What the hell is going on with all these toxic disasters in the news?

Over the past week, we’ve had a terrifying crisis at the GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove, CA, involving a pressurized tank of toxic chemicals on the verge of spilling or exploding for days and the evacuation of 50 thousand people in Orange County.

At the same time, right up the road in LA, we had a spill of thousands of gallons of crude oil that got into the LA River  

Then, news broke of the horrifying tank rupture and explosion at the Nippon Dynawave paper mill in Longview, Washington, involving hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic liquid and 11 workers who were killed. 

People have been asking me all week, “What the hell is going on?” And that’s because I’m a professional editor and an award-winning journalist who’s been covering toxic disasters like this for years. Also, I’m from Orange County, and my family lives in Garden Grove, about 10 minutes from the GKN Aerospace facility, so I’ve been watching all of this very closely. 

If you haven’t been obsessively investigating these kinds of stories like I have, the recent rapid-fire bombardment of headlines can make it seem like all these toxic disasters are coming out of nowhere. An explosion here, a toxic spill there, a fire there. “Why is this happening? And what the hell do we do?” 

So, right off the bat, the most important thing to understand is that this is not all just happening now. It’s been happening, and most of the time you just haven’t been hearing about it. 

Did you hear about the toxic explosion and fire at the Smitty’s Supply facility in Roseland, Louisiana in August? 

Did you hear about the toxic Biolab fire in Conyers, Georgia the year before that? 

How about the toxic lithium battery fire at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California?

I promise you, this is just the tip of the iceberg…

All the craziness this week actually gives me extreme deja vu that goes back to the first toxic disaster I covered while it was unfolding: The 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. 

From the train derailment itself to the disastrous and unnecessary decision three days later to empty five rail cars’ worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set it on fire—releasing a massive black death plume into the air and exposing communities for miles to deadly toxins—that story was so horrific and unbelievable that it drew the attention of the public and the media, and then the public and the media started noticing that more train derailments were happening all over the place. 

And it felt then exactly then like it does now. People were rightly asking, “What the hell is happening? Is the sky falling? Is this all part of some big conspiracy or what?” 

But because I had been interviewing so many railroad workers, I knew the reality that the US averages over 1,000 train derailments a year. Which is a big problem, but it’s not a problem the media had covered much before East Palestine, so when they finally did start covering derailments, it felt like it was all happening suddenly and it was all coming out of nowhere.

But, again, because I’ve spoken to railroad workers across the industry, I also knew that this is part of a larger problem that is the result of decades of deregulation, corporate consolidation, and ruthless, profit-seeking, cost-cutting railroad executives and their Wall Street shareholders destroying the rail industry and our supply chain so they could rake in record profits. Cutting jobs, year after year. Piling more work onto fewer workers and working them to the bone. Making the trains longer, heavier, and more unwieldy. Automating human jobs and removing layers of security designed to keep workers safe and the communities those trains are blazing through safe as well. 

This all comes down to these companies obsessively trying to lower their operating ratios, year after year, and sacrificing long-term safety for short-term profits. 

Don’t forget that, throughout 2022, railroad workers were preparing to go on strike for the first time in decades, and they were warning me and anyone who would listen that, if these greedy rail giants and Wall Street bloodsuckers weren’t reined in, it was only a matter of time before a deadly catastrophe happened on the rails. Then, President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to break the potential rail strike in early December of 2022, workers had contracts shoved down their throats, and nothing on the rails fundamentally changed. Then, two months later, the derailment in East Palestine happened.

There are two really important lessons here that we need to learn to understand what’s happening now, in 2026, with these toxic disasters around the country. 

First, like with the train derailments, there is a similar dynamic going on here where a high-profile disaster has people and the media just paying more attention to these things now. 

As a journalist who covers these kinds of disasters year round, all over the country, in red states and blue states, in cities and rural areas, I can tell you that: These disasters aren’t just starting now and they’re not freak accidents coming out of nowhere. And if you think you’re safe and far away from the danger, I have some bad news for you… 

You may be living in or near a “sacrifice zone” and not even know it. You could be breathing in toxic exhaust from nearby factories and trash incinerators, your pipes may have lead that’s poisoning you, your local water supplies may be contaminated by runoff from industrial plants, nuclear facilities, fracking operations, coal mines, landfills, massive industrial farms and concentrated animal feeding operations. A truck or train or ship, operated by exhausted and exploited workers and hauling hazardous chemicals, could crash by your home. A military base or government-owned plant could be polluting your body and blood with PFAS/PFOS or radiation. Or a giant damn data center could be moving to your town. 

Again, this shit is everywhere.

And if you’re only seeing this in Democrat or Republican terms, if you’re only looking at the headlines and not the history behind these toxic disasters, then you are not gonna see the full picture here. This is not a red state or a blue state problem, this is a working-class problem. Corporations and the government are turning more of America into one giant “sacrifice zone,” and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we realize.  

Just like with the corporate behemoths and Wall Street vultures who destroyed the railroad system with the help of their bought-off politicians in both parties, the crisis we’re in now developed over time.  And while every toxic disaster is different, I often feel like I’m investigating a serial killer because I hear the same stories coming from different disaster zones around the country. 

And if I had to name that killer, its name would be: Profit. Specifically, it’s our political and economic system that prioritizes private profits over the public good and working people’s lives. 

That has been the driving force behind decades of policy measures to deregulate industries, corrupt the very government agencies that are supposed to regulate them, defang the penalties for polluting our community, and disempower the workers and local residents affected by them so they can’t do anything about it. And, of course, that is the driving force behind all these greedy executives and Wall Street shareholders across industries obsessively cutting costs while simultaneously speeding up production, ignoring safety protocols and removing safety measures, and almost always choosing short-term profits over long-term investments in safer facilities, stronger worker protections, and less outdated equipment until and unless a catastrophe happens. 

Basically, all this dangerous, life-threatening, environmentally hazardous stuff has ended up all around us, and it’s all gotten less safe, over many years of corporations and politicians “fucking around” for their own gain at our expense. Now, America is in the “find out” stage, and working people are the ones getting stuck with the toxic bill.

💾

This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on May 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

By the end of World War 2 in Europe, that continent’s extremely violent self-destruction had killed tens of millions and wrecked many economies. Its politically dominant employer classes had driven their national governments to a clash that had produced those results. By 1945 the war’s outcome had proved far worse than many in those classes had imagined or wanted before the war. Europeans had struggled after 1917/1918 to overcome their self-destruction in World War 1. In the short span between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second World War, Europe destabilized itself via its reparations program, Germany’s staggering inflation, and then global capitalism’s worst ever collapse in 1929. The consequences of those destabilizations ramified across Europe and undermined the League of Nations effort to prevent a second world war.

In 1945, for most Europeans, the greatest urgency attached to recovery from the war. For Europe’s employing classes, more urgent still were defenses against certain immediate threats. Russia’s army had been crucial to defeating the Nazis and to forging Russia’s post-war alliances with Eastern Europe. The mass of the USSR’s military forces, potentially supplemented by those of its new Eastern European allies, struck western Europe’s employer classes as existential threats. After 1945, western Europe’s employer classes smoothly and quickly refocused their hatred from a dead Hitler to the living Stalin and to their nations’ communist parties allied to Stalin.

Western Europe’s employer classes were threatened domestically by communist and socialist political parties whose militants had often led underground anti-fascist or anti-Nazi resistances. Thereby those militants often became broadly popular leaders. Across Europe national communist parties collaborated in various ways with one another (including the powerful Soviet party). Some post-war European heads of state such as France’s Charles de Gaulle included communist party leaders in their governments. In reaction to such developments, Europe’s employer classes quickly became obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.”

A parallel development had happened across the Atlantic in the US. There the Great Depression after 1929 had provoked a mass political shift leftward by the US public. Employees in unprecedented numbers had joined industrial unions allied in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. Because the socialists and communists were often the militants in the CIO’s successful organizing drives across major industries, employers in the US were all the more alarmed by those successes in the 1930s and the 1940s. The CIO, socialist and communist parties also formed a far more powerful coalition within the Democratic Party than they had ever been before 1929.

The alliance between the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt and the CIO-socialist-communist collaborations – the so-called “New Deal” coalition – terrified the employer class. The coalition’s key 1930s achievements included establishing the Social Security system, federal unemployment insurance, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal public jobs program that hired many millions of the then unemployed. What terrified the employer class even more was how the New Deal coalition paid for those achievements. It reformed the federal tax system in a sharply progressive direction. Because corporations and the rich were especially taxed, US wealth and income inequalities dropped sharply. Then in the 1940s, the same US government that took huge steps against economic inequality at home allied itself with the Communist Party leadership of the USSR (Stalin) to fight World War 2 against fascism.

By 1945, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the US employer class had become, like its European counterpart, obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.” Parallel obsessions in western Europe and the US converged in a joint plan. Employers and their political supporters and dependents attacked Communist parties everywhere, depicting them as mere agents or dupes of a foreign power, namely the USSR. They demonized the USSR as the epitome of evil, a dark empire threatening democracy, freedom, Judeo-Christian values, religion per se, civil liberties, and so on. A Cold War was declared between the former allies, NATO emerged, and the Warsaw Pact followed as did arms races and geo-political confrontations. The US would lead NATO to “contain the Soviet threat.” The US organized alliances across other continents while locating hundreds of military bases across them. Beyond means of “containment,” the bases marked and enforced a new informal US global empire that replaced much of the old British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Japanese, and other expiring colonialisms.

“Anti-communism” ideologically unified the domestic and international strategies of the employer classes in Europe and the United States. Under that ideological banner, those employer classes mobilized their governments to collaborate with them to destroy national communist parties and the USSR. As global hegemon, the US went further. It demonized socialism and socialist parties by defining and treating them as nearly identical with their communist counterparts. It also used anti-communism as a major ideological weapon to replace formal European and Japanese colonialisms by the informal, US-dominated “rules based international order.”

The US-western Europe connection helped employer classes in both regions to repress or at least weaken their nations’ communist and socialist parties. The US moved very aggressively (as in the Taft-Hartley law of 1947) also to destroy labor unions at home and collaborated with anti-union forces across Europe. Where war-weakened Europe lost its colonies, a strong post-war US could and did rush in to integrate the ex-European colonies into a US empire. The new US empire had to be informal. It had to allow the ex-colonies formal political independence even as it subordinated them to US economic, military, and political dominance across most of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europe sank into the role of the US’s very junior partner.

The US-western Europe connection brought the US valuable allies against the USSR. Given the military technology of the two world wars – reliance on huge armies fighting across immense terrains – Europe was a land buffer usefully located between the US and the USSR. It provided added protection to the Atlantic ocean’s water buffer. European colonialism had created a genuine world economy that the US could take over. Within that world economy’s particular hierarchy, Europeans were dominant nearly everywhere (except, of course, in the case of Japanese colonialism). Non-Europeans were integrated as subordinated people (economically, politically, culturally). As the Europeans’ formal empires gave way to the US informal empire, colonialist hierarchies persisted with the only real changes occurring at the top. There the civilian and military chiefs of the US (and their delegates) chose, elevated and enriched local elites to direct its informal empire’s development.

The Marshall Plan funded postwar Europe’s recovery in ways that also secured its subordinate role in the new US empire. Funds distributed by the US Central Intelligence Agency since 1947, by the US Endowment for Democracy since 1983, and by other public and private groups supplemented the Marshall money. The advisers who often came with the funds gave Europe’s anti-communist political parties, mass media, labor unions, academic and cultural organizations, many means to use against their domestic enemies. The post-1945 US-western Europe alliance mounted an immense, richly-funded, never ending campaign to shape and control world history. It worked well, overcoming numerous challenges, for 70 years until internal and external forces combined to end it. Now, as the US-western Europe connection dissolves, the contours of its totality and historical significance become clearer.

The relentless rise of China’s economy outgrew the economies of all parts of the US-western Europe alliance over recent decades. China thereby contributed crucially to that alliance’s dissolution. So too has China’s ability simultaneously to forge a new global economic coalition, the BRICS (initially Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The BRICS’ establishment and growth (with new members and partners) responded to their felt needs for mutual support and less economic dependence on the US. The BRICS passed a milestone in 2020 (downplayed in Europe and the US) when their aggregate GDP surpassed that of the G7. The former has continued without interruption to outgrow the latter through the present.

The anti-colonialism that inspired the transitions from colonies to independent nations over the last century has survived that transition. It sometimes infuses rebellions against the hegemony of the US. At other times and places it coalesces with religious movements and populist social movements. In these and other ways, it too helps shape changing patterns of global trade and investment. Ex-colonies seek and engage alternatives to trade and investment with former colonial masters in London, Paris, Berlin, etc. They form new economic partnerships with China and increasingly with other BRICS. Increasing competition and lost economic opportunities challenge western Europe, Japan and the US. They also reduce the role of the US dollar as world currency.

The Trump regime represents both the extent of that decline and extreme efforts to stop or at least slow it. Hitting nearly the whole world with tariffs, suddenly and massively without warnings or negotiations, is a desperate act. Offering subsequently to lower initially high tariff rates in exchange for tribute (foreign nations’ commitments to spend and invest $ hundreds of billions in the US) is a blunt, stark, and hostile act. That European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accepted it is a craven act of Europe’s even more desperate submission. The war on Iran with Israel without consultation or preparation with its European and other allies, coupled with demands for massive, risky support for the US war effort, was also a desperate act. Its goal was to reverse the decline of the US empire; its result was the opposite. The decline accelerated.

The decline, still not admissible publicly in most US politicians’ discourses, nonetheless lurks everywhere in widespread feelings of lost national direction and/or impending social doom. Trump bitterly reproaches former allies like Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and, above all, western Europe. For example, he rewrites post-1945 history as a story of western Europeans, among others, cheating and abusing the US economy because weak US governments failed to resist and fight back. Trump presents his tariffs as the overdue fight back heroically ending the previous weak governments. Trump was so invested in such political theater situating him as “the strong leader,” that his sudden, rushed tariff program was intolerable even to a Supreme Court he otherwise controls.

