logo

Author: admin

Categories
USA World

Red Card the Host: Why Countries That Can’t Respect the Rules Should Never Host the Games Again

USA Red Card!

By Vahid Razavi — Author of The Age of Nepotism and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, Founder of EthicsInTech.com and NoEthicsInBigTech.com Producer of the Forever Peace Now Documentary

I have loved the beautiful game since I was a kid in Iran, long before I climbed the Berkeley hills to watch football of the American kind for free among the eucalyptus trees. Football — real football, the one played with feet — has always had one sacred promise: twenty-two players, one ball, one referee, and the same rules for everyone. The son of a king and the son of a street vendor get the same yellow card for the same tackle. That promise is why billions of us watch. It is the last democracy many people on this planet ever get to see.

This summer, on American soil, that promise was sold for a phone call and a halftime show.

So let me make a simple, sober proposal, as a lifelong fan and as the author of a book literally titled The Age of Nepotism: any country whose government cannot hold enough respect for the rules of the international games should be barred — permanently — from hosting international games. Not fined. Not warned. Barred. Forever is a long time, and that’s the point. You don’t get to borrow the world’s cathedral and rearrange the pews for your cousin’s wedding.

Exhibit A: The Red Card That Took a Phone Call

On July 1st, US striker Folarin Balogun was shown a red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under the laws of the game, that means a suspension. Every fan on Earth knows this. Every eight-year-old in a Sunday league knows this.

Then the President of the United States picked up the phone, called his good friend Gianni Infantino — the same Infantino who handed him a freshly invented “FIFA Peace Prize” at the Kennedy Center in December — and suddenly, hours before the Belgium match, the ban was “suspended.” Belgium’s federation was given a few hours in the middle of the night to file an appeal without the documents needed to file it. Even Sepp Blatter — Sepp Blatter! a man who knows a thing or two about FIFA scandals — reminded the world that “red cards are not overturned by political phone calls.” When the disgraced former president of FIFA is the voice of institutional integrity in the room, you have redefined rock bottom.

Here is why this matters beyond one match: the overturning of a referee’s decision under political pressure is the exact opposite of democratic values. Democracy is not elections. Democracy is the boring, beautiful machinery underneath: independent bodies, written rules, evidence, and decisions that don’t change because a powerful man is unhappy. When a head of state can un-send-off a player, he is teaching two hundred countries watching that rules are for people without friends in high places. That is not sport. That is nepotism with a scoreboard — and I wrote the book on that.

Exhibit B: Whose Anthem Is This Anyway?

This Sunday’s final is Argentina versus Spain. Neither of them, last I checked my atlas, is the United States. And yet the ceremony will feature the US national anthem, performed by Jennifer Hudson, before a final the US is not playing in — while the anthems of Canada and Mexico, the two other host nations who carried a third of this tournament, are nowhere on the program.

Think about that. Three countries hosted this World Cup. One gets its anthem sung at the final. The other two get to watch from the cheap seats of their own party. In football tradition — a tradition older than FIFA’s current leadership and hopefully longer-lived — only the anthems of the two competing nations are played. Full stop. The anthem addition isn’t patriotism; it’s a territorial marking. It tells Canada and Mexico exactly what kind of “co-hosts” they were: cosigners on a loan for a house they’ll never sleep in.

Exhibit C: Law 7 Says 15 Minutes. Hollywood Said 30.

The Laws of the Game — written by IFAB, the body that has guarded football’s rules since 1886 — are refreshingly clear. Law 7: the halftime interval must not exceed 15 minutes. It exists for a reason. Players’ muscles cool. Rhythm breaks. Injury risk climbs. The interval is part of the sport, not a commercial slot.

For this final, the break is being stretched toward 25 to 30 minutes so a Super Bowl-style halftime spectacle can be assembled and disassembled — a parade of pop stars and Hollywood celebrity cameos, with a stage rolled over the pitch where, moments earlier, athletes were competing for the highest honor in world sport. The greatest match on Earth, interrupted twice as long as the rules allow, so a country that mostly calls this sport “soccer” can turn it into content.

