LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

2026-06-08T16:54:28.303-07:00

'Petty and vindictive' Trump 'is being publicly humiliated on the world stage'

U.S. President Donald Trump with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday, July 28, 2025 in Turnberry, Scotland. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

Alex Henderson

June 08, 2026

ALTERNET

When President Donald Trump is accused of having a belligerent tone with longtime allies of the United States, he often responds that he is merely standing up for a country that has been disrespected and taken advantage of. Trump views himself as a symbol of American strength, but according to British journalist and i Paper reporter James Ball, the U.S. president is looking "weak" and "humiliated" in front of other countries.

"Trump's maniacal self-confidence has endured beyond the first year of his second term in no small part thanks to the constant flattery of his subordinates and a friendly online media ecosystem," Ball explains in the UK-based i Paper. "He seems to genuinely believe that he has 'ended 10 wars,' or that he is constantly breaking record highs in his approval ratings among Republicans. Neither is true."

Trump's "overweening self-confidence," according to Ball, "seems to" be the thing that "propelled" him "into his war with Iran" — a war that, Ball emphasizes, isn't going well for the United States.

"One of the founding principles of the MAGA movement was getting the U.S. out of its endless entanglements overseas, and instead putting 'America First,'" Ball notes. "But the pull of proving himself superior to his predecessors on Iran and the Middle East — Trump has spent a decade endlessly criticizing President (Barack) Obama's deal to curb Iranian nuclear enrichment — seemed to prove irresistible. On a high after kidnapping President (Nicolás) Maduro from Venezuela, and having received a flattering briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming U.S. airstrikes could lead to regime change in Iran, Trump launched his own Middle Eastern adventure."

Ball continues, "Trump never set out a clear aim for the war, not least because he never bothered making much of a case for it, either to the public or to Congress. But it is impossible to claim the current situation as a win against any kind of goal. The world's economy remains on the brink of disaster, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked. Peace negotiations are in deadlock. The Iranian regime's hold on the country is more secure now than it was before US operations began."

Trump, the British journalist laments, is in way over his head with Iran — much to the detriment of the U.S. as well as its allies in other countries.

"Trump is a petty and vindictive man," Ball warns. "He has spent much of his second term trying to bring the power of the federal government to bear against his political enemies, for real and imagined slights. He has pursued vendettas for weeks, months and years against those he feels criticized him unfairly. Now, he is being publicly humiliated on the world stage, while every world leader watches on. What might a man like Donald Trump do in such a situation? Trump has made himself look foolish, and weak. That could make him more dangerous than ever.

2026-06-08T16:53:43.713-07:00

Higher Education Must Not Become a Research Arm of Militarized Power

Universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education.

By Henry A. Giroux ,

Truthout

June 8, 2026

A pro-Palestine protester holds a placard that says, "No more research for IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces)" during a 2024 rally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as student demonstrators demand divestment from Israeli military ties.Vincent Ricci / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

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What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.
The Dangers of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex”

The late U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by what he called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address on the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower included the word “academic,” recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that threatened their intellectual independence and democratic mission.

Critics Slam Carney’s Plan to Jump-Start Canada’s Economy via Military Industry
Canada’s prime minister faces blowback for his plan to hike Canadian arms companies’ profits by 240 percent in 10 years. By Nora Loreto , Truthout March 3, 2026

This warning extends to countries that increasingly live in the shadow of the U.S.’s expanding warfare state and its militarized culture. For instance, against an increasingly militarized global order, the Canadian government has unveiled an expansive “Defence Industrial Strategy” backed by 81.8 billion Canadian dollars (around 60 billion in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending in Budget 2025, including 6.6 billion Canadian dollars devoted specifically to expanding the country’s defense-industrial infrastructure. The strategy marks the largest long-term expansion of Canada’s military economy since the Second World War.

What once appeared to be limited partnerships between North American universities and defense industries has evolved into a far broader transformation of higher education itself. As Canada dramatically expands military spending through its Defence Industrial Strategy, universities are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of defense priorities. Federal initiatives encourage partnerships between universities, defense contractors, and government agencies in fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, autonomous systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. Research funding is increasingly directed toward projects framed around national security, defense innovation, and military competitiveness. As these priorities gain influence, higher education is being reshaped by the social logics of militarization, technological control, and permanent security, altering not only what knowledge is produced but also the purposes to which it is put, raising urgent questions about the future of the university as a democratic public sphere.

Militarized knowledge production blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

The growing use of drones and AI-driven warfare systems is not simply a military development. It signals a broader transformation in how research and knowledge are produced, funded, and valued. As universities deepen their involvement in military research, fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data analytics to robotics and cybersecurity are increasingly organized around the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare. AI technologies are already being deployed by state agencies to monitor migrants, journalists, activists, and political dissidents, while drones have revolutionized warfare by making it cheaper, more remote, and less accountable. Under such conditions, knowledge is not viewed primarily as a public good serving democratic life. Instead, it is increasingly organized around military imperatives of prediction, control, targeting, and domination. The result is a form of militarized knowledge production that blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

Michael S. Sherry rightly argues that in an age in which state power is increasingly organized through militarized values and security logics, military culture now shapes not only state policy but “broad areas of national life.” As David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization no longer operates only through armies and weapons systems. It increasingly shapes culture, technology, modes of governance, and everyday life. As Goldberg observes:

The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purposes, the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The implications for higher education are profound. Militarization does not simply reshape culture, technology, and governance. It also reorganizes the production of knowledge itself, aligning university research with the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare while legitimating authoritarian forms of power. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence research tied to military and surveillance applications deepens these dangers. Universities are increasingly helping to develop technologies used for predictive policing, automated warfare, mass surveillance, and forms of digital authoritarianism that blur the line between security and repression. Such developments are routinely justified in the language of innovation, efficiency, and national security, yet they raise profound ethical questions about the role of higher education in designing technologies that deepen inequality, expand state violence, erode civil liberties, and facilitate the killing of civilians, including children, in conflicts largely removed from public scrutiny.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities, and the capacity for democratic agency itself. When higher education embraces military partnerships and military-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is recast as a threat rather than a democratic necessity.
How Militarization Reorganizes the Production of Knowledge

As militarization becomes woven into the fabric of political culture, universities increasingly reorganize knowledge, research priorities, and technological innovation around the assumptions of permanent conflict, geopolitical competition, and security management. In doing so, higher education normalizes the belief that militarized knowledge and military solutions should govern everyday life. Yet militarization does not merely reshape research priorities and institutional culture. It also reorganizes historical memory, civic identity, and the very terms through which democracy is understood.

Militarization also bears heavily on the production of knowledge itself. As Fintan O’Toole observes, contemporary authoritarian movements do more than expand military power; they seek to reshape historical memory and civic consciousness. Shameful histories are recast as heroic achievements, while assaults on democracy are reimagined as acts of patriotism. The Confederate rebellion is transformed from a defense of slavery into a noble cause, much as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is increasingly celebrated by its defenders as a patriotic uprising rather than an assault on democratic institutions. Equally troubling are efforts to remake the military itself through demands that soldiers be trained for loyalty to political leaders rather than to constitutional principles. Here, power seeks not only to command institutions but also to militarize knowledge, memory, and civic identity. Universities have a crucial responsibility to resist such distortions by defending historical truth, critical inquiry, and the capacity to distinguish education from propaganda.

As Kevin Baker notes, military solutions increasingly displace diplomacy, democratic institutions, and other civic responses to social problems. Within a culture saturated by militarism, aggression is celebrated as prevention, repression is justified in the name of security, and military force is invoked to discipline dissent and erode democratic values. Under such conditions, education is organized less around the imperatives of democratic culture than around the demands of the arms industry, surveillance systems, technological acceleration, and the national security state.

These developments become even more troubling when they intersect with the ongoing marketization of higher education. At its best, higher education functions as a democratic public sphere, a place where students learn to think critically, question authority, engage history, and imagine alternative democratic futures. Yet under the pressures of neoliberalism, universities have increasingly abandoned this mission. Education is now often reduced to job training, students are treated as consumers, faculty are deskilled and casualized, and learning is defined largely in instrumental terms. Questions about how education might nurture civic courage, ethical imagination, social responsibility, and democratic agency are increasingly sidelined in a market-driven university culture.

Yet the assault on higher education is not only economic. It is also ideological and political. In recent years, a growing chorus of liberal and conservative critics has claimed that universities have lost their way, charging that the humanities and critical scholarship have corrupted higher education through ideology and activism. Under the seductive language of “reform,” “balance,” “civility,” “institutional trust,” and “neutrality,” these critics present themselves as defenders of academic integrity while advancing a profoundly reactionary project. In some cases, liberal critics go so far as to treat “social justice” as a threat to scholarship rather than asking how power, exclusion, race, gender, class, empire, and inequality have always shaped what counts as knowledge. Their calls for neutrality, which function as a cover for depoliticization, do not protect intellectual freedom; they align with a broader assault on critical thought, historical memory, and democratic culture. They are aghast at the notion put forward by Thomas Chatterton Williams that “For humanities departments [and higher education in general] to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.” In doing so, they obscure the far more dangerous attacks on higher education coming from the right: censorship, book bans, assaults on DEI programs, the repression of student protest, and efforts to align universities with corporate, state, and military interests.

Critical scholarship is condemned as ideological, while militarized research, donor influence, state-directed threats of defunding, and forms of ideological indoctrination are celebrated as common sense. The real danger is not that universities have become too political, but that they are being stripped of their democratic mission and transformed into institutions that normalize conformity, surveillance, militarization, and authoritarian power. Higher education is not under attack because it has been ruined by the left. On the contrary, it is under assault by the Trump administration and a broader network of far right forces precisely because it keeps alive a dangerous truth: education is not merely about credentials, careers, or conformity to the status quo. At its best, it cultivates the capacity for critical judgment, informed dissent, compassion, and democratic agency. What authoritarian movements fear most is not ideological indoctrination but an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable, and imagining a more just future.

Militarization deepens anti-democratic tendencies. Research is increasingly tied to military applications, geopolitical competition, and outside funding rather than to the public good. Universities adopt the language of security, risk management, efficiency, and competitiveness while corporate and military values increasingly shape institutional priorities. As a Simons Foundation policy briefing warns, militarization has increasingly become a “default response” to political instability and global insecurity, reinforcing a culture in which social problems are framed through the logics of surveillance, strategic competition, and military preparedness rather than diplomacy, public investment, and democratic cooperation. As Professor Catherine Lutz notes, such actions run the risk of eroding legal and moral boundaries. In such a climate, higher education loses its civic character and becomes subordinated to the interests of the warfare state and defense industries.

As universities become increasingly tied to military and security logics, they risk abandoning their civic purpose in favor of a pedagogy of permanent emergency, one that privileges surveillance, strategic competition, and technological domination over critical inquiry, civic imagination, ethical responsibility, and social solidarity. What disappears in this militarized vision of higher education is the conviction that universities should cultivate informed citizens capable of holding power accountable rather than simply servicing the imperatives of the national security state.

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking, and instrumental rationality. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism, and state power are pushed aside in favor of managerial efficiency and national competitiveness. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, sexual violence, or war crimes are too often met not with dialogue but with surveillance, administrative repression, and policing.

The dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.”

In such instances, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture. As scholar John Gills notes, the dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.” In this way, universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education. Such developments raise not only political and educational concerns but also urgent ethical questions about the kinds of institutions that universities are becoming and the values they choose to endorse.

The militarization of higher education raises a profound ethical question: What happens when universities enter into partnerships with military institutions while remaining silent about documented human rights abuses associated with those same institutions? Such silence is never politically neutral. It suggests that violations of human rights can be overlooked, rationalized, or normalized when carried out in the name of security, defense, or national interest.

This issue extends beyond universities themselves and raises broader questions about the responsibilities of democratic governments. As Canada, among other countries, deepens military cooperation with allies and expands investments in defense industries, it cannot exempt those relationships from ethical scrutiny. If credible allegations of war crimes, torture, collective punishment, or sexual violence are ignored in the name of strategic alliances or national security, democratic principles are hollowed out from within. Universities, precisely because they are charged with fostering critical inquiry and ethical judgment, have a responsibility to challenge such silences rather than reproduce them.

These ethical concerns become especially urgent when universities maintain relationships with institutions implicated in serious human rights abuses. The issue is particularly troubling in light of allegations regarding the use of sexual violence against Palestinians. Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof noted that while there is no evidence that Israeli leaders explicitly order rape, United Nations investigators have reported that sexual violence has become one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” in the mistreatment of Palestinians. Other human rights organizations have reached similarly disturbing conclusions.

Such allegations also raise broader concerns about how security regimes can be used not only against occupied populations but also against those who challenge state policies. Reuters reported that organizers of a flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza alleged that some activists detained by Israeli authorities experienced physical abuse and that at least 15 reported sexual assaults, including allegations of rape. Zeteo provided shocking and wrenching video testimonies from some of the activists, largely ignored by Western media. Whatever the final findings regarding these allegations, they underscore the need for independent scrutiny of security institutions and the dangers of granting them unquestioned legitimacy in the name of national defense. When accusations of abuse are met with silence rather than investigation, the boundaries between security, impunity, and state-sanctioned violence become increasingly blurred.

If universities claim to uphold principles of human rights, social responsibility, and ethical inquiry, they cannot selectively ignore such evidence when it implicates states or institutions with which they maintain research, military, or security partnerships. To do so risks transforming universities from spaces of critical inquiry into institutions that legitimate power while remaining silent about its abuses. At stake is more than the question of particular research contracts. It is the moral integrity of higher education itself.

These concerns are not confined to particular institutions or isolated abuses. They are symptomatic of a broader culture in which militarized values increasingly shape public life, political discourse, and social priorities. From sporting events and military recruitment in schools to popular films, social media spectacles, gun culture, and state-sponsored propaganda, aggression, domination, and war are normalized as features of everyday life.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the influence of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who celebrates “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and wraps militarism in the language of white Christian nationalism and religious righteousness. As Jasper Craven observes, Hegseth champions a form of “military manliness” stripped of any ethical center. Such a worldview elevates domination as a virtue, defines violence as a moral ideal, and transforms, in Craven’s words, “the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological religious crusade.” As these values circulate through culture and public institutions, they increasingly shape higher education itself, influencing not only what universities teach but also the forms of knowledge they produce, fund, and legitimate.

Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression.

At the same time, vast intellectual, scientific, and financial resources are being diverted from urgent public needs such as climate justice, public health, democratic education, and social welfare toward the expansion of military technologies and security infrastructures. In the process, the arms industry reaps enormous profits while universities increasingly risk becoming laboratories for aggression rather than institutions dedicated to civic responsibility, ethical imagination, and the common good.

Defenders of militarized partnerships insist that universities must remain pragmatic and “neutral” in securing funding and advancing national interests. But neutrality in such cases is largely a myth. Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression. Higher education has no legitimate ethical mandate to function as a research arm of militarized power.
Universities Must Refuse to Become Laboratories for War

The issue is not whether universities are political, but what kind of politics they embody and in whose interests they function. In an age marked by rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, climate catastrophe, and endless wars, universities cannot escape matters of power and values, and they must decide whether they will serve democracy or militarized power. Nor can educators retreat into the call for neutrality. At stake here is more than institutional policy. It is the fate of the university as a democratic institution. Few writers understood these dangers more clearly than Toni Morrison, who warned: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”

Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning can nurture radical hope, civic responsibility, informed agency, critical thinking, and substantive democracy. The struggle against the militarization of Canadian universities is therefore not merely a fight over funding priorities. It is a struggle over whether education will serve democracy or become an extension of the warfare state. Activists from groups like World Beyond War Canada and the Canadian Federation of Students are right to insist that genuine security comes not from militarism and permanent war, but from investing in education, housing, public health, and the social good.

Universities must refuse their transformation into laboratories for war, surveillance, and technological domination. At stake is whether higher education will further accommodate militarized and authoritarian power or become a crucial site of resistance, critical consciousness, and democratic possibility, one that refuses to confuse security with fear, civic responsibility with obedience, and education with the demands of war and domination. In an age when militarism increasingly shapes culture, politics, and everyday life, universities must remain among the few institutions willing to defend critical inquiry, civic responsibility, and democratic freedom against the expanding reach of the warfare state.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

2026-06-08T16:49:44.869-07:00

'Appalling' video captures driver wrecking ancient National Park forest

By Oke (talk · contribs) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1138764

Adam Lynch

June 06, 2026

ALTERNET

San Francisco Gate reports employees are searching for someone who appears to have illegally driven a car through the delicate bristlecone pines ecosystem of the Inyo National Forest.

“Adam Leidy, Inyo National Forest’s off-highway vehicle and over-snow vehicle program manager, posted two videos to his Facebook account in late May — one flagging tire marks on the wrong side of some ‘no motor vehicles’ signs and another one showing a Subaru on the move,” reports SF Gate. “Leidy asked anyone with information about the driver to contact Inyo’s dispatch at 760-873-2405.”

“Scientifically, I’m appalled,” said Jeff Holmquist, a researcher for the White Mountain Research Center, told SFGATE. “In my view, it’s obscenely damaging and extremely unfortunate.”

Home to some of the oldest trees on earth, the alpine region of the Inyo National Forest has remarkably vulnerable soil. Between the revered, ancient trees lies a fragile biocrust, a thin layer of living material consisting of algae, moss and lichen that binds the topsoil and protects it from harsh highland wind and sparse rain.

