their oversight, workers might find themselves overpaying to invest in funds that underperform. Even modest differences in fees or performance can, when compounded over time, make a huge difference in how much someone is able to save for retirement, potentially tens of thousands of dollars at the end of someone’s career. By the Labor Department’s own math, 1% in additional fees can shrink someone’s nest egg at retirement by 28%.

When overseeing retirement accounts, employers have a fiduciary duty to make prudent decisions and put their workers’ interests first. If they allow financial firms to fleece plan participants, they can be held responsible under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, a pension-era law that now governs 401(k)s.

Over the last 15 years, employees have increasingly sued large employers over unnecessarily high fees or inferior investment options. Companies like UnitedHealth, Boeing, Verizon and General Electric, without admitting wrongdoing, chose to settle suits for tens of millions. Aronowitz has called the increased litigation a “con game” that misleads judges, argued that such cases should go before a specialized court and labeled the whole enterprise a “scam.” 

Over 90 of these class-action lawsuits against large employers were filed in 2025. To Aronowitz, that’s a big number — his former firm tracked and publicized the rise of these suits as part of its business underwriting liability coverage to employers — but it’s a tiny fraction of the more than 700,000 401(k) plans nationwide. 

ERISA says nothing about which types of investments are prudent; it sets a standard of care, not a list of approved options. It’s up to employers to use their judgment, and employers have generally been wary of allowing cryptocurrency, private equity or hedge funds onto their plans because they are more complex than the usual stocks and bonds, often untested and much more expensive. Nevertheless, Trump issued an executive order last year blaming the limited uptake on “regulatory overreach” and “lawsuits filed by opportunistic trial lawyers” and calling for new rules. 

Aronowitz, as head of the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Department of Labor office that enforces ERISA, is responsible for following through. His most significant move is a rule to make it far harder for workers to sue. The proposal, which will likely be finalized later this year, outlines a set of factors for employers to consider before approving investments. Just following this process would entitle employers’ decisions to “significant deference” from the courts — a “safe harbor,” or legal shield, meant to guard those decisions from challenge. A company could load a plan with a high-fee private equity fund and be protected from suit as long as it showed it had followed the rule and considered the fees.

To opponents of the change, like Khawar, who was second-in-command of EBSA under President Joe Biden, this is a mere “check-the-box approach,” akin to a teacher awarding a math student an automatic A — even if the answer is wrong — because the student showed their work.

Aronowitz has bristled at this sort of criticism. “Absolutely not,” he said in April at an industry event. “Read the proposed rule. We require a rigorous, objective, thorough and analytical fiduciary process that must be documented.” 

At the same time, Aronowitz is also pulling back on policing plans’ investment choices. In April, EBSA released a bulletin updating its enforcement priorities. In addition to announcing that agency staff must now get Aronowitz’s sign-off before any major enforcement action, it set a new guideline for investigators. “EBSA must avoid cases that unfairly second-guess process-based fiduciary judgments,” the bulletin said, meaning investigators should not challenge an employer’s investment choices if the employer can show it followed the proper steps, regardless of the outcome for workers. 

Tim Hauser, a 34-year-veteran of EBSA who was the highest-ranking career staffer there before retiring last year, said such ideas undermine the heart of ERISA. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EBSA was “dedicated to protecting plan participants,” he said, but that has changed under Aronowitz. The ability of courts and regulators to hold employers accountable for using bad judgment when choosing 401(k) investments is “fundamental to this whole system,” Hauser said. “They are proposing to deprioritize it at the same time that they are encouraging plans to invest in more complicated, opaque investments. It’s infuriating.”

The shift at EBSA has also been evident in court. Over the last year, the Labor Department has filed amicus briefs — friend-of-the-court filings that lay out legal arguments for judges — in several class-action lawsuits on the side of the defendant company. In the past, the Labor Department’s briefs had generally sided with the employees. These amicus briefs can be influential. Recently, the agency interceded on Home Depot’s behalf in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs then dropped it.

A Labor Department spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica that EBSA would prioritize “the highest-risk matters” in order to protect participants. 

In pushing for looser rules and easing enforcement, the Trump administration and Wall Street are aiming for much more than giving workers the option of investing in so-called alternative assets. They predict it will become common, part of a new normal.