Abducting Maduro from Venezuela, the 12-day war on Iran with Israel in June, 2025, and their longer one begun in March, 2026: these are also pieces of the same political theater. They are made-for-the-media distractions: not just from the hovering Epstein scandals or the deeply-troubled inequalities of the domestic US economy, but from the deeper threats of a declining empire. Thus a reaction formation type of neo-colonialism inspires many of Trump’s favorite distractions. So far from admitting decline, those distractions construct a US empire as strong and growing, taking over nations like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran while planning the same for Panama, Canada, Greenland, Mexico and others. When charged with violating international law and the whole United Nations project, Trump proudly rebrands both actions as bold signs of US strength.

Now again, as in 1945, western Europe and the US find themselves at crossroads. The declining empires then were the Europeans’. Now in 2026 it is the decline of the US empire that has become both the US’s and Europe’s problem. In its desperate moves to slow or stop that decline, the US has turned on its subordinated European partners. That problem and that turning derive from the empire decline shaping this historical moment.

In Trump’s second presidency, he withdrew much of the US’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. This not only weakened the Ukrainian side in that war but also left a militarily underdeveloped Europe to rely even more on economic sanctions against Russia. Europe thus lost access to cheap Russian oil and gas. High energy prices resulted, drove up European export prices, and thus damaged its competitiveness. Meanwhile, China’s relentless growth miracle (fast-rising productivity and low inflation) continued its many years of outperforming both Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder and European competitiveness generally. China’s GDP growth far exceeded that of the entire West for the last few decades. Volkswagen’s crisis was so severe it seriously considered the US invitation to move its immense company to the US from Germany. Deindustrialization now deeply disturbs all of Europe’s economies.

The global economy looks increasingly like a great contest between China and the US with Europe increasingly out of the picture or merely a footnote to it. Trump’s massive tariffs on or demands for tribute from Europe combine both abandonments and assaults by the US on its former allies. NATO trembles and faces growing forces of dissolution. Trump demands European nations fund their own defenses in part because the declining US empire needs to enlarge its own military as an offset, Trump hopes, to that decline.

The Europeans are stuck in that metaphorical room whose walls are closing in on them. Their subordination is reflected in their passage from junior partners in US led Coalitions of the Willing to the 2026 Iran war that Spain and Italy have refused to join. Trump openly threatens to leave NATO. The employer classes of Europe are most worried about the combination of no more US-funded defense protection via NATO and the compensatory need to fund expanded European military spending. That will likely mean reducing European spending on its social welfare model of capitalism. Employer classes who do that risk triggering massive opposition from the left (labor unions, socialist, communist and anti-capitalist parties increasingly working together).

So far, Europe’s employer classes have tried to cope with this situation by a quasi-hysterical campaign to demonize Russia as a threat to invade and conquer its European neighbors. Europe’s current, mostly low-in-the-polls heads of state position themselves as great bulwarks against the Russian danger. This strategy aims to justify the increased spending on defense that in turn necessitates reduced government welfare spending. The latter is then rationalized as the whole society’s necessary sacrifice for safety from the Russian demon. The employer classes hope that this way of retaining their wealth, income and power will not be opposed by their working classes as the political issue of our times. The employer classes prefer that the great hyped Russian danger be the political issue.

While the Russian danger discourse might secure Europe’s employer classes a few more years of sitting atop Europe’s wealth and power distributions, it fails to address Europe’s long-term decline. That promises to continue and quite possibly accelerate because little is being done in Europe to directly oppose that continuance. Indeed, the disagreements inside Europe on whether to join the US/Israeli war on Iran coupled with fear of being singled out for retaliations by Trump heightened the competitive pandering among Europeans to curry favor with him. Such divisions have always weakened European unity. Rebuilding that unity is surely a necessary, albeit insufficient, component of any imaginable rescue of Europe from its deepening decline.

The long, uneven, and sometimes frustratingly slow historical shift from capitalist colonialism to today’s anti-imperialism undermined first Europe’s and now the US’s empires. A new crossroads beckons. One way leads toward a new Chinese global empire. Another leads toward a multi-national program of mutual accommodation, a kind of socialism with global characteristics.

On a patch of sidewalk on a busy industrial corridor in Newark, federal agents with rifles, metal batons, flak vests, and balaclavas faced off against unarmed activists with cardboard signs and a bullhorn. Detained workers could be heard on the soccer field behind the prison walls, shouting in Spanish, “¡Libertad!” (Freedom!)

Since May 22, 300 of them are on a work stoppage and hunger strike. Over video chat, one worker told the crowd outside that they had stopped eating and working for as little as $1 an hour (or no pay at all) to demand an improvement in their living conditions. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom. We’re not treated like people. We’re treated like animals.”

The hunger strikers are demanding to meet with the governor, the release of young and elderly detainees and all medically vulnerable people, and ultimately, freedom for all.

For months a group of activists with the ICE Out of NJ coalition, which includes the immigrant rights group Cosecha, the Catholic advocacy group Pax Christi, and the worker center New Labor, has been protesting outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed privately owned detention center where immigrants, mostly Latino, are jailed without due process.

Families and lawyers of the detainees report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and guards with the GEO Group, the private-prison contractor, have been denying them medical care, offering them food swarming with worms, and refusing them bail bond or access to their lawyers. Many were snatched from construction job sites, or still wearing their service-industry work clothes; others were taken while reporting at courthouses for green-card appointments.

“In our cases, we had already been processed, we were complying with legal requirements, and there was no order from a judge for our detention or arrest,” wrote a worker identified as Brian in a handwritten letter in early May, co-signed by 300 others with redacted names, pleading for help from elected officials. “ICE officers did not take into account the fact that there was already an immigration court date, and they arrested us during check-in appointments at USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] facilities.”

FROM SCARCE FOOD TO NONE

They struck because they wanted to hit their jailers’ bottom line, but they were already going without food, and their health has further deteriorated. “People aren’t eating because of the strike we are organizing and there’s no medical assistance,” said a released hunger striker named Luis to Radio Jornalera (Day Laborer Radio). Speaking with his back to the camera to conceal his identity for fear of retaliation by ICE, Luis said another detainee had become severely dehydrated and couldn’t walk. Food was already scarce or inedible, even before the strike.

When hunger strikers sought medical help at the nursing center in the prison, “they wouldn’t lend us the wheelchair,” Luis said. “We had to put in our own pills, give our own liquids with sugar and a little salt to compensate for electrolytes.” He said there has been no due process for the detentions; he was detained by ICE during a routine check-in, which doesn’t normally occur for people who have a legal case going through the immigration system. People with no criminal records have faced exorbitant fees of upwards of $50,000 for bail, or outright denials to be released on bond.

“If they freed us, we wouldn’t generate profit for this business,” Luis told the Guardian.

Nationwide, the majority of imprisoned immigrants through 2025 had no criminal records. As the American Prospect has reported, the GEO Group is raking in record profits with a federal contract valued at $1 billion. Some of these profits come from imprisoned immigrants working for little or no pay. Workers report they are coerced into participating in the government’s supposedly Voluntary Work Program through solitary confinement and other forms of torture.

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, with an asterisk: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Convicted or not, all labor has value. But what’s doubly wrong is that immigrants in ICE jails haven’t even been convicted, and are being denied due process.

VIOLENT RETALIATION

In what activists are calling retaliation, on May 28 the GEO guards and ICE agents responded to the hunger strike and work stoppage with beatings. Detainees have reported to their lawyers and families that striking units have even had the building’s ventilation cut off, while the floors in some cells are smeared with the blood of detainees.

“Right now there are ICE agents inside of Delaney Hall violently beating the hunger strikers,” Nedia Morsy, director of the nonprofit Make the Road NJ, said in a statement. “Someone will be killed if no one intervenes and shuts this down.”

Gabriela Fuentes said her husband Jose Marroquin called her around 1:30 p.m. to “say they were being beaten and pepper sprayed… This started because they [ICE] wanted to take the only person who translates for them in the unit.”

“They wanted to take him away,” she said outside the prison in a video recording. “So all of the prisoners asked to not take him away. So then agents, ICE agents came to the unit and tried to cuff him, and that’s when the confrontation started.”

She said that the detainees lifted their hands to indicate they didn’t want to fight. The guards took them to their cells. “And then there were the prisoners banging on the doors to please let them out,” Fuentes said. “My husband says there was blood in the floor and in the walls that clearly the agents now were cleaning up because they knew they messed up.”

In a statement, Fuentes said that she bolted to the prison to speak out about what was happening inside. When she got there, she saw that “one of the guys was taken by the ambulance because a guard broke his nose.”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said agents responded to “to a physical fight involving detainees at Delaney Hall.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwyane Mullin has upped the ante, threatening to retaliate against sanctuary cities by pulling Customs and Border Protection officers from airports.

Even before the strike, speaking out about conditions in the prison was met with retaliation. “We have to be very careful, everything we say and do is closely monitored, at all times,” Jordi Alvarado told local news outlet NJ.com in early May. “And then, almost as if on cue, his face abruptly disappeared from the screen of the iPhone advocates had used to call him,” reported NJ.com columnist Daysi Calavia-Robertson. On the blacked out screen, a message popped up. “Call paused.” And shortly after, “Call ended.”

OFFICIAL ACTION DEMANDED

Local and federal elected officials have put out statements condemning the deplorable living conditions and treatment of detainees. New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat, went inside the prison on May 25, came out, joined the protestors, and got pepper sprayed. But the ICE Out of NJ coalition is demanding more action.

“Elected officials, the Governor, and the Attorney General cannot continue ignoring what is happening behind these walls,” said Jorge Torres of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in a statement. “They must enter the facility immediately, speak directly with the people, and hold GEO Group and ICE accountable for this violence.” The detained immigrant workers have written three letters to legislators pleading for their release; they’ve received no reply.

“I have never thought Delaney Hall should open,” said New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill at a news conference on May 26. “We had a law here in New Jersey against privately run detention facilities…The fact that they wouldn’t let me in there gives you some sense that there is some ‘there’ there, and that’s really concerning to me.”

The cruel impunity is as plain as day, both inside and outside the immigration detention center. On the night of May 27, federal agents struck protesters with batons, pushing one into the path of a tractor trailer wheel, a video shows.

On Thursday after reports of assaults on detainees began circulation, some local elected officials were allowed inside the prison, but access is still limited. That same day, the New Jersey Department of Health was denied full access for an inspection.

The reports often come from the families of the detained. “We’ve been hearing from constituents who have family members inside, including a mother who is being beaten by ICE agents and an 11-year-old girl who spoke to her father inside who said that there are a lot of people inside who are bloodied,” U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman told NJ.com on the afternoon of May 28.

SOLIDARITY FUNDRAISERS

Gabriela Soto’s husband Martin Soto Hernandez was detained in January while buying diapers. He had previously been arrested for a domestic violence incident, but the charges were later dismissed and expunged, according to his lawyers. His lawyer says Soto Hernandez has lost 110 pounds: “He’s skin and bones.”

Even in his poor condition, he helped organize the hunger strike and was later transferred to a different detention camp in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on May 25.

“My husband Martin Soto got illegally detained by ICE tonight,” Soto wrote on a GoFundMe page to raise funds for her husband’s legal defense shortly after he was imprisoned. “We never fully got a lawyer for his immigration status because his court date was due for 2028… I want to be able to have a lawyer defend him so that he can stay here. His kids depend on him. His daughter knows he is her world. This is unfair what Trump is doing to this country. He’s ripping families apart and this is not fair. Please help us.”

“At this very moment, Delaney represents a dark and desolate world for those who sought to attain the American Dream,” said Gloria Guerrero of New Labor in Spanish to Labor Notes. Guerrero organizes alongside domestic workers whose husbands have been detained in ICE prisons. “Children wait for the return of parents detained by a cruel and inhumane system—locked in dungeons, treated like criminals, and stripped of every right, including the right to humane treatment,” she said.

“Yet for others, it is the greatest business venture in history—one that utterly disregards the dignity of human beings. Delaney is a Latino concentration camp where many are forced to sell themselves out of sheer necessity, shielding their faces in shame from a community that cries out: ‘Quit that job now! I am your people! I am your kin!’ Meanwhile, on the inside, others are holding fast in a strike of protest and resistance—a struggle to which we offer hope, and which we support from the outside!”

On May 24, Karam Ismael, 43, received a phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli army officer. The caller delivered one message: evacuate your home in 20 minutes before we bomb it. At first, he thought it was another scare tactic, similar to the messages the Israeli army used to send during incursions into neighborhoods. It was one of several calls made to residents of Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, with a warning that covered residential blocks near al-Quds Supermarket and a local UNRWA clinic. The area included dozens of homes that had not previously been bombed throughout the past two years.

Four minutes after receiving his first call, Ismael’s phone rang again. The officer told him they had 10 minutes left, ordering him to evacuate immediately and to notify his neighbors. This time, he took the threat seriously and fled with his neighbors, leaving his belongings behind.

After half an hour, quadcopter drones appeared and hovered above the residential block, followed by the fighter jets. The entire block was leveled.

This was not the first such incident in recent weeks in which the Israeli army warned entire residential areas to evacuate and then bombed their homes. The Israeli army has been following a new pattern during the ceasefire: targeting residential blocks that had not experienced a ground invasion and had not been bombed during the war, remaining intact and still sheltering their owners. Over the past week, the army appears to have escalated this approach by specifically targeting residential blocks that had previously remained undamaged.

The officer who had called Karam Ismael stayed on the line with him for more than half an hour, making sure everyone had left. When Ismael asked which house they were targeting, the officer cut him off. “That’s none of your concern,” he recalled being told. “Just inform the neighbors.”