“Vehicle tires can compact soils and damage root systems — making it more difficult for plants to absorb water and nutrients — and also leave behind seeds of invasive species, according to a park spokesperson. “In high-elevation settings — especially in Bristlecone Pine forests and alpine tundra — this damage is particularly severe,” Inyo National Forest personnel told SFGATE. “These plants grow extremely slowly. A single vehicle driving just a short distance off-road can kill or damage hundreds of small plants and shrubs. Recovery of soils in these ecosystems can take decades or even centuries.”

Car tires carousing though restricted sections can damage slow-growing seedlings, or blast roots that would sooner rot away than recover. They certainly damaged the fragile biocrust, said the park spokesperson.

“My guess is that the tracks that this vehicle left will be there for the rest of my life and probably yours, too,” Holmquist told the paper. “… It’s a horrible thing, and I say that both as somebody who has a real reverence for the natural world and as a scientist. We’re ants compared to these ancient trees, in terms of size but particularly in terms of longevity. It’s such a peaceful, serene place. You have a sense of deep time as you sit at the base of these trees.”

Despite the destruction, SF Gate reports the citation for driving a vehicle off the road in a way that disturbs land, wildlife or vegetation only comes with a $250 fine. The agency’s main tool for against degrading the precious environment and filling it with invasive bramble is education, starting with clear signage.

“We also install physical barriers — rocks, bollards, and other structures — to discourage off-road driving,” the spokesperson told SFGATE. “And we invest in public education, because most visitors want to recreate responsibly; they just need clear guidance.”

2026-06-08T16:38:50.703-07:00

As the Climate Crisis Heats Our Ocean, Trump Is Tossing the Thermometer

At a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data collecting buoy is moored in the Indian Ocean.
(Photo by David Zimmerman/ NOAA)

Erika Spanger
Jun 06, 2026

Union of Concerned Scientists/Blog

It’s easy for us land dwellers to forget that we live on a water planet, more than 70% of it covered by a vast ocean. But we are entering an age—or more accurately, have created an age—when that fact will be impossible to ignore. With global climate change, the seas are rising, yes, but they are also warming, slowly but steadily, and that warmth is now reaching levels that can drive profound changes here on land. Many of those changes have begun, many are on display this year, and some will have seismic consequences going forward.

Almost as shocking as the scale of these changes are the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the very scientific instruments that enable us to understand them. We’ll get there. But first, a little immersion into our water planet to better understand what it means to overheat it and force the ocean to compensate.
Earth, Despite the Name, Is a Water Planet

‘Absolutely Crazy’: Horror as Trump Moves to Dismantle Crucial Ocean Monitoring System

A more representative, less terra-centric view of our 70% water planet.

(Photo by NOAA/NASA GOES via Smithsonian)

A quick refresher on Earth’s ocean. I mean, where did it even come from, all this water?

After Earth’s molten formation 4.6 billion years ago, the planet gradually cooled below the boiling point of water and, fueled by steam released from volcanoes, it rained for thousands of years, filling the low-lying surface of the planet. An era of bombardment by icy asteroids provided a huge additional volume of water. And voila, a water planet was born, almost entirely covered by one massive ocean. Tectonic activity eventually produced large land masses and, over time, both plate movement and global temperature fluctuations have greatly changed the shape of the ocean—and the land, our default perspective—e.g., tying more or less water up in ice. But with the exception of a couple of global ice ages, the liquid ocean has always dominated Earth’s surface. We’ve almost always been a “blue planet,” and always a water planet.
Water Manages Heat—and Thus Life—on Earth

This water was the birthplace of life on Earth. Indeed, water is considered the birthplace of carbon-based life anywhere, which is why scientists search for it in other solar systems. It took at least 500 million years for the first life to form in the ocean (~4.1 billion years ago), and once it did, life remained simple and aquatic for the vast majority of Earth’s history. It took fungi, plants, and especially animals big evolutionary leaps to venture out of the ocean (and much of it did not; today, nearly 80% of Earth’s animal life, measured in biomass, lives in the oceans), first to the tidal zone, then the coasts, and even today, with terrestrial life spanning most dry land, the ocean continues to exert tremendous influence on that life. It does this through a range of mechanisms. Chief among them, our ocean plays the dominant role in managing the Earth’s heat and making large regions of the planet habitable.

The ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

A core way the ocean does this is by absorbing solar radiation at tropical latitudes and distributing that heat via vast ocean currents to cooler parts of the world. These currents then distribute water that has cooled at the poles back toward the equator. Without this mechanism, the heat that makes life possible even in the otherwise frigid latitudes would remain concentrated around an intolerably hot equator. In this sense, the oceans are a great regulator of the global climate, tamping down extremes and supporting Goldilocks-style just-right regional climates around the world.

The oceans are also the primary source of moisture and precipitation—basically, weather—to land. As the sun heats ocean surface water, it evaporates, creating humid air that is transported by forces like winds and the Earth’s rotation, delivering precipitation, the water that makes terrestrial life possible.

So, if the role of the ocean in managing Earth’s temperature is fundamental to life on Earth, what happens when we overheat it?
The Ocean: an Unfathomably Huge Heat Buffer

A depiction of how the Earth has dealt with the energy imbalance created mainly by burning fossil fuels and adding heat-trapping molecules to the atmosphere. The oceans have spared us the true brunt of global warming, storing 91% of excess heat, up from 89% when this visual was created three years ago.(Graphic by Copernicus)

The ocean is estimated to have absorbed 91% of the excess heat, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, that has been trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat storage is possible because of the ocean’s specific heat capacity—i.e., water takes a lot more energy to warm than land or air. Direct absorption of sunlight, the main way the ocean absorbs heat, depends on the level of albedo present, where darker surfaces, like the ocean surface, absorb more of the sun’s energy than light surfaces, like polar ice caps, which reflect it back to space. But other mechanisms, like heat exchange with the atmosphere, warm the ocean, too.

Without that excess-heat absorption and storage in recent decades, life on land would have been thrown into chaos (at best) by skyrocketing temperatures by now. According to one study, the heat taken up by the upper layer of the ocean between 1955 and 2010 was enough to warm the atmosphere by a jaw-dropping 36°C. This massive, climate-mediating role of the ocean puts our thus-far unsuccessful human efforts to keep warming to 1.5 or 2°C in sharp relief. That is, the ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

The Buffer Is Getting Thin

The vastness of the ocean means it requires tremendous inputs to respond. But the excess heat that carbon emissions have trapped since the start of the Industrial Revolution is one such tremendous input. Major recent research captures the scale in this way, according to one of a new study’s 50 authors, John Abraham: the heat absorbed by the ocean in 2025 alone is “like 12 Hiroshima bombs being detonated each second, for every minute, hour, and day for the entire year.”

The absorption of that heat means that the average temperature of the oceans has been steadily rising, and now those temperatures are reaching levels that fuel impacts, including on land, that we will be unable to ignore.

Overall, the ocean has broken average temperature records every year for the past nine years. Temperatures have increased most at the surface, where sea surface temperatures have warmed roughly 0.8°C between 1901 and 2020, and recently broke new monthly high records for thirteen consecutive months, starting in mid-2023. But deeper layers are warming, too. The chart below shows ocean heat content at different depths. And while slow ocean circulation constrains the movement of heat to great depths, ~20% of total warming is occurring below 700 meters.

(Credit: ECCO https://ecco-group.org/ohc.htm)

So, Where Are We Today?

The NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) data in the chart below shows 2026 SSTs rising to rival the record-breaking levels of 2024. This is influenced by the formation of a Super El Niño. Outlooks point toward new record high ocean temperatures this year, potentially creating the new hottest year on record for Earth in 2027.

2026 sea surface temperatures are now rivaling those of 2024, the warmest year on record. (Graphic by Copernicus)

Climate change is the clear driver here. Thanks to tools like Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), we can now see the role of climate change in daily sea surface temperatures, and thus in marine heatwaves and other anomalies. According to the CSI, this week, both the notable heat in the Indian Ocean and that in the Equatorial Pacific (where the El Niño is forming) are made substantially more likely due to climate change.

The role of climate change in driving warm ocean surface temperatures.

(Graphic by Climate Central)

Symptoms of the Ocean’s Fever

These temperatures are now manifesting in impacts around the world and pointing toward accelerating change. In follow up blogs, we will unpack these symptoms in some detail, but to name significant ones:

Warmer water hastens the melting of “ocean-terminating” ice sheets (i.e., land-based ice connected to the ocean), contributing to sea-level rise; creates a warming feedback loop by shrinking sea ice and increasing the ocean-warming albedo affect; enhances ocean stratification, where warmer surface and cooler deep waters fail to mix and redistribute heat; this in turn can drive hypoxic conditions, starving deeper waters of oxygen; can slow major ocean currents (thermohaline circulation), which are driven by changes in density, in turn driven by water temperature and salinity; and can super-charge storm systems, from tropical cyclones to Nor’easters, causing stronger and more rapidly accelerating storms.

We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.

Then there is the acute heat that manifests in marine heatwaves, a condition that is now chronic and widespread in oceans around the world. In 2023, an estimated 96% of the ocean by area experienced a marine heatwave. The most significant heatwaves (all recent) have disrupted marine food webs and caused major ecological harm, resulting in widespread, prolonged coral reef bleaching, large-scale wildlife deaths, and damaged commercial fisheries.

Given the ocean’s significant role in driving or influencing vastly-consequential terrestrial climate patterns, like the Asian Monsoon, ocean overheating has implications for the human systems that are attuned to those patterns, from water supply, to agriculture and food security, energy production, and more. We’ll be tracking ocean temperatures, reporting on developments, and digging into these implications in subsequent blogs.
An Age of Consequence for Warming a Water Planet

The tremendous capacity of the ocean to store away heat meant that the consequences of warming our planet were slower to be made visible. It now means that an enormous amount of excess heat energy now exists in the oceans, to be gradually released to other Earth systems in forms like direct heat to the atmosphere (as we see in El Nino years), melting of ice, and the supply of sea-surface heat that fuels tropical cyclones, to name a few.

It also means that releasing of that heat, slowing ocean warming, and eventually cooling the ocean cannot be accomplished on practical human timescales, but rather in hundreds to thousands of years. We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.
Our Need to Understand Our Changing Planet Meets the Trump Administration

An essential requirement for meeting the era of ocean heat is better understanding how our oceans and climate are changing, and for this, we have global ocean and climate monitoring infrastructure. Here in the US, the Trump administration is attempting—through staff cuts, budget cuts, eliminating data and information (e.g., datasets and websites taken down), and dismantling our monitoring infrastructure—to make ocean, land, and atmospheric change harder to see.

It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations.

Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots. Sending taxpayer-funded ships on taxpayer-funded missions to essentially unplug functional taxpayer-funded ocean monitoring systems is baffling. Given the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the Trump agenda, it could look like a massive attempted cover up, except that the crime—warming the planet—is ongoing, and there’s really no covering up the changing climate, because we live here.

The ocean has become easy for the wealthier people of the world to ignore: a place to extract resources and dump waste. But this titan is now rumbling into a new kind of activation, more central character than backdrop. It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations. History won’t look kindly on the leaders of this time who ignore the science and the obvious signals. May it reflect that they were forced by their people, in time frames that made a difference, to phase out fossil fuels and invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet.

© 2023 Union of Concerned Scientists

Erika Spanger
Erika Spanger, the director of strategic climate analytics in the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, researches, writes, and speaks about US climate change impacts and preparedness.
Full Bio >

2026-06-08T16:29:57.394-07:00

Reclaiming the Pursuit of Happiness

Let’s celebrate the Declaration’s 250th by ending US poverty.

George, who is homeless, panhandles along a street in Lawrence on August 16, 2019 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Fran Quigley
Jun 07, 2026

Common Dreams

Every week in our law school eviction court clinic, we see parents hustling from their workplaces, still wearing fast food and home healthcare uniforms, hoping to push back the day when they and their kids will be sleeping in their car. We see seniors and persons living with disabilities on the verge of eviction because they had to spend their rent money filling prescriptions. We see some of the 43 million people in the US who are living with hunger.

Every person suffering like this is a rebuke to the core promise of the Declaration of Independence. We should commemorate the Declaration’s 250th anniversary with a renewed commitment to the pursuit of happiness, which means our government fulfilling basic economic needs.

From the very first moment of its existence, the United States embraced economic rights. The Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph commits our government to protecting the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. The founders, as flawed as they were, knew that this promise included ensuring that basic needs are met.
“Not a Charity but a Right”—The Founders and Government’s Role in Ending Poverty

The Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, lamented the democracy-undermining existence of poverty. Natural rights are violated, Jefferson wrote, when some residents struggle and others prosper. So he insisted that the government has a duty to act to remedy the injustice, including through aggressively progressive taxation.

Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

Other founders agreed. Alexander Hamilton explained that the General Welfare Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution (“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes... to provide for the General Welfare of the United States”) creates a government that addresses unmet economic needs. Hamilton’s fellow Constitution framer James Madison called for the new nation to enact laws that would “reduce extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity, raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.”

For 18th century politicians, this type of government intervention was not hypothetical. Colonial governments instituted price controls on food and aggressively regulated gristmills to keep the cost of bread affordable for all.

The founder with the most pronounced vision of economic rights was Thomas Paine, author of the seismic pamphlet Common Sense and a driving force behind the American Revolution and the new government it birthed. Paine called for the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and for direct government anti-poverty interventions like old-age pensions, support for families with young children, full employment, and a basic income. “It is not charity but a right—not bounty but justice that I am pleading for,” he said.
The Meaning of the “Pursuit of Happiness”

Beyond the founders’ own words, it is clear from historical context that a 1776 commitment to protecting the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” includes ensuring that subsistence needs are met. Law professor and dean Linda Keller’s comprehensive review of political thought and contemporary use of this critical phrase during the 18th century led her to conclude that basic economic rights are deeply rooted in the nation’s foundation.

“Its inclusion was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but rather the pursuit of happiness established an ‘unalienable right’ that includes an economic dimension,” Keller writes. “In particular, there are minimum needs that must be met in order to pursue happiness, for instance food, shelter, and clothing. Thus the government must provide the conditions to enable individuals to pursue happiness.”

Over the decades, other scholars have agreed. “The Declaration of Independence manifests a government’s affirmative role in protecting rights,” writes law professor Bert Lockwood. “Both the plain and ordinary meaning of happiness and its common usage in the 18th century indicate that the notion of happiness cannot be entirely separated from material well-being. Access to the minimal necessities of life, such as shelter or basic medical care, is thus an indispensable prerequisite to the notion of happiness.”

Charles Black, the longtime Yale Law professor and civil rights advocate who helped argue the legendary desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, said the point was obvious. “The possession of a decent material basis for life is an indispensable condition, for almost all people at all times, to the pursuit of happiness,” Black wrote. “The right to pursuit of happiness is going to be for all but a small minority of those in poverty, a pale sardonically grinning ghost of a right.”
“Necessitous Men are not Free Men”

US leaders since the founders have underscored this same point: Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

“Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Roosevelt announced as the foundation of his proposal for a Second Bill of Rights ensuring access to housing, healthcare, and living wages.

US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

Soon after, the international community heeded Roosevelt’s call. Virtually every nation has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which enshrines into law the rights to housing, healthcare, and living wage incomes.

Yet the US has not ratified the treaty known as the ICESCR. Not coincidentally, every wealthy nation that has ratified does far better than the US in protecting the pursuit of happiness. Those nations have comprehensive and successful programs ensuring housing, healthcare, and adequate incomes for their residents. In those countries, the grim eviction court scenes we witness every week are almost unheard of.

We can do better, too. US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

These rights are necessary for the pursuit of happiness. The founders knew it, and so do we. Along with fireworks and picnics, let’s celebrate the 250th by finally fulfilling the real promise of the Declaration of Independence.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Fran Quigley
Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

2026-06-08T16:29:10.341-07:00

US Workers Are Paying the Price for Federal and State Refusal to Raise the Minimum Wage

Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living.

Activists with One Fair Wage participate in a “Wage Strike” demonstration outside of the Old Ebbitt Grill restaurant on May 26th, 2021 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Gabriela Ramirez-Perez
Jun 07, 2026

OtherWords

For years, Congress and elected officials across the country have sidestepped one of the clearest economic problems facing working families: The minimum wage no longer keeps pace with the real cost of living.

Today, even full-time work at the federal minimum wage doesn’t pay enough to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And too often, politicians have intervened to keep it that way.

For example, I live in Oklahoma, where the state minimum wage has been tied to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009. As a result, a full-time minimum-wage worker here earns about $15,000 a year before taxes—below the poverty line for an individual and wholly inadequate to survive.

This problem did not happen by accident.

An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

In Oklahoma, some state lawmakers introduced bills to raise the minimum wage year after year—only to see those proposals die without a hearing or a vote. In 2014, the legislature went even further, passing a law that prevented cities and towns from raising local wages, even if local voters and community leaders supported the change.

That meant Oklahomans who wanted to see workers earn a fair wage were left with one remaining option: taking the issue directly to the people.

Again and again, voters in red, blue, and purple states alike have passed measures to raise their minimum wages. In the last decade or so, voters have approved minimum-wage increases in about a dozen states, including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Washington, plus DC.

In early 2024, Oklahomans turned to the state’s initiative petition process as well. Over 150,00 voters signed a petition to place State Question 832 on the ballot. If approved, SQ 832 will gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over several years and then index future increases to the Consumer Price Index after 2030.