In recent years, the typical 401(k) plan has settled into a pattern, one that’s proven popular with investors but less lucrative for the recordkeepers and asset managers that serve plans. Decades ago, actively managed mutual funds, where professionals pick investments and charge for doing so, were dominant. They carried higher fees, often above 1% of the amount in the fund each year. But over time, passive funds, which often track an index of stocks or bonds like the S&P 500, attracted investors with their promise to deliver the same or better results for fees often below 0.1%. 

Investment and administrative fees in 401(k) plans have, on average, steadily decreased. One main reason is the rise of passive funds, but another, experts say, is the threat of litigation. With cheap options broadly available, large companies might have a hard time explaining to a judge why they forced their employees to choose funds that cost 10 times more.

This decline has pinched profit margins in the 401(k) world, said Kai Richter, an attorney with Cohen Milstein who has long specialized in ERISA class-action cases. “So the financial industry is looking for other ways to make money.” 

Nonpublic investments like private equity are, as a rule, actively managed. That means higher fees. If 401(k) plans began to commonly include these investments, the long-term trend of lower fees would halt and perhaps reverse. 

Broad adoption of alternative assets is indeed the administration’s goal. One of the most consequential parts of a 401(k) plan is the default option, since most workers simply leave their money there. Usually, the default is a target date fund, which, based on the investor’s target date of retirement, gradually shifts its composition as that date approaches from mostly publicly traded stocks to mostly bonds, becoming more conservative and less risky as the person gets closer to needing the money. Target date funds haven’t changed much over the past two decades as they’ve soared in popularity. They offer all-in-one simplicity and, since they are often passive, low cost. Adding complex investments like private equity or hedge funds as a standard part of the mix would be a sea change. 

The proposed rule professes to be “neutral” as to what effect the new, lax standard will have on investments, but it confidently predicts that companies will include more alternative assets over time in 401(k)s. That, after all, is the point of the rule, to broaden access to “the potential growth and diversification opportunities associated with alternative asset investments,” as Trump’s executive order put it. After the rule is finalized, plans covering about 5 million participants will add new or modified target date funds that include alternative investments, according to the proposal, and the number will continue to grow every year. 

Over the past year, there’s been a wave of product announcements in the 401(k) industry as financial companies, taking their cues from the administration, have prepared to offer new options to plans. Major firms that manage private investments, such as BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, have announced funds for 401(k)s that include private assets. 

Ahead of the proposed rule’s adoption, Empower, the second-largest recordkeeper, has been expanding alternative options through managed accounts where participants opt to have advisers shape their 401(k) portfolios. About 1,000 companies have agreed to offer these investments to their workers, Empower’s CEO said recently. 

But the ultimate effects of the administration’s efforts won’t be limited to alternative assets, and the outcome is far from certain. The proposed rule seems sure to meet legal challenges, and employers, even with Aronowitz’s assurances, might remain reluctant to overhaul their plans. Short of lawsuits, employers may fear blowback from their workers, who surveys show are content with traditional investment options. 

Paul Kiel, business reporter with a focus this year on 401(k) plans.

 

The Plot to Ruin America

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So, who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land.

But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota.

That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold.

But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.”

Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas. Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025.

The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative.

That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

CounterPunch, this piece first appeared on Red Scare. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

 

"Freedom of Navigation"? from an "Ill-Advised War"!

 

Anyone outside White House vortex of spin and lies knew the die was cast as soon as Iran demonstrated its ability to seize the Strait of Hormuz and hold the world’s energy markets hostage. With that, the vaunted principle of “freedom of navigation” that the United States has stood behind not only in the Middle East but around the world was shattered. And, as we are now witnessing, a crack in a fundamental pillar of U.S. power has dire consequences for the U.S.’s stature in the world and the rules-based system that has largely preserved peace and ensured prosperity for the Free World.

There is no such thing as “partial” or “conditional” freedom of navigation of the world’s oceans and waterways. The diplomatic contortions the U.S. continues deploying are something to behold. “Any fees in the Strait of Hormuz would be voluntary,” suggested a diplomat from Oman, recently enlisted by Iran to obtain its pound of flesh from the Trump negotiators. Iran, however, was not playing along: Of course the payments would be mandatory. (Who would pay otherwise?) 

The New York Times explained: “Call it voluntary if you like — Hormuz was completely open before this war, and now it isn’t,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization in London. “That is not Oman’s doing, they never wanted this. All this hassle is part of Washington’s bill for starting an ill-advised war.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reliably disingenuous (unless he somehow believes the claptrap he parrots), insists that “the United States would oppose any scenario in which use of the strait was monetized, regardless of whether it was called ‘a fee or a toll or a donation.’” The U.S. can oppose it, but there is no reason to doubt that Donald Trump and his hapless negotiators will simply give way on this bedrock principle.