I have nothing against singers. I have produced comedy nights and concert events for peace for over a decade — music and laughter are how we survive. But there is a difference between a celebration and a hijacking. The Super Bowl is America’s party and America can run it however it likes. The World Cup final belongs to the world, and the world was not consulted. When you change the rules of a game to fit your entertainment industry, you have confused hosting with owning.

The Pattern, Not the Incidents

One overturned red card is a scandal. One anthem is arrogance. One stretched halftime is showbiz. Together, they are a pattern: a host country’s political and commercial power bending the rules of an international institution in real time, in public, without consequence — while the institution’s president smiles for the cameras like a court jester who forgot which one of them wears the crown.

And this is exactly how it works everywhere else, too. The same logic that overturns a red card by phone call is the logic that overrides international law by veto, that shreds treaties, that sells weapons with one hand while accepting peace prizes with the other. If a country will not respect the rules of a game — a game! the lowest-stakes, most joyful covenant humanity has — why would anyone believe it will respect the rules of war, of trade, of human rights? The World Cup was a test with training wheels. It was failed anyway.

The Remedy: A Lifetime Ban for Rule-Breaking Hosts

So here is my proposal, and I offer it to FIFA, the IOC, and every international federation with a spine left to locate:

Write it into the hosting agreements. If a host government politically interferes with officiating or disciplinary decisions, if a host unilaterally alters the laws or format of the game for commercial or political benefit, if a host uses the ceremony of an international competition to elevate itself above the other participating nations — that country is disqualified from hosting any future edition. Permanently. Players don’t suffer; the country can still qualify and compete like everyone else, under the same rules as everyone else. That’s the whole point. It only loses the privilege it proved it cannot handle: holding the whistle.

Fans should demand it. Federations should demand it. Canada and Mexico, freshly humbled at their own tournament, should be first in line to demand it.

A red card, after all, is not a punishment. It is a protection — of everyone else on the pitch. It’s time the hosts learned they can get one too.

May the best team (Spain) win on Sunday. May the referee’s decisions stand. And may nobody’s phone ring.

By Vahid Razavi — ForeverPeaceNow.com | ParentsPlea.com | Author of The Age of Nepotism, Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof and the forthcoming NO ETHICS IN BIG TECH (releasing Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2026)

 

Categories
Africa Asia Global issues Iran refugee war and peace

Starving the Global South: How the Israel-US war on Iran and the Hormuz Blockade Are Setting the Table for Mass Famine

Idle fertilizer cargo ship blockaded in the Strait of Hormuz contrasted with an African farmer in a failed field holding an empty fertilizer sack.
137 days into a war nobody voted for, one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade is trapped behind a blockade — and the poorest farmers on Earth will pay with their harvests, and their children’s lives

For over two years my team and I have documented the human cost of war — the children of Gaza, the war in Iran, the forgotten of the war in the Caribbean. Today I want to talk about a weapon that never appears in the Pentagon’s briefings: hunger. Because the war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28, 2026 is not only killing people with bombs. It is quietly preparing to kill millions more with empty plates, thousands of miles from the battlefield, in villages that could not find Tehran on a map.

As I write this, on July 15, 2026, the war has been grinding on for 137 days. The Strait of Hormuz — first closed by Iran in retaliation for the February 28 attacks, then sealed further by an American naval blockade — remains effectively shut to commercial fertilizer traffic. A fragile ceasefire has technically failed and control of the strait remains one of the core unresolved disputes, and shipping traffic is still minimal. The men who started this war will never miss a meal because of it. The same cannot be said for a farmer in Malawi, a mother in the Sahel, or a rice grower in South Asia.

The chokepoint nobody talks about

We hear endlessly about oil. But the Strait of Hormuz is also the artery of the world’s food system. According to the United Nations, roughly one-third of the entire global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through this single waterway. The IFPRI calculates that the closure has blocked around 21 million metric tons of annual urea export capacity from the Gulf region alone. NPR reports that the shutdown has bottled up close to half of the world’s urea exports — the most common nitrogen fertilizer on Earth. The region also supplies roughly a quarter of global ammonia trade and nearly half the world’s sulfur, the feedstock for phosphate fertilizer.