Yet even as Oklahomans moved toward a vote, politics intervened. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delayed the election for SQ 832 nearly two years. The wait is about to come to an end on June 16—when voters will finally get their say.

In the meantime, the delay and political games have forced working families in Oklahoma to wait as costs continue to rise. While wages for our lowest-wage workers have been frozen for 17 years, housing, groceries, and utility bills have all become more expensive.

Today, a minimum-wage earner in Oklahoma would need to work about 93 hours a week—more than two full-time jobs—just to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

No one should have to work that much simply to survive. That fact is proof that the current economy is failing many of the people who keep our communities running.

Workers most affected by legislative inaction are the very people we rely on every day: home health aides caring for seniors, childcare workers helping parents stay employed, restaurant staff serving meals, retail workers keeping stores open, and hotel staff assisting travelers. Many of these essential workers still struggle to afford basic necessities.

Our working families have spent years shouldering the cost of federal and state inaction. They are paying the costs through financial stress, unstable housing, delayed healthcare, and less time with their families because they are constantly working to stay afloat.

Many other states have already raised the minimum wage above the federal level, recognizing a simple truth: An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

SQ 832 gives Oklahoma voters the chance to move the state forward after years of legislative inaction. On June 16, Oklahoma voters can take an important step themselves.

But this issue should not rest solely on state ballot measures. Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living—a goal that ultimately requires action from Congress, too.

Because hard work should mean stability, not poverty.

This column was distributed by OtherWords.

Gabriela Ramirez-Perez
Gabriela Ramirez-Perez is a policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute.
Full Bio >

2026-06-08T16:25:41.636-07:00

Trans Athletes Don’t Threaten Women—Patriarchal Politicians Do

As the defense teams in Hecox and BPJ seek to police the bodies of transgender women and girls, all women and girls who don’t adhere to society’s rigid standard of femininity will feel the impact.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates rally outside the US Supreme Court as justices hear arguments in challenges to state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports on January 13, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)

Fatima Goss Graves
Jun 07, 2026

The Hill
The power politicians have over women’s bodies is one of the oldest tools of control in American history. Throughout that history, the promise of protecting women has been the longtime excuse for excluding women from civic life and limiting our freedom. That history isn’t over.

The Supreme Court will soon decide Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ—legal cases out of Idaho and West Virginia that will determine whether transgender athletes will be allowed to compete on women’s and girls’ school sports teams.

‘MAGA’s Weird Obsession’ Continues as House Passes Bill Forcing Schools to ‘Out’ Trans Kids

Idaho’s attorney general has argued that the bans ensure “women’s spaces and sports remain fair, safe, and dedicated to empowering female athletes.” Or, in other words, that we must allow politicians to pass these bans to “protect” women. Although the court’s decision is expected any day now, I have already made mine. Transgender sports bans are not and never have been about protecting women.

I have spent my career fighting to protect the bodily autonomy and legal protections of all women and girls. When people ask me, whether genuinely or in bad faith, why transgender women are unequivocally included in my organization’s work, I tell them the truth: Our fight is the same.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

The tactics being used to exclude transgender athletes are similar to those once used to keep women from casting a ballot, having a credit card, or getting the healthcare they need.

In 1776, a woman couldn’t own the clothes on her back, much less the home she built. Proponents of the practice said it was “intended for her protection.” One 100 years later, when women were shut out of the legal profession, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such paternalism, even stating that “man is, or should be, woman’s protector.” And when women were later fighting for the right to abortion, we were told that our bodies are not our own.

It is no wonder, then, that the red herring of protecting women is being deployed in the Trump administration’s executive orders and in the Hecox and BPJ cases. It is the same excuse being used in a flurry of sports bans and anti-transgender bills that have been introduced and implemented around the country over the past six years. Ultimately, transgender sports bans fail to address the real threats women face in sports, like unfair pay and unequal access to training and facilities.

The great irony is that bans against transgender women in women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, and other areas of public life actually endanger all women. The Idaho law that the Hecox case is challenging, for example, requires women and girl student-athletes whose sex is disputed to undergo invasive sex testing, including physical examinations. Athletes in men’s sports are not subject to the same degradation.

For as long as women and girls have been allowed to participate in sports, their bodies have been scrutinized. From non-white women who do not conform to white beauty standards, to girls with short hair or baggy clothes, to those who are deemed too strong, women athletes who do not perform femininity as some deem correctly have been harassed, punished, and forced to face humiliating tests to prove their gender.

It is no accident that Project 2025 and its supporters are pushing both anti-transgender legislation and a rollback of women’s protections against sexual harassment and assault, their right to reproductive healthcare, and even their ability to vote. Today, as the defense teams in Hecox and BPJ seek to police the bodies of transgender women and girls, all women and girls who don’t adhere to society’s rigid standard of femininity will feel the impact.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court’s decision in Hecox and BPJ will reaffirm what I already know to be true: We women, including transgender women, must be in the fight for liberation together.

© 2023 The Hill

Fatima Goss Graves
Fatima Goss Graves is a nationally recognized leader in the fight for gender justice and an expert in law, policy, and culture change. She is president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, president of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, and a co-founder of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund.
Full Bio >

2026-06-08T16:22:41.696-07:00

How Do We Reclaim Our Future From War?

Are we stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all.

A woman holds up her hands with the words No War written on them as she takes part in an anti-war protest on March 14, 2026 near Habima Square in Tel Aviv, Israel.
(Photo by Erik Marmor/Getty Images)

Robert C. Koehler
Jun 07, 2026

Common Dreams

Is war simply part of human nature? It’s been absurdly “ordinary” throughout my lifetime, and continually expanding its power and psychological reach.

And unless you’re in the middle of it—unless you’re digging for a dead child beneath a bombed building—war is just an abstract horror. It’s necessary. It’s what keeps us safe. Glory, glory hallelujah.

“You ask: What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Hmmm...

We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend.

This is Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in 1940, just as World War II has opened its jaws. In that context, yes, his words make sense, but the paradox hiding in those words—the speech titled “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat”—is that with victory there may be no survival either. The Good War gave us, of course, the nuclear bomb. It gave us much of the military hell that’s happened in my lifetime. It also gave us, along with a multitrillion-dollar annual global military budget, a sense of eternal necessity to be ready for the next evil monster who wants to get us.

That’s it? We’re stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all, but I started digging back into history to get a fuller sense of what others thought. Who are we?

As Steve Taylor, writing some years ago in Psychology Today, noted:
Our view of human nature determines our view of the human race’s future. If we believe that human beings are innately warlike, then there is no reason for us to believe that our future holds anything else but more of the chaos and conflict that has filled our past. But if we believe that conflict is not innate to us and that our aggression is due to external factors rather than being “hard-wired” into us, then we’re entitled to have a different vision of the future.

There seems to be a consensus among historians that we didn’t start organizing for—and waging—war until about 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era, when agriculture began replacing hunter-gathering as humanity’s primary source of survival. A key component of agriculture was, and is, possession and development of land, which began sending waves of change through human consciousness: protect, protect, protect! Land turned into property. And thus, for thousands and thousands of years now, people have been collectively re-envisioning their relationship with each other.

Obviously, this is a quickie look at human history. My point is simply to push the idea that war isn’t inevitable, but rather a response to significant change. I now jump ahead to 1895, when New York Journal owner William Randolph Hearst sent a photographer to Cuba to cover the insurrection going on there against Spanish colonial rule. The photographer cabled Hearst that there was no war to cover, to which Hearst responded: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

And Yellow Journalism was born! And war has remained media’s friend ever since. It’s headline news. There’s fighting, slaughter, and eventual victory—for someone. And the victor controls the narrative.

Well, actually, it’s the media that controls the larger narrative. That is to say, the media creates the context: War is real. It’s what we do. In essence, it’s the bookend of every historical period, the arbiter of social change and, therefore, human evolution. Any questions?

OK, here’s where I start losing my sanity. War may not be part of humanity’s DNA, but it certainly seems to be accepted as though it were. We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend. And ultimately transcend, as a new empire emerges. And then another. Whatever we do in between our wars—live in peace, more or less—may have value, but it’s not all that interesting. It’s just the lull between glorious battle cries.

And thus war starts to seem like who we are. Obviously, it’s part of who we are, because we’ve made it so, but whatever serious value it has in the moment is minimal. Mostly it’s incredibly destructive. It’s an addiction. It’s the lavishly funded antithesis of human connection: with one another, with Planet Earth.

As Rupert Ross writes in his excellent book about Aboriginal wisdom, Returning to the Teachings: “The principle of wholeness thus requires looking for, and responding to, complex interconnections, not single acts of separate individuals. Anything short of that is seen as a naïve response destined to ultimate failure.”

Oh God. Wholeness. Connection. This is the opposite of war. The meaning and complexity of these concepts requires enormous exploration, but for the moment I end with a story about heart-ripping courage and connection—about the nature of peace – that I initially wrote about nine years ago.

This happened in 2017, on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon. A man started screaming racial slurs at—started waging war with—two teenage girls on the train, one of whom was wearing a hajib. He shouted, “Go back to Saudi Arabia!”

Several passengers intervened, standing between the girls and the screamer, pushing him away. The screamer had a knife; he started slashing. Two people were killed, a third was injured. The killer fled the train. He was later arrested. But, oh my God, another act of public horror had occurred. People did what they could. A woman knelt by one of the dying men—Taliesin Namkai-Meche—holding him, comforting him. He said to her, “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.”

Those were his last words.

As I hear them again, I realize that this is who we are, even if we don’t know what they mean. They sear the soul with doubt, with cynicism. How can we reclaim them? Do we have it in us to be so deeply loving? The only larger question is this: How do we reclaim—and start creating—our future?

2026-06-08T16:09:22.732-07:00

Mainers Donate to and Rally With Platner After Reporting on Past Relationships

“If Graham Platner and all of you find a way to build that redemption through this campaign,” Congressman Ro Khanna told a Maine crowd, “maybe you would show a way for this country to start to redeem itself.”

Graham Platner, a Democrat running for US Senate in Maine, speaks to a crowd in Bar Harbor on June 5, 2025.
(Photo by Andrew Estey/Graham for Maine)

Jessica Corbett
Jun 07, 2026
COMMON DREAM

Since The New York Times on Thursday published reporting about some of US Senate candidate Graham Platner’s past relationships—including allegations of physical aggression that the Democrat denied—Mainers have continued to rally with and donate to the political newcomer’s disruptive campaign, which has focused on promoting working-class priorities and defeating the oligarchy.

Maine’s primary is on Tuesday, but Platner has been the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November since Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign over a month ago, citing a lack of financial resources.

Calling Attacks on Platner ‘Politics as Usual’, Mainers Say They Have Back of Working-Class Champion

Platner Campaign Says Fundraising Up, Polling Lead Over Collins Holding, Despite Latest Smear Effort

In the wake of the Times reporting, Platner “raised more money than on any day since Gov. Mills’ withdrawal from the race,” according to his campaign. Specifically, as of 7:00 pm ET Friday, the 41-year-old oyster farmer and combat veteran had collected “over $200,000, from over 5,000 donors, with an average contribution of $40.”

A Graham for Maine spokesperson said in a statement that “the people of Maine know what’s on the ballot Tuesday: not Graham Platner’s past, but whether their voice in the Senate works for them—or billionaires and special interests.”

The Times spoke with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Platner. The interviews arranged by his campaign were with three exes who now support his candidacy. The other three “offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and ‘toxic’ relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.”

Much of the coverage and commentary has focused on Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner from roughly 2013-15. The 40-year-old previously worked for former Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and right-wing organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Independent Women’s Forum, and Ladies for Kavanaugh—a group she co-founded to support the US Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who faced sexual misconduct allegations but was still confirmed as a justice by a majority of senators, including Collins.

“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat—it has nothing to do with that,” she told the Times. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”

Fifield said that Platner’s offensive posts on Reddit—an early controversy in his campaign—“reminded me of just how much he hated women,” and she challenged his insistence that he did not know the skull and crossbones tattoo he got with fellow Marines in Croatia closely resembled a Nazi symbol until last fall, when it became another campaign controversy, and he got it covered up.

According to the Times:
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders—sometimes hard enough to leave marks—and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

Platner acknowledged to the newspaper that he had “too often self-medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during what he called a “very dark period of my life,” but he also strongly denied any claims of physical intimidation or altercations with past partners or knowing about the tattoo’s Nazi ties.

Phil Proschko, who served with Platner in the Marines and also got the symbol tattooed on him, said in a brief interview with Zeteo on Friday: “No, we did not purposely get hateful fucking shit because we’re racist people... We got matching tattoos because we were in our 20s, drunk in Croatia, and that’s it. That’s all that fucking happened.”

Platner reiterated his responses to the Times during a nearly 25-minute interview with Chris Hayes on MS NOW. After the host read portions of Fifield’s allegations, Platner said that “anything alleging physicality” and “anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was” is “simply not true,” and is coming from “someone who’s politically motivated.”

“I’ve been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” added Platner, a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Hayes also invited the candidate to discuss reporting by the Times and The Wall Street Journal late last month that during an internal vetting process, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told campaign staff that he had exchanged sexual messages with multiple other women early in their marriage, and they had addressed it in counseling—plus Gertner’s video response supporting her husband, which Platner shared on social media.

Since Thursday, some have criticized the Times, with reporters from other outlets saying that the paper “breezed past” the full scope of Fifield’s right-wing work history for an article seen by critics as “a hit job against an anti-oligarchy, anti-Israel populist.”

Fifield also spoke out against the final product, writing in a long social media post on Friday that “it dawned on me that this really was a setup all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign.”

Responding to Fifield’s post, a spokesperson for the Times told Newsweek: “We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner. Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the US Senate.”

After the sexting reports, Mills said that “people have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.” The newer reporting on Platner’s exes has directed fresh attention toward the governor.

As NBC News detailed late Friday:
A source close to Mills told NBC News: “The governor remains on the ballot, and in the wake of this week’s stories, people across Maine are reaching out to tell her they’re voting for her and encouraging her to get fully back into the race.”

One Democrat who had been involved in Mills’ campaign said she would move forward anew only if Platner were to step aside, not to challenge him. The Democrat said losing to him “especially now” would serve as an embarrassment to the outgoing governor.

That person, and others, noted that Tuesday’s primary was not the deadline they are looking at, but rather a mid-July deadline under state law. That’s when Platner would have to step aside to be replaced as the nominee.

Platner made clear during his interview with Hayes that he hasn’t considered stepping aside, and since the Times’ Thursday reporting, MS NOW and Fox News have spoken with various voters on Maine streets who continue to back the candidate:

Platner has stayed on the campaign trail, joining Maine gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson; Matt Dunlap, who is running for the state’s 2nd Congressional District; and Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a potential 2028 presidential candidate, for a “Changing the Tides” rally in Bar Harbor on Friday.

Platner stressed that “we are up against one of the most powerful political systems in the history of the world. It is a system of billionaires and special interests. It is a system of corrupted politicians like Susan Collins... who for years has given us some charade that she’s a moderate, that she stands up against her party, that she cares more about her constituents more than she cares about those that donate money to her. We see through it.”

He also addressed the various controversies throughout his campaign, saying: “Since the beginning, Maine, you had my back. When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public, as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness, of recovery and accountability and growth, Maine had my back.”

“Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated, and weaponized, you have my back,” he told a cheering crowd. “And when politically motivated, serious, and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back. The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me. And to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”

Meanwhile, Khanna, a Philadelphia-born son of immigrants, said during the event that “sometimes I think we’re broken right now as a country,” with so many Americans who “feel unseen, unheard, undervalued.”

“We can barely talk to each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re having different conversations, even about the situation we see with Graham and Amy... no ability to have dialogue,” he continued. “For this country to heal, we need to find some way of having grace. We need to find some way of having redemption. We need to find some way of saying that if someone... felt hurt by Graham in a past relationship, we can listen to them, and we can listen to Graham, and we can have conversations as mature Americans, as fellow citizens.”

“If Graham Platner and all of you find a way to build that redemption through this campaign, through this transformation,” he added, “maybe you would show a way for this country to start to redeem itself, because we sure need that as we approach this 250th anniversary.”

From Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who initially backed Mills in the Maine primary, to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an early supporter of Platner who caucuses with Democrats and twice sought their presidential nomination, the party “is united” behind “a single goal,” Khanna also told the crowd. “We will defeat Susan Collins in November.”

Sanders renewed his support for Platner in a Saturday social media post highlighting key campaign issues:

US Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) is set to help rally donors for Platner during a virtual event on Sunday. As Politico noted: “The event is the first public stamp of approval from Schatz, who has not endorsed Platner previously. Making it even more notable is Schatz’s status as a rising leader in the party: He is currently deputy conference secretary and chief deputy whip for the Senate Democratic Caucus, and he has secured the votes—and Chuck Schumer’s endorsement—to take over the No. 2 role next year.”

2026-06-08T16:02:25.674-07:00

‘Now Is the Time to Organize,’ Says Medicare for All Coalition

“The American people are hungry for bold ideas that reform fundamental institutions that have failed them for too long. And they are looking for leaders who will take on powerful interests and fight for working people.”

An advocate holds a sign during a news conference on Medicare Advantage plans in front of the US Capitol on July 25, 2023 in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As Americans endure the high prices of food, gasoline, housing, medication, and more under President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress, a coalition of over 325 organizations argued Monday that “now is the time for Medicare for All.”

