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A Certain Weeping: Beyond Bin Laden’s Wildest Dreams
Along with grief and loss, the anniversary of 9/11 brought home for many the "incalculable cost" of the quarter century of carnage it unleashed - the militarizing "beyond all sanity," the othering of "everyone who isn't 'them,'" the lying, fear-mongering, inflicting of terror that's left America hollowed out from forever wars now mostly against imaginary enemies within. The bleak consensus: There would be no Trump without 9/11, the senseless, self-defeating war on terror did not end, and it damn near did us in.
The commemoration of 9/11 came hard on the tawdry heels of a pointless, "historic" midterm convention by a "staggeringly incompetent" dumpster fire of a GOP shameless enough to hoist "Never Forget" signs while forgetting or twisting beyond recognition what it was we vowed not to forget - our unity and humanity in the face of unprecedented loss. Instead, it mirrored the betrayal of a nation's history and values, the turning of a government on itself to morph into an engine of its own destruction. "Defend Freedom!", vaguely blared other signs, without specifying just whose freedom, or at what cost. Thus did the event's speakers giddily spiral into paranoia and conspiracy, pointing stubby fingers at their "enemies" of choice: "Terrorists. Muslims. Criminals. Antifa. Black or trans people. Undocumented immigrants. Suspected undocumented immigrants. Opinion-havers. Op-ed writers." Etc etc.
And, these days, commies. Ted Cruz savaged "communists and Islamists (who) hate Christians, hate Jews and hate capitalism.” Little toad-like, wide-eyed MAGA Mike shrieked we are a nation "being attacked from within" (true, that) by Dems "beholden to radicals. We have let the barbarians inside the gate, and next year the Communists will be in Congress." (Oh, please.) Ever-slimy J.D. called half of Congress "the party of hatred (that) despises America and the people who built it." Don Jr. revisited the "dystopian hellscape" of left-wing ideology, declaring, "Communism is on the march." His demented old man said Dems "turned our cities into scenes of death, misery, murder, poverty and destruction," but thank God "we took that dark age of America and turned it into a golden age." Also, he'll give you a $5,000 bribe if you "cheat like hell" on Election Day. Inspiring.
Later, at a 9/11 Pentagon event, he and his lackeys reiterated their devotion to “never forget” not to learn anything from a grievous, vengeful past. Trump said his Iran debacle fulfills a "sacred oath" to "never, ever forget,“ or learn, squat. Dangerous zealot Pete said "our warriors" have "fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for half a century, that cheered on 9/11," a total lie. Iran's government and people decried the “mass murder of human beings" on Sept. 11, with huge crowds attending candlelit vigils. Sliding past pesky facts, Pete yawped Iran still "plots to kill our citizens" and "we're still sending terrorists where they belong - to Hell." Then he crudely veered to Scripture: The struggle against evil "will continue until Judgment Day, "our only answer (is) eternal vigilance,” and thank you Jesus for brave new "warriors who will say when it matters most, 'Send me.'”
Startlingly for those of a certain age who, dumbfounded, watched it unfold on that blue-sky day - and then rewatched it a thousand times, trying to grasp a reality so much of the world, but not this once-shining city on a hill, has experienced - about a third of Americans are too young to remember the chaos of 9/11 - its searing images of office workers, often holding hands, plunging to their deaths; the collapse of both towers in a vast cloud of ash, dust, paper, carcinogens; the courage of firefighters and first responders, thousands of whom died that day or later of cancers; the initial summoning of our better angels as a nation came together for one another. Historian David Blight cites "the essential grief of it...a sheer sense of unspeakable loss." He also calls it "the most visual event in our history, so shocking, so horrifying that you can’t watch it without a certain weeping."
Obviously, it didn't last. At first, Bush's language was of criminality, not war. The resources of the federal government would go to help victims' families and "find those folks who committed this act." He was rational: He told Congress the terrorists "practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism (that) perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam." Then - from fear, hubris, ineptness, talking to mad Cheney? - his rhetoric pivoted to the martial, the need in a new world to "win the war against terrorism." “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," he said, and new Sen. Hillary Clinton echoed him: “Every nation has to be either with us or against us." Absurdly, he vowed to end terror, evil itself, "a frightened child wishing to rid the world of bad guys." Even language warped into creepy, blood-and-soil, "Nazi-resonating" totalitarianism with the newly coined "Homeland Security."
