Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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June 19
The Washington Post says Pete Hegseth’s vaccine policy backfired
An influenza outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas has in the past few weeks and might have even killed one person going through basic training. If it wasn’t already clear why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to eliminate the military’s universal flu vaccine mandate was an exceptionally bad idea, it should be now.
Hegseth announced the policy change in April, and since then, of Air Force trainees have opted to get the shot. The vaccine does not provide perfect protection, but it reduces infections, lessens the severity for those who catch it and limits the spread. Last year’s version of the flu shot reduced the chances of falling ill , with even higher effectiveness among younger adults.
The Lackland outbreak offers unnecessary reminders of how disruptive the flu is in military settings. Members of the armed forces are often crammed into close living quarters and share meals at communal tables.
Through human history, more soldiers have died from disease than combat injuries: An of deaths during the Civil War were from uncontrolled infectious diseases. In 1777, George Washington for all soldiers in the Continental Army to improve readiness.
When Hegseth announced the new vaccine policy, he claimed that “overly broad” mandates “only weaken our war-fighting capabilities” and stressed that his rollback would “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”
In reality, his apparent motive was pandering to anti-vaccine elements inside President Donald Trump’s coalition. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former trial lawyer who has profited from lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, to make it harder for people to get immunizations. Never mind that Trump himself received the flu and covid vaccines last fall.
Fortunately, Hegseth’s changes this spring allow for individual branches of the military to impose narrower mandates in certain circumstances. In light of the outbreak, Air Force officials were granted an exception to Hegseth’s rule. That has allowed them to at the San Antonio base to receive flu shots.
The secretary cannot stop seasonal diseases like the flu, but unnecessarily ruling out ways to mitigate harm only degrades military readiness.
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June 21
The Wall Street Journal on the rise of Democratic Socialists
The story of the year in American politics so far, after ’s falling popularity, is the rise of the Democratic socialists. Their influence bears watching as the next generation tries to fulfill Bernie Sanders’s goal of taking over the Democratic Party.
Avowed Democratic Socialists of America candidate Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C., last week, and it wasn’t close. The 38-year-old won 53.5%-35.9% over mainstream black Democrat Kenyan McDuffie, and she did better in some upscale white areas than in the city’s black neighborhoods.
This follows the pattern of 34-year-old in New York City. In Los Angeles, DSA member Nithya Raman made the general election ballot against Mayor Karen Bass. DSA members on the LA City Council have put referenda on the November ballot to let noncitizens vote in city elections and give the council control of the police.
The DSA is also using its urban base to seek gains in Congress. “People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Mamdani said at a rally for three House candidates in New York’s primary on Tuesday. “This slate here today is our answer.”
Mr. Mamdani’s picks include Darializa Avila Chevalier, a “proud member” of the DSA. She’s trying to defeat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Ms. Chevalier’s platform is something else:
“Abolish ICE,” because “this agency exists to control our communities, not to keep us safe.” “Create a four-day 32-hour work week with no loss in pay,” plus “a universal basic income,” as well as a “federal jobs guarantee.” Free government childcare, free pre-K, and free college. Medicare for All, “including abortion.” Federal rent control via a 5% national cap on yearly increases for existing units managed by “large landlords.” She believes “all deportations are wrong,” because it is “double punishment” to “subject someone who has committed a crime to both a criminal system and then additionally to an immigration system.”
Another socialist backed by Mr. Mamdani is Claire Valdez, a member of the state Assembly running to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Her agenda also includes “national rent control,” “a 4-day, 32-hour work week with no change in pay or benefits,” abolishing ICE, and passing Medicare for All. She’d also end “at will” employment for all workers, legalize strikes for federal employees, pass a Green New Deal, and put “a federal freeze on residential electricity bills.”
Mr. Mamdani is also behind former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. Mr. Lander used to be a DSA member but says he left after its celebratory response to the massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7. Yet he wants to pack the Supreme Court to 13 Justices, create a national wealth tax, abolish ICE and pass Medicare for All.
These races—and others across the country—reflect the potent organizing of the DSA and the leftwing march of young progressive voters. Their goal is to turn the Democratic Party even further left than it has moved since Bill Clinton. Win or lose on Tuesday, the DSA agenda is gaining among Democrats.
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June 23
The Philadelphia Inquirer says that the U.S. healthcare system needs a public option
Long ago, when most Americans left the house for mass entertainment, they flocked to carnivals that crisscrossed the country to delight small towns and big cities. Shows typically included a barker whose steady stream of superfluous oratory enticed folks to spend their hard-earned cash on sometimes dubious performances.