“Our democracy is struggling, and the status quo is not working. Too many corporate-backed politicians continue to push for a ‘business as usual’ approach while wages stagnate, public goods and services erode, and billionaires amass grotesque amounts of wealth,” says the coalition’s open letter.

“How can one feel optimism for our future when over 40% of us are carrying around the burden of medical debt?” the letter asks, citing data from KFF. “How can we plan for our futures when we can’t afford to go to the doctor or cover rent?”

According to the coalition:
We need an agenda that working-class people and everyday Americans can rally behind. Without one, far-right, fascist politicians are filling that void. This fascist agenda redirects people’s rightful anger at our system’s failures to unjustly place blame on immigrants, low-income people, and people of color. It’s time to acknowledge that failing to provide transformational policies and hope to the working class has allowed fascism to rise and hold on to power. It’s time to challenge the corrupt CEOs who profit off despair. To show people real solutions that can work.

No one can fix our rigged economy overnight. Our structural inequality is decades in the making. But one piece of the solution is to take on one of the largest industries in our country: healthcare.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) have repeatedly introduced the Medicare for All Act. While support for the bill among elected Democrats and the US public has grown, the legislation hasn’t progressed in either chamber, which are both narrowly controlled by the GOP.

However, “we may face a once-in-a-generation opportunity to legislate on healthcare in 2029,” notes the letter. While the midterms are less than five months away, enacting a federal Medicare for All system would likely require electing more members of Congress and a new president who would support such legislation in the November 2028 election.

“We need to rally behind the boldest possible reform, Medicare for All, that brings together the broadest possible movement, not overly complex incremental measures that prop up the same systems we’re seeing fail under the weight of attacks by Trump and Republicans,” the groups argued. “The American people are hungry for bold ideas that reform fundamental institutions that have failed them for too long. And they are looking for leaders who will take on powerful interests and fight for working people.”

“Now is the time to organize and inspire!” the coalition stressed. “A small minority of skeptical healthcare policy wonks may try to convince us to scale back, that structural change isn’t winnable. The reality is that alternative proposals don’t move us towards Medicare for All and complicate our already broken system. Halfway measures allow corporations to continue profiting off the sick.”

The letter urges members of Congress “to stop listening to the political consultants and start listening to the people,” and Americans nationwide to “join us in dreaming of an economy that works for all of us. Where workers get paid a living wage and have expanded and enforced rights. A future where people can afford safe, healthy, and affordable housing and utilities. Where schools are robustly funded.”

“A core part of that vision is making healthcare a human right,” the letter emphasizes. “Americans understand we must get corporate greed out of our healthcare system once and for all.”

The letter was circulated Monday by the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, whose healthcare policy advocate, Eagan Kemp, said in a statement that “the massive momentum for Medicare for All should serve as a wake-up call to all who profit from our broken healthcare system and those who do their bidding.”

“Everyday Americans are tired of watching the pigs at the healthcare trough gorge themselves day after day while hundreds of millions of people in the wealthiest country in the world suffer from inadequate access to care, delays and denials, and crushing medical debt,” Kemp argued. “Medicare for All would end the ability of corporations to put greed ahead of people’s needs and would finally guarantee that everyone in the US can get the care they require.”

“The movement for Medicare for All is growing by leaps and bounds because the people are demanding change,” he added. “It is time those in power meet the moment and fight for the healthcare system we need and that the people are demanding, Medicare for All.”

Coalition members include the Democratic Socialists of America, Indivisible, MoveOn, National Nurses United, National Organization for Women, One Fair Wage, Our Revolution, People’s Action Institute, Physicians for a National Health Program, Progressive Democrats of America, RootsAction, Sunrise Movement, United We Dream Action, and other organizations that advocate for people with disabilities, seniors, women’s rights, workers, and more.

2026-06-08T15:57:01.164-07:00

Senate Dems Demand Release of Legal Opinion Behind Trump Lie That Iran War Has ‘Terminated’

“Is there something in the rationale they don’t want us to see?” asked Sen. Tim Kaine.

US Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) speaks to reporters following the weekly Senate Democrat policy luncheon at the US Capitol on March 3, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As a fresh exchange of attacks between Israel and Iran over the weekend and into Monday threatened to plunge the region deeper into war, dozens of Democrats in the US Senate are demanding that the Trump administration publicly release its legal justification for declaring the war “terminated.”

“The ongoing naval operations and related efforts to conduct a blockade against Iran constitute hostilities,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump on Sunday. “Furthermore, the United States and Iran, and their associated partners and proxies, have continued to use lethal force in contravention of the ceasefire, which also constitute hostilities.”

Trump claimed in a notification to Congress in early May that the “hostilities” he launched against Iran in late February—without approval from lawmakers as required under the US Constitution and War Powers Resolution of 1973—have “terminated” due to the ceasefire deal reached in April. Trump administration officials have also asserted that the truce, which critics have said is a ceasefire in name only, paused the WPR’s 60-day clock, after which the president is required to immediately withdraw US forces from hostilities.

The Democratic lawmakers—led by Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Tim Kaine (Va.), and Chuck Schumer (NY)—wrote in their Sunday letter that “we would not need to discuss the War Powers Resolution if this were a war authorized by Congress, but it is not.” The senators demanded the release of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion underlying the administration’s claim that the Iran war has “terminated,” along with any other relevant documentation.

“Your administration has not explained to the Congress or the American people why you believe the Constitution permits launching a war of this magnitude—including the loss of US servicemembers’ lives, scores of civilians killed in Iran and the broader region, and staggering economic and geopolitical costs—without authorization from Congress as Article I requires,” the senators wrote. “The facts, history, and law affirm that the hostilities that began on February 28 are active and ongoing, in violation of international law and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.”

The letter was sent days after the House of Representatives approved a war powers resolution aimed at pushing Trump to end the Iran war, which has roiled global energy markets, threatened a global food crisis, and driven up costs in across the US economy. Three Republicans broke ranks to support the resolution.

The House-approved measure was a “concurrent resolution,” meaning it would not have the force of law even if the GOP-controlled Senate also passed it. In May, the Senate advanced a separate resolution led by Kaine that would have legal force, but Trump would be able to veto the measure if it reached his desk.

During a Senate hearing last week, Kaine pressed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on why the administration has not allowed lawmakers to review the OLC’s formal legal opinions pertaining to the Iran war.

“Is there something in the rationale they don’t want us to see?” Kaine asked.

2026-06-08T15:54:49.001-07:00

‘Schumer Is Far Out of Touch’: 80% of New York Democrats Oppose US Weapons Transfers to Israel

“If current party leadership is unwilling to represent their own voters and the majority of Americans, then it is time for new leadership.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during the Senate Democrats’ news conference in the US Capitol on April 14, 2026.
(Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A poll released Monday shows that around 80% of Democratic voters in New York oppose US weapons transfers to Israel, putting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—a stalwart supporter of Israel—way out of step with his voter base.

The survey, conducted by Data for Progress and published by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, found that 82% of New York Democrats—and 60% of the state’s voters overall—believe the US “should restrict taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel until it stops attacking civilians in Gaza.” The poll also found that 76% of Democratic voters in the state would favor the US Senate voting to halt the transfer of US bombs to Israel, which has repeatedly used American weaponry to commit grave war crimes.

The poll was conducted roughly a month after Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) broke with the overwhelming majority of their Democratic colleagues in voting against two resolutions aimed at blocking Trump administration sales of 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers to the Israeli government.

The resolutions were spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who polled more favorably than Schumer among New York voters overall—as did New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has been floated as a possible primary challenger to Schumer in 2028.

“New York State voters, especially Democrats, aren’t being represented by their senators,” the IMEU Policy Project wrote on social media, adding that “Schumer is far out of touch with New York voters on funding Israel.”

A majority of New York voters (51%), and 70% of Democrats, believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the new poll, a position that Schumer has rejected—putting him in conflict with both his own constituents and leading Holocaust scholars and human rights organizations.

“When Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand voted against blocking the bombs and bulldozers Israel is using to destroy Palestinian and Lebanese homes, they were not just voting against the vast majority of their own Senate caucus and Democratic voters, but they were voting against the majority of New Yorkers they’re elected to represent,” Margaret DeReus, the IMEU Policy Project’s executive director, said in a statement. “If current party leadership is unwilling to represent their own voters and the majority of Americans, then it is time for new leadership.”

2026-06-08T15:47:12.115-07:00

‘Unsettling’ Accounts of HHS Leadership Fuel Calls for RFK Jr. to Resign

“Every day that goes by without Secretary Kennedy’s long overdue resignation is a day American lives are put further in harm’s way,” said the director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on April 22, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jun 07, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

While public health advocates have sounded the alarm about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since senators confirmed President Donald Trump’s “profoundly unqualified” nominee to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services over a year ago, The New York Times’ Sunday reporting on his job performance at HHS sparked fresh calls for his resignation.

HHS “affects the health of 340 million Americans and provides healthcare to 40% of the population through Medicare and Medicaid,” explained the Times, which interviewed a dozen people who have had contact with Kennedy as secretary and other department employees. His nearly 16-month tenure has already featured a measles outbreak that killed two children in Texas last year, the recent hantavirus cases among cruise passengers, and the ongoing Ebola crisis in Africa.

As the newspaper detailed:
Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.

Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Mr. Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.

The paper highlighted the National Institutes of Health posts held by acting directors as well as the lack of a surgeon general (Trump’s picks keep stalling in the GOP-controlled Senate), Food and Drug Administration commissioner (Marty Makary resigned in May, reportedly over a controversial vape policy sought by Big Tobacco), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief (Kennedy fired CDC’s Susan Monarez in August after they clashed on vaccine policy, which led other officials to step down). Courtney Spencer, the secretary’s newly appointed top spokesperson, claimed that the department is “aggressively recruiting top talent to fill every remaining vacancy.”

As for Kennedy’s schedule when he’s in Washington, DC, “he spends much of his day in closed-door meetings, according to those who work with him, and has little direct engagement with his staff,” the Times reported. Sources pointed to his history of skipping gatherings with the leaders of the department’s 13 operating divisions, and some described him as “checked out.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai signaled support for the Trump appointee’s performance so far, telling the Times that the department’s “rapid and comprehensive response” to the Ebola outbreak proved that “under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS continues to safeguard the health and wellness of the American people.”

However, Kayla Hancock, director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project, said in a statement that “accounts from within the Trump HHS paint an unsettling picture of RFK Jr.'s absentee leadership amid public health crises both present and looming.”

“Trump’s health secretary hasn’t stepped foot inside the CDC in nearly a year despite historic measles outbreaks inflamed by his own anti-vax propaganda,” she stressed, summarizing the reporting. “When Kennedy does show up to the HHS office—typically for just six hours a day, which must be nice—he isolates himself from top staff and ignores lawmaker requests for months on end.”

Hancock noted that “while Kennedy can’t be bothered to involve himself in spiraling health threats like Ebola, he finds plenty of time to do a shirtless photo spread with Kid Rock, babble for hours on... his taxpayer-funded vanity podcast on topics like teen sperm, and orchestrate a wasteful department-wide fishing expedition for any data he can use to breathe life into his debunked anti-vax agenda.”

“Worse, while RFK Jr. is unwilling to do his job, he’s perpetuated a dangerous HHS leadership void for months, refusing to fill vital roles with actual competent, qualified people who would pick up his slack,” she added. “Every day that goes by without Secretary Kennedy’s long overdue resignation is a day American lives are put further in harm’s way.”

The reporting builds on warnings from experts since Kennedy took over HHS. Last September, nearly every living former director or acting director of CDC jointly argued in the Times that RFK Jr. “is endangering every American’s health.” The following month, six previous US surgeons general collectively wrote in The Washington Post that they had a duty to alert Americans that Kennedy is a danger to public health. In February, The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, marked his “one year of failure” with an editorial cataloging his broken promises and “destruction that... might take generations to repair.”

Journalist Seth Abramson‬ ‪responded to the Times article with a new warning: “Do not doubt that if a major pandemic hits, millions of Americans will die because of this grotesque man. *Millions*. And not a single person in America better say that we didn’t know it was coming. The alarm bells have been ringing nonstop that this sick buffoon is going to kill innocent people.”

2026-06-08T15:41:36.965-07:00

Thousands March in Albania After PM Says Pristine Land ‘Belongs’ to Kushner-Backed Group

“One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday,” said one group opposing a proposed luxury resort project supported by Jared Kushner.

An aerial view shows a large crowd of protesters gathered outside the prime minister’s office in Tirana, Albania on June 7, 2026.
(Photo by Vlasov Sulaj/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jun 08, 2026

Albanians took to the streets in droves for the eighth consecutive day on Sunday to protest a proposed $1.6 billion luxury resort complex backed by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, one of several investors in the project, which opponents say is both corrupt and disastrous for wetlands and wildlife.

“One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday,” said the Albanian Ornithological Society, a leading critic of the proposed development. “Millions around the world are united in one voice for nature, for justice, and for the protection of what belongs to everyone, standing for every protected area in Albania.”

‘Nation is Not For Sale’: Thousands of Albanians Protest Kushner Resort Plans in Protected Wetland

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has vocally defended the project amid mounting public backlash, saying in a recent interview that the land marked for development “belongs to the investors,” not the Albanian people.

Rama also criticized the thousands of people who have turned out to protest the luxury hotel project as well as international media coverage of the demonstrations, saying that “there is no chance” that “the projects in Albania will be defined by street protests.”

Demonstrators, many raising pink flamingo cutouts to decry the project’s expected impacts on the vulnerable bird and other wildlife, have demanded cancellation of the resort project and Rama’s resignation, accusing him of steamrolling environmental concerns to bolster the country’s tourism industry and curry favor with the Trump administration. Kushner currently works for the administration as a “special peace envoy.”

“We are stronger than your bulldozers,” chanted demonstrators over the weekend.

As The New York Times reported last year, Rama heads the government committee that gave “Kushner and his business partners the right to move ahead with accelerated negotiations to build the luxury resort on a 111-acre section of the 2.2-square-mile island of Sazan that will be connected by ferry to the mainland.”

“Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity company backed with about $4.6 billion in money mostly from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East sovereign wealth funds, is pursuing the Albania project along with Asher Abehsera, a real estate executive that Mr. Kushner has previously teamed up with to build projects in Brooklyn, New York,” the Times added.

Lea Ypi, an Albanian academic, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian on Monday that “Albanians know that real-estate speculation without state support means ordinary citizens will struggle to buy a flat or pay the rent.”

“They know that luxury tourism means holidays in your own country become a privilege for the few,” Ypi added. “With no unions to speak of and a labor movement that only appears in communist-era footage of May Day parades, work conditions are so exploitative that only those from countries even more desperate are willing to take the jobs that arise.”

2026-06-08T15:34:28.213-07:00

‘We’ve Been Four Days Without Light’: Cubans Describe Suffering After Four-Month US Oil Blockade

The oil embargo has also devastated Cuba’s tourism industry, with multiple international hotel chains abandoning the country.

Residents collect water from tanker trucks and carry containers through the streets amid widespread shortages in Havana, Cuba, on June 5, 2026.
(Photo by Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The US military for the last four months has been blockading oil shipments from entering Cuba, and residents living on the island are saying the situation is growing increasingly dire.

In a Monday report from The Guardian, several Cubans described how their lives have been thrown into turmoil by the Trump administration’s oil blockade, which began shortly after the US military invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.

As noted by The Guardian, Cuba’s gas stations have now been empty for months because of the blockade, and the state’s power company struggles to keep electricity on for even a few hours every day.

One unnamed doctor in Havana who spoke to The Guardian said that “we’ve been four days without light” in his apartment building, and warned that the fuel shortages would cause even more severe crises on the island the longer they persist.

“Without electricity, water is also a problem,” the doctor said. “And there are mosquitoes everywhere.”

Havana resident Martha Pérez told The Guardian that she has had to buy gas from “an online supermarket,” but added that “the price is US$29 a bottle when it used to be just a few cents when I bought it from the state.”

As reported by The Associated Press on Monday, Cubans have been buying fuel on the black market at exorbitant prices that most people cannot afford.

Rather than pay such high sums for gas, many Cubans have simply given up driving all together.

Auto body shop owner Diriel Valdez told the AP that his business has been severely hurt by the oil embargo because Cubans aren’t bothering to have their cars maintained or repaired amidst the fuel shortages.

“People don’t want to do major repairs anymore,” Valdez said. “A lot of them have their cars parked. They don’t have much hope that they’ll be circulating the way they used to.”

Adding to the economic misery, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that many international businesses that have operated in Cuba for years are now pulling out due to the cost of maintaining operations.

The oil embargo has been particularly harsh on Cuba’s tourism industry, and the Journal reported that “Spanish hotel giants Iberostar and Meliá have said they are giving up management of at least a dozen Cuban hotels each,” while “Royalton Hotels & Resorts, a Canadian operator, ceased operations after grappling with a collapse in tourism.”

2026-06-08T15:21:50.749-07:00

Trump Can’t End His Disastrous War Against Iran Until He Gets Israel Under Control

The rapid return to war over recent days is a stark reminder that, while the US chose how to start this conflict, it has only one vote on how to end it.

A woman passes in front of an anti-American mural on April 12, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. On April 8 President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran, conditional on shipping being allowed to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Peace talks held in Pakistan have since stalled, reportedly over Iran’s nuclear stockpile and continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Connor Echols
Jun 08, 2026

Responsible Statecraft

Amid a rapid escalation between Israel and Iran, Yemen’s Houthis have rejoined the Iran war, launching a volley of missiles at Israel and pledging to implement a “complete and total ban” of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. It’s safe to say that the tenuous ceasefire in the Middle East is now unraveling.