9/11was "when things began to go wrong for the United States," argues former Bill Clinton adviser Bill Galston. When "the world's most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own," we swiftly squandered our global good will, power, money, resources and whatever remained of our moral capital after decades of imperialist crimes to invade Afghanistan, then Iraq, now Iran, in forever wars born of the same lies, missteps, ignorance, arrogance and racism whose abuses and lack of accountability continue to haunt and fracture us today. Added to millions of innocent lives lost, the reflexive move to demonize, dominate or torture those seen as lesser also led to "a staggering level of the willful infliction of suffering...of gratuitous cruelty and sadism that became operationally part of the war on terror."
An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct, post 9/11 violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen; up to another 3.8 million people died indirectly in those war zones. Bush promised great military victories, as Americans learned (again) to equate national strength with the ability to inflict harm. When misbegotten wars faltered, ravaged, failed - it took the Taliban just 20 years to retake power - leaders began recycling 9/11 lies to justify new wars (see Iran), recycling hardware and manpower from the old, well-funded wars for a paramilitary and counter-insurgency force at home (see ICE), finding domestic enemies to scapegoat and target (see migrants et al), and pitting Americans against each other while turning a blind eye to the boundless corruption behind it. In brief, after a long road of death and destruction, "The war on terror has come home."
Historians debate whether Osama Bin Laden "won" after all in the dark aftermath of 9/11. He failed in his desire to establish a caliphate and expel western countries from the Middle East, but "the magnitude of the self-inflicted wounds (of) America's overreach," argues former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, "hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.” Rhodes is often haunted by the cost in blood and treasure of what we did - and what we didn't do, say, for climate change, health care, education: "If you came down to Earth from another planet and tried to make sense of the fact that the United States spent several trillion dollars chasing a relatively small number of terrorists around a few countries, toppling governments and then fighting insurgencies when it has huge problems...you would think this is a country that has gone insane.”
To The Intercept's Nick Turse, a quarter century after 9/11, "It's clear that bin Laden won." A major goal, Turse notes, "was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger domestic economic collapse." In 2001, America enjoyed an unimaginable budget surplus of $128 billion. After decades of ruinous wars, tax cuts for the rich and too much spending on the wrong things, today's national debt is over $40 trillion, we'll pay more than $1 trillion in interest, and that will likely double in the next decade. In 2004, Bin Laden touted his strategy of "bleeding America to the point of victory," writing, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without achieving for it anything of note.”
Of late, America's "swirl of toxic policies and overreach has opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams" - the rise of a more deadly terrorist than any foreign threat or even Cheney, who deemed "quietly" waterboarding detainees "a no-brainer.” Trump, Putin's fragile, useful idiot, has "stepped into that slipstream of othering people" - Black president, Mexican "rapists," immigrant caravans, Democrats - unleashed by 9/11, and swiftly taken nearly 4,000 authoritarian actions, 1,050 undermining democracy: Over 940 silencing dissent, 650 destabilizing foreign policy, 600 gutting civil rights, 500 spewing misinformation, one biggie tryiing to kill us all with greenhouse gases, and now headlining the global erosion of democracy to render the U.S. "Patient Zero." "Bin Laden is long gone, but his spiritual successor remains ensconced in the White House," Turse darkly notes. "The Al Qaeda leader couldn’t have hoped for better."
At last week's 9/11 remembrance, several relatives of the dead spoke out against the same "sickening, unfathomable" othering, denouncing "using this tragedy to spread hate, which does no honor to the victims." Jonathan Larsen likewise urges we find hope in the "stories of what people did when faced with the prospect of horrific death, people who had to weigh that against their own humanity." Those stories offer "hopeful messages about America" because "they’re about humanity, a humanity 9/11 was engineered to make us forget." Our own "true instincts," he argues, are "of greatness, of self-sacrifice," demonstrating "that any of us, unburdened by stupid stories about who our fellow humans are, will help each other." 25 years later, "What we need to recover our forgotten better natures are better stories." May we tell them, and hear them above the unutterable carnage, and find solace going forward.