The market response was immediate and brutal. Granular urea out of Egypt — the global bellwether — jumped from roughly $400–490 per metric ton before the war to around $700. The World Bank recorded a 46 percent month-on-month spike in urea prices between February and March, and its Commodity Markets Outlook now projects fertilizer prices will rise 31 percent on average in 2026 — the worst affordability crisis since the Russia–Ukraine shock of 2022. By spring, fertilizer prices were running roughly 80 percent higher year-on-year.

Fertilizer is not a luxury good. It is the difference between a harvest and a failure. Norman Borlaug’s green revolution fed billions with synthetic nitrogen. Take it away, and the mathematics of hunger reassert themselves with terrifying speed.

Africa and Asia: the collateral damage

The countries most exposed to this shock are precisely the ones with the least responsibility for the war. FAO data reported by Forbes Africa shows how deeply the continent depends on Gulf fertilizer: Malawi imports 57 percent of its fertilizer from the region, Namibia 53 percent, Uganda and South Africa 51 percent, Madagascar 45 percent, Kenya 38 percent.

And the timing could not be crueler. The FAO’s Director-General warned in Rome this month that a delay of even a few weeks forces farmers to reduce fertilizer application or abandon it altogether — and that the damage is transmitted forward into the next harvests, tightening food supplies through the second half of 2026 and into 2027. The Sahel’s main planting season runs June through August — right now — overlapping with the lean season, when household food stocks are already exhausted. Southern Africa’s planting window opens in October–December; if affordable fertilizer has not returned by then, an entire second growing season is lost. The World Bank warns that rice output in South Asia, Southern Africa and parts of East Asia could fall by 20 to 50 percent. There is no need to speculate about the weather; the farming calendar alone tells us the catastrophe is already locked in.

The numbers of a preventable atrocity

Consider where the world already stood before this shock hit. According to IPC data, 318 million people across 68 countries face crisis-level hunger in 2026 — Nigeria alone accounts for 27.2 million, the Democratic Republic of Congo 26.7 million. For the first time this century, two famines are running simultaneously, in Gaza and Sudan — both, I will note, man-made. The World Bank reports that nearly 52.9 million people are projected to be acutely food insecure in West and Central Africa during this very June–August lean season, with more than 87 million facing hunger in East and Southern Africa.

Onto this tinderbox, the war throws a torch. The World Food Program estimates the conflict could push 45 million additional people into acute hunger. Forty-five million human beings — for a war of choice.

And who will catch them when they fall? No one. Because the United States spent 2025 dismantling USAID, once the backbone of global food and health assistance. A study published in The Lancet in June 2025 projected that the elimination of USAID funding could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under five. The safety net was burned before the fire started.

Hunger does not stay where it is born

History teaches us what comes next. The food price spikes of 2007–08 triggered riots in dozens of countries. The 2010–11 spike helped ignite the Arab Spring and toppled four governments. People who cannot feed their children do not sit quietly and starve — they move. They walk to the coast, they hand their savings to smugglers, and they board boats for Europe. The Mediterranean graveyard will fill again, and the same European leaders who cheered this war will wring their hands about “migration crises” of their own making. You cannot bomb a region’s food supply and blockade its fertilizer and then act surprised when desperate humanity arrives at your shores.

What must happen

Open the strait. End the war. Restore emergency fertilizer financing for import-dependent nations — the African Development Bank’s Emergency Food Production Facility and the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health initiative point the way, but they cannot substitute for peace. And hold accountable the war profiteers who treat famine as an acceptable externality. Every projection in this article carries uncertainty — that is the nature of forecasts. But the direction is not uncertain. We are watching, in real time and with full documentation, the construction of a famine. No one will be able to say they did not know.

Peace now. Forever peace, now.