Over the past week alone, the army struck residential blocks belonging to the Al-Kurd family in Nuseirat on May 22, the al-Khatib family in al-Bureij and the Abu Shamala family in al-Maghazi on May 23, and the al-Tawil family in Nuseirat again on May 26. In each case, the pattern that emerged was clear: civilian residential blocks with no apparent connection to military activity were bombed for the first time in the war, displacing their families for the first time as well.

The escalation comes as Israel has been openly threatening to resume the genocide in Gaza. After Palestinian factions refused a U.S. demand to disarm, rejecting conditions put forward by Trump’s envoy Nickolay Mladenov in mid-April, Israeli media reported that the army was preparing to restart operations “as early as next month.” Netanyahu signaled the same after the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, stating that Israel would now “focus on Hamas.” According to reporting by Drop Site News, Mladenov presented Hamas with a 15-point roadmap, making total disarmament a precondition for any reconstruction or Israeli withdrawal. Hamas and other factions rejected these terms as “the occupation’s conditions,” pointing out that Israel had not implemented a single one of its own obligations under the first phase of the deal: the Rafah crossing remained blocked, no reconstruction materials had been allowed in, and Israeli forces had expanded their presence deep beyond the agreed boundaries.

No more options

According to residents who were made homeless during the Nuseirat bombing, the Israeli army targeted one home, but the strike damaged six neighboring houses, rendering them uninhabitable.

Ahmad al-Kurd, 34, said that the army did not initially specify which house it intended to strike, instead ordering the entire block to evacuate. “We left our homes carrying nothing and returned to rubble, finding nothing,” he told Mondoweiss. 

Al-Kurd added that even the house that had been targeted was home to over 12 families, each comprising at least 5 people, while the surrounding buildings housed many more, totaling around 25 families.

“What did we do to deserve this?” he exclaimed. “This is happening during a ceasefire, during blessed days as we await Eid al-Adha”.

Al-Kurd also mentioned that there was no Hamas presence in the residential neighborhood. “There’s no resistance here,” he said. “There was no justification for the Israeli army to target us.”

Khalil al-Najjar, 41, a resident of al-Bureij who experienced a similar strike, told Mondoweiss that residents also received the same calls from Israeli officers.

“We ran out in fear that missiles would fall on our heads,” he said. “We couldn’t even take a change of clothes. Just what we had on our backs.” 

When they returned to the site of the bombing, they found their homes lying in ruins, al-Najjar added, leaving over 50 families homeless and without any belongings.

“We have no more options left,” he said, explaining that every school-turned-shelter in the area turned them away, while tent encampments had no room or tents to speak of. “So we’re just going to live in the ruins of our homes. What else can we do?”

‘In Gaza, even the child is wanted’

Naama Salem, 49, said that at first she saw neighbors carrying some belongings and rushing out of their homes. When she asked what was happening, they told her a call had come from the Israeli army ordering the neighborhood to evacuate within twenty minutes. 

“At that moment, I felt that the house could be bombed at any second, so I got dressed and left,” she said. “I could not even reach my ID card, which I kept in my bag beside me.”

Her daughter, a high school student, lost all of her books, notebooks, and study materials in the bombing. For the entire war, Salem’s home hadn’t been bombed. She considered herself lucky to have escaped that fate that had befallen most of Gaza’s population, and believed that the worst was behind her in light of the ceasefire. She assumed the army might strike the home of a wanted person, and that would be it.

“We never imagined that the policy of bombing whole residential blocks would return,” she said.

She added that the situation is getting worse day by day, even during the ceasefire. “Every day, there are people killed. Every day, homes are destroyed, and families are displaced. We sleep in fear of the bombing, we walk the streets in fear, and we sit with our children in fear. Fear has become a permanent guest in our homes, our hearts, and among our loved ones,” she said. “This situation is unbearable. It is more than human beings can stand.”

Khalil al-Najjar, the Bureij resident who lost his home, said he knows his neighborhood and all of its residents one by one — and that there are no members of Hamas or resistance groups among them.

There was no one wanted by the Israeli army inside the residential block, he asserted. Rather, what Israel really wants is to turn as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible into displaced and homeless people. “It’s to pressure us into leaving our homeland,” he explained.

“In Gaza, the child is wanted. The woman is wanted. The man is wanted. The elder is wanted. Even the animals are wanted by the Israeli army,” he said.

For more than a week, the nation of Bolivia has been in a state of full-on revolt.

In response to neoliberal reforms by the recently elected right-wing government led by President Rodrigo Paz, unions have launched a general strike, peasants and Indigenous peoples have set up dozens of roadblocks throughout the country, and massive marches have been held in the capital, La Paz. These are just a few expressions of a much broader social discontent, which has brought the country to a halt and stoked mass resistance to the larger project of U.S-aligned, right-wing attacks on workers and social movements in Latin America.

Joseph Bouchard, a social scientist and journalist currently in La Paz as a visiting fellow at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, explained the diverse character of the movement. “It’s sort of a grouping of different social movements and groups that I think represents the wide spectrum within the Bolivian left,” Bouchard told Truthout. “You have teachers unions and workers unions. You have mining unions. You have just regular people joining who are not necessarily part of any movement. You have an Indigenous federation who used to be part of an anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s. You have [former president Evo Morales’s] people … And so you have really all these groups that together add up to sort of the largest representation of the Bolivian left, disaffected voters, organized groups, disorganized groups.”

While the diversity of the movement also brings a wide range of demands, one of the most popular is for President Paz to resign, with some sectors of the movement arguing that the country should maintain a general strike indefinitely until Paz has been ousted. The level of outrage is especially profound considering that Paz has only been in office for six months.

How to Lose a Populace in 6 Months

In October 2025, Bolivia elected right-wing populist Rodrigo Paz, ending 20 years of government by the left-wing MAS (Movement to Socialism) party founded by former president Evo Morales. Paz, running on a campaign of “capitalism for all,” promised to address economic hardships plaguing the country. His campaign also benefited from the implosion of MAS, which was experiencing intense infighting from which it has not recovered.

Despite appealing to the economic concerns of the Bolivian people and positioning himself as more of a centrist than the country’s established (and much more extreme) right, once elected Paz wasted no time in carrying out attacks on the country’s workers and poor. One of his first moves was to eliminate a tax on large fortunes. He has also proposed education policies that teachers have criticized as privatization-oriented measures.

Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: a land privatization law and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies.

Two policies in particular have incited the outrage now rocking the country: Law 1720, a land privatization law which many see as a move to hand over Indigenous lands to agribusiness and other large-scale landowners, and Supreme Decree 5503, which eliminated state fuel subsidies, practically doubling the consumer cost of fuel overnight. Along with the rising fuel costs, Paz’s government has further angered Bolivians by importing low quality fuel, or “junk fuel,” as the people call it, which has reportedly damaged people’s vehicles, imposing repair costs many cannot afford.

It did not take long for the outrage to spread. Bolivia had already seen significant protests in December 2025, just a month into Paz’s presidency, but these were halted due to negotiations between the government and the country’s largest union federation, Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). Despite these negotiations the Paz administration continued advancing neoliberal reforms, further fueling outrage and forcing COB and other unions, including teachers unions, to call strikes at the start of May. Around the same time, rural Indigenous communities embarked on a long march to the capital, while other peasant and Indigenous communities erected blockades across major roads.

Despite its best efforts, the Bolivian government has not yet quashed the nationwide shutdown, though on May 26 the country’s Chamber of Deputies voted to repeal restrictions on the use of military force against protesters. Even before the vote, the state had deployed militarized forces against protesters. This repression has only further radicalized the movement, with some protesters using dynamite, rocks, and slingshots to defend themselves against the military, according to multiple sources on the ground who spoke with Truthout. Reports emerging on social media confirm this as well.

A history student at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés who spoke with Truthout described the repressive climate that the protesters are braving.

“Especially police, they have been repressing the movement with chemical agents, rubber bullets, and so on,” she told Truthout. “[The military] tried to stop the blockades which have been in the roads, but 30 minutes after they left, the blockades were rebuilt with even more people.”

The student, who is a member of the socialist youth group Combate Rojo, asked to remain anonymous due to the doxxing to which members of her organization have been subjected from the far right. She mentioned that arrests and violence have been common in the crackdown on protests.

A Challenge to the Regional Right and U.S. Imperialism

The protests in Bolivia are not merely a national issue. They have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests. These interests are expressed clearly in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which names the Western Hemisphere as the administration’s top region of strategic interest. It states, “The goal is for our partner nations to build up their domestic economies, while an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.”

The protests in Bolivia have implications for a regional strategy in which the United States is relying on far-right allies in Latin America to advance U.S. interests.

Paz has closely aligned Bolivia with the United States, joining the recently formed Shield of the Americas, a military alliance composed mostly of right-wing governments with the stated mission of fighting cartels. On May 21, the alliance issued a joint statement condemning the protests in Bolivia, alleging that the protesters are being led by “criminals and drug traffickers.”

Under the Trump administration, allegations of drug trafficking have been used to justify a wide range of interventionist and militaristic policies including the attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the establishment of a seemingly permanent military occupation along the U.S.-Mexico border, dozens of illegal and deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean, and a growing military campaign in Ecuador that has resulted in the bombing of a civilian farm in a rural village.

Bouchard argued that the U.S. response to the protests is a rejection of Latin American sovereignty.

“You can vote for a government and then decide you’re unhappy with what they’re doing if you feel like they’re betraying their promises or not fulfilling what they voted for,” Bouchard said. “This is how democracy works. U.S. government and right-wing allies in Latin America are basically saying that no protests are ever legitimate; if you vote for a government you’re basically supposed to accept whatever they do after.”

Several of the Latin American governments who signed the Shield of the Americas statement are likely observing the protests in Bolivia with concern that their own populations could draw inspiration from them.

The same week that Bolivian trade unions launched their general strike, Argentina and Chile saw massive student-led demonstrations against attacks on public education. Both Argentine President Javier Milei and Chilean President José Antonio Kast have been pushing their own neoliberal reforms similar to those carried out by Paz.

They know that they can bring down governments … They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions.

Even in Brazil, which is currently governed by the left-wing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, university students and municipal teachers in São Paulo have been on strike and held combative marches against austerity pushed by the state’s far right governor. While the protests in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have not reached anywhere near the level of widespread anger expressed in Bolivia, they demonstrate a regional trend in which workers, students, and broader communities are beginning to rise up against economic strain and far right movements.

The history student who spoke with Truthout said that there are many in the movement in Bolivia who understand that their uprising poses a challenge to far more than just Paz’s agenda.

“[Protesters] mention Milei, they mention the genocide [in Gaza],” she said. “That internationalist connection to U.S. imperialism and Israel, it’s there. You just can’t hide it.”

Bouchard said that the Bolivian people understand their country’s history, and this informs how radical the movement has become and how much more radical it can get.

“They know that they can bring down governments,” Bouchard said. “They’ve done it before many times. These tactics work and they can get concessions. They know that the Paz government is quite weak, and if they use these tactics like they’ve done before they can win.”

Protests erupted on Sunday night outside of the Delaney Hall immigrant jail in Newark, New Jersey, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moved to transfer a strike leader from the jail.

Some 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike on Friday in protest of the conditions at the ICE jail. On Sunday, activists and family members learned that the jail was preparing to move Martin Soto, one of the detainees who had announced the strike.

Gabriela Soto, Martin’s wife, saw ICE agents loading Martin into a van, and ran to block the van that held her husband from leaving the site. Other demonstrators joined in blocking the van from leaving the facility, and forced it back to the detention facility. Protestors formed a blockade for hours to prevent Martin Soto from being moved out of the site.

“Free Martin!” the protestors chanted. “Free them all!”

Later, around 1 am on Monday, ICE agents began to move a caravan of vehicles out of the facility, and protestors again attempted to block the vehicles from leaving. ICE agents then shoved aside protestors, pushing them against the sidewalk and against cars, and pepper sprayed at least one protestor.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson announced on Monday that after “ICE successfully dispersed approximately 70 agitators” it succeeded in transferring Martin to another facility.

Since the start of the hunger strike, family members and supporters have gathered outside of the detention center. Among others, a 10-year-old child spoke about her father, who is currently being imprisoned in the facility by ICE.

On Friday, Gabriela Soto translated calls from prisoners, including her husband Martin, who said, “We deal with racism, with bad conditions, with guards that do not help us…. It gets worse all the time, and they don’t treat us like people.”

The guards soon cut access to the detainees’ phones so that these calls could not continue.

People being imprisoned at Delaney began a hunger strike after signing two letters describing their circumstances and conditions.

“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped — detained without justification — not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” they wrote. “Families are being destroyed and separated.”

“We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases,” they went on. “We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court.”

One participant in the labor and hunger strike wrote in a letter describing the conditions of the jail:

We have people sleeping on the floor for not being processed quick enough. They neglect medications for people who are in dire need of it. All of our bonds are denied and they are telling us to file habeas corpus for everyone that is in here, they constantly tell us we are a danger to society. The same judge that denies your bond is the same judge that reviews our immigration court cases and that is not fair.

Delaney opened as an ICE jail in May 2025 in a $1 billion, 15-year contract between private prison contractor GEO Group and ICE. It is the largest ICE facility on the East Coast and has faced pushback since the announcement of its opening.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim visited the detention center Saturday, and wrote on X that he saw inside it a “high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate senior year”; a woman “who had a miscarriage in the detention facility” and was “left to manage [it] all on her own”; and a “carton with the milk inside congealed solid.”

On Monday, Kim returned to the site, and said that he was pepper sprayed. “Instead of engaging with me and others about the poor conditions, ICE sent in an armored vehicle and a line of armed agents that only poured gasoline on the fire,” he wrote on X. Kim described ICE agents tackling and restraining protestors and firing pepper balls and spray into the crowd.

On Tuesday morning, the protest continued, and video footage from outside Delaney once again shows ICE agents detaining and dragging protestors.

Leqaa Kordia — a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who was arrested in Newark when meeting with immigration officials about her status and then detained for over a year in ICE jails for her Palestine activism — wrote a statement in solidarity with the Delaney hunger strikers.