Update: Oh look! Over there! Another lying scumbag, another hapless scapegoat, another desperate, vengeful, shiny circus - "Operation Heartland Surge To Find New Imaginary Enemies" - to distract us from colossal crimes and failures. Huh.
ICE, born of Bush/Cheney's ill-conceived War on Terror, brought the war home to Chicago.Getty Images
Sep 15, 2026
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'Actively Malevolent': Trump EPA to Eviscerate Rules on Planet-Heating Pollution From Power Plants
In what environmental advocates describe as "another gift to the fossil fuel industry," the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.
Power plants are considered the largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and account for about a quarter of the nation's climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In 2024, the EPA under the Biden administration used the Clean Air Act to require that many new gas plants and existing coal plants reduce their carbon emissions by 90%, including by installing carbon capture technology, by 2032.
The EPA estimated that the rule would reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.38 billion metric tons over the next two decades, the equivalent of about a year of emissions from the entire US electric power sector.
On Monday, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under President Donald Trump, announced an end to this policy at a meeting of energy ministers at the Group of 20 conference in Houston.
Not only will this prevent the enactment of a policy that the EPA has estimated would prevent around 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma cases by 2035. But the administration is also rolling out a proposal seeking to prevent future administrations from regulating carbon emissions as a health risk.
It is an effort that runs parallel to the administration's rescission of the 2009 "endangerment finding," which allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act on the grounds that they are harmful to human health. That move is also being challenged in court.
Power plants are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act, Section 111, which allows the EPA to regulate facilities that "cause, or contribute significantly to" dangerous air pollution.
But whereas the courts have previously interpreted this statute to regulate the outputs of entire facilities, the Trump administration is asking courts to adopt a novel reading of the statute which says each individual chemical under scrutiny must “contribute significantly” to climate change.
As Meredith Hankins, legal director for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained in a policy memo last week, it likely won't be easy for the administration to prove that the CO2 emissions from US power plants aren't a significant driver of climate change.
"Power sector emissions account for a quarter of total US emissions, so if they cannot be counted as significant, it’s hard to conceive of any emissions that would," Hankins wrote. "In fact, if the US power sector were a nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter after China, the United States, India, and Russia. That’s a pretty 'significant contribution' to the problem."
The effort to gut power plant regulations comes after the hottest meteorological summer recorded in US history and amid a year with one of the largest numbers of climate disasters on record, including widespread drought, destructive wildfires, and repeated flooding and tornado outbreaks.
As the planet has warmed over the last half-century, the US has seen a sharp, near-sevenfold increase in weather disasters costing over $1 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting," said Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, following news of the EPA's rollback of power plant rules. "This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public."
She added that "the Sierra Club will fight back against this reckless and dangerous proposal with everything we have in the courts, in Congress, and in communities across the country.”
If successful, the reversal of the power plant rules would be one of the most significant steps in Zeldin's push to eviscerate the EPA's authority to combat climate change on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this summer, during a meeting of the National Coal Council, he bragged that "many of the items" on the industry's "wish list are now done."
He has put the wheels in motion to roll back virtually every Biden-era regulation on the coal industry, including rules limiting pollution from mercury and toxic metals, controls on toxic wastewater from coal plants, and limits on coal ash.
And while seeking to undermine the legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases, Zeldin's EPA has also taken a sledgehammer to its practical ability to do so, dismantling offices that collect climate data, erasing information about human-caused climate change from the agency's websites, and filling research panels with scientists employed by the fossil fuel industry.
Former State Department energy official Alan Eyre noted that on the world stage, the US "has always been obstructionist" when it comes to climate policy. Under Trump, he said, "we're actively malevolent."
Sep 14, 2026
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Advocates Say Last Thing That Should Be Allowed Is Letting Billionaire Tech Bros 'Regulate Themselves'
Several Big Tech CEOs over the weekend called for a slowdown in the development of artificial intelligence, but some advocates are warning that these Silicon Valley oligarchs are not to be trusted.
Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, on Monday dismissed the recent statements made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, X CEO Elon Musk, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calling for more guardrails to be placed on AI development.
"We can’t trust the AI industry to regulate itself," said Greer. "We can't really trust anything these self-interested billionaires say."
Greer conceded that the CEOs' warnings about the potential dangers of AI deserved to be heeded, but argued that allowing them to craft their own safeguards would be a grave mistake.