By Vahid Razavi — ForeverPeaceNow.com | ParentsPlea.com | Author of The Age of Nepotism, Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof and the forthcoming NO ETHICS IN BIG TECH (releasing Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2026)
Sources
  • CNBC — Fertilizer prices surge amid Iran war (Mar 25, 2026): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/25/fertilizer-price-iran-war-food-security-inflation-urea-potash-nitrogen-farmers.html
  • NPR — War with Iran disrupts fertilizer exports (Mar 26, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/g-s1-115240/iran-war-strait-hormuz-fertilizer-exports-farmers-planting-season
  • IFPRI — How fertilizer policies could exacerbate Hormuz price shocks (May 2026): https://www.ifpri.org/blog/how-fertilizer-policies-could-exacerbate-hormuz-price-shocks/
  • World Bank Food & Nutrition Security Update #121 (Mar 27, 2026): https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/40ebbf38f5a6b68bfc11e5273e1405d4-0090012022/related/Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Update-121-March-27-2026v2.pdf
  • World Bank Food & Nutrition Security Update #122 (May 29, 2026): https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/40ebbf38f5a6b68bfc11e5273e1405d4-0090012022/related/Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Update-122-May-29-2026.pdf
  • FAO — Fertilizer scarcity will affect next harvests, DG warns (Jul 2026): https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/strait-of-hormuz-crisis–fertilizer-scarcity-will-affect-next-harvests-and-food-supplies–fao-warns/en
  • Forbes Africa — Africa’s Fertilizer Crisis (May 29, 2026): https://www.forbesafrica.com/current-affairs/2026/05/29/africas-fertilizer-crisis-threatening-regional-food-security
  • Middle East Institute — From Hormuz to the Sahel (May 2026): https://mei.edu/publication/from-hormuz-to-the-sahel-a-fertilizer-shock-and-a-maghreb-solution/
  • African Agribusiness / IPC — 318 million in crisis-level hunger (Apr 2026): https://africanagribusiness.com/318-million-people-face-crisis-level-hunger-in-2026-across-68-countries/5667/
  • AfDB / Al Jazeera — African governments must act on fertiliser shortages (Apr 2026): https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/african-governments-need-take-urgent-action-fertiliser-shortages-92779
  • GIS Reports — Iran war squeezes critical supplies (Jun 5, 2026): https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/iran-war-strains/
  • foodfacts.org — Inside the 2026 food crisis: https://www.foodfacts.org/articles/global-food-crisis-2026
  • The Lancet — Projected effects of USAID defunding (Jun 2025): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext

 

Categories
News USA

A Senate Seat Is Not a Family Heirloom: The Graham Appointment and the Age of Nepotism

A Seat is Not an Heirloom
Senator Seat Is Not An Heirloom
Lindsey Graham died on a Saturday. By Monday, a president had hand-picked his sister — a woman who has never stood before voters in her life — to sit in the United States Senate. This is nepotism in its purest, most public form.

Eighteen years ago I wrote a book called The Age of Nepotism, about how favoritism toward family and friends corrodes business, politics and society. I never imagined the age would announce itself this brazenly.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died suddenly on July 11, 2026, at age 71, of an aortic dissection, hours after returning from a trip to Ukraine. Whatever one thought of his politics — and readers of this site know I opposed his war hawkishness for decades — a human being died, and his family deserves compassion. My condolences to them are sincere.

But compassion is not a constitutional principle, and grief is not a qualification for the United States Senate.

Forty-eight hours from funeral to coronation

Here is the timeline, and it should trouble every American regardless of party. Graham died Saturday night. By Monday morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he had recommended Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to fill the seat — calling it “a fabulous tribute to Lindsey.” By Monday afternoon, Governor Henry McMaster had appointed her, standing at a podium and framing a seat in the world’s most powerful legislative body as a gift to a grieving sibling: it was his honor, he said, to ask Lindsey’s little sister to finish his work for him.

Finish his work for him. As if the Senate seat belonged to Lindsey Graham personally — a family business to be passed down — rather than to the 5.4 million people of South Carolina.