“When you choose hunger over submission, you’re doing something that terrifies ICE,” she wrote on Monday. “You are proving that even when they break your bodies, they can’t break your will. You are proving that a person stripped of freedom can’t be stripped of dignity.”

“I know the conditions you’re enduring,” she went on. “The rotten food. The medical neglect. The psychological torture of indefinite limbo. I know what it took for you to look at that tray of slop and say: No more. Not until I’m free.”

A judge in Delaware—a state with more registered business entities than people—ruled Monday in favor of a small town that allows corporations to vote in local elections.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz ruled that the town of Fenwick Island, population 400, did not violate the state Constitution by permitting business entities—which make up 12% of the town’s “population”—to vote in municipal elections, as case plaintiff the ACLU of Delaware had claimed.

“What is a ‘person?’ When one cuts to the heart of this case, that is the question,” Karsnitz wrote to open his 20-page ruling.

‼️‼️Delaware Superior Court upholds a municipal ordinance allowing individuals to cast votes on behalf of LLCs, trusts, and corporations in local elections against a challenge that the ordinance constitutes unlawful vote dilution for real persons under the state constitution. aboutblaw.com/blQg

— Anthony Michael Kreis (@anthonymkreis.bsky.social) 2026-05-27T20:46:10.133Z

“According to the law, a person is anyone or anything that can initiate and be subject to legal proceedings. By this conception, any adult, corporation, or institution is a person, but a minor is not a person, a fetus is not a person, and a humanoid robot… is not a person,” the ruling continues. “This highlights that legal personhood is dependent solely on legal recognition.”

The judge noted that in 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended Fenwick Island’s charter “to expand its voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick.”

“Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts,” Karsnitz added.

“I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners,” the judge wrote.

“Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction,” he continued,“ referring to the malevolent artificial intelligence-powered computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film version of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ”However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.“

“Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself,” Karsnitz concluded. “And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.”

Fenwick Island Mayor Natalie Magdeburger told Reuters earlier this year that “a property owner who pays taxes and is subject to our ordinances should have a say in who represents them on our Town Council.”

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Delaware contends that “with over 2 million business entities incorporated in Delaware–roughly double the amount of actual people living in the state–the people of Delaware risk having their voices drowned out when towns like Fenwick Island allow corporate voting.”

Karsnitz’s ruling does not mention Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 US Supreme Court decision affirming that political spending by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other groups is a form of free speech protected by the 1st Amendment that government cannot restrict. The decision ushered in the era of super PACs—which can raise unlimited amounts of money to spend on campaigns—and secret spending on elections with so-called “dark money.”

While Delaware’s corporate personhood laws long predate Citizens United, numerous critics of Monday’s ruling referred to the case, including the progressive legal advocacy group Demand Justice.

A Delaware state judge just ruled that corporations can vote in local elections.

Over 200 "artificial entities" (LLCs, trusts, corporations) are now registered voters in Fenwick Island. That's 12% of the electorate.

Delaware has more corporations chartered in the state than… pic.twitter.com/YJ5EZ1F1en

— Demand Justice (@WeDemandJustice) May 27, 2026

“Corporations aren’t people,” the group asserted on X. “They don’t have kids in local schools, they don’t drink the water, they can’t be jailed for crimes, and they shouldn’t get a vote.”

Some compared Hawaii, where Democratic Gov. Josh Green recently signed legislation clarifying that corporations are not people, with Delaware.

“Hawaii made a move to rein in Citizens United,” writer Van Dennis posted on X, “and Delaware responded, ”The fuck you are.“

Trump administration cuts to grants disbursed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) likely resulted in a delayed response to the current Ebola outbreak in parts of central Africa, former federal health officials have said.

As of Monday, at least 220 people are suspected to have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. More than 500 cases of Ebola have been detected in Congo alone.

Though the virus was officially uncovered just last week, it’s believed that it had been spreading undetected for at least several weeks prior.

The Trump White House dismantled USAID last year, with the State Department absorbing its remaining necessary programs. The cuts affected billions of dollars in grant money for thousands of programs and nonprofit organizations around the world.

If left intact, some of that funding could have resulted in faster detection times for the current outbreak, former federal officials within USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told NBC News,

“What we’ve lost is speed, which is the most important thing in an outbreak like this,” said Nicholas Enrich, former acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID.

People who were once employed in programs funded by the U.S. have had to find new jobs, former CDC medical officer Daniel Bausch pointed out.

“Now they’re driving a taxi in Kinshasa or selling fruit somewhere. So this cadre of reasonably trained people that you can employ just isn’t around,” Bausch explained.

Heather Reoch Kerr, country director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the DRC, also said the lack of funding is disrupting the response to the Ebola outbreak.

“Many facilities in affected areas are operating without basic protective supplies” because of cuts to USAID, Reoch Kerr said.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently addressed the outbreak, saying that health officials within the organization are prepared to tackle the situation head-on. However, “we are facing an extremely serious and difficult outbreak,” Tedros added. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

The cuts to USAID, as well as the Trump administration’s decision to exit WHO (a choice that was finalized earlier this year), will undoubtedly disrupt global health responses, like what’s being seen in central Africa right now, health experts predicted.

The cuts have “disrupted the ability for contact tracing to happen, for those preventive activities to be mounted very well,” Abraham Leno, director of government relations for the humanitarian organization Alight, told The Hill.

Other experts predicted this outcome several months ago.

“Because of these two decisions and the long-lasting consequences, lives will be lost,” said Lindsey Locks, an assistant professor of Global Health at Boston University, in an op-ed last year.

Beyond disease outbreaks, the Trump administration’s decisions will “reverse decades of progress in reducing malnutrition and hunger worldwide,” Locks said.

The administration’s moves to dismantle international health infrastructure will “weaken the shared governance architecture for outbreak preparedness and response,” Chatham House fellow Ebere Okereke wrote in January.

“The WHO’s authority has been diminished,” Okereke added, noting, “Disease surveillance depends on trust.”

“The ‘mosaic’ will be built on the principles of seeking to recruit from both the most oppressed segments and from among the most selfless. … The mosaic must immediately begin a dialogue toward building a consensus—as soon as possible—about how to best further coordinate our collective efforts.” –Russell Maroon Shoatz 

“Freedom is indivisible, or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few. Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom, or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.” –June Jordan 

Oftentimes, powerlessness and despair lead people to turn on one another. Far too many who are scared to fight the crisis will fight their neighbor instead. The history of conquest, colonization, and capitalism is filled with examples. Like clockwork, we can always identify those who are confused, stuck, and deluded by their inability to determine where to direct their fury. In the face of vast oppression, instead of aiming for the head of their tormenters and ruling tyrants, these types blame those next to them. It’s a common reality where poverty flourishes, conflict simmers to a boiling point, and where rigid ideologues preach. In the face of fascism, there are plenty among us in the U.S. who seem doubtful about our collective power. There will need to be some level of understanding in order to overcome. Instead of a call for resentment-filled “unity” or traditional fronts, we can look to what former Black Panther, Black Liberation Army member, and political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz called “the mosaic” for a model of what’s possible. We will not beat back repressive power with a bunch of fragmented groups and individuals beefing over all of the nothingness they have control over.  

Perhaps nowhere throughout the Western world is the pitifulness of empty division more apparent than in the U.S. An ongoing circus of sectarian leftists continue to define themselves by pointing fingers at one another, even going as far as blaming each other for genocides, imperialism, and geopolitics that are far beyond their respective spheres of influence. This is a gross overestimation of their own relevance, size, and impact, indicating a ridiculous disconnect. After all, if you took all of the different sections of leftists (Marxists, anarchists, etc.) in the U.S., and added them together in sum, you would fail to total even half a percent of the U.S. population. That’s why I regularly use this leftist microcosm of a much larger problem to highlight the delusion we’re inundated with. As I’ve previously written, it’s a place where you can easily understand how twisted people become on self-important quests while failing to beat back all they claim to be against at home. 

Genocide is not happening because someone you don’t like posted a take you don’t agree with on their social media. Imperialism does not need the consent of a U.S. population that largely doesn’t vote because the U.S. is an oligarchy where public opinion doesn’t truly influence policy. The ruling class doesn’t need to “distract” people from the Epstein files for the same reason it doesn’t care about the public will at this point. They don’t appear to fear us much, if at all. The question remains, will we give them a good reason to? The current answer is a loud “no,” as long as people play games that have nothing to do with organizing to defeat the ruling class. This will not happen by waiting for a political party, an outside government, or a hero to do it for us. Expecting as much is an entitled U.S. mindset. It will not happen by projecting ourselves onto movements past or present that we are not part of, while pretending we represent them solely on the basis of ideological identity. It will not happen by being loud influencers on social media, pundits, or celebrities who simply react to worsening conditions for the sake of engaging their followers. Instead, we have to take the lonely and often isolating road away from all of this popular absurdity toward a better project. 

Shoatz has an essay titled “The Dragon and the Hydra.” This historical study of organizational methods examines some pitfalls of relying on highly centralized models of resistance. Shoatz lifts up successful examples throughout Black history that didn’t operate this way. In his collected works, “Maroon the Implacable,” the essay includes an end section titled “The Mosaic.” Shoatz lays out the distressing conditions similarly to what I have detailed above, writing: 

At present, there are many sectarian divisions due to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, cultural, and geographic differences. These hinder individuals, organizations, and entire communities who already interact, share many of the same concerns, are faced with similar obstacles to their well-being, and already cooperate to various degrees. But we can all come together like a “mosaic” with a goal of creating positive changes in our collective well-being.

According to Shoatz, his vision for the mosaic was more complicated than forced assimilation. He continues: 

The “mosaic” will not be an effort directed toward imposing any type of multiracial, multiethnic, gender-neutral, or conformist utopian universalism. No! The mosaic will allow individuals, organizations, and entire communities to exercise self-determination in deciding what types of social orders they choose to struggle to bring into being, while at the same time learning how to better come together with others to form societies that will be superior to the ones in which we now live. Thus, the word “mosaic” fits us in many ways. We will add to the dictionary definition by defining ourselves as “the mosaic: the movement of oppressed sectors acting in concert.”

Shoatz explains that “the ‘mosaic’ is an ideological jumping-off point that will serve all of our separate and collective interests; it can also be termed ‘Inter-Communal Self-Determination.’” In the spirit of learning from the Black Panthers—successes and failures—Shoatz presents a somewhat revised approach. After all, radicalism and praxis are living practices; you have to know more, study more, and comprehend more than one ideology or historical example in order to supersede it. You cannot “critique” what you don’t understand, haven’t read, or haven’t educated yourself about. He illustrates the better approach by drawing on a multitude of elements of Marxism, anarchism, and Leninism to reach his conclusions. The breadth of his study shows how he could suggest such a mosaic movement, and the limitations of our current situation reinforce his call. If anything, I would take his analysis a step further upon witnessing the seemingly impervious nature of doctrinaire leftism, which traps far too many in the pits of regression. As it stands, we don’t have an oppositional or even functional left. We have “leftists” and “leftism,” and there’s a difference. We’re in the midst of deterioration, but we can rise above it all and approach life with the humility needed to learn and evolve. To build a mosaic movement, we will have to grow beyond the goofiness that leftism is reduced to in the U.S. while fascism thrives. 

We don’t have an oppositional or even functional left. We have “leftists” and “leftism,” and there’s a difference.

Tunisian radical theorist and member of the infamous Situationist International, Mustapha Khayati, offered the work “Address to Revolutionaries of Algeria and of All Countries” in July 1965. He explained:

Everywhere there are social confrontations, but nowhere is the old order destroyed, not even within the very forces that contest it. Everywhere the ideologies of the old world are criticized and rejected, but nowhere is “the real movement that suppresses existing conditions” liberated from one or another “ideology” in Marx’s sense of the word: ideas that serve masters. Revolutionaries are everywhere, but nowhere is there any real revolution.

The abundance of loud, self-styled radicals talking as if they’re generals of great armies or have huge revolutionary accomplishments under their belts is utter absurdity. It is especially asinine when losses are piling up. What is there to be so arrogant about? A mosaic movement will have to break free from orthodoxy and learn through actions that bring our politics to life. 

East German communist dissident Rudolf Bahro wrote in “Socialism and Survival” that orthodoxy becomes reactionary “when a new epoch in the liberation struggle is impending, involving a fundamental regrouping of forces, and this orthodoxy then tries to push people back into the patterns prescribed by the old theoretical paradigm that must now be dialectically superseded.” He said, “We cannot wait until our old recipes start to work after all.” We are repeating past mistakes based on petty nonsense. We are regularly falling apart. If we do not want the failure of all this to keep falling on us, then we should move out of its way. We should move on to bigger, better, and more thoughtful practices. We should move toward the mosaic.

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

You’ve probably never heard of the Mare Med III Conference before, and that’s by design. The closed-door business conference takes place annually and is organized by the Israeli events company Benny Moran Productions (the Israel-Greece Chamber of Commerce is listed as a partner and co-sponsor of the conference). The purpose? To deepen Israel’s political, military, and economic relationship with—and influence in—Greece. 

From May 12-13, the third annual meeting of Mare Med III took place in the unassuming rooms of the Brown Acropol Hotel in Athens, Greece. The program featured a litany of speakers, including: Sharren Haskel, Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs; former officers of the Israeli Navy and Air Force now serving as executives at Israel Aerospace Industries; the CEO of Israel Shipyards; Greece’s minister of tourism; the general secretary of the Greek Ministry of Defense; and the chief economist and head of economic consulting at BDO Israel. 

This year’s Mare Med III Conference hardly made a blip in the news cycle, but that’s not because the substance of the event wasn’t newsworthy. And we know this because one independent journalist, Dimitri Lascaris, former TRNN board member and host of Reason2Resist, managed to secure a ticket and film everything. 