President Donald Trump demanded that all parties deescalate, writing on Truth Social Monday morning that “Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding” so long as “ignorance or stupidity” don’t get in their way. But the latest developments suggest that the United States has limited control over the path of the conflict, which is now entering its fourth month.

‘The Humiliation Just Compounds’: Trump Tells Netanyahu Not to Bomb Iran, Then Israel Strikes Anyway

After Iran struck Israel on Sunday in what Tehran described as retaliation for Israeli ceasefire violations in Lebanon, Trump publicly urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand by and wait for negotiations to bear fruit. “I call the shots,” Trump told the Financial Times. “Netanyahu doesn’t call the shots.”

Just a few hours later, Israel launched strikes across Iran, hitting what it called “strategic defense systems.” Iranian officials said Israel also hit a petrochemical plant in southwestern Iran.

The rapid return to war is a stark reminder that, while the US chose how to start this conflict, it has only one vote on how to end it. Israel has shown little interest in bringing the war to a close, and many influential pro-Israel voices in the US argue that Trump must “finish the job” and overthrow the Iranian government. And, while Iran has made clear that Lebanon must be part of any ceasefire, Israeli officials remain determined to keep up the fight against Hezbollah, including through large-scale attacks on Beirut.

Trump’s public demands that Israel deescalate suggest that the US is trying to create at least some public separation between its actions and Israel’s. But Iran is weary from years of staccato conflict with Israel and determined to make the most of the leverage it has gained by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

In practice, this means Tehran is no longer willing to distinguish between US and Israeli attacks. “No one believes the Zionist regime acts without coordination with the United States,” a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said Monday.

Still, Iran has so far avoided launching new attacks on US assets in the Middle East. This relative restraint may be due to Tehran’s desire to maintain options for future escalation. Another possible explanation is that Iran believes recent reports indicating that Trump has privately said he won’t return to war unless Tehran kills more US soldiers.

The reentry of the Houthis into the war throws an uncertain variable into these calculations. The group earned sympathy throughout the Middle East for its attacks on Israel in retaliation for alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. With Israeli forces bogged down on multiple fronts, the Houthis now seemingly see another opportunity to increase their legitimacy and pursue their long-standing goal of confronting Israel.

If the Houthis follow through on their threats to block Israeli shipping, then the Trump administration will face significant pressure to help Israel reopen the key strategic waterway, which is now a crucial pathway for exporting Persian Gulf oil from Arab states because of the Hormuz closure. But even the US military has shown a limited ability to force the Houthis to stand down, despite the best efforts of both the Biden and Trump administrations in recent years.

It will take time to determine the exact impact of the Houthi threats to Israeli shipping. Previous Houthi attempts to partially blockade the Red Sea have already forced many shipping companies to reroute around Africa rather than traveling through the Suez Canal. While the Houthis have generally claimed to target only Israeli ships, the group has used a broad definition to define what counts as Israeli, making it difficult for companies to determine whether they are free to pass.

Meanwhile, Iran is signaling that it wants to stop the latest round of escalation with Israel, saying in a statement Monday that it will stop its attacks so long as Israeli forces halt strikes in Lebanon. The message is clear: if Trump wants a deal with Iran, then he’ll have to restrain Israel first.

© 2023 Responsible Statecraft

Connor Echols
Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter. Echols recently completed a fellowship with the Arabic Center for Study Abroad in Amman, Jordan, and he received his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and Middle East and North African Studies.
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2026-06-08T15:21:38.280-07:00

Trump Is Trying to Shoot His Way Out of US Decline—It Won’t Work

The president wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion; a wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on March 3, 2026.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/ AFP via Getty Images)

Robert Freeman
Jun 08, 2026

Common Dreams

The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a “hyperpower,” then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.

Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2+ trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.

President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.

A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.

The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.

Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.

The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.

It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.

It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.

It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.

Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.

Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”

None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?

This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…

US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…

The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.

The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.

The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.

This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US can do about it.

It would take decades to rebuild the weapons-focused industrial capacity the US possessed in the 1960s. Given the failure of the larger military enterprise in the US, there is no certainty that, once delivered, it would not be ill-conceived, misdirected, or already obsolete. In fact, given the Pentagon’s track record, the likelihood is that it would be all three.

The deepest problem for the US in grappling with increased Pentagon funding is rooted in its world view.

That was formed in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. After both events, the US stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in its ability to destroy any other country. Heady stuff but the world doesn’t sit still.

Countries do not acquiesce in their own destruction. They organize themselves to fight back; they collaborate with other countries for collective self-defense; and they employ asymmetric strategies to defeat predators, as Vietnam and Afghanistan did, and as Iran has just done. The US military hasn’t gotten the memo.

The unprovoked Iran debacle has boosted the fortunes of Russia and China, the US’ principal rivals. It has elevated Iran to being the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That rise is abetted by a quartet of Islamic powers that are tired of US and Israeli bullying: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They are forming an “Islamic NATO” to keep the US and Israel out of the Gulf. This is super important.

Since World War II, the Middle East has been one of the most important regions in the world because of its vast oil wealth. A 1945 US State Department memo stated that “Arab oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

It is the Trump Pentagon, the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, that has destroyed the US’ control of that “greatest material prize in world history.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. By forcing 50% higher oil prices on the rest of the world, the US is draining wealth from every country on Earth. Many of those countries were already economically tenuous. There’s not a one that doesn’t despise the US for the extortion.

Is that an organization to which we want to grant an additional half a trillion dollars a year? Every year? So it can wreak more destruction on US fortunes? Before it rethinks itself and how it can contribute responsibly to US well-being in the world? It’s not even fatuous. It’s insane.

So, if a $1.5 trillion budget for the military is not the solution to the US woes, what is?

The US could more plausibly revive its fortunes in the world by investing the would-be increase in Pentagon spending into the civilian economy, instead.

It should invest in the nation’s people—education—so as to improve the economy’s productivity. It should invest in the nation’s infrastructure to increase the economy’s efficiency. It should invest in scientific research and development to boost innovation. And, it should re-invest in alternative energy to build resilience.

Productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. Resilience. Those are what built the US in the 20th century. They are the real foundations of national well-being. None of them are mysteries as far as how they lead to a better economy and a stronger state. None are conceptually hard to carry out.

Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite.

He is gutting education, rescinding major infrastructure projects, savaging scientific research, and in all ways possible dismantling alternative energy. Those avenues all go against the essence of Trumpism, which is looting, shifting national resources and wealth to the already wealthy—Trump’s base.

Looting is what Trump’s proposed increase in the Pentagon budget is really all about. It is the Mother of All Trump Grifts. It is 277 times larger than his laughable $1.8 billion Slush Fund. It wants to hide the grift under the quasi-sacrosanct cover of military spending.

But it doesn’t begin to even acknowledge, to say nothing of fix, the deep failings in the military. It actively damages the economy by diverting scarce resources to parasitic looting that inflicts more harm than it heals.

Trump’s proposal improves the fortunes of the already very wealthy, as all things from Trump do. It lards them with $500 billion of unaccountable giveaways every year. It is a payoff to his rich backers and to the military Trump thinks he’s going to need to finish his overthrow of the government when the time comes, in 2028.

The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophes like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, all of which have degraded US power, influence, and standing in the world.

Alternatively, it can invest in the economy, in the American people, to create higher growth, income, equality, resilience, and prosperity. Instead of trying to shoot our way out of our self-inflicted decline, we can try to think our way out, earn our way out, work our way out. It’s not certain. Nothing ever is. But it has so much more dignity and likelihood of success about it.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Robert Freeman

Robert Freeman is the Founder and Executive Director of The Global Uplift Project, a leading provider of educational infrastructure for the developing world. He is the author of The Best One Hour History series whose titles include World War I, The Cold War, The Vietnam War, and many others.
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Scholar Says Trump Disaster in Iran Helps Prove That Era of ‘American Empire Is Over’

Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, said US military retrenchment is needed on a global scale.

Brad Reed
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran has gone so poorly that it portends the end of the American-led global order, foreign policy scholar Jennifer Kavanagh wrote in an analysis published Monday by The American Conservative.

Despite Trump’s repeated declarations of a total US victory over Iran, Kavanagh wrote that the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has revealed the limits of the American military, which in 2025 had a budget of nearly $1 trillion.

Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, argued that the Iran war has been particularly damaging to US power because it has drained US munitions supplies and has still achieved none of the major objectives Trump outlined at the start of the conflict.

“Some estimates suggest the United States has burned through 1,000 Tomahawk missiles, nearly 50% of its Patriot and THAAD stockpiles, and significant portions of advanced stand-off weapons like PRSM and JASSM missiles,” Kavanagh wrote. “The constraints on US military power created by these shortages will be consequential and enduring.”

In practical terms, Kavanagh said, this means the US simply cannot meet key commitments for the foreseeable future, such as supporting the defense of Taiwan in the case of an attack by China.

Kavanagh emphasized that American policymakers should reduce US military commitments around the world and not cling to a global order that is no longer sustainable.

“The period of US military dominance—and of American empire—is over,” Kavanagh wrote. “The resulting future will be less comfortable for the United States, but its changes are overdue and its challenges manageable. With the right moves today, American retrenchment can leave the United States, and the world, better off.”

This retrenchment, wrote Kavanagh, would refocus American defense strategy solely on defending US territory and “ensuring access to key economic markets.” In practice, this would mean closing military bases and ending deployments in Europe and the Middle East, a “narrowing” of security guarantees to NATO allies, and explicitly stating that it would not defend Taiwan in the face of an attack from China, which Kavanagh said would “reduce the risk of a war with China that at this point the United States is unprepared to fight.”

“These changes in posture and alliance commitments would amount to a massive transformation of American foreign policy,” Kavanagh acknowledged, “but the result would be a sustainable military position, consistent with US capabilities and resources and tailored to protecting US interests.”

There Is No Military Solution to the Middle East’s Political Issues

As difficult as it may be to imagine it now, what will be required is to work toward a regional security framework built on non-aggression, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of all states, and an end to the Israeli occupation and denial of Palestinian rights.

A flag of Iran hangs from a damaged residential building that, according to Iranian authorities, was hit by a strike on March 4 during the US-Israeli military campaign on April 14, 2026 in southeastern Tehran, Iran.
(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

James Zogby
Jun 08, 2026

Common Dreams

Back when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, I asked National Security Council officials, “Why are you expending all of your economic leverage, and political and diplomatic resources on stopping Iran from developing a bomb they don’t have (and even if they did, could never use), while these same resources could be mobilized to pressure Iran to end its meddlesome behaviors that are destabilizing countries across the region?”

Despite this reservation, when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was announced, I supported it for three reasons. First, “the nuclear deal” was a negotiated settlement, which is always better than conflict. And despite White House spokespeople saying otherwise, Catherine Ashton, a top British diplomat involved in the negotiations, offered assurances that the deal was only a first step and that Iran’s behaviors would be next on the agenda. My hope was that sane minds would prevail and the initiated process might lead to a regional security compact and framework for peace.

The second reason was the way Republicans were working overtime to sabotage the agreement. It was unconscionable that they invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint session of Congress to urge members of Congress to vote against their own president. That was unacceptable interference in US politics.

The third (and maybe most unexpected) reason was the reaction to the JCPOA inside Iran. In a poll we conducted months after the deal was announced, we found a significant change in Iranian public opinion. Our earlier polls had demonstrated Iranians largely in favor of the regime’s spending money on allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. With the hint of peace, Iranians turned their priorities inward, with declining support for the regime’s foreign involvements. Instead of resources going abroad, Iranians wanted them to be used at home to create employment and opportunity. They also elevated their demands for greater personal freedom and political rights.

A decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever.

When, after Donald Trump’s election, he cancelled the Iran deal and began threatening the regime, we repeated the poll. The results had reverted. When citizens feel their country is being threatened, they tend to be less critical or to “rally around the flag.”

In the ensuing years, amid continuing signs of hostility from all sides—US, Israel, and Iran—the situation has shown no promise of improvement. Despite promising a better agreement, Trump did nothing more than deepen the animosity. The Biden administration was handed the thankless task of bringing a dead deal back to life—a task to which they never appeared to be fully committed. For its part, Iran continued to behave as a bad regional actor, all the while making threats and building its military capabilities.

Left on their own, the Arab Gulf states sought to create stability out of the possibility of chaos with which they were forced to contend. Unlike Iran, which had decided to use its wealth to export its influence and its anti-Western ideology, the Arab Gulf states had taken a different path, focusing on development, tourism, and trade. Their continued prosperity required a stable regional environment. And so, amid the tensions between the US and Israel and Iran, these Arab states made diplomatic and economic overtures to Iran, hoping for a more secure environment in the Gulf. They even hoped that the lure of joint prosperity and security might move the Iranians to join them in pursuing a more stable and prosperous future and convince the Israelis to resolve the longstanding wound of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, fostering conditions for regional peace. There was to be no such luck!

Israel wanted the economic benefits of regional peace but was unwilling to play its part. It intensified its occupation and the repression and strangulation of Palestinians. Then came October 7, and the region exploded. In short order, as Israel was pursuing a genocidal war in Gaza, Iran’s ally in Lebanon became engaged in a fateful and costly exchange with Israel in the north, a miscalculation with devastating consequences. The Israelis launched a deadly bombing campaign killing thousands of Lebanese, including Hezbollah’s leader. Months later, Israel and the US attacked Iran and killed Iran’s spiritual leader. Iran returned fire setting off a broader confrontation.

Negotiations produced what were called “cease fires” during which Palestinian and Lebanese death tolls continued to mount. When, egged on by Israel and Republican neocons, President Trump decided to “finish the job” by defeating the Iranian regime, the conflict took on a new character. Iran intensified its attacks on neighboring Arab Gulf states that housed US bases and closed the Straits of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies and negatively impacting the Gulf region’s economies.

Reading some of the Israeli, Arab, and US press is enough to make one pull out one’s hair. Some Israeli commentators from the far-right (and their American neocon acolytes) remain convinced that all that’s needed is another massive bombing campaign, coupled with yet a few more “targeted assassinations”—as if those tactics, which Israel has used repeatedly, will be any more successful than they’ve been in the past.

Meanwhile, hard-line Arab opinion writers celebrate the “brilliance” of Iranian tactics. It’s hard to see how incurring the enmity of their neighbors and putting their own and the region’s economic futures at risk can be construed as anything but reckless.

The US media is even more confounding, with its apparent addiction to breathlessly and uncritically following the barrage of confusing and contradictory posts coming from the president.

And so, a decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever. Although the situation is far more complicated than a decade ago, and the enmity on all sides so much deeper, the way forward is recognition that piecemeal approaches to the region, playing whack-a-mole, have only made the region less secure.

As difficult as it may be to imagine it now, what will be required is to work toward a regional security framework built on non-aggression, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of all states, and an end to the Israeli occupation and denial of Palestinian rights. This entails the recognition that there are no military solutions to the region’s political issues. In fact, each round of violence only exacerbates existing problems. It’s a tall order requiring leadership that is smart, courageous, and visionary. That may not exist today, but it’s necessary—and it’s the goal toward which we must direct our efforts.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

James Zogby
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream. Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 1988, he led the first ever debate on Palestinian statehood at that year's Democratic convention in Atlanta, GA. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.
Full Bio >

2026-06-08T15:20:47.463-07:00

Human Rights Watch Calls Out ‘Troubling Conditions’ in Trump Health Aid Agreements With Africa

“After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights.”

A healthcare worker fills a syringe with a dose of lenacapavir, a long-acting HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) injection, during the drug’s rollout in Nakuru, Kenya on March 26, 2026.
(Photo by James Wakibia/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Trump administration is requiring African nations to agree to a series of “troubling conditions” to restore lifesaving health aid, according to a Human Rights Watch report on Monday.

The administration’s abrupt shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year shut off billions of dollars and caused havoc across Africa’s healthcare system, resulting in what public health models project could be hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

But under what has been dubbed the “America First” Global Health Strategy, the administration has negotiated secretive agreements with dozens of these countries to restore some of the funding. Most of them have been kept under lock and key by the US.

Those that have been made public have come with terms that Human Rights Watch said “raise concerns that health aid is being inappropriately leveraged to extract terms beneficial to the US in negotiations around natural resources and access to sensitive health data from recipient countries.”

In March, a draft memorandum of understanding with the government of Zambia was revealed to have conditioned $1 billion for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other disease prevention for millions of people, on the country’s acceptance of a separate bilateral treaty that would have given US companies greater access to the country’s minerals.

A leaked State Department memo, prepared for Secretary Marco Rubio, put the exploitative terms plainly: “We will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

After the details of that agreement were met with backlash, the text of agreements with several other countries—Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda—were suddenly removed from the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act Library.

A Human Rights Watch assessment of the agreements with those five countries—as well as agreements with Rwanda and Liberia that were leaked—revealed that in order to restore a portion of the more than $800 million collectively stripped from them by the US, they’d have to agree to several coercive measures that jeopardize the reproductive and privacy rights of their citizens.

“The agreements show the US intends to condition vital health assistance for millions of people on acquiescence to troubling conditions,” said Julia Bleckner, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch. “After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights.”

All seven of the agreements require the governments to provide the US with “broad access to data and information” to monitor compliance with the Helms Amendment, which forbids the use of US foreign assistance to pay for abortion care.