Too often today, our nation’s capital resembles that midway where a slick barker spouts enticements to assure that he will always give them what they want. That may be fine when the tickets sold are for harmless attractions, but what mostly seems for sale in 21st-century Washington is this country’s very soul.
One glaring example of our current predicament is an embarrassingly disappointing healthcare system that who can neither afford adequate medical treatment nor a health insurance plan to help them pay for a doctor or the cost of a hospital stay.
Even as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was being signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, it was clear it would need future adjustments. Unfortunately, that necessity has been ignored by President , who in both his first and current administrations has found it more beneficial politically to criticize rather than improve Obamacare.
The ACA has helped cut from nearly 16% in 2016 to 8% last year. That means more work needs to be done. But while Trump keeps promising a better alternative to Obamacare, he’s barely delivered on even the “ ” to improve healthcare access for all.
Trump proposed an ACA alternative in January that he calls “ ,” but it’s too weak to get the health insurance industry to become a better partner in extending coverage to more Americans. Trump’s plan would instead end the ACA subsidies that have helped millions of people pay for health insurance while cutting prescription drug prices and requiring insurance companies to do a better job reporting their costs and profits.
A National Institutes of Health study concluded the Obama administration comprised of hospitals, insurance companies, and drug companies” to help it make the ACA law because “it was not politically feasible” to get the bill passed any other way. Unfortunately, the feasibility of improving Obamacare has become even more remote under Trump.
That’s a sign of the political strength of major health insurance companies, including UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health (the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield), and CVS Health, which acquired Aetna in 2018. Those firms , and show no sign of wanting to ever voluntarily reduce any income derived from federally subsidized premiums paid by Obamacare customers.
It’s time to stop the giveaway to health insurance companies and reconsider an idea that has failed past attempts to survive Washington politics. Americans need a public option similar to Medicare that would allow eligible participants of all ages to pay adjusted health insurance premiums based on their incomes. , and President Harry S. Truman proposed a public option for the United States more than 70 years ago, but Congress wouldn’t approve it.
“Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” . “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.” That same speech could be made today, but this Congress and president seem even more in thrall to the powerful insurance companies that today .
The American Medical Association, in a recent report, cited Washington’s kowtowing to corporate healthcare interests trying to maximize profits as a contributing factor to a current statistic that within the next two years. “Many physicians find themselves practicing in direct conflict with their own values, the values that led them to a career in healthcare in the first place,” said the AMA report.
With thousands of doctors abandoning their practices and millions of Americans still unable to afford health insurance, it’s time for a bolder, better healthcare system. This country is too prosperous to have so many Americans worrying themselves to death while trying to figure out how to afford decent medical care.
This nation cannot afford our president’s weak ideas to fill huge gaps in America’s healthcare delivery system. Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how it’s done in . Lyndon B. Johnson got . And Obama opened the door for a successor to craft the next phase of the Affordable Care Act. It’s time for Trump to stop promising something even better and produce it.
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June 23
The Boston Globe says Donald Trump’s Iran deal looks like a surrender
The reviews of President Trump’s peace deal with Iran are in, and they aren’t pretty.
On the right, the said the president had committed the United States to “humiliations,” while The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the deal a On the left, , the national security adviser under former president Joe Biden, said the deal indicated that “the United States basically lost this war.”
From the center right, called it “surrender.” And from the center left, economics blogger described the deal as a Katrina moment when even many of Trump’s defenders “will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.”
If few across the political spectrum can see value in the deal, the reason should be patently clear: It is a hollow promise, a deal to make a deal that is sounding suspiciously like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear pact negotiated by then-President Barack Obama in 2015 that Trump tore up in 2018.
The new Memorandum of Understanding calls on Iran to dilute, or “downblend,” its enriched uranium under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (which also called for removing some of that uranium to other countries). In the MOU, Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” But Iran has always maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes.
Details for a final deal will be negotiated in the coming two months — an absurdly short time frame for incredibly complex issues. In the meantime, the United States will release billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The United States pledges to lift all sanctions if and when a final deal is signed. Oddly, all this must be endorsed by the United Nations, a body Trump has long mocked as . And by unfreezing Iranian assets before a final nuclear deal is struck, he is effectively paying Iran to return things to the way they were before.
Nowhere does the MOU address Iran’s mass manufacturing of ballistic missiles and weaponized drones, or its subsidizing of military proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran pledges to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping — but the MOU seems to leave open the possibility that in 60 days Iran can start taxing tankers to transit the waterway, something it was not doing before.
So in many ways, Trump’s deal will return the Persian Gulf to the status quo ante — only arguably worse, because Iran now understands that the mighty US military cannot prevent it from strangling the world’s economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.