“When I looked at the lineup of speakers, I didn’t hesitate to fork over the money, as painful as it was to pay anything towards an event that is designed to deepen relationships between Israel and Greece,” Lascaris says. “But it was the only way that I could actually get access to the event and hear what was being said behind closed doors. And it has in fact been an extraordinarily enlightening, if not utterly nauseating, affair.” 

In his wrap-up report from Day 1 of the conference, Lascaris shared these unsurprising-but-still-shocking observations: 

First of all, I have not heard the words “Palestine” or “Palestinians” once today. I’ve listened to probably twenty people speak, including various ministers and deputy ministers of the Greek government. The Palestinian people did not come up once. There was never any hint of criticism of what Israel is doing.

And perhaps the most shocking pro-Israel commentary I saw was a Cypriot politician… looking at the Israeli ambassador to Greece—who was sitting in the front row at that moment, beside the Deputy Foreign Minister of Greece, just a few meters away from me—and saying to him: “Yes, it’s going to cause a lot of suffering. We know it’s going to cause a lot of suffering, but you’ve got to finish the job.” Meaning: [Israelis] need to revive the criminal war of aggression against Iran and presumably destroy the country, if not the entire region.

Thanks to Lascaris, you can now see and hear for yourself what these callous death merchants say to each other behind closed doors. Watch these reports on the Reason2Resist YouTube channel: 

💾

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) finally released its long-awaited autopsy of Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign.

The rollout was highly on-brand for the Democratic establishment. The 192-page document seems slapped together, is full of typos, and was released only because CNN obtained a copy. In an accompanying note, DNC Chair Ken Martin said the report didn’t meet his standards, but that it was being released “because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

In fact, the report has further eroded that trust by omitting some big, obvious reasons why Harris lost. Concerns about Biden’s age and his inexplicable decision to run for reelection are barely mentioned, and there’s virtually no analysis of the Democratic policies that might have helped propel Trump to another victory.

If one were compiling such a list, support for the Gaza genocide would presumably be near the top, but the issue is not mentioned once in the massive report.

You’ll recall that Harris never distanced herself from Biden on this question. In her first interview after becoming the nominee, she maintained the party line on Israel, reciting the usual claptrap about the country’s right to “defend itself.” Asked point-blank whether her foreign policy would differ from Biden’s at all, she said it would remain the same. That is to say, the United States would continue to send weapons to Israel while the country carried out a genocide.

A couple of months later, she reiterated her position on The View, telling the hosts that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently. Although later in the interview she said that, unlike Biden, she would put Republicans in her cabinet.

Throughout the Harris campaign, Palestine advocates called on the former Senator to shift her position and take a firm stance against Israel’s actions.

“By taking a strong stand against Netanyahu’s authoritarian policies, the Biden-Harris administration can unify the Democratic Party and regain the trust of key voter bases, including young people, Arabs, and Muslims,” read an open letter to Harris from the Not Another Bomb coalition to Harris at the time. “This decisive action will reinforce the administration’s commitment to democracy and human rights, contrasting sharply with the far-right extremism embodied by Trump and his supporters. It sends a clear message that the Democratic Party stands for peace, justice, and the protection of all people, thereby strengthening the coalition needed to secure victory in the 2024 elections and beyond.”

She wouldn’t budge.

At the Democratic National Convention that August, the Uncommitted Movement pushed for a Palestinian speaker to be included. “The difficulty in approving even a single Palestinian American speaker among the dozens of speakers on the convention stage sends a troubling message to our anti-war voters, suggesting they aren’t truly included in this party,” explained a statement from the organization’s founders.

The request was denied.

It’s inaccurate to say the campaign simply ignored these issues. On the contrary, they leaned in from the opposite direction, embracing hawkish former House member Liz Cheney and sending Rep. Ritchie Torres to Michigan, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans, to tell voters that Harris would stand with Israel.

There’s a certain kind of centrist pundit who likes to wax sarcastic about the 2024 election and point out that Trump is also an ardent supporter of Israel. The inference is that people concerned about Gaza accomplished nothing by voting against Harris.

However, this brand of snark often presupposes that people fed up with the genocide actually voted. Yes, some people backed Trump because they irrationally believed that the guy currently bombing Iran was antiwar, but the actual number of people that foolish is presumably negligible. Much hay is also made over the Green Party, but Jill Stein got fewer than 900,000 votes and thus had no discernible impact on the ultimate result.

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 race is how many people stayed home.

“The most telling fact in this race is the drop in voter turnout,” wrote Mitchell Plitnick days after the election, pointing out that Harris netted millions less votes than Biden did in 2020.

“Theories will emerge, but the cause of Harris’ disastrous failure will forever be debated,” he wrote. “Still, there are good reasons to believe the Middle East in general and Gaza in particular played a significant role.”

“Nobody is going to get excited about the ‘politics of joy’ and ‘endless brat summer’ when they’re watching a kid raising his hands while he’s being burned to death attached to an IV,” political consultant Peter Feld told me at the time. “It pretty much puts an end to any of the vibes that they were trying to run on.”

“I don’t think you can explain this election without explaining the non-voters, and I think some of the post-election polling that’s come out and attempts to explain it by talking to voters is going to miss this story,” he continued. “If you haven’t spoken to non-voters, you haven’t explained the election.”

Insofar as polling exists on this issue, it backs up the assertions of Plitnick and Feld. A January 2025 YouGov survey found that 2020 Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 cited Gaza as the top reason.

If you need further proof that Gaza hurt Harris at the polls, just look at what’s happened since November 2024. Israel critics are prevailing in Democratic primaries, and groups like AIPAC have become entirely toxic, and support for Israel has plummeted to historic lows amid the war on Iran. A recent NBC News poll found that just 32% of U.S. voters view Israel positively, which is down from 47% in 2023.

It’s difficult to overstate the incompetence of the DNC, but leaving this kind of stuff out of the “autopsy” report certainly feels like much more than oversight. Officials formerly connected to Biden and Harris are openly admitting as much.

“What’s important is what’s missing, what they’re not releasing,” Harris’s former communications director, Ashley Etienne, told Politico. “It feels like what the DNC is doing is cherry-picking the parts of it that it wants to actually release, that [are] less problematic for the party going forward.”

It’s an oversimplification to say Gaza is what cost the Democrats the election. There are multiple factors in every presidential race, and many of them have nothing to do with foreign policy. However, ignoring the genocide’s obvious impact on voters is malpractice and suggests that Democratic leadership could be poised to repeat the same mistakes in 2028.

Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos made news earlier this week by claiming the reason he fired 30 percent of the Washington Post’s staff and rebranded it as a more conservative media outlet is because its previous iteration was not a “profitable enterprise” and it needed to be. This is consistent with previous arguments he’s made as to why he moved the traditionally centrist—if neoconservative on foreign policy—newspaper more visibly to the right wing since Trump took office in early 2025.

SORKIN: Why lay people off at the Post? Why fire people?

BEZOS: Because the Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet

SORKIN: Does it? Some people say it should be a trust

BEZOS: Yes. It's a measure of its relevance. If people aren't paying for… pic.twitter.com/ENtR4t6S58

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2026

CBS News, after its parent corporation Paramount was purchased by the multibillionaire Ellison family last year, also had a similar, more overt right-wing rebrand, bringing in self-identified “zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss to run CBS News and crack down on stories deemed too critical of Trump while disciplining anything perceived as too progressive. This culminated with a much-mocked statement of “10 journalistic principles” a la Citizen Kane, followed by “5 guiding principles” for CBS Evening News, both of which read like LLM-generated marketing copy for a local Dodge dealership. 

“Our foundational values of liberty, equality and the rule of law,” reads the third principle, “make us [Americans, presumably] the last best hope on Earth. We also believe in Franklin’s famous line about America as a republic—if we can keep it. We aim to do our part every night…”

The views for [the Washington Post’s] last 20 YouTube videos—combined—are less than the downloads I get for a single episode of my own podcast, which I record in my kid’s bedroom next to a stuffed elephant.

Both the Ellisons and Bezos—and their respective functionaries—framed their pivot explicitly in marketing terms. Which, of course, they would. Being ideological, or concerned with other unrelated business interests, is considered gauche and even may run afoul of securities law which requires them, at least in theory, to use business properties to expand the shareholder value of those invested in said properties, not unrelated business interests or their own ideological agendas. 

But there’s only one problem with this alibi: there’s no evidence there’s a market for yet another generic, right-of-center publication pumping out Club for Growth and regime change schlock. The Post’s opinion page is now a dreary, manifestly unpopular torrent of stuffy Republican talking points with none of the vaguely populist appeal of raw MAGA-ism. Indeed, in the first year of the right-wing pivot, the Post still lost $100 million, which is roughly what it lost in 2024, the last year of its more center-left branding. Let us take a look at the sizzling view counts and viral sensationalism of their Opinion page rebrand, “Make It Make Sense”:

The Post, as I noted at the time for TRNN, purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches, tedious anti-woke screeds and––for some reason––revisionist positive takes on Herbert Hoover.

Washington Post hip vertical content update!

1) an unaccountably sweaty James Hohmann bashing Bernie’s wealth tax
2) mindless cheerleading of Trump’s Iran attack
3) Herbert Hoover (??) hagiography
4) an unaccountably sweaty James Hohmann defending Congress trading stocks pic.twitter.com/sHV93GHjc4

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) March 4, 2026

This is clearly the content kids these days are crying out for. Their X account for these videos often gets only one or two retweets, and the views for their last 20 YouTube videos—combined—are less than the downloads I get for a single episode of my own podcast, which I record in my kid’s bedroom next to a stuffed elephant. 

CBS News ratings have similarly continued to decline since their anti-woke rebrand. This is most apparent with Weiss’ pet project, the revamped CBS Evening News, where she brought on her preferred company-man himbo, Tony Dokoupil, to awkwardly loiter in Real America-coded diners, Sparks and Steam factories, and other such homespun imagery, while delivering a recap of the day’s events with all the gravitas of a local plaintiff’s attorney commercial. 

Dokoupil’s most notable journalistic contribution before being awarded the coveted Evening News anchor desk by Weiss was dressing down author Ta-Nehisi Coates and implying he was a terrorist because he wrote too sympathetically of Palestinians. This is consistent with Weiss’ history of promoting tabloid propaganda for Israel, and the Ellisons, who are the largest private donors to Israel’s military. 

Ratings for CBS Evening News have declined by about 20 percent since Weiss’ Real American Values rebrand. 

This “marketing pivot” narrative is largely repeated uncritically by US media, who all have to act like there’s nothing else going on but organic marketing concerns. “The billionaire newspaper owner, dissatisfied by years of losses, wants the newsroom to double productivity with half its budget,” read one typically credulous New York Times subheadline on his “shake up” of the Post. 

This isn’t to say these oligarchs want to lose money on their ventures, but they want to be profitable within the narrow confines of very specific ideological goals that align both with other business interests and their own political agenda.

“What’s so confounding about the attempt to meddle with/potentially gut 60 Minutes is it’s arguably the one thing that’s working,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin on social media incredulously about Weiss’ interventions. “10 – 12 million people tune into every episode. It’s the most watched primetime broadcast in America. Why destroy that audience?”

This “shaking up dying business model” framing is uniformly adopted by Weiss’ elite media peers. “For Bari Weiss critics two mull,” Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote in January. “If your business is built on shows with shrinking audiences, made up of old people with shrinking years left, watching a shrinking medium w/ a shrinking future, it’s Mission Impossible. Only a revolutionary/radical shift can adjust this reality.”

But Weiss and Bezos’ right-wing turns have very little to do with ratings, clicks, eyeballs, or market demands. It’s not at all “revolutionary” or “radical,” it’s simply a more supercharged and nakedly ideological orientation of the typical pro-capitalist, pro-war media consensus the public has been fed for decades. It’s the same pro-corporate framing despite Americans growing increasingly populist on matters of economics; the same pro-Israel, pro-war schlock despite Americans becoming increasingly anti-Israel and anti-war. This dubious “market demand” framing was made most absurd when Weiss insisted last November that to win over Middle America—which she assessed had “lost trust” in mainstream media—CBS ought to hire the “charismatic” Alan Dershowitz, an 87-year-old Trump partisan best known for defending the increasingly unpopular Israel and befriending and apologizing for Jeffrey Epstein and pedophilia more broadly.  

The reality is the Washington Post’s annual losses are only 0.03 percent of Bezos’ net worth. The Paramount purchase was less than 10 percent of the Ellisons’ net worth (and most of it wasn’t their money, in any event) and CBS’s right-wing turn has been essential to building political support for the Ellisons’ real prize: the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes control over HBO and CNN. This isn’t to say these oligarchs want to lose money on their ventures, but they want to be profitable within the narrow confines of very specific ideological goals that align both with other business interests and their own political agenda. For Bezos it’s clear that means generic pro-capitalist, pro-war, more conventional Republican content. For the Ellisons, and Weiss, it’s pro-capitalist and pro-security state ideology mixed with anti-woke hobby horses like trans and college kid-bashing and, of course, defending and promoting the long-term PR goals of Israel. It’s under this rubric that these somewhat bizarre and manifestly unpopular rebrands make sense. They’re not chasing “middle America” or an increasingly cynical public turned off by mainstream media; they’re turning a relatively small part of their overall investment portfolio into an ideological playtoy, either to suck up to Trump, channel their their own right-wing grievances, shore up their massive security state investments, or—as is most likely the case—a combination of all of the above. It’s essential we understand this, or we’ll continue to misdiagnose what motivates these overt and illiberal media rebrands.

As the US Justice Department indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on Wednesday in what could be a prelude to military action, the Cuban government denounced the US for “cruel and ruthless aggression.”

The 94-year-old Castro, who served as Cuba’s leader until 2021 after taking over for his brother Fidel in 2008, was indicted on one count of conspiracy to kill US nationals for his alleged role in the shooting down of planes operated by the anti-Castro Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of four Cuban Americans.