The agreements with Mozambique, Rwanda, and Liberia require them to provide “any data” requested by the US to ensure compliance with the amendment, while Uganda’s permits the US to conduct unannounced spot checks of health facilities and clinics.

“By making a broad package of health aid contingent on broad and potentially invasive surveillance of Helms compliance, the agreement could encourage a more restrictive regulation of abortion than national law mandates and give rise to further violations of the right to healthcare,” says the report.

The agreements also give the US permission to directly audit clinics, laboratories, and health programs to ensure compliance with the conditions. Six of them require clinics to provide access to “any data” requested by the US at a sample of facilities it chooses.

Agreements with five countries also mandate that they share biological specimens taken from patients and associated information related to novel infectious diseases, which HRW described as part of an effort to undermine a global pathogen access and sharing system being created by the World Health Organization, from which Trump has removed the US.

HRW said in a news release:
The agreements raise serious concerns about use of people’s private health data, without clear limits, uniform safeguards, or meaningful protections for patient confidentiality, including in several countries with weak or absent domestic data protection laws. The agreements contain no prohibition on this data being shared with US pharmaceutical companies without patient consent.

“Governments negotiating health assistance agreements with the United States face difficult choices,” Bleckner said. “They should be wary of terms asking them to sign away their populations’ rights and push for the inclusion of civil society representatives and multilateral global health organizations like the Global Fund in deliberations.”

2026-06-08T14:59:43.829-07:00

MISOGYNIST FEMICIDE THREAT

‘There'll be no Kristen’: Trump tells NBC host she’ll be ‘blown up’ if war objective fails

Alexander Willis
June 7, 2026
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump (left) appears on NBC News' "Meet the Press" with Kristen Welker (right), Sunday, June 7, 2026. (Screengrab / NBC News)

President Donald Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker in an interview that aired Sunday that she would be blown up should his administration fail to achieve its stated war objective.

In an episode of “Meet the Press,” Trump was being pressed on his deeply unpopular war against Iran, which, despite the president having claimed it would be resolved in a matter of weeks, has dragged on for well over three months.

“Remember, you were in Vietnam 19 years because stupid people, you were in so many different countries, every war you were in for years, look at Iraq!” Trump said. “You were there for years!”

Among Trump’s most prominent campaign pledges was to “end the endless wars.” During his acceptance speech in 2024, Trump explicitly said: “I’m not going to start a war.”

And yet, Trump not only authorized the unprecedented attack on Venezuela back in January, but launched Operation Epic Fury in late February, kicking off the largest-scale U.S. military conflict since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The stakes, however, were great, Trump warned Welker, who he said would be blown up should his administration fail to achieve its goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“Listen, Kristen, we're there for a few months and the threat is largely over – soon it will be over – but you cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon or they will blow you up,” Trump said. “There will be no Kristen, there will be no NBC, there will be no 'Meet the Press,' you will end the 'Meet the Press' string.”

2026-06-08T14:54:16.334-07:00

Scott Pelley Details Weiss ‘Push to Air ‘State Propaganda’ on CBS News

“She was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president.”

The Free Press’ Honestly with Bari Weiss hosts Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on January 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press)

Julia Conley
Jun 08, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Days after being fired from the CBS News program ‘60 Minutes’ for speaking out against the dismissal of several top correspondents and declaring that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was “brought in to kill” the show, veteran journalist Scott Pelley described in detail the right-wing former opinion columnist’s efforts to push for political coverage that centered the White House’s point of view—regardless of the facts.

“There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News,” Pelley told The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro Sunday.

Pelley was interviewed after he and his former colleagues spoke out against what fired correspondent Cecilia Vega called “censorship” at the 58-year-old program since Weiss took the helm of CBS News last year. Weiss was installed following a White House-approved merger of parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, owned by the son of President Donald Trump backer Larry Ellison.

The new editor-in-chief, who first gained notoriety as a student at Columbia University when she led a campaign against pro-Palestinian professors and later railed against “cancel culture,” arrived at CBS last fall with promises to promote “journalism that reports on the world as it actually is” and that is “fair, fearless, and factual.”

But in his interview with the Times, Pelley expanded on his earlier accusation, made in a statement released last week after he was fired, that Weiss had demanded that he “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story”—revealing that the coverage in question dealt with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.

Good was shot in her car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after several officers gave her conflicting instructions, and footage of the shooting showed an agent approaching the front of her vehicle as she turned the wheel to the right. Pretti was shot by Customs and Border Protection agents in another incident, after he approached a woman one officer had thrown to the ground. Top administration officials accused both victims of being violent and called Good a “domestic terrorist” while barring state officials from investigating the killings.

Pelley said that before Weiss intervened in the coverage of the fatal shootings, he had pushed to use images “in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.”

“I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.”

But Pelley’s push to get ahead of any criticism that ‘60 Minutes’ was being biased against the agents or the Trump administration didn’t stop Weiss from emailing the show’s executive producer hours before the story was set to air, asking that producers “make the protesters look more violent” and even promote a false claim about Good that was pushed by the White House.

Pelley said the message from Weiss was, “You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

“This is not what you see on the video,” Pelley told Garcia-Navarro. “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her.”

Pelley said he refused to make the changes, and did not hear from Weiss about the piece after it aired. A CBS spokesperson told the Times that the suggestions Weiss had made “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro: “My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.”

The story on Pretti and Good came weeks after Weiss pushed the show’s producers and correspondents to change a segment on Trump’s deal with El Salvador under which hundreds of immigrants have been deported to the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center after being falsely accused of being gang members.

Pelley’s revelation about the exchange with Weiss was called “devastating” by The Hill reporter Niall Stanage, while the grassroots progressive group Our Revolution said Pelley had described “a CBS News editor demanding reporters change facts to match Trump’s version of events to help justify the murder of a US citizen.

“That isn’t news. It’s state propaganda,” said the group. “Bari Weiss is not a journalist. She is an asset of the Trump administration. She should be sued and removed and Paramount should answer for installing her.”

Scottish historian William Dalrymple added that Pelley’s interview revealed Weiss as “a major threat to truthful journalism.”

The chaos at CBS has intensified as Paramount Skydance has pushed for a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN—raising alarm that the cable network could soon see a significant shift toward reporting that blatantly centers the White House’s viewpoints.

CBS legend spills on 'jaw-dropping' meeting before firing: 'Accuses me of physical abuse'

Alexander Willis
June 7, 2026
RAW STORY

60 Minutes' Scott Pelley. (Shutterstock)

Scott Pelley, the veteran broadcast journalist who was controversially fired by CBS News last week, revealed new “jaw-dropping” details Sunday about his last meetings before his ousting, one that included, he claimed, false accusations of physical abuse.

CBS Executive Producer Nick Bilton – who was hand-picked by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and reportedly vetted by David Ellison, a strong ally to President Donald Trump whose company owns CBS – met with Pelley and proceeded to do “something absolutely jaw-dropping,” Pelley told The New York Times in its report Sunday.

“He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people,” Pelley recalled Bilton doing, explaining the reasoning behind the mass purge of staff for the network’s “60 Minutes” program. “The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better.”

In a follow-up meeting immediately preceding Pelley’s firing, Tom Cibrowski – president and executive editor of CBS News since last year – leveled a shocking allegation against Pelley, who had been with CBS News for nearly four decades.

“Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie,” Pelley told the Times. “I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, ‘well, OK, I take that back.’ And I said, ‘great.’”

Pelley continued: “So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes.”

Pelley said that he left the CBS News office out of frustration, and later the same night, he received an email informing him of his termination “for cause.”

2026-06-08T14:51:48.336-07:00

‘There Must Be Accountability,’ Says Jayapal in Response to 50+ ICE Detainee Deaths

“This is unprecedented and further proof that ICE and their private, for-profit prison contractors should not be sent another cent of taxpayer dollars.”

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) speaks at a rally in Lafayette Park near the White House in Washington, DC on May 1, 2025.
(Photo by Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jun 08, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal on Monday demanded accountability for the Trump administration officials responsible for the “unprecedented” number of people who have died while detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term.

“Yesterday, I was notified of the 50th death in ICE custody since Trump returned to office,” Jayapal (D-Wash.)—the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement—said on social media. “This is unprecedented and further proof that ICE and their private, for-profit prison contractors should not be sent another cent of taxpayer dollars. There must be accountability.”

As Detained Immigrants Strike Against ‘Chaos and Cruelty,’ Advocates Demand ‘Not Another Dime for ICE’

‘What I Witnessed and Experienced Today Was Shameful,‘ Says US Senator Pepper Sprayed by ICE

According to ICE’s public database, 51 people have died while detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency during Trump’s second term, including two people who were killed in a sniper attack on an ICE administrative and processing center in Dallas. At least 10 of the deaths were men who killed themselves, according to an Associated Press investigation published late last month.

ICE recently announced it would stop reporting the deaths of people recently released from ICE detention. The reporting policy, enacted in 2021, was meant to assure accountability and prevent the agency from offloading severely ill detainees.

Many of the deaths were preventable, say experts who point to systemic understaffing and DHS policy choices that weaken detainee care and employee oversight.

Jayapal’s call comes as ICE detainees across the nation are resisting abuse in concentration centers across the nation, through hunger strikes and other civil disobedience, as well as via lawsuits.

Hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey—which is operated by prison profiteer GEO Group—are participating in a hunger and labor strike over unsanitary conditions, inedible food, poor medical care, and prolonged detention, while federal agents have attacked people outside the facility including protesters and a sitting US senator.

Similar strikes and other acts of resistance are either ongoing or recently occurred at Adelanto Processing Center and its Desert View Annex in California, North Lake Processing Center in Michigan, Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania—all run by GEO Group—and other lockups. Detainees who participate in hunger strikes or speak to reporters say they have been placed in solitary confinement and subjected to other retaliation.

Despite—some critics say because of—reports of widespread abuses, DHS recently shut down its Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), which was created by an act of Congress signed into law during Trump’s first term amid rampant systemic abuse of migrants including detainee deaths, family separation, and severe overcrowding. OIDO had the power to receive detainee complaints, investigate alleged abuse or misconduct, inspect detention facilities, and report systemic problems to DHS leaders and Congress.

Jayapal, who is an immigrant, has been one of Congress’ most vocal critics of Trump’s xenophobic immigration crackdown. She was a leading voice for the replacement of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and has visited several ICE detention centers—and been blocked from conducting official oversight duties at one of them.

She also introduced the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, a proposal “to end the use of private, for-profit detention centers, end the use of mandatory detention, update and implement robust minimum requirements for care, and conduct urgent oversight at other facilities across the country.”

Last week, Jayapal highlighted a report published by the office of DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari that detailed violations of food safety and medical care standards, excessive use of force, and other improprieties at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, which is run by prison profiteer LaSalle Corrections.

“This DHS OIG report details what we have heard from detained immigrants across the country—that these detention centers have violated numerous required standards and are putting people’s health and safety at serious risk,” Jayapal said in a statement. “And this report verifies what many immigrants have stated is happening at these private, for-profit detention centers across the country.”

“DHS must immediately withdraw funding from the numerous detention centers that consistently do not meet the minimum required standards for housing immigrant detainees,” the congresswoman added. “For those that remain, DHS must require facilities to take immediate corrective action and engage in serious oversight of these for-profit prison operators who are prioritizing their cash coffers over meeting basic health and safety standards.”

Lawmaker floored by horrifying conditions inside notorious ICE facility: 'Deep breach'

Robert Davis
June 7, 2026

RAW STORY

Demonstrators face off with federal law enforcement during ongoing protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside the Delaney Hall detention center, in Newark, New Jersey, U.S., June 6, 2026. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

A Democratic Senator revealed the horrifying conditions inside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, during a new interview with Mother Jones.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) visited ICE's Delaney Hall over the weekend, where he was given a guided tour of the facility. Inside, Kim said he witnessed women trying to get one of their friends help while the person was having a medical episode. Kim added that the guards at the facility seem to have little regard for the rights of the immigrants who are locked up there.

“They refused to let me talk to any detainees,” Kim told Mother Jones as he exited Delaney Hall. “They told me that if I were to speak to any detainees, the oversight tour would immediately be cut off and stopped. This is impeding my ability to lawfully do the oversight that I’m legally allowed to do, and I told them I thought this was a deep breach of my responsibilities and what the American people are demanding.”

The scene in the women's unit seemed to stick with Kim as well.

“They’re just frantic and waving and pointing, and I saw the woman curled up on the bed. I asked, ‘What is happening here?’" Kim said, adding that the guards didn’t answer.

He added that people who have been moved to medical units have no way of contacting their families and loved ones. ICE won't share their location either, citing security concerns.

“They aren’t telling her family where she is, which hospital she’s in. They’re saying it’s a security problem,” Kim said. “Can you imagine if your loved one was in a hospital and you don’t know what hospital they’re in, and then you’re told to just file some bureaucratic papers, and cross your fingers that they’re going to get back to you?”

2026-06-08T14:40:40.788-07:00

Trump 'blindsided' AI companies with bizarre plan to grab ownership stake: report

David Edwards
June 8, 2026
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump told reporters he had a meeting locked in with the biggest names in artificial intelligence to discuss the government taking ownership stakes in their companies. There was just one problem — nobody had told the companies.

Leading AI companies were "blindsided" by Trump's announcement Friday that he planned to meet with "all the big" firms about taking "pieces" of their companies, "possibly as soon as next week," three sources told NOTUS.

"I actually have a meeting scheduled in the very short, in the very near future, with — did you know that? — all of the companies," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. "And we're talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI."

The executives learned about the meeting from the president's public comments, not from the White House, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. As of Monday afternoon, the administration had provided no details on timing or location.

Trump framed the idea in populist terms. "There's something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public," he said. "It would be a beautiful thing."

But the proposal — which would rank among the most consequential federal interventions in the private sector in modern history — has drawn sharp pushback, including from within Trump's own party.

When Trump took a 10% stake in Intel in August 2025, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) fired back on X: "If socialism is government owning the means of production, wouldn't the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea."

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told CBS: "For so many of my self-described true conservatives, you're going to have to explain to me how this reconciles with true conservatism and true free-market capitalism. I don't see it."

Even Trump's former AI czar, David Sacks, pushed back against the idea. "Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we're already sliding toward," Sacks wrote on X. "America won't win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first pitched the idea of giving Trump shares in his company in early 2025, NOTUS reported. But Anthropic — now the world's most valuable AI company at a $965 billion valuation — had not yet discussed the concept as of last week, according to a fourth source. Spokespeople for OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google all declined to comment.

2026-06-08T14:38:26.145-07:00

'Jaw-dropping' corruption could see Trump's UFC fight scrapped at last-minute: law expert

Matthew Chapman
June 8, 2026

RAW STORY

Construction is underway on a temporary arena that will host the UFC Freedom 250 fight card in June, while ongoing construction on the planned White House ballroom in the area of the former East Wing continues at the White House in Washington D.C., U.S., May 28, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

President Donald Trump has been hit by a new lawsuit over his UFC arena being built on the White House South Lawn — and the details left a former federal prosecutor incredulous.

Joyce Vance detailed the most shocking parts in her Civil Discourse Substack.

The idea for the fight raised red flags from the start, noted Vance.

"UFC President Dana White has reliably supported Trump through his three campaigns. This is quite a reward for his dedication," she wrote.

And, although White denies this event is "transactional," he's pledging $60 million for construction and $700,000 for repairs to the White House lawn after the event — assuming those repairs even happen, since Trump has dropped hints he wants the arena to be permanent.

The new lawsuit, Vance said, offers astounding insight into just what a scheme of "corruption and kleptocracy" is on display.

"The amount of corruption alleged in this lawsuit is jaw dropping, even for Trump," she wrote on BlueSky.

For one thing, she noted, the plaintiffs point out that Trump “giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access” — all while he purchased up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC's parent company, and the UFC itself promotes a cryptocurrency firm sponsoring the event and advertising itself with White House iconography.

And as all this is going on, the plaintiffs — a Vietnam vet and a senior citizen activist — said, this whole project defaces the nation's capital. “The Claw, which is constructed primarily out of steel, is 92 feet tall, 154 feet wide, and weighs 600 tons ... The Claw thus dwarfs the adjacent White House. It is visible from the National Mall to the south," the lawsuit reads.

To do this, the suit continued, the White House and UFC are violating National Park Service regulations, ignoring congressional approval, and environmental permitting.

The complainants are asking a judge to stop the event from taking place.

"A ruling and perhaps an appeal or two could materialize quickly given the timing here," Vance concluded — but the real fireworks could start to fly if "an injunction is in place and Trump is forced to cancel or at least postpone his plans."

This comes amid other reporting that Republicans were scrambling to get the limited tickets to the UFC event, and polling indicates the demographic groups Trump was hoping to win over with the spectacle have already soured on him.

'Yikes!' Alex Witt stunned as lawyer flags Trump's staggering 'insider dealing' scandal

Robert Davis
June 7, 2026

RAW STORY

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a gold Olympic medal belonging to U.S. speed skater and Wisconsin native Jordan Stolz during an event at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, U.S., June 5, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

MS NOW's Alex Witt was stunned on Sunday after a former Florida state attorney flagged President Donald Trump's latest insider-dealing scheme.

Trump's Department of Justice has been working to establish what it's calling an "anti-weaponization" fund to pay claims from people who say they were wrongfully prosecuted by the federal government. Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the DOJ was not moving forward with the fund, but Trump directly contradicted that statement on Sunday by telling NBC News's Kristen Welker that he believes people who were prosecuted for rioting on Jan. 6, 2021 should be paid.