"It’s clear that these industry leaders think they are best positioned to craft AI policy for the good of all humanity," said Greer. "We think that’s horseshit. Lawmakers should be listening to independent experts, researchers, civil society, and the communities most impacted."
"Congress should act," Greer added, "but they shouldn’t just do whatever the AI bros tell them to."
Greer's sentiment was echoed by Colorado Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros, who wrote in a Sunday social media post that "we need to regulate AI for all of the existential threats it poses," before adding that "we cannot expect the very people who got us into this mess to self-regulate their way out."
"Congress needs to act now," Kiros emphasized, "and guard against ANY corporate influence."
However, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday indicated that he was perfectly content to allow the AI industry to regulate itself.
During an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Johnson said that "Congress is obviously less qualified" to write rules for AI development "than the people who are pushing this frontier to know the ins and outs of it." Johnson then insisted that any effort to regulate AI needs to be "a partnership with the industry itself, with the corporations that are doing this."
Mike Johnson punts on oversight of AI companies: "Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know the ins and outs of it" pic.twitter.com/EXU1raDExB
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2026
This drew an incredulous reaction from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who said the speaker appeared to be making excuses for congressional inaction.
"Based on the speaker’s excuse, Congress could never pass laws or do oversight on medicine, energy, airplanes, etc.," wrote Lieu in a Sunday social media post. "Members of Congress don’t need to be [computer science] majors to understand it’s a good idea to require AI companies to be able to turn off AI models/agents if they go rogue."
Johnson isn't the only Republican to oppose AI regulation, as President Donald Trump on Monday suggested that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating the technology, which is so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote in a social media post, “and the USA has that, in spades!”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—whose district includes multiple Silicon Valley giants—argued on Saturday that the AI industry feels emboldened to regulate itself due to a crisis of "elite impunity," in which no one in the American ruling class faces consequences for disasters such as the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis.
"It is time for We the People to stand up," wrote Khanna. "And demand to make the rules and hold people accountable with civil and criminal liability for their actions."
Sep 14, 2026
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After Threatening Canada, Trump Suggests Its Potential EU Partnership Is a ‘Hostile Act’
In the wake of President Donald Trump's threats of annexation and economic warfare, Canada is distancing itself from the United States and moving toward a first-of-its-kind "associate membership" with the European Union. Trump suggested on Wednesday that this could be a "hostile act."
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first introduced the idea earlier that day of Canada deepening its ties with the EU economic bloc during a meeting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
"Democracies have the freedom to choose with whom to work," Von der Leyen said, suggesting that an "Alliance for the Future" between the EU and Canada would expand cooperation on technology, economic security, and military industry, among other critical areas.
She described such cooperation as a necessity in an "openly hostile world."
This was, in part, a not-so-subtle dig at Trump, who has antagonized Canada during his second term by slapping 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian imports and repeatedly floating the idea of making it the "51st state."
Europe, too, has been targeted by Trump's trade war, while the president has repeatedly threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, by suggesting the United States could take control of it—including by military force.
An "associate membership" in the EU for a non-European nation has no formal basis in EU statute. One EU diplomat told Reuters that "nobody really knows what it means."
However, Trump described it as an unmistakable slight and issued more threats.
"I think it’s laughable, the whole thing with Canada," he told reporters on Wednesday. "Canada’s been a terrible trade partner."
If the two reached an agreement, Trump said he may retaliate further, heightening the tariffs that have led to sharp declines in European exports to the US and driven up costs for American consumers, especially low-income households.
"If they do that, if I think it’s at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things," Trump said. "So if they do that, if Europe does that with a bad intention, if it’s a good intention, that’s fine.”
"If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe," he reiterated.
Speaking at the European Parliament on Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—whose compatriots are now more inclined to view the US as an "enemy" than an "ally," according to a recent poll—said of Von der Leyen's proposal, "We welcome this ambition."
While he did not discuss the specifics of becoming an associate member, he agreed that Canada's relationship with the EU should move beyond the current Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).
"Canada and Europe should secure our strategic autonomy through deep cooperation in the full range of strategic capabilities, including critical minerals, defense industrial capacity, AI and compute, energy security, space, and payments," he said.