Who is Darline Graham Nordone?

Let us be fair and precise, because fairness is what separates criticism from smear. Nordone is by all accounts a decent public servant. She spent years as director of public information at the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation Department and has served since 2019 as a Commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind. She holds a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. Her brother became her legal guardian and adopted her when she was 13, after their parents died — a genuinely moving family story.

But here is what she has never done: run for office. Any office. She has never held a legislative position, never crafted policy, never cast a vote on war or taxes or healthcare, never faced a single constituent town hall. Even her supporters concede the point — Senator Tim Scott, endorsing her, called her a “wonderful placeholder.” A placeholder. That is the bar now for the United States Senate: share the right last name.

Her qualification, in the eyes of the president who recommended her, was stated openly: it would be a “tribute” to her brother, “who loved her dearly.” Love is beautiful. Love is not a mandate.

Why this matters beyond South Carolina

Defenders will say: it is only until January, when the term expires; governors appoint caretakers all the time; widows and relatives have filled seats before. All true. And all beside the point. The “widow’s succession” tradition was criticized as nepotism a century ago, and it is nepotism now. The fact that a practice is old does not make it right — it makes it entrenched.

Consider what this appointment actually does. It restored the GOP’s 53–47 Senate majority within 48 hours, chosen not by South Carolinians but by a president in Washington who publicly instructed a governor whom to pick — and the governor complied within hours. Nordone will now cast votes on war powers, on budgets, on judicial confirmations, in a chamber of 100 people who govern 340 million. Every vote she casts will carry the same weight as that of a senator vetted by millions of voters. And the message sent to every talented, qualified public servant in South Carolina — every legislator, mayor, judge who spent decades earning the public’s trust — is that none of it matters as much as bloodline and presidential favor.

This is the same disease I have documented in Silicon Valley boardrooms and dynastic politics the world over, from the Assads, Bush to the Trumps to the Kims: power treated as inheritance. Democracies do not die all at once. They die by precedent — one “harmless tribute” at a time.

The way forward

South Carolina voters will get their say soon: candidates file starting July 21 for an August 11 special primary, with the seat on the ballot in November. I urge the voters of South Carolina — and I say this as someone who agrees with them on very little — to demand candidates who earned their place. And I urge Ms. Nordone, if she is the public servant her record suggests, to do one honorable thing with her borrowed seat: refuse to run for it, vote her conscience rather than her instructions, and hand it back to the people it belongs to.

A Senate seat is not a family heirloom. It is a public trust. The moment we forget the difference, we are no longer citizens — we are subjects.

By Vahid Razavi — ForeverPeaceNow.com | ParentsPlea.com | Author of The Age of Nepotism, Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof and the forthcoming NO ETHICS IN BIG TECH (releasing Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2026)

Sources
  • NBC News — Graham dies at 71: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/sen-lindsey-graham-dies-71-brief-sudden-illness-rcna552722
  • Washington Post — Aortic dissection, death after Ukraine trip: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/12/lindsey-graham-longtime-south-carolina-senator-dies-71/
  • NBC News — McMaster appoints Graham’s sister after Trump recommendation: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-lindsey-graham-sister-darline-mcmaster-appoint-senate-term-rcna587302
  • CBS News — Tim Scott “wonderful placeholder” remark: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lindsey-graham-replacement-senate-south-carolina-governor/
  • WIS TV — Nordone’s background, first woman to represent SC in Senate: https://www.wistv.com/2026/07/13/mcmaster-announce-replacement-us-senate-after-death-lindsey-graham/
  • TIME — Nordone appointment and career details: https://time.com/article/2026/07/13/darline-nordone-lindsey-graham-sister-south-carolina-senate-trump-mcmaster/
  • Fox News — Appointment restores 53–47 GOP majority: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lindsey-grahams-sister-appointed-senate-gop-rushes-protect-fragile-majority
  • CNBC — Special primary Aug 11, candidate filing: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/13/trump-lindsey-graham-darline-south-carolina-senator.html