“For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said as he announced the charges at Miami’s Freedom Tower. “My message today is clear: The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.”

While Blanche described the four men as “unarmed civilians,” the Cuban government said the group had repeatedly violated its sovereign airspace and that it had warned the US government before shooting down the plane.

Declassified documents from a month before the incident show that officials in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) viewed the Brothers’ activities as “taunting” and feared the Cuban government might shoot a plane down.

“Is a sovereign state like Cuba obligated to tolerate illegal and continuous incursions into its territory? Under no circumstances,” the Cuban embassy in the US said in a statement published on Wednesday on social media. “International law and global civil aviation conventions protect the sovereignty of nations over their airspace.”

“When formal warnings to the [International Civil Aviation Organization], the FAA, and political authorities are sustainedly ignored, the defense of borders and national security becomes an unavoidable duty for the protection of the country.”

✈️🇨🇺 MythBreakers: Exposing the Brothers to the Rescue hoax

Is a sovereign State like Cuba obligated to tolerate illegal and continuous incursions into its territory?

Under no circumstances. International law and global civil aviation conventions protect the sovereignty of… pic.twitter.com/p9UC0shT95

— Cuban Embassy in US (@EmbaCubaUS) May 20, 2026

The indictment comes as the Trump administration issues threats that have been widely interpreted as signals that another military regime change operation could soon be on the horizon, following the administration’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran already this year.

“CUBA IS NEXT! Thank you [President Donald Trump] and [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]!” cheered US Rep. Carlos Giminez (R-Fla.), one of many Miami-based politicians who have called for aggressive action by the Trump administration against Cuba in recent days.

He was responding to a video posted by Rubio on Wednesday directed at the Cuban people in which he again denied that the crippling oil blockade imposed on Cuba by Trump bore any responsibility for the economic ruin the island’s population currently faces.

After effectively cutting off Cuba’s primary supplier of oil in January when the US conducted its illegal operation to abduct Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs on any country that provided oil to Cuba, scaring off its other main suppliers, including Mexico, Russia, and Algeria. Last week, Cuba’s energy minister announced that the country had “absolutely no fuel oil, no diesel.”

🇺🇸🇨🇺 pic.twitter.com/nwEePVJ1lX

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) May 20, 2026

But Rubio told the Cuban people in Spanish on Wednesday: “The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the US. As you know better than anyone else, you have been suffering from blackouts for years. The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is that those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”

He specifically laid the blame at the feet of the accused, the military-run company Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), founded by Raúl Castro in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The company has come to control large swathes of the Cuban economy, from hotels and grocery stores to gas stations and banks, and is estimated to control between 40-70% of Cuba’s overall economy, according to a recent New York Times report—though the secrecy of the organization makes it difficult to determine its true value.

Rubio said that the entrepreneurs running GAESA “have $18 billion in assets and control 70% of Cuba’s economy,” which was first reported by the Miami Herald last year based on balance sheets obtained from the company. But the Cuban government and other critics have disputed this figure, arguing that it actually refers to Cuban pesos, which would make its holdings closer to about $746 million.

Regardless, Rubio omitted any mention of the fact that even prior to the oil blockade enacted in January by Trump, the US still had a strict trade embargo in place against Cuba for more than 60 years, which the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America has estimated cost the country more than $130 billion since it was imposed—more than the total gross domestic product of the entire country in 2020.

Rubio said on Wednesday the US was ready to open a “new chapter” with Cuba, but that the thing getting in the way was “those who control their country.”

Rubio now full Orwellian: the total blockade that we have put on your country after decades of an embargo has nothing to do with the scarcity in your lives or the fact that we are intentionally starving your children. https://t.co/OLLHJfyo3E

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 20, 2026

In light of Trump’s persistent suggestions that he wants to “take” Cuba and “do anything I want with it,” the Cuban government described Rubio’s message as one meant to justify further US coercion.

“The reason why the US secretary of state lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously when referring to Cuba and trying to justify the aggression to which he subjects the Cuban people is not ignorance or incompetence,” said Carlos Fernández de Cossío, the deputy minister for foreign affairs in Cuba, in a social media post on Wednesday. “He knows full well that there is no excuse for such a cruel and ruthless aggression.”

Last week, the US offered to give Cuba $100 million in humanitarian assistance to deal with the crisis it has imposed through its oil blockade, but only if it agrees to “meaningful reforms” and “fundamental changes” to its government that would allow greater access to US companies.

Cuba’s current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, contended that an easier way to alleviate Cuba’s suffering would be “by lifting or easing the blockade, as it is well known that the humanitarian situation is coldly calculated and induced.”

Update (2:00 pm ET): This story was updated to include comments from acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche following the announcement of a formal indictment on Wednesday.

The financialization of the American electoral process is well documented. Now two key progressive legislators are proposing a new law to do something about it. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12) introduced the Abolish Super PACs Act on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. It’s a measure they say will eliminate one the primary ways billionaires funnel cash into elections: super PACs. The bill would limit donations to super PACs to $5,000 for both individuals and corporations.

“Today, the average American gets one vote. Billionaires, however, through their super PACs, can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect the candidates of their choice and to defeat candidates who stand up for working families or a just foreign policy,” Sanders said. 

The measure is necessary, Lee said, to save a democratic process that is under strain from unlimited sums of money poured into elections by billionaires and corporations. 

“Our bill would ensure that millionaires, billionaires, corporations, corporate interests, special interests would no longer be able to get around the guardrails, the limitations that everyday individuals like you and I have,” Lee said. 

A super PAC, or political action committee, is an entity that can currently raise unlimited donations from individuals, corporations, and unions. It can spend that money to independently support or oppose candidates, including through advertising and other election-related expenditures. 

Candidates cannot formally coordinate with a super PAC. But that limitation is often skirted, leaving the wealthiest Americans with disproportionate influence over electoral outcomes.

Both Sanders and Lee pointed to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 as a key motivator to overhaul current election laws sooner rather than later. Since the controversial ruling opened the door for unlimited outside spending on elections, corporations and billionaires have turned to super PACs to unleash a barrage of spending. 

“I don’t want people to think this is just another issue. It is a more important issue,” Sanders said at the press conference announcing the bill. 

“We are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare. Why is that? You think it may have something to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies who spend millions of dollars making sure we don’t move to a Medicare for All system?”

“This is an issue that touches on every single issue facing working people in this country,” said Sanders.

Billionaire Elon Musk used his America PAC to pour roughly $288 million into Trump’s and other Republlicans 2024 presidential campaign. 

The Abolish Super PACs Act comes as a smaller and wealthier group of donors fund a growing proportion of campaign spending. The New York Times reported that just 300 billionaires and their families accounted for 19% of all federal campaign spending in the US in 2024, much of it funneled through Super PACs. Before the Citizens United ruling, contributions from billionaires made up only 0.3%.

“It corrupts, it discourages, I call it functionally disenfranchising the political process from every aspect, from every angle,” Lee said.

In her new book, The Complicit Lens, media scholar Robin Anderson reveals how legacy media in the US presented Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza as defensive and justified, casting doubt on IDF bombings, employing passive language to deflect blame for atrocities, and repeating Israeli talking points, often word-for-word. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Anderson about the ways US media has systematically run interference for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, aligning its coverage with Israeli military narratives while downplaying—and even condoning—the wholesale massacre of Palestinians.

Guests:

• Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. Anderson edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, serves as a Project Censored Judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), where she also writes regularly, and is an Izzy Award Judge for the Park Center for Independent Media. Her writing has appeared in a range of outlets, including CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost.

Additional links/info:

• Robin Anderson, OR Books, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And just once again, we’re looking at Israel-Palestine and the disaster that’s happening there to bring you the intimate details of what people are facing and what can be done. And we’re talking today to Robin Anderson, who has The Complicit Lens, which is an incredible piece of work. Robin is Professor Emerita of media studies at Fordham University, award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her work examines films, television, media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. And she edits the Rutledge Focus Book series on media and humanitarian action and serves as project centered judge and contributes to the annual state free press and joins us here today and this latest book we’re talking about is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

And Robin, welcome, good to have you with us.

Robin Anderson:

Thank you for inviting me.

Marc Steiner:

Going through all this work that you did on media coverage and what’s actually happening in Israel-Palestine. I want to get to the bottom of things first and why the major media in America is so complicit in telling the lies about what’s happening in this war. I mean, there have been decades and decades of anti-Semitic stuff about the Jewish control of the media. That’s not it. There’s something really fundamentally deep about what’s going on here and why they are willing to tell the lies they’re telling and push the agenda they’re pushing. So let’s start there.

Robin Anderson:

Yeah. Well, the theme through the book is exactly what happened in the US media to just actually compel them to completely abandon their basic role as journalists. And I think the Israeli lobby is a big one. I devoted an entire chapter to talking about the influences in the New York Times and a few other press, but they’ve been watched and monitored by a group called Camera, by honest reporting. Just as students and faculty have been doxed, if they get identified, many of them have by Canary mission, they will call up their employers and they will tell them not to employ them and that has happened in numerous cases. So it’s not only journalism, it’s kind of the civil society and the public sphere and our discourse has for years been very constrained. I’m not sure that US journalists anymore, even though they’re supposed to be the seasoned professionals at some of the most prominent and legacy media, I’m not sure they know the background anymore of Israel.

I’m not sure that they understand really the international rules of war because if you’re blocked by the directives such as the New York Times and CNN, if you have your editors openly telling you to cover the press in a certain way, which is what we have, we had it at the CNN and the New York Times, and those are very influential legacy media sources. If we have them doing that over a period of a few years, you’re not proficient anymore really in understanding the rules of war or the Geneva Conventions. And then when you leave those basic core understandings out of coverage, either through self-censorship, editorial censorship, or simply just ignorance, you can’t tell the story.

Marc Steiner:

I want to get very specific here, the stuff you’ve written about in terms of the New York Times and CNN and exactly what they did, exactly what the leadership has told their reporters what they can and cannot do and how can they even be possible. But this is really explain that in greater depth.

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think that was so shocking and I think the intercept, well, a number of articles came out on the intercept, but CNN was putting all of its copy through its Jerusalem Bureau and the IDF had eyes on that stuff and CNN tried to play it down and say, “Oh, really? They hardly had anything to say.” And the staffer who had leaked to the intercept this information said, “Oh yes, every single word was shaped by Israeli censors.” So they told them, “No, there are things you can and cannot say. You can’t say genocide.” That’s a taboo word. But the really weirdly obscured things that a lot of us began to notice where you couldn’t identify Israel as the perpetrator of the dropping of 2000 pound bombs. So you couldn’t say you just had to say explosion. So a lot of people identified these headlines and indeed the press did not identify that these were Israeli bombs until the Israelis themselves would say, “Oh, okay.

Well, we got a Hamas commander.” As soon as they said they got a Hamas commander, then you could justify any loss of human civilian life and then you could talk about Israel having done the bombing. So lots of very strange things like that, that you can actually … So what I did in a couple chapters is look at the coverage and compare them to these directives. New York Times, same thing. New York Times was more explicit about pulling out any of the principles really of international law about occupation when the New York Times staffer that leaked it to the intercept said, “How can you not talk about occupation?” That is at the core of the conflict. We’re not able to represent this more accurately without talking about the occupation, but they couldn’t talk. So a lot of them, refugee camps, that’s very, very important. You have to know that these people in Gaza, many of them were refugees or the descendants of refugees that were victims of the Nakba.

So all of that background history allowed them to start the war at October 7th, say, “This was only Hamas. It came from nowhere, the evil of Hamas and therefore all of the subsequent reporting was either justified or retaliatory. They started it and they didn’t start it. There’s a long history of how Israel was constantly actually committing war crimes already before October 7th.

Marc Steiner:

So there’s a lot of what you said here. Before we get back to Israel and Hamas, which I’d like to do, given what you’ve written, what do you think the political dynamic is that allows the journalistic leaders and others in those two organizations, CNN and New York Times? Look, I read the New York Times every day and every Sunday. I mean, I’ve been doing it for the last 40 years.

Robin Anderson:

Sorry to hear that, Marc. Really.

Marc Steiner:

There’s a lot of good stuff from there, but this is not one of them. What the dynamic is that allows that to happen.

Robin Anderson:

Right. Well, I actually devoted an entire chapter to the New York Times and you really have to look at their Jerusalem bureau. Their Jerusalem bureau over a period of years has been shaped to be very Israeli focused and Israeli-centric. So right off the bureau in the New York Times in Jerusalem sits atop on the air above a house where a BBC reporter, a Palestinian BBC reporter had to leave his house, put his wife and children in a taxi, leave their things and never come back. So right away the New York Times has a vested interest in no right to return. That’s a major issue for Palestinians, the right to return.

And right away, well, wow, that geostructural bias, if they had the right to return, the New York Times, the House that they spent money on that Thomas Friedman presided in and all of these other bureau chiefs stayed there admitting that many times their children were in the IDF. And for one, Elizabeth Kershner, who’s still writing for the New York Times, her husband was intimately involved with doing PR for the Israeli military. So these are conflicts of interest of all sorts. At one point, one of the public monitors for the New York Times said, wow, wouldn’t you get a different point of view if you had somebody in the West Bank that could really see what the settlers did to people and all that. So if you get a different view of the situation, but they never did that. In fact, they listened to a canary mission, either a canary mission or an honest reporting briefing that criticized one of their photojournalists and he was fired from the New York Times well before October 7th.

So they got rid of Palestinian journalists at the same time they kept nurturing this very individualized point of view from Israel.

Marc Steiner:

So a couple of things here, but I want to take a step backwards for just a minute to explain to the people listening to us what the Canary Commission is. You’ve referred to it like three or four times here. People need to understand what it is.