Carney stressed that the act was not one of hostility toward the United States and that he did not seek to form "a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival." But he also seemed to draw a contrast with Trump's bellicosity.
"We do not seek power to dominate others," he said. "On the contrary, we are pursuing resilience so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity, or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law."
Trump has not yet specified what tariff rate he'd seek to impose against Europe or what would signify that the alliance with Canada had a "bad intention."
But Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian social-democratic politician and member of the European Parliament, said that "the fact that Trump immediately resorts to new threats is further proof that stronger EU-Canada cooperation is both wise and necessary."
"He does not find the idea ridiculous; he fears it because it would weaken his divide-and-conquer tactics and his ability to wield illegal tariffs as political and economic weapons," she wrote on social media.
"He might not react when you lift a finger," she added. "But he will understand when you raise a fist."
Sep 17, 2026
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‘Time We Send Her Packing,’ Troy Jackson Says of Collins Voting to Confirm 2 Anti-Abortion Judges in a Week
"Enough is enough," Democratic US Senate candidate Troy Jackson declared on Thursday after Republican Sen. Susan Collins voted once again for an anti-abortion judge to join a federal court for a lifetime appointment—a frequent action taken by the five-term Maine lawmaker despite her persistent claims that she supports reproductive rights.
Collins' vote on Thursday was for Kasdin Miller Mitchell, a litigator and former solicitor general of Alabama who also served as a clerk for far-right US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She was confirmed in a 49-45 vote to serve on the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
But Mitchell wasn't the only anti-choice judge Collins voted to confirm this week, Jackson noted with scorn.
On Tuesday, the former logger and Maine state Senate president recorded a video responding to her tie-breaking vote in support of Judge Matthew Byrne to join the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
Byrne sits on the board of an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center and said in 2020 that he opposed allowing pregnant patients to access abortion in nearly all cases, without any exceptions for rape or incest. He said he supported exceptions—which, in reality, often do little to protect access to care—for cases in which a pregnant patient's life is at risk, but said that the term “life of the mother” should be “strictly defined so as to avoid creating loopholes.”
Jackson asked in his video on Tuesday, "Does she think that people in Maine are stupid?"
"It's time that Mainers had somebody that's going to fight for their reproductive rights every damn time," he added.
On Thursday, Jackson expressed disbelief that for the second time in four days, Collins had voted in favor of an anti-choice judge.
Mitchell helped defend the state of Alabama as it tried to terminate Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, arguing in a brief that the state had "inherent sovereign authority to determine which providers qualified" for Medicaid, "based on their own unchecked assessment of an organization’s ethics," according to Reproductive Freedom for All.
Mitchell also signed letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of other anti-abortion judges and served as the counsel of record for the Independent Women’s Law Center, an anti-choice group that has opposed the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage, equal pay and family leave legislation, and the Violence Against Women Act.
Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan said Collins' votes this week "show she’s not going to stand up for Maine women any time soon.”
“Susan Collins confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and said herself she still doesn’t regret it," said Linnehan. "Now, she’s falling in line with Trump once again to put fanatical anti-abortion judicial nominees on the bench for life."
The Maine Democratic Party highlighted more than a dozen federal judges Collins has backed in recent months, including Judge Whitney Hermandorfer of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, who defended Tennessee’s total abortion ban; Judge Joshua Dunlap of the US Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, which includes Maine, who advocated for a "fetal personhood" bill in the state; and Judge Maria Lanahan to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who defended Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and pushed for restrictions on medication abortion.
"For the second time this week, Susan Collins has voted to confirm ANOTHER anti-abortion, MAGA judge," said Jackson on Thursday. "It’s time we send her packing."
Sep 18, 2026
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'Drop the Genocide 20': Activists Launch Campaign to Exclude Officials Behind Biden Gaza Policy From Democratic Politics
As another presidential election approaches and a new Democratic administration may be on the horizon, human rights campaigners are trying to ensure that it won't be staffed with the same policy officials who architected former President Joe Biden's Gaza policy.
Most Democratic voters are now appalled by Israel's military campaign in Gaza, which leading human rights groups and scholars have recognized as a genocide. It has led to the deaths of at least 73,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children, according to official totals, and left most of the population displaced and living amongst rubble.