Donald Trump’s nonstop lies about our control of the Strait cannot alter the new power dynamic in the region, as Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson details: 

The United States expended a large portion of its munitions, both precision-guided bombs and missiles such as Tomahawks and advanced missile interceptors such as Patriots, in a multiweek burst of “epic fury” in order to create a situation where Iran believes it will remain in control of one of the world’s key shipping corridors (and may well do so), all while ensuring for itself sanctions relief and billions of dollars in economic oxygen.

While U.S. President Donald Trump still mulls the idea of restarting the war with Iran, few take that seriously because kinetic action achieved little except higher gasoline prices, and the U.S. midterm elections are now even closer. To get a short-term peace, Trump offered all carrots and no sticks. Even future carrots: The MOU actually commits the United States to refraining from future sanctions on Iran.

Sure enough, Trump’s flimsy memorandum of understanding has become Iran’s mechanism to exert its leverage over the Strait, angle for sanctions relief, pursue access to frozen funds, and haul in international reconstruction funds — all without making binding commitments to address the ostensible reason Trump launched his reckless war, its nuclear weapons program.

Brookings Institution’s Burt Jones observed recently that “Iran [showed] that it can flex the major muscle that it has, which is to constrict shipping through Hormuz, and it can withstand the price that the West would impose on it.” Having accomplished that, nothing that will occur in post-war talks is likely to alter the new regional reality: 

Iran comes out of the war “in a stronger position than we went in.”

In reporting on Iran’s newfound negotiating partner, the New York Times reported last week: Iran and U.S.-allied Oman are moving forward with plans to collect payment for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, despite public American objections, according to an Iranian official and four diplomats with knowledge of the matter.

If enacted, the plans would be a significant change from the prewar status in the strategic waterway, underscoring how the American Israeli decision to attack Iran on Feb. 28 has changed the Middle East in far-reaching and unanticipated ways.

Demonstrating Iran’s newfound confidence, “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles at two commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz early Tuesday,” the Wall Street Journal reported. It is just the latest sign that the shift in power in the region has become more profound as the war played out.

 Kari Heerman of the Brookings Institution explained: “Iran did not only assert control over the strait, it also experimented a little bit with politically conditioned access, offering discounts to its friends and higher rates to its enemies.” Heerman noted in analyzing how “freedom of navigation” has lost any meaning. “[T]hat’s a major departure from not only the status quo ante, it also presents major challenges for international maritime law.”

We hear each week that the talks are at risk of “collapsing” or that the “fragile truce” is at risk. Iran, with Oman’s aid, is systematically asserting long-term control of the Strait. Trump has zero interest in returning to full-scale hostilities; the economic sanctions that have constrained Iran are already being unwound; and the entire topic is a political loser for Trump. As oil prices gradually drift downward, Trump is less inclined to restart major military operations. The war is over, as both sides know. The memorandum talks are merely the means of tallying the cost to U.S.’s international standing.

Given all this, much of the Iran coverage has taken on an air of unreality. The Trump regime pretends to be engaged in grown-up statecraft; legacy media coverage regurgitates the Trump team’s assertions that Iran is desperate for a deal. The headlines take at face value the threat that the U.S. would resume a full-scale fight; but no one engaged in the talks believes that is remotely possible.

Rather than frame the news of the day around what the Trump regime is saying about events (Trump ready to destroy Iran again!), coverage of the talks should lay out the facts to educate the public about the new balance of power (Iran using muscle to extract economic benefits from Strait of Hormuz).

The U.S. has sacrificed a cardinal principle of a rules-based international order, freedom of navigation of the seas, which is a strategic defeat of immense importance.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress, having entirely abandoned its constitutional and oversight role in America’s disastrous war, is equally responsible for this debacle. Republicans have made the case better than the most esteemed constitutional scholars: allowing the president (especially one as ignorant and reckless as this) unchecked control of foreign policy is a recipe for constitutional chaos and national security ruin.

Democrats need to keep the pressure on, insisting on comprehensive hearings and definitive committee reports to document the serial blunders in launching and conducting the war, tally the human and financial costs, and assess the diplomatic, economic, and strategic consequences of Trump’s catastrophe. Republicans have disqualified themselves from holding power. It will be up to Democrats to reassert Congress’s role as a critical constitutional player in matters of war and peace — and deal with the consequences of the loss of freedom of navigation of critical waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.