Robin Anderson:

It’s originally an Israeli based organization that monitors students and faculty and other kind of people canary mission and has docs people and students and faculty at university campuses and many times it has resulted in students being sanctioned and faculty being sanctioned. Of course, I wrote about this happening at Hunter College in the book. Honest reporting is basically a propaganda organ, which not only creates their own media, propagandized media, but that also puts pressure. And this is external pressure coming into newsrooms and into universities where they’ve got no business in these kinds of civil society venues and institutions of higher education and legacy media that is supposed to know how to manage its own electoral boards and its own electoral staff.

Marc Steiner:

What you bring out in complicit lens, I mean, has very frightening in terms of what it means not just for Israel, Palestine, and what’s going on there, but for the future of media in this country. It’s not new that the media is influenced by people who own the media. That’s been a battle forever. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but it’s been a battle inside the media forever. But what you’re describing here is something pretty frightening. And I think that the whole … It’s one of the reasons I think they don’t really cover the opposition inside of Israel from Jewish Israelis saying, no, we’re not participating and why they don’t cover those things as well and what life is like inside of Palestinian villages. So I think this is a really, what you’ve written, what you put together is important for people to wrestle with in terms of how you get your information.

How do we know what’s really happening?

Robin Anderson:

Well, one of the reasons, as a consequence of this type of reporting, the media has lost legitimacy, terribly lost legitimacy, but young people particularly who don’t look at legacy media, if I was in front of a class and I asked my students who read The New York Times this morning, nobody would have. So they’re getting their information from their handheld devices and that’s where they’re getting their news and they were on their handheld devices when Palestinian journalists were being killed in large numbers for documenting things on the ground. So we as Americans, we had these two different realities really. We had the documentation and the visuals, the testimony, the aftermath, the pictures of rubble and the suffering and the Palestinians. And that I believe really accounts for so much of why the United States is now rejecting the state of Israel and for a very long time, the majority of adults in the United States has not wanted our government to send weapons to Israel.

So we caught onto that. And I think in this barrage of propaganda, I think it’s notable that we have resisted it and I think that’s really incredible on the part of the American people. In terms of I would like to talk about how we fix this and I believe-

Marc Steiner:

That was my next question, but go right ahead, please. I

Robin Anderson:

Believe these journalists and these editorial boards, they need to be held accountable. They really do. The three Israeli leaders including Isaac Hertzag, the president of Israel to kind of a figurehead Netanyahu’s the prime minister.

Marc Steiner:

Right, but the president doesn’t have much power inside the Israeli structure. Well,

Robin Anderson:

He’s coming to New York City. He’s coming to New York City and he’s being hosted and honored by the Jewish religious seminar.

Marc Steiner:

Yeshiva or Union Theological?

Robin Anderson:

Union theological

And he’s going to be here in May and a UN commission found that it is very likely that he is responsible for inciting genocide. So the rules of genocide, very much part, you can’t have a genocide without a language that incites it. And these people were inciting this language and saying how Hamas was animals by extension Palestinian people and Herzog came right out and said, Palestinian civilians are guilty. So I think he shouldn’t be coming to New York City at all. I think he should be being hauled up in front of the Hague. At one point in the CNN, one of the staffers said, “Many of us noticed that our anchors didn’t have much pushback, if any, to these Israeli leaders who at a time, and here’s the language of the incitement statute is it has to be a time of great tension. You have to be a public figure and you have to have a platform, a legitimate … You have to be on a mainstream media platform and they all fit that bill.

So that’s what we call incitement. And as the CNN staffer said, we came very close to that by not challenging these demonization of the Palestinian people, which also is another theme that goes throughout the book is over and over again,

Marc Steiner:

Palestinians

Robin Anderson:

In frame and in adjectives and in every way were dehumanized over and over again.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. And as I was reading what you wrote, I thought about my friends in Israel-Palestine on both sides and how I remembered distinctly this big fight that took place when one of my friends who was an Israeli, these were theater people and I used to do theater with Israeli Palestinian companies. I said something about Palestinians and he spit on the ground. And then a fight ensued between him and one of the women in the company over that spit who was also Jewish. And people don’t realize how deep the divide is, I think, inside Israel. It’s not evenly split, but it’s a deep divide over where everything is going.

Robin Anderson:

I think recent polls that have come out of Israel have shown that the majority of Israelis thought that all of the Palestinian civilians were guilty as well and they were a threat. They’ve been propagandized now for a very long time, even though the newspaper Haretz is one of my major sources because after October 7th, when they called in the Hannibal directive,

Marc Steiner:

Which

Robin Anderson:

Is just kill everybody, don’t let anybody take any hostages. We don’t want to negotiate. When they called that in, you had Israelis pilots in Apache helicopters indiscriminately bombing the festival grounds when Hamas was trying to get their hostages, of course that’s a war crime. It’s true that Hamas committed some war crimes, committed war crimes. Nothing could compare, however, to what Israel has done. And at the time, what’s so fascinating is that the demonization again and again of Hamas, particularly in Palestinians as animals, they justified and served to cover up and to be the beheaded baby stories. As Richard Sanders, the filmmaker said, it wasn’t what Hamas did. It was what they didn’t do that the media reported on. So Hamas was guilty. They made stuff that was really over the top saying that Hamas did so they could carry out the genocide. And I think over time that the Israeli people have been incentivized and propagandized to believe that.

Marc Steiner:

When you look at American media coverage as you do with intensity, and it seems that it’s changed significantly over the last 10 years, talk a bit about your analysis about why that is and why- Oh Mark,

Robin Anderson:

I’ve been writing about media and war for an awfully long time.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, you have. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. That’s why I asked you the question.

Robin Anderson:

I see this whole … I think one of the really big changes was when the US media embedded with the troops during the war on terror. This did two things. It showed you one side of the war, the US soldier’s side and emphasized that side because they were right there over the shoulder. And then the other thing is they allowed them to talk about it as if it were a reality show. And so we had these entertainment frames coming in with the war on terror, first a reality show, the invasion. Then of course there was the rescue of Saving Private Lynch, which was just the movie plot to Saving Private Ryan. And then you had all of the first person shooter game soldiers would come back and help them with the technology, help them with making it look like real shooters. So for a long time, the whole beginning of the 21st century, war was turned into entertainment by our media.

Sadly, what happened in Gaza was that it was so horrible. The media tried something else. Well, I’m just going to say what the Israelis say and have this outlandishly pro- Israel coverage, but people had their alternative information sources and they were looking through their handheld devices at the suffering of the people in Gaza. And I think they understood finally that war is not a game. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s horrible. It’s destructive. It kills people. It puts them in conditions of catastrophic no water, no food and no hospital. One of the things that I read and was the hardest chapter for me to write, Mark, was the hospital chapter, Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system and the attacks on El Shifa and all the subsequent hospitals. And it was so outrageous the way the media covered that, just distortions and one-sided. And those are the real things that I would really like to see them held accountable for that

Marc Steiner:

Kind of thing. And I’ve covered some of that with doctors from Palestine in Gaza talking about what’s been going on. I’m curious how you think we get to that point where they’re held accountable and well, let me just stop there because the other part is a much deeper question that we may not have time to get into. Well, I’ll say it anyway, which is that hatred of Jews just bubbles below the surface in our world. Antisemitism just bubbles below the surface. This is exploding it.

Robin Anderson:

That’s right.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Robin Anderson:

And I put that in a number of places in the

Marc Steiner:

Book

Robin Anderson:

About how this is really building antisemitism. The way that antisemitism is defined as you cannot say anything against the state of Israel implies that all Jews now are for the state of Israel. That implies that it’s a monolithic community.

Marc Steiner:

And it’s not.

Robin Anderson:

And it is absolutely

Marc Steiner:

Not.

Robin Anderson:

It’s not. And so when Jewish people are against the genocide, that gets lost in that equation. And now everybody’s going to look to the Jewish people as having perpetrated a genocide. And I think that’s a real problem.

Marc Steiner:

And in terms of the media coverage itself, one of the things I thought about as I was reading what you wrote, it shows the power of the media to influence the world in extremely negative and dangerous ways.

Robin Anderson:

Yes. So as long as the perpetrators are genocide, as long as the global elites, as long as the West unquote can look at a newspaper and stay in this beltway, if you will, this beltway bubble or stay … I think the New York Times and legacy media know that young people who are anti-genocide, they know they’re not watching them. All they care about is the elites and the governments and the congressmen who are under the same influence that the media is. 82% of our Congress people take money from APAC, both Republicans and Democrats. We know the influence that this Israeli lobby has had and that is now becoming toxic. That’s beginning to change. And now we’re going to have the anti-APAC primaries. You take APAC, you’re going to get primaried.

Marc Steiner:

But you have APAC along with the conservative Christian world together are really pushing this agenda.

Robin Anderson:

They

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely

Robin Anderson:

Are.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah.

Robin Anderson:

Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism and white supremacists. I mean, I was just writing something about Pete Hegthest, Christian Crusade cross on his chest and as Jesuit priest said in the Pope, this is not Christianity. This is a cartoon version. This is actually a war game, Crusader Kings. This is actually gaming again, this twisted version of Christianity that now is marked that this is at the White House and Trump thinks he’s God and it’s really horrible.

Marc Steiner:

So before we have to close, I’m curious all that you’ve written, and I really do encourage people to read this, it’s incredible analysis that you put inside your work that we’ve only touched the surface so we may have to do this again. How do you see this unfolding in terms of our future, in terms of resistance to it and what it might all pretend?

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think we need to act to preserve alternative media in every way, independent and alternative media and the internet. We need to really focus on that. We need to find the parallels between AI narratives and the kind of empire boomerang that we have going on where so much that has happened in Gaza is now being repeated, if you will, in Lebanon and now the media just isn’t covering it. But I think we really need to look carefully at more of the mechanisms and interconnections that drive the media and that drive the military industrial complex. We’ve now also are entering an era of elite capture where billionaires, the Ellison family is now controlling CBS and they may well control other outlets. And I think these are incredibly dangerous and I think we need to focus our attention there. And I think holding legacy media for their coverage of Gaza Responsible is really primary.

I mean, maybe this is a fantasy of MindMark, but I see my book. I have fantasies of somebody holding my book at the Hague and calling out the media at the International Court of Justice and actually telling them for the rest of us how they manipulate the media frames.

Marc Steiner:

That could happen. I mean, I could see that happening. That’s a good idea. I like that idea. I think this is really important to explore in greater depth and also the contradictions that are involved and the dangers involved in this on so many levels. And I think that I want to encourage people, if you have a chance just to check out the book, The Complicit Lens, US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, it’s really worth kind of wrestling with and looking at, plus the articles you’ve written you can find that we’ll be linking to here in this interview. And Robert Anderson, I do hope we stay in touch. You have a lot to say. We’ve barely touched the surface what you have to say and I look forward to many more conversations.

Robin Anderson:

I do too, Mark. Thanks so much, Brad.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you for being with us today. Once again, let me thank Robin Anderson for joining us today. We’ll be linking to her work and check out her book on Gaza. It’s entitled The Complicit Lens: Our Mainstream US Media Covered Gaza. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be delving more deeply into all of this. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic, Rosette Sowali for producing the Mark Steiner show, the Tylers Keller Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at the real news for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, just write to me at mss@threwnews.com and I’ll get back to you right away. Once again, thank you, Robert Anderson, for joining us today.

So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

Palestine defenders decried Tuesday’s announcement by the Trump administration of US sanctions targeting four nonviolent campaigners involved in the recent humanitarian flotillas that tried to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.

The US Department of the Treasury said in a statement that its Office of Foreign Assets Control “is taking action against four individuals associated with the pro-Hamas flotilla organized by the US-designated Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA) that is attempting to access Gaza in support of Hamas.”

The sanctioned individuals are Saif Abu Keshek, a Palestinian with Spanish and Swedish citizenship and PCPA leader who helped organize and lead Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) missions; Jordan-based PCPA president Hisham Abdallah Sulayman Abu Mahfuz; Mohammed Khatib, who is based in Belgium and is the European coordinator for Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network; and Jaldia Abubakra Aueda, Samidoun’s coordinator in Madrid.

This latest weaponization of US dominance over global banking and finance and tech monopolies in service of Israel follows the sanctions placed on four leading Palestinian human rights groups and 11 elected officials of the @IntlCrimCourt as well as Francesca Albanese

— Maureen Murphy (@maureenclarem) May 19, 2026

“The pro-terror flotilla attempting to reach Gaza is a ludicrous attempt to undermine President [Donald] Trump’s successful progress toward lasting peace in the region,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement Tuesday. “Treasury will continue to sever Hamas’ global financial support networks, no matter where in the world they are.”

There is no substantiated evidence that the Gaza flotillas are linked to Hamas. Meanwhile, United Nations experts, numerous national governments, human rights groups, and experts say Israel is perpetrating genocide, apartheid, colonization, occupation, and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.

Samidoun called the sanctions—which freeze any of the targets’ US assets and ban Americans from doing business with them—“the latest manifestation of the ongoing US genocidal war on the Palestinian people” and pointed to Israel’s ongoing violent interception and seizure of GSF vessels on the high seas off the coast of Gaza.

“Today’s sanctions by the US come hand-in-hand with today’s Israeli piracy of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla, and the abduction of hundreds of international activists at sea,” the group said in a statement. “All of these sanctions targeting Palestinian organizations, not only those targeting us, are aiding and abetting genocide.”

Since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, the Biden and Trump administrations have supported Israel with tens of billions of dollars worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover, including vetoes of numerous United Nations Security Council Gaza ceasefire resolutions. Total US financial support for Israel since it was founded in 1948—largely via the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs—is approaching $300 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Since returning to office, Trump has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activists, students, organizations, and foreign nationals. Critics—including advocacy groups, academics, and some judges—have condemned what they have called attacks on free speech, association, and academic freedom.

The Trump administration has sanctioned International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan and other numerous other ICC jurists after the Hague-based tribunal issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders who were killed by Israeli attacks.

On Tuesday, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that the ICC is also seeking his arrest, and that he would “fight back” by ordering the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Palestinians from their homes in the illegally occupied West Bank.