Dave Aronberg, a former Florida state attorney, told Witt that the entire fund "reeks of insider dealing" because it was established as part of a settlement Trump agreed to in a lawsuit against the IRS, an executive agency he oversees.

"As a matter of law, you cannot sue yourself and then choose not to fight it, and then write yourself a multibillion-dollar check out of the taxpayers' kitty while giving your own businesses immunity from the tax laws," he said, referring to a provision in the settlement that gives the Trump family absolute immunity from future tax cases.

Aronberg also noted that the deal seems to violate multiple aspects of the U.S. Constitution.

"It violates Article One because it steals Congress's spending power away from it. It violates Article Three because federal courts aren't supposed to rubber-stamp collusive sham lawsuits and settlements. So, if the judiciary doesn't throw this whole thing out, then the rule of law in this country just becomes a dead letter," Aronberg said.

His comments seemed to leave Witt stunned.

"Yikes!" she said.

THE GRIFT

Trump exposed for eye-watering taxpayer cost of DC takeover

President Donald Trump looks on as he exits Air Force One on his arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, January 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Thomas Kika

June 08, 2026

ALTERNET

A new watchdog report has exposed the eye-watering costs to U.S. taxpayers that have piled up as a result of President Donald Trump's federal takeover of Washington D.C.

Last summer, Trump announced via executive order that the federal government would be taking over control of the D.C. police department, while also deploying forces from the district's National Guard regiment and from the regiments in other states. This, he and his MAGA allies claimed, was being done to address rampant crime in Washington, despite the fact that major crimes had been on the decline in the city for years, as they have been in many major metro areas. It was also speculated that the move came as a response to one of Trump's former DOGE employees, Edward Coristine, getting assaulted by two teenagers.

On Monday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a new report detailing the vast expenses that this takeover has racked up on the dime of taxpayers, totaling over $18 million in less than a year, based on materials that the group obtained from the U.S. Marshals via a lawsuit.

"From August 2025 to March 2026, the U.S. Marshals Service identified over $18 million in taxpayer funded costs related to its deployment for the Trump administration’s federal takeover of D.C., according to records obtained by CREW through a lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act," the watchdog report explained. "The marshals play several important roles, including providing security for judges, tracking down fugitives across the country and running the witness security program. The agency apparently pulled resources from district courts across the country, including in Guam and the Virgin Islands, to participate in the 'D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.'”

These additional costs from the Marshals are on top of the $332 million cost related to the deployment of National Guard forces to D.C. as of February.

The CREW report added later: "The most significant cost was nearly $6 million pulled from USMS’ tactical operations division, the unit responsible for responding to high-threat and emergency situations. The agency also pulled over $3 million from its investigative operations division and over $2 million from the D.C. Superior Court, reducing the number of marshals providing security in a high profile courthouse in D.C. during a surge of threats against judges."

Based on emails that the group obtained from the lawsuit, they also determined that the "marshals’ involvement in it was announced abruptly and had significant staffing implications," with one August email from a chief in the Tactical Operations Division claiming that agents would be deployed the following day.

2026-06-08T14:35:43.515-07:00

Trump administration killed criminal investigation of GOP Senator’s coal companies

Molly Redden, ProPublica

Avi Asher-Schapiro, ProPublica
June 8, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he and members of his administration deliver remarks to reporters on the Trump administration's support for coal energy production, among other topics, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.

The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.

The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.

People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.

But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.

“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.

That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.

“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”

The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.

Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.

Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.

“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”

While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.

“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”

Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors.

Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.

“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”

The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.

The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South. Estimates of its fortune fluctuate. Forbes tallied Jim Justice’s net worth to be as much as $1.9 billion until 2021; more recently, it declared him “broke” and facing $1 billion in debt. But environmental groups have accused his companies of misrepresenting their assets to avoid paying environmental penalties.

Ruby said company finances seesaw because coal is a “boom and bust” industry.

Justice, who was first elected governor of West Virginia as a Democrat, announced he had become a Republican at a Trump rally in 2017. Trump backed Justice’s bid for Senate in 2023, amid a contested GOP primary. Justice went on to win the seat, helping Trump clinch a GOP majority in the Senate.

Coal mines often leach dangerous chemicals like arsenic into waterways and are required to strictly monitor pollution discharge and keep it under certain limits. The family’s companies have settled many accusations of environmental violations by agreeing to pay fines and invest in better pollution prevention without admitting or denying culpability.

In recent years, however, the company has repeatedly flouted regulators and the legal process. Jay Justice has been a no-show at court hearings involving Clean Water Act violations in the past, and in 2024 a judge in Alabama issued a civil contempt order against him for his repeated failure to respond to those lawsuits. Ruby, the Justice companies’ lawyer, attributed the violations in that case to surrounding facilities the family does not own. The case is now in mediation.

A number of recent legal proceedings have laid bare the extent to which the Justice companies may have knowingly violated environmental laws, a key threshold for bringing a criminal matter.

Such allegations surfaced in a 2023 civil case brought by the Justice companies’ former chief of environmental compliance Robert Fowler. In the suit, Fowler claimed that Jay Justice blocked him from spending the money necessary to comply with environmental laws, including making court-ordered payments and repairing equipment. As a result, according to emails disclosed in the lawsuit there were at times complaints of near-daily violations of permit water requirements.

In a resignation letter and in subsequent court filings, Fowler said he was concerned the circumstances exposed him to “potential civil and criminal liability.” Fowler declined to comment.

The Justice companies denied Fowler’s accusations. The Justice companies believe the government’s criminal investigation was based primarily on Fowler’s claims, which Ruby dismissed as the allegations of a “disgruntled” former employee.

Last month, a jury in Alabama found that the Justice companies had made false representations to Fowler about his role, but it did not award him the millions of dollars in damages he demanded in his lawsuit. The judge has yet to enter his final ruling.

In the DOJ’s aborted investigation of Southern Coal, prosecutors and federal agents had begun to gather evidence, scrutinizing testimony in the Justices’ various civil trials, and had approached former employees seeking information. Government attorneys also sent subpoenas seeking further documentation, said those familiar with the probe, a move that was opposed by the company’s lawyers.

People familiar with the case said Justice Department attorneys were ready to fight the Justices’ lawyers over the subpoenas.

But before they could move forward, Blanche’s office shut it down.

2026-06-08T14:12:38.951-07:00

Trump’s Board of Peace is fueling genocide in Gaza

Maureen Clare Murphy

The Electronic Intifada

1 June 2026

The Gaza reconstruction plan is displayed during the Board of Peace meeting at the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, 19 February. Alessandro Di MeoANSA via ZUMA Press

More than half a year after the US president announced a ceasefire deal to end Israel’s military offensive, little has changed for Palestinians in Gaza who have endured more than two years of relentless attacks and deprivation of the necessities of life.

Authorities in Gaza, human rights groups and aid organizations are warning that despite the nominal ceasefire, Israel is still using food as a weapon of war while Palestinian families, denied adequate shelter, are being made to live in deplorable and unsafe conditions.

Around 940 people in Gaza have been killed since the supposed ceasefire went into effect in October 2025, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to more than 72,940, as of 1 June.

Around a third of those killed since the ceasefire were targeted near the so-called yellow line demarcating the nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s territory where Israeli ground troops remain deployed, according to the UN human rights office.

“The available information raises serious concerns that the Israeli army is shooting at ‌and killing ⁠presumed civilians simply on the basis of their proximity to the so-called yellow line, which would amount to unlawful killings and thus war crimes,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territory, told Reuters.

The dead in Gaza also include dozens of civilian police personnel, many killed while on duty, while Israel-backed armed gangs attempt to undermine attempts by the authorities in Gaza to maintain civil order. Israel has also assassinated the leaders of Hamas’ military wing in their homes along with their family members, as well as the son of Hamas’ chief negotiator.

In April alone, at least 111 people, including 18 children and seven women, were killed in Israeli airstrikes, shelling and by drone attacks and gunfire in Gaza.
Warnings of “total collapse”

All captives held in Gaza since October 2023 have been released by armed groups as part of the deal. But instead of withdrawing, Israel’s ground forces are now in direct control of more of Gaza’s territory than the 53 percent mapped in the ceasefire deal, pushing Palestinians ever closer to the sea.

In recent days, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said that he directed the military to seize 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.

And instead of allowing for the surge in unfettered aid called for by the ceasefire, Israel is delaying, blocking and otherwise hindering the delivery of life-saving assistance.

On 14 May, World Central Kitchen announced that while there was no reduction in the need for food assistance in Gaza, it was reducing the number of meals it is cooking to pre-ceasefire levels due to financial and capacity restraints.

“We specialize in emergency food relief, not long-term food security,” the US charity said. “Governments, institutions and international partners need to commit the sustained, secure funding that this crisis demands.”

After three people were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on 17 May, the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan said that Israel was pushing “humanitarian conditions toward total collapse … as part of a systematic policy of using starvation as a weapon.”

On 25 May, on the eve of the Eid al-Adha holiday, the Government Media Office in Gaza warned of a “dangerous and unprecedented” worsening of the already catastrophic humanitarian situation amid the ongoing Israeli blockade.

Basic foods were in short supply amid “soaring rates of poverty and displacement” in Gaza, where the unemployment rate has risen to nearly 80 percent.

Less than a third of the number of trucks stipulated in the ceasefire agreement have entered Gaza, the Government Media Office added, “a dangerously low figure that is utterly insufficient to address the escalating humanitarian, food, health and relief needs.”

Palestinians walk through al-Zawiya market in Gaza City on 26 May ahead of Eid al-Adha. Bilal OsamaAPA images

During a recent press conference at the UN Correspondents Association press room in New York, Janti Soeripto, the head of Save the Children US, said that children are still arriving at the charity’s clinics showing signs of acute malnutrition.

Soeripto was joined by the principals of Oxfam America and Refugees International, as well as a medical doctor who worked at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital during April, to ring the alarm bell that the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are not being met.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, said that Israel “is continuing … to systematically obstruct humanitarian aid,” including by deregistering aid workers and organizations, while the US was failing to hold Israel to its commitments.

The result is that “people cannot get enough food, children and families are camped out in raw sewage waiting for any kind of proper shelter.”

Konyndyk added that the obstruction of aid doesn’t only violate UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which endorses the Gaza ceasefire and conferred legitimacy onto the US president’s Board of Peace. Nor does it only contradict Israel’s commitments under the ceasefire deal.

“It is an outright violation of obligations under international humanitarian law, completely irrespective of any UN Security Council resolution or peace commitments.”

“There is no legal basis” for conditioning the facilitation of humanitarian aid on political concessions, Konyndyk added.
Bait and switch

Humanitarian aid groups attempting to deliver life essentials in Gaza say that Israel is the party violating the agreement in the ceasefire deal and hindering a surge in aid – what should be the most straightforward and uncomplicated aspect of the agreement to execute.

And yet the Board of Peace’s report to the UN Security Council on the implementation of the ceasefire deal obscures Israel’s responsibility for the current situation in Gaza, placing the blame for the ongoing impasse on Hamas and other armed groups for their refusal to give up arms.

Israel is not faulted by name in the report, despite the hundreds of people killed and thousands injured in Gaza since October, the continued obstruction of aid and other blatant violations of both the ceasefire deal and international law.

For its part, Hamas accuses the US and Israel of moving the goalposts and trying to “implement terms that Hamas never agreed to – specifically, disarming the resistance while Israeli forces continue to occupy most of Gaza and violate the ceasefire on a daily basis,” as Drop Site reported.

Based on interviews with the leaders of Palestinian resistance factions, Drop Site added that Palestinian negotiators argue that Washington and Tel Aviv have scrapped the narrow terms of the October agreement – which is categorically different from the 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” dated 29 September 2025, published by the White House, and replaced it with the 15-point framework that was presented to Hamas in this April and summarized by the Bulgarian politician and diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative of the Board of Peace, on X.

That agreement, as Drop Site summarizes, “demands the total disarmament of the Palestinian resistance as a prerequisite to implementing the terms of the signed deal” – in other words, the “total victory” and surrender of Hamas that Israel was unable to achieve on the battlefield.

Mohammed Al-Hindi, the chief negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was involved in the October deal, told Drop Site that the position of the resistance is that weapons are a “national issue to be discussed in the second phase [of the ceasefire deal], and that before entering the second phase, the first phase must be implemented.”

Hamas and other factions maintain that they did not agree to anything beyond the six-step ceasefire agreement that dealt with the release of all captives in Gaza, living and dead, in exchange for Palestinians held by Israel; the cessation of all military operations; partial withdrawal of the Israeli military; and the “full entry of humanitarian aid and relief.”

“Officially, there is no deal on the terms of a ‘second phase,’” Drop Site added.

Despite this, Hamas says that it has created a mechanism for handing over power over Gaza’s civil affairs to the National Committee for Administration of Gaza created by the Board of Peace. However, Israel has not allowed the committee to enter Gaza and, according to Hamas leader Osama Hamdan, Mladenov “has failed to convince the Israelis or compel them.”

The site of an overnight Israeli airstrike on residential block in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, 19 May. Bilal OsamaAPA images

Instead, Mladenov appears to be singularly focused on pressuring Hamas.

The Times of Israel reported in May that Mladenov warned Hamas in a letter that failure to accept the Board of Peace’s disarmament framework would render the commitments of the ceasefire deal “null and void.”

The warning can be reasonably interpreted as a threat to resume Israel’s high-intensity attacks on Gaza that have killed tens of thousands of people – presumable acts of genocide, according to a preliminary ruling of the International Court of Justice – and a further tightening of the siege and return to famine conditions met with an arrest warrant for Netanyhau from the International Criminal Court.

Mladenov’s letter was co-authored by Aryeh Lightstone, a senior adviser to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. During Trump’s first administration, Lightstone was senior adviser to David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, and was appointed special envoy for economic normalization for the advancement of the Abraham Accords – the full normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel that was hailed by Trump as a “historic diplomatic breakthrough” when the agreement was inked in 2020.

Mladenov, who also heads a UAE government diplomatic training institute, championed the normalization deals ushered in during Trump’s first administration while he was the UN secretary-general’s Middle East envoy.

Mladenov’s style of diplomacy then, as now, is to “badger Palestinians into accepting an unjust status quo while making little to no demands on Israel,” as this writer put it in 2020.

While delivering ultimatums and threats to Hamas, Mladenov is handling Israel and its prime minister, wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes, with kid gloves.

The Bulgarian diplomat stated on 5 May that he had a “positive and substantive discussion” with Netanyahu during which “we all reaffirmed our commitment to the full implementation of President Trump’s 20-Point Comprehensive Plan.”

The following day, Israel targeted Azzam al-Hayya – the son of Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’ political bureau and the faction’s lead negotiator – killing him and another person and injuring nine others in the Gaza City attack.

Mladenov has made no condemnations of Israel’s assassinations or slaughter of civilians in Gaza during the nominal ceasefire while obscuring Israel’s obstruction of aid – a blatant violation of the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 provisional measures to prevent genocide, its subsequent additional measures and October 2025 advisory opinion finding that Israel’s restrictions on aid into Gaza breached international law.

Meanwhile the Board of Peace smeared internationals participating in a solidarity flotilla aimed at breaking the siege on Gaza, calling their advocacy “performative love-boat activism of people who know nothing of and care even less for the condition of Gazans.”

In the same post on X, the Board of Peace claimed that it had “SIGNIFICANTLY scaled up support for the people of Gaza” and stated that “Hamas’ theft of aid has dwindled from 90 percent to less than 1 percent” – even though it was Israeli-backed militias that had routinely intercepted and looted aid trucks in Gaza in the months leading up to the ceasefire.

There is no evidence to support the claim that Hamas, which says it has lost hundreds of officers and security guards in Israeli attacks while they were attempting to protect aid convoys, engaged in significant theft of aid, as determined by an internal US government analysis and acknowledged by Israeli military officials.

And while the Board of Peace crudely twists the facts on X, its high representative is engaged in slightly more sophisticated if no less harmful obfuscation.

Mladenov’s report to the Security Council on the implementation of Trump’s Gaza plan discusses the blocking of aid in “very oblique, roundabout terms,” Refugee International’s Konyndyk stated during the UN Correspondents Association press conference. “But at no point does it ever acknowledge … the continued pattern of obstruction by the Israeli government in direct contradiction to their obligations under the ceasefire deal.”

Konyndyk said that Mladenov telling the Security Council during his briefing that every element in phase one must be upheld “is a backward way of acknowledging that it has not been.”

“If the guarantors of the deal cannot even hold the Israeli government accountable for meeting basic humanitarian obligations, what realistic prospect is there that the parties will be held to account for the more complicated political and security elements of the deal?” Konyndyk asked.

Bankrupt board

While the Board of Peace’s high representative insists that full disarmament in Gaza is the key to unlocking every other aspect of Trump’s plan, he acknowledged in his report to the Security Council that the billions of funds committed for the execution of Trump’s plan have not been disbursed.

The Guardian reported during May that of the $7 billion pledged during the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace, only $23 million for overhead costs and $100 million to fund a future police force has been delivered – amounting to “$1.75 for every $100 pledged.”

An estimated $71.4 billion is needed for recovery and reconstruction in Gaza, according to a European Union, United Nations and World Bank assessment published in April.

From the beginning, the Board of Peace failed to win over the European Union, which has not joined the organization due to its naked attempt to bypass and undermine the United Nations.