But many of the Biden advisers and appointees who gave cover to Israel during its pivotal, exceptionally deadly early months have settled comfortably back into the respectable liberal intelligentsia, with roles at universities, think tanks, and media outlets.
As 2028 inches closer, a coalition of peace groups is urging these institutions to pledge that they will "drop the Genocide 20," a group of 20 ex-Biden officials they deemed "responsible for promoting, lying about, and covering up the Gaza genocide," even as Israeli officials made numerous statements indicating intent to fully destroy Gaza and its people.
The list, published Thursday on the coalition's website, includes:
- Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who denied before Congress that Israel was blocking aid to Gaza despite his own State Department's assessment, a falsehood that allowed him to avoid following a US law that would have required the US to restrict weapons shipments to Israel. (Blinken is now a board member at the Center for American Progress.)
- Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who said in May 2024 the administration categorically "does not believe" that Israel was committing a genocide. The International Court of Justice had already found a "plausible" genocide risk was present, while the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories said there were "reasonable grounds” to believe a genocide was occurring. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, meanwhile, had reported that Israel's "siege" cutting off humanitarian aid had left more than 1.1 million Palestinians facing "catastrophic" food insecurity and on the brink of famine. (Sullivan is now the Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at Harvard's Kennedy School and a co-host of The Long Game, a national security podcast for Vox.)
- Former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk, who in November 2023 endorsed Israel's strangling of humanitarian relief as part of a method to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and later denied a US Agency for International Development (USAID) report of starvation in Northern Gaza after Israel dismissed it. (McGurk is now a global affairs analyst at CNN and a partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Lux Capital.)
- Former Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer, who falsely claimed the US was putting "pressure" on Israel to reach a ceasefire and promoted Israel's false narrative that the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a “command and control facility” for Hamas, helping to justify an attack that rendered the territory's largest medical facility "completely nonfunctional," according to the World Health Organization. (Finer is now a senior fellow with Yale Law School’s Tsai Leadership Program and co-hosts The Long Game with Sullivan.)
- Former White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who claimed that the Biden White House had "not seen any indication [Israeli forces] have violated international humanitarian law," in April 2024, at which point more than 33,000 Palestinians had been killed, and systemic attacks on civilian homes, medical aid workers, and schools had been widely documented.
- Former UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who vetoed three ceasefire resolutions brought before the UN Security Council and denied that Israel was blocking aid.
"The purpose of the list is to demand these officials be removed from future Democratic administrations, as well as think tanks and academic and liberal spaces," said the coalition, which includes Just Foreign Policy; Palestinian Youth Movement; Track AIPAC, which tracks lobbying by pro-Israel donors; Peace Action; the Democratic Socialists of America; and About Face, a group representing anti-war veterans.
"The culture of bipartisan elite immunity is what drives US war crimes and support for war crimes. From the Vietnam War to post-9/11 torture to the Iraq War, elite war criminality never receives any meaningful sanction from either party. It is treated as a mere policy disagreement among friends," the coalition said. "This dynamic is a key reason Biden officials knew they could arm, defend, and cover up the genocide in Gaza for 15 months, and simply move back into liberal spaces, nonprofits, and future governments."
The campaign urged these organizations to oppose any efforts to give the 20 people on the list "institutional or political power that positions them to continue to perpetrate harm."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American lawmaker in the US House of Representatives, has signed the pledge, as has Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, who is likely to enter the US House in January after winning the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District earlier this year.
Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker, who first broke news of the coalition's effort, said more lawmakers were expected to join in support.
The coalition noted that there were "far more than 20 people in the US government responsible for the US-backed genocide in Gaza" but acknowledged that it needed to limit itself to those most responsible to remain actionable.
It also said that a parallel effort was in the works to hold members of the Trump administration accountable for their own policies in Gaza and elsewhere.
"The Trump administration’s time will come, especially given its attack on Iran and war crimes against the Iranian people," the coalition said.
But for now, the activists are putting their focus on the Biden administration because “that’s who is currently out of power and actively engaging in reputation laundering and historical revisionism.”
The pledge comes as increasing numbers of Democratic politicians describe Israel's conduct in Gaza as constituting a genocide, a position shared by the majority of Democratic voters. The coalition said that without consequences, this is meaningless.
“The word ‘genocide’ has certain implications and obligations. It’s not a buzzword,” the coalition said. “If an elected [official] says