The US administration has also sanctioned independent UN Palestine expert Francesca Albanese and her family—a move that was temporarily blocked earlier this month by a federal judge who asserted that the Italian humanitarian “has done nothing more than speak.”

“Every time Palestinians and their supporters organize internationally, Washington reaches for the terrorism label to shut them down,” Isabelle Hayslip, advocacy manager at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday. “The net keeps widening. Palestinian diaspora communities now live under constant threat of designation for demanding their rights.”

A leader of Bolivia’s main labor federation, the Bolivian Workers’ Union, said late Monday that the country’s public prosecutor is “trying to silence” mass protests that have included Indigenous communities, miners, peasants, and teachers in recent days, as the government issued arrest warrants for labor and grassroots organizers.

TeleSUR reported that State Attorney General Roger Mariaca confirmed his office was charging Mario Argollo, executive secretary of the union, known in Spanish as Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), with public instigation to commit crimes and terrorism.

“They will not subdue us in the struggle we have undertaken,” Argollo said in a statement. “They are trying to silence us as leaders with popular actions and criminal charges.”

Drop Site News also reported that the public prosecutor issued an arrest order targeting Justino Apaza Callisaya, a leader of the Federation of Neighborhood Councils of La Paz (FEJUVE), “an influential grassroots organization tied to urban protest movements and labor mobilizations.”

BREAKING: New documents purport to show arrest and detention orders issued by Bolivia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office in La Paz against protest leaders and labor organizers connected to recent nationwide strikes and road blockades.

It says prosecutors are investigating several… https://t.co/9lVZV3IL1R

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 19, 2026

The office is also reportedly investigating “several individuals” following COB’s declaration of a general strike on May 1.

“The accused are being investigated for extremely serious offenses including: public incitement to commit crimes, criminal association, terrorism, financing terrorism, attacks on transportation security, [and] attacks on public services,” reported Drop Site.

The mass mobilization has included dozens of road blockades across the country as the union and other groups have demanded the resignation of President Rodrigo Paz, whose administration ended a fuel subsidy amid an economic crisis; higher wages; and an end to privatization, including through Law 1720, which opponents say would allow the transfer of Indigenous and peasant land to corporations.

Protesters have spent days marching from their communities to La Paz, where thousands were met by riot police armed with tear gas canisters on Monday.

🇧🇴 Protesters from Bolivia’s indigenous movements filled the streets of central La Paz on Monday, with demonstrations stretching across Plaza San Francisco, Plaza Murillo, the Casco Urbano Central, and near the Casa del Pueblo and national legislature.

Photos obtained by Drop… pic.twitter.com/FaXpVu4K6o

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 19, 2026

Al Jazeera reported that some protesters brandished “dynamite sticks and slingshots” as they arrived in the capital city.

An unspecified number of protesters were injured Monday as the government deployed the police and the military to try to break the road blockades, Al Jazeera reported. TeleSUR said that at least four demonstrators were reportedly killed. About 90 arrests were made.

The US State Department said Sunday that it supported Paz’s efforts to “restore order for the peace, security, and stability of the Bolivian people.”

COB said the government was responding with “militarization and repression instead of listening to the people.”

“History will remember who defended the citizenry and who turned their backs. No force should be above the people or their rights,” said COB.

The arrest documents and government investigations, said Drop Site, showed that “the Bolivian government is escalating its response to the protests by describing parts of the strike movement not simply as civil unrest, but as potential terrorism and organized criminal activity.”

A student leader at the Public University of El Alto told Drop Site, “No matter what the Paz government attempts to do, repress the protesters or sanction us as terrorists… we will continue to uphold the sovereignty and rights of our peoples.”

A former Altiplano mayor and Aymara social leader was direct about the betrayal: "This government was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples — who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to… pic.twitter.com/tS80WqG1Zi

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 18, 2026

An Indigenous leader told the outlet that Paz’s government “was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples—who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to use the state to go after the very forces that got them to power.”

This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.

Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.

The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.

The Military is Really Big Bucks

There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.

It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.  

It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually.  

And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.

The Peace Dividend

In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Reagan and Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.

At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.

Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.

It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.

This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.

It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.

The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War

President Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration, could be push by Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.

But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.   

That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.

The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the U.S. economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?

Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.

As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.

In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.  

We’re really going into what we believe is the early chapters of an investment supercycle in the US for electricity growth,” Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, told Barron’s during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. “If you take a step back, we probably haven’t seen an analogous period of time like this since 1945.”

The AI build-out being undertaken at lightning speed is big business for companies like GE Vernova, which, along with Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, supply over 75 percent of the world’s gas turbines. GE Vernova’s equipment alone supplies 25 percent of the world’s electricity, and a staggering 55 percent in the United States. In the first quarter of this year, the company racked up $2.4 billion in sales related to orders for data centers, more than total sales for the previous year. Orders for gas turbines are booked out into 2030.

In February, Siemens Energy announced it was investing $1 billion to expand its production of grid equipment in response to soaring demand for electrification, including restarting production of gas turbines at a plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had stopped producing them in 2020.

Hitachi Energy invested $37 million to expand an existing facility in South Boston, Virginia, that produces large power transformers — another key piece of equipment in meeting the energy demands of the AI build-out. The company has invested over $1.5 billion into its transformer business alone. Like the gas turbine business, more than 50 percent of the large power transformer market is controlled by the same three companies, alongside Hitachi Energy and Toshiba Energy Systems.

Even beyond these key suppliers, AI investment propped up an otherwise anemic economy, accounting for anywhere from half to 75 percent of GDP in the first quarter of this year.

The windfall of profits for these manufacturers, however, reflects a severe supply crunch for these critical pieces of equipment, with both gas turbine and large power transformer orders backed up for years and associated costs rising. These pieces of machinery are generally made to order and are incredibly capital- and labor-intensive, taking over a year to deliver after an order is placed. The supply strain is so severe that the White House is considering bumping orders for GE Vernova turbines from other countries to move up US-based hyperscalers in their place.

What industry publications warn is a growing “hardware bottleneck” that threatens to limit the AI build-out and the ensuing profit-making for many corporations and Wall Street speculators could be a key point at which workers can leverage power in the living struggle breaking out around AI and its quickly expanding impacts on conditions for the working class, the climate, and government.

The Destruction of Labor Power?

In a 2021 blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mused that his work at the company reminded him daily of “the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital.”

Left to their own devices, the likes of Altman and the other titans of the tech billionaire elite would like nothing more than to remake society into one where all else is subservient to their profit margins. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is currently on a fundraising spree to bring in $100 billion to Project Prometheus, of which he is the co-CEO. Describing itself as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” the fund aims to buy up, hollow out, and implement AI and other forms of automation across manufacturing firms in various sectors.

Linking the broader fight against AI with worker organizing efforts at key choke points in the data center supply chain is a critical strategy and a potent weapon.

This future is being actively contested on multiple fronts. Communities across the country have banded together to fight the construction of data centers in their towns and have won moratoriums blocking future construction in others. Unions are beginning to bargain around AI and workers are developing tactics to fend off the impacts of AI in an increasing number of workplaces. In 2024, automation, though not directly related to AI, was a central issue of the three-day strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) that shut down ports across the East and Gulf Coasts.

The impacts, however, are already being felt. Young people entering the workforce face a particularly bleak job market. The Dallas Federal Reserve reports that “workers age 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since 2022.” Unemployment rates among young people and recent college graduates are the highest in years. This comes alongside grim warnings from the AI architects themselves on the massively disruptive impact AI may quickly have on a wide range of industries, though particularly among white-collar workers.

In 2024, Elon Musk announced that he would build the largest supercomputing facility in the world in Southwest Memphis — the facility, called Colossus, was built with no public input whatsoever. Powered by thirty-five gas turbines, this facility emits more pollution into a nearby black community at one time than the levels of pollution emitted from the Memphis International Airport, according to Memphis Community Against Pollution.

Musk was recently awarded a permit to build a second facility nearby. Memphis, a majority black city, has been particularly targeted by the right-wing billionaire class. National Guard troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were mobilized to the city by the Trump administration, and it was just split apart in redistricting efforts to deprive the city of political representation and hand another congressional seat to the Republicans.

Data centers across the country are driving up power bills, using tremendous amounts of water and causing related water quality issues, emitting pollution from turbines and other machinery, and even causing illness among those living nearby.

With eye-popping amounts of capital at their disposal — and plans to increase their investments — the Big Tech companies show no signs of stopping the rapid build-out and their attempts to integrate AI into as many parts of the economy and our lives as possible. Linking the broader fight against AI with worker organizing efforts at key choke points in the data center supply chain is a critical strategy and a potent weapon.

AI’s Limiting Factor: Electricity

Agas turbine is a colossal machine. Weighing in at more than 400 tons and measuring nearly fifty feet long, a single turbine can generate enough electricity to power a modestly sized city, or between 100 and 400 megawatts. Faced with order backlogs, many manufacturers and hyperscalers are opting for smaller turbines, called aeroderivatives, that are essentially jet engines repurposed for energy generation.

“[Energy] is the bottleneck,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told Joe Rogan during an interview in late 2025, adding emphasis on “the.”

The industry analysis firm Industrial Info Resources (IIR) reports that around $2.4 trillion in AI data center development is currently underway in the United States. The power needs of these data centers have continued to increase. IIR reports that electricity demand in the United States has “risen from roughly 23 GW of new load in 2023 to about 42 GW today, with another 32 GW under construction.” By comparison, in 2024, data centers consumed 24 GW of energy. IIR estimates that by 2030, new load demand may reach around 90 GW, if not higher.

Hyperscalers have few options available to them to quickly meet these energy needs besides gas turbines and large power transformers. Many companies are scrambling to develop nuclear small modular reactors (SMR), but that technology is likely still years away from being readily deployed. Increasingly, battery production capacity — spurred by policies and investments by the Biden administration primarily to assist electric vehicle (EV) production, which were subsequently nixed under Donald Trump — is being redirected toward producing energy storage solutions for the growing power needs of data centers.

Power generation and distribution are thus key sites of struggle for workers to exercise power in the battle over AI and its potentially wide-ranging impacts on work, life, the environment, and government.

Not only are these machines in high demand and capital- and labor-intensive, but they are also manufactured domestically in only a few locations. GE Vernova’s main gas turbine production facility is located in Greenville, South Carolina, with over 2,500 workers; Siemens Energy’s main production facility is in Charlotte, North Carolina, with around 1,500 workers; and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ main plant is in Savannah, Georgia, with over 500 workers.

Large power transformer production is clustered in a similar geographic area, with key plants like Hitachi, Prolec GE, Siemens (at the same facility that produces gas turbines), and Eaton, among others, located from southern Virginia through North Carolina and into Upstate South Carolina. Production of various input components and other production related to the grid is also fairly concentrated in this same general geography.

Because these critical machines are manufactured in so few locations, and those locations are clustered together, any disruptions to production would have cascading and wide-ranging impacts, giving workers powerful leverage over the AI build-out.

Power generation and distribution are key sites of struggle for workers to exercise power in the battle over AI.

In addition to direct outreach to workers in this sector and at these key facilities, capital investment in these plants means many are or will soon be hiring. For the last two years, the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) — where I serve as organizing coordinator — has been recruiting workers through its Rank and File Program to get jobs in strategic industries to organize. The primary focus of this effort to date has been the electric vehicle and battery supply chain. As a result, in-plant organizers are now rooted at key facilities and are building out a network across the sector, connecting committee-building efforts across the region rather than confining organizing activity to a workplace-by-workplace basis. Recruitment and committee building are ongoing.

Another area of work is now emerging to build out a similar network of worker militants engaged in committee-building efforts and connected together through an industrial network in power generation production. With the stage set for a general strike on May Day 2028, the role this sector of workers could play in exercising power behind a broad set of working-class demands — around AI implementation and automation, for the climate, and for redistribution of the exorbitant profits of these companies toward social needs — would be quite significant.

The United States is the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy by output. Large-scale, capital-intensive plants in heavy manufacturing make for stable, important targets for worker organization. A company that invests $13.9 billion in a brand-new factory (the cost of Toyota’s new EV and hybrid battery plant in North Carolina, for example), is planning on staying put for the long term and obtaining a profitable return on its investment — even if it’s confronted with labor unrest and worker organizing.

The massive strikes and organizing sweeps of the 1930s and ’40s rightfully serve as inspiration for worker militants today. There is much to be learned and studied from that period, particularly as it pertains to how workers laid the groundwork for the upsurges and pitched battles that took place by building similar networks of worker militants rooted in key facilities today. But no doubt the social turmoil of the period in general played a large role, as it may now, in opening an opportunity to advance the working-class movement in a more militant and combative direction, focused among the unorganized sections of the class in these simultaneously vulnerable and strategic sectors of the economy.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday accused US President Donald Trump of “orchestrating a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies” amid new reporting on the terms Trump is seeking in talks to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.

ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government.

The president is also expected to receive a public apology from the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first White House term.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that the reported settlement terms represent “another installment” in Trump’s “ongoing effort to turn the federal government into a personal cash machine for his unpopular extremist movement.”

“This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Raskin. “Worse still, this is only the beginning—a declaration that the prior payouts were just a down payment, and that he now intends to earmark billions more in taxpayer dollars for his political allies, sycophants, and private militia of unemployed insurrectionists.”

“The president has no authority to conjure up billion-dollar compensation schemes or raid the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle valid lawsuits. Trump is systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents,” Raskin continued. “Congress must act immediately to reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government.”

According to ABC, which cited unnamed sources who emphasized that the settlement’s terms should not be considered final until officially announced, the deal is “expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

“The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight,” ABC noted. “Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars.”

ABC’s story came on the heels of reports earlier this week revealing internal Justice Department discussions on settling Trump’s lawsuit, which he filed in late January. Last month, a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s suit, noting that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”

“Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case because Trump controls both parties,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote late Thursday. “Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a ‘settlement.’ Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.”

“Mind-boggling corruption,” Goldman added.