Mohammed R. Mhawish, reporting for New York magazine, observes that “under its own logic, the three active military fronts currently disrupting the Middle East — Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — are theaters of war that should be resolved by the Board, if only they were not being waged by two Board members, the US and Israel.”

Whatever illusion of American protection guarantees that lured Gulf states to join the Board was shattered when the US and Israel jointly attacked Iran from military bases in their countries.

Damage to energy assets resulting from the attacks on Iran and its reprisal strikes on oil and gas facilities in nearby Gulf states may amount to $58 billion for repair costs alone, according to the research firm Rystad.

Gulf states UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were among the handful of countries that made pledges to the Board of Peace weeks before the surprise attack on Iran.

Counting on the US to provide stability is now a harder sell, and the Board of Peace’s empty coffers can be reasonably viewed as a vote of no confidence by states who had initially pledged.

An unnamed source described as “familiar with” the Board of Peace told The Guardian that “the worst outcome is that Hamas agrees to disarmament, and then says ‘go ahead, start delivering’ … What will they [the Board of Peace] do?”

Reuters reported that the US is “considering asking Israel to give some of the tax money it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to fund the US president’s post-war plan for Gaza.”

The mere suggestion of any such proposal is an indicator of the Board’s desperation and recklessness.

The Palestinian Authority says that Israel is withholding some $5 billion in taxes, amounting to around half the PA’s annual budget. Israel’s withholding of the funds that it collects on behalf of the PA has “set off a ⁠financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries of thousands of civil servants,” according to Reuters.
The real plan for Gaza

The Trump fantasy for Gaza, illustrated with glittery AI-generated graphics by the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, upon the plan’s reveal, has no Palestinian involvement and no money.

It also has no legitimacy.

The US joined the Board of Peace “through an executive order signed by Trump, who invoked a federal statute that normally requires congressional backing for American participation in international institutions,” Mhawish writes.

The Board charter has not been approved by the Senate, which approves international treaties, and the body “has no permanent relationship to any durable US or international institution, as the UN Security Council’s endorsement is set to expire at the end of next year.”

Trump would remain permanent chair even when his term ends and “the next administration would have no viable method to redirect funds, significantly restructure the Board, or undo the plans already set in motion.”

The “multilateral organization … created out of thin air,” as Mhawish puts it, has failed to consolidate the support and funding it would need to actually function.

Displaced Palestinians live in worn tents amid deteriorating humanitarian conditions and severe shortages of food, water and healthcare at Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, 20 May. Bilal OsamaAPA images

But in the meantime, the Board of Peace is providing Israel with diplomatic cover to advance its strategic goals: systematically destroying homes in the areas under its control to prevent their displaced residents from returning and to render the landscape unrecognizable and uninhabitable in pursuit of its genocidal aims of destroying the conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza.

Israeli leaders have not shied from expressing their desire to empty Gaza of its Palestinian population – the majority of them originally forcibly displaced during the violent creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land conquered in 1948.

On 26 May, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, reiterated the aim of “voluntary emigration … from Gaza” – a euphemism for forcible mass transfer.

Israel intends “to end the Palestinian presence in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas leader Osama Hamdan told Drop Site. “They are trying to send a message to the Palestinians that there is no solution within Palestine, and that the only solution is for them to leave.”

Sara Roy of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern studies similarly told Mhawish, the writer for New York magazine, that the Board of Peace vision for Gaza, as a proxy for that of the Israeli government, is about “eliminating Gaza as the center of resistance, and about ending the whole Palestinian political project to which Gaza is the key.”

Were Hamas and other resistance factions to agree to surrender arms, leaving Palestinians in Gaza totally defenseless, this would indeed be the key to unlocking the rest of Israel’s plan for Gaza, cloaked in the fake language of diplomacy and peace.

Has Trump torpedoed the ICC’s Gaza probe?

Maureen Clare Murphy

The Electronic Intifada

18 May 2026

Activists pose with a mock-up gallows protesting Israel’s new death penalty for Palestinians law outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague on 17 April, the annual commemoration of Palestinian Prisoners Day. James PetermeierZUMA Press Wire

“I am very proud that we are sanctioned,” Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said of the administration of US President Donald Trump and the Treasury Department’s orders criminalizing four prominent Palestinian groups during a recent event in The Hague.

For Sourani, the criminalization of four Palestinian human rights organizations by Israel’s principal ally is an indicator of their effectiveness in threatening the decades of impunity that paved the way for the genocide in Gaza.

“We inflicted pain on those criminals,” Sourani said during the launch of a report on the impact of sanctions imposed by the US president on 11 officials elected to the International Criminal Court, including judges and prosecutors, and other human rights defenders.

“They worry and they know that if we proceed rightly, using the law effectively … they will know where this will end up,” a defiant Sourani added. “As all criminals in history, they will be held accountable.”

But under the sanctions, it is human rights defenders, international lawyers, judges and experts who are being treated as criminals – even those living outside the US and who are not subject to its domestic law.

Francesca Albanese, an independent UN human rights expert, has also been sanctioned under Trump’s executive order for her work carried out under her mandate as special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – despite her status granting her immunities under a convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946. She is the first holder of a UN mandate to be subjected to sanctions in the history of the world body.

Albanese and her husband, who are Italian nationals, and their 13-year-old daughter, a US citizen, lost access to the US, including their property in Washington, under the sanctions. Albanese, who can no longer open a bank account, has likened the impact of sanctions to being condemned to “civil death.”

Albanese announced on 13 May that a US court suspended the sanctions imposed on her following a lawsuit filed by her husband and daughter.

A federal judge stated that Albanese was designated as punishment for First Amendment-protected speech, and that she had sufficient connections to the US to enjoy constitutional protections.

The judge’s ruling does not have any bearing on the sanctions imposed on any sanctioned individuals and organizations besides Albanese.

The sanctions lump international lawyers and judges with drug traffickers and “terrorists,” disrupting their lives and their work and cutting them off from their property, bank accounts and nearly anything that relies on digital services or the use of a credit card – including being able to simply buy a subway ticket.

All individuals and institutions sanctioned by the Trump administration were interviewed by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court for its 90-page report titled “Criminalizing Accountability.”

The report demonstrates how US sanctions have profoundly disrupted the lives of designated individuals and the staff of designated organizations and their families due to “the extraordinary global reach of the US banking, information technology and service sectors.”

Washington’s targeting of the ICC also threatens “accountability efforts for victims and survivors across all ongoing investigations,” from the Philippines to Venezuela, the report states.

Moreover, the ability of the US to exploit global dependency on technology and services based in the country “poses a threat … to the sovereignty, independence and security of states and their nationals.”
Additional arrest warrants rumors

Like Israel, the US is not a member state of the International Criminal Court or a signatory to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute. That statute allows for investigation of the nationals of states that aren’t party to the court if the alleged crimes occurred in the territory of an ICC member state.

Palestine joined the ICC in 2015 after it was admitted as a state to the United Nations.

While the administration of US President Joe Biden reversed sanctions imposed on Fatou Bensouda and two other court officials designated during Trump’s first term, it opposed the court’s investigation into suspected Israeli war crimes that was opened in early 2021.

DAWN, a human rights group based in Washington, has urged the ICC to investigate senior Biden administration officials, including the former US president, “for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.”

Karim Khan, the current ICC chief prosecutor, announced in November 2024 that the court had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, citing the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza “and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts,” among other serious violations. Arrest warrants were also issued for three Hamas leaders who were all eventually confirmed to have been killed.

Khan was reportedly investigating far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir before he went on leave following allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority last year. When announcing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan suggested that there may be additional charges over alleged international crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

Khan, who rejects the misconduct claims, was cleared of wrongdoing by three judges following a UN investigation, Middle East Eye reported in March.

The misconduct allegations are still being reviewed by the executive bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, the governance and management body of the court.

There has been little public activity by the overstretched and underfunded court on the Palestine investigation during Khan’s ongoing and indefinite leave of absence. His leave “brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill,” the The New Yorker stated in an October 2025 article on the misconduct scandal.

Recent reports indicate that the wheels of international justice may be slowly moving in the meantime, however.

An unnamed source told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Khan requested arrest warrants for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. In its report published on 17 May, Haaretz added that a “diplomatic source” said that Orit Strook, an Israeli lawmaker, and two Israeli military officials, were also being investigated.

The ICC has denied that new arrest warrants were issued in the Palestine case. It is possible that the applications for arrest warrants were prepared by Khan before his leave of absence or that his request is still under review by judges.

Since the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were announced, the ICC amended its regulations so that applications for arrest warrants “must remain secret and can only be made public with the permission of the judges.”
“You have been warned”

The degree to which political intrigue is at play in the misconduct probe that has paralyzed Khan’s work at the ICC is unclear, though Khan was reportedly threatened by Nick Kaufman, a British-Israeli lawyer who claimed to be informally advising Gallant, less than two weeks before the sexual misconduct allegations were leaked to the media.

Khan was also subject to pressure by David Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary at the time, and Lindsey Graham, the senior US senator. He also “received a security briefing that indicated that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was active in The Hague and posed a potential threat to the prosecutor,” according to Middle East Eye.

“Target Israel and we will target you,” a dozen Republican US senators, including Marco Rubio, the current secretary of state, warned in an April 2024 letter to Khan.

While tremendous pressure has been brought to bear on Khan and the court over its Palestine file, Israel’s underhanded efforts to consolidate its impunity began much earlier.

Israel mobilized its various intelligence apparatuses in a shadow “war” to try to put an end to the court’s preliminary examination and, later, its full investigation. Netanyahu viewed the tribunal as a “strategic threat” long before Khan’s term as chief prosecutor.

The misconduct allegations have all but spelled out the downfall of Khan, who was the first current ICC official to be sanctioned during Trump’s second administration. The criminalization of those upholding international law may result in the collapse of the court itself, which is being held up by the fortitude of its remaining staff with little meaningful support by the states that built the court.

The Coalition for the ICC observes that the sanctions against court officials have been “widely denounced” by states around the globe but the designation of the Palestinian human rights groups “have been met with a worrying silence.”

Nor has the ICC or the Assembly of States Parties made any public statements about the criminalization of the Palestinian groups for their work with the court.

But even if sanctioned court officials have received statements of support, they have seen little pushback by state parties to the ICC against the sanctions and practical support for those targeted by Washington.

One exception to this is Spain’s request that the European Commission activate a statute that would prohibit compliance with the sanctions by companies, nationals and residents of the EU.

The response from the UN General Assembly and secretary-general to the sanctions on a UN mandate holder has been “muted … in stark contrast with two previous occasions where coercive measures were used against UN independent experts,” according to the Coalition for the ICC report.

“So far no one wants to stand in the face of the bully,” Albanese said during the launch of the report.

This inaction “greatly impacts the functioning of the UN and has a chilling effect on the UN and on individuals, in particular people engaged in investigative work,” Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and one of three investigators on the UN Commission of Inquiry examining Israel’s system of oppression as a whole, told the Coalition for the ICC.
“A form of secondary victimization”

The aim of the sanctions is to “target a few with the aim of impacting the whole,” Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, told the Coalition for the ICC.

“The consequences have been immediate, and the impact on the daily lives of those designated, and their families … has been striking,” the coalition states in its report.

The documentation and advocacy work of the Palestinian human rights groups placed under sanctions – Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – has been profoundly disrupted.

They are “unable to receive funds or to process payments such as salaries, rent or other office expenses essential to their operations,” the report states.

Senior staff members with dual nationalities have had to resign and the organizations lost significant amounts of funding from not only the US, but also European donors.

Their websites, email lists, social media accounts and other digital services were shut down, resulting in the “permanent deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of videos, documentaries and victim testimonies about violations in Palestine.”

The sanctions follow years of persecution and Israeli attacks that destroyed the offices of Al Mezan and PCHR, which are based in Gaza. Several PCHR employees and their family members were killed in Israeli attacks.

For human rights defenders in Gaza, access to their salaries is “a matter of survival” for them and their families, as the coalition states in its report.

Israel has denied international human rights organizations, investigators and journalists access to Gaza, where more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023, making the work of the targeted Palestinian groups all the more essential.

The organizations are moreover a link between victims and the International Criminal Court, and their criminalization is “a form of secondary victimization” for victims of grave abuses who are left wondering where to turn to, according to Margaret Sattherthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.

The sanctions have shaken civil society working on a range of issues and organizations in the US who “face exposure to criminal liability for routine acts” in their work towards justice and accountability, should they be viewed as providing “material support” to designated individuals and groups, the Coalition for the ICC states in its report.

The designated Palestinian groups have been outcast from networks and coalitions based in the US. Some US nationals even “took themselves off group chats and completely stopped engaging with designated individuals,” the coalition adds.

Groups based outside the US have also taken “steps to prevent their US staff from working with the designated organizations and individuals,” leaving their Palestinian human rights colleagues feeling abandoned and isolated.
“Financial warfare”

The US sanctions regime – the weaponization of American dominance over the international financial system as a “new form of financial warfare,” as the lawyer Gavin Sullivan told the Coalition for the ICC – came out of the so-called War on Terror in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Dependence on networks linked to the US compels financial institutions in other countries to overly comply with the sanctions and cut “services to designated persons, even when domestic law does not mandate the termination of services,” the coalition explains in its report.

Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, said that not only were his bank accounts in the UK and Malaysia frozen, but his ex-wife’s bank account was “frozen when he tried to transfer money to her for their children,” the report states.

Family members of sanctioned court officials have also had US visas revoked and their Google, Apple and Amazon accounts canceled, with corporate monopolies instrumentalized “as proxy enforcement arms for sanctions,” according to the Coalition for the ICC.

The banks of the sanctioned Palestinian groups closed their accounts and they have been prevented “from transacting in any currency, even in the euro, Jordanian dinar or Israeli shekel.”

European banks “choose over-compliance,” violating the law by refusing to open a bank account for legal EU residents, who are guaranteed the right to a basic account.

The Trump administration has threatened to sanction the court itself if it doesn’t stop the investigation of Israeli and US nationals and amend the Rome Statute so the court can no longer prosecute nationals of non-state parties.

If the US makes good on its threat, it would immediately impact the ICC’s banking systems and financial transactions. It would affect all their investigations across all situations and the ability of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims to deliver reparations.

Already, the designations have “created a wave of fear among actors working on justice and accountability,” the Coalition for the ICC states.

For Nicolas Guillou, a French ICC judge, the greatest risk posed by the sanctions lies in this fear: “If judges are afraid to judge, prosecutors are afraid to prosecute and lawyers are afraid to defend, we are no longer in a state governed by the rule of law.”

This is the intangible, invisible impact, the coalition states, whether it be organizations not providing evidence or “friend of the court” briefs, to “senior experts not applying to be a judge or UN independent expert” out of fear of being criminalized.
“No other choice”

Giving in to pressure by Israel and its powerful allies to drop the Palestine file would irreversibly compromise the independence and impartiality of what is meant to be a court of last resort for the world’s most vulnerable victims.

“It should be the end [of the court], because then you are an instrument using the sword of justice solely against the enemies of the powerful,” Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, is quoted as saying in the report.

It would also represent a major defeat of the rule of law in favor of a world in which might makes right.

“The sanctions are imposed in the same manner as when medieval criminal thugs kidnapped judges, burnt court houses and killed witnesses,” Sidoti, the Australian expert, told the Coalition for the ICC.

The first wave of sanctions on ICC judges targeted four women from countries with marginal power relative to the countries of the judges who were initially spared, though sanctions have also targeted nationals of key US allies, including Canada and the UK.

The coalition notes in its report that “beyond the ICC and those cooperating with it, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions against national judges, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and advocacy groups and movements under separate executive orders.”

Those orders are issued without any judicial oversight and designated individuals have “few, or no, due process protections.” Nor do they receive prior notice to their assets being frozen or access to the classified information used to support their designation.

“These actions directly violate the sovereignty of individual states,” the independence of their judiciaries and the rights of their citizens, the coalition adds.

The sanctions have “the potential to become a considerable threat to the rule of law worldwide and in Europe,” Guillou, the French judge at the ICC, states in the report.

Incidentally, the US company Expedia canceled a hotel reservation Guillou had made in Europe, citing the sanctions. Expedia was named in a recent report by the UN Human Rights Council as one of more than 150 companies with ties to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.

A corporate accountability project of the American Friends Service Committee states that Expedia’s listings in settlements inherently discriminate against Palestinians, who are unable to access those properties. Some listings moreover “raise concerns of pillage, as the company is charging a commission on their booking without the freely given consent of the legal landowners.”

While denying services to sanctioned ICC officials like Guillou, companies like Expedia are profiting from violations of the international law that those sanctioned officials are working to uphold.

But despite everything they are up against, Palestinians human rights defenders vow to seek justice through whatever means necessary.

Palestinian human rights organizations tried to work with the Israeli justice system for decades, Issam Younis, director of Al Mezan, said during the launch of the Coalition for the ICC report in The Hague.

“It’s mission impossible,” Younis said of engaging with the Israeli system, leaving Palestinians victims wondering where to turn to. A window of opportunity was opened when Palestine was recognized as a UN member state and became a state party to the ICC.

“The minute that we decided to go there, we were subjected to unprecedented smear campaigns to delegitimize us and defund our organizations,” Younis said of Palestinian groups engaged with the court.

“We will never give up,” Younis added. “There is no other choice.”

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada. She worked for Al-Haq between 2004 and 2006.