Republican Senator of Louisiana, admittedly no friend of Trump’s, summed it up fairly when he wrote on X: “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
Cassidy’s assessment touches on the cost of this underwhelming settlement. The approximately 15-week campaign left 13 American service members and more than 3,500 Iranians dead. It cost the US military more than $32 billion and nearly drained the nation’s storehouse of missile and drone interceptors.
And the threat the war posed for the global economy was enormous. The sharp reduction in tanker traffic through the strait caused possibly the in oil supply in history, driving the price to above $120 a barrel and forcing countries to dip deeply into their reserves.
Before the first US and Israel bombs fell on Iran, gas in the United States was selling on average for at the pump. By early June, the average nationwide price had risen to . All told, according to Moody’s Analytics, the war cost the United States in both military spending and higher consumer costs — nearly $1,000 per American household.
Amid the disruptions in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer supplies, the World Bank lowered its forecast for global economic growth to — the lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic.
No wonder Trump told reporters in Europe after signing the MOU that he was worried that the war was about to trigger a global economic downturn rivaling the Great Depression of 1929 — an outcome that would have made him look as bad as . “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have ​happened,” the president said.
It was boldly honest of the president to admit that he was so worried about his image for history. But surely the Iranians were pleased to hear that their ability to create global economic havoc has become their superpower against this superpower.
Sending the country into war is a president’s most somber and significant power, and Trump, true to form, has used it rashly in this war. It took a primary loss against a Trump-supported rival for Cassidy to speak honestly about the emperor’s new clothes. Might this be the moment when other Republican members of Congress remove the veil from their eyes and rein in his recklessness before he overreaches again?
One could be forgiven for not betting on that possibility. But there are midterm elections this fall, and chances are higher that voters will use their ballots to hold the president accountable. Trump pledged in 2024 to end military missions overseas and to focus American resources on America’s working people. This war did neither.
His blundering, costly, and pointless use of the American military has damaged the US economy and its international standing — and it should be beyond the pale for anyone who truly puts America first.
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June 21
The Guardian say allies must protect the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians
The “ceasefire” in Gaza is a “cruel and deadly illusion”, James Elder, the Unicef spokesman, on Friday. Israeli forces have since its declaration in October, says the Gaza health ministry, including 265 children – an average of one a day.
The killings and broader humanitarian crisis have been overshadowed by the war on Iran and have diverted attention from escalating violence in the occupied West Bank. Last week, former Israeli prime ministers, military chiefs and heads of security services were among the signatories of accusing its government of “doing nothing to eradicate Jewish terror” there. Ehud Olmert, one of the former prime ministers, Israel of “an organized, systematic, state-funded campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”, with security forces assisting settler violence. Meanwhile, the army chief troops “killing like we haven’t killed since 1967”.
But a from the International Crisis Group points to another dangerous development: the relentless campaign pushing the West Bank’s economy towards collapse. That does not only hurt individuals and families. Without a functioning economy, there can be no Palestinian state. As the report warns: “The economic conditions necessary for any Palestinian future other than permanent subjugation are being dismantled.” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and head of a far-right pro-settler party, has said that he wants to bury the idea of Palestinian statehood and promised “economic strangulation”.
Since 1967, Israel’s controls on the have prevented it from developing an autonomous, functioning economy. The chokehold tightened dramatically after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. The Palestinian economy saw real GDP shrink from $17.8bn to $13.7bn in 2024. Almost 300,000 Palestinians lost jobs in the West Bank and Israel.
The demolition of homes and uprooting of olive trees are visible. But damage behind the scenes goes deeper. The tightening of already punitive restrictions on movement in the West Bank has damaged agriculture, employment and business and fractured its economy. Few Palestinians are now permitted to work in , though the security establishment reportedly believes that restoring work permits could make Israel safer. The withholding of customs revenues collected by Israel has crippled the Palestinian Authority, which paid employees just half their salaries last June. The Palestinian economy rests on the ability to do business with two Israeli banks; repeated threats to the immunity and indemnity letters underpinning that relationship have made even the US bridle.
Meanwhile, an investigation by a rights group that Israeli exporters regularly hide the origin of produce grown in occupied to qualify for unlawful tax breaks. The Charity Commission after Melanie Ward, a Labour MP, said that charities in England and Wales have donated at least ÂŁ28m to illegal settlements. And an Israeli real estate event in London .
This contrast casts an especially harsh light on the failure of Israel’s allies to take substantive action. Sanctions against violent settlers and those who enable them are insufficient, yet the UK has from a ban on trade with illegal settlements or other decisive action. MPs rightly call for more. Palestinian livelihoods, as well as lives, must be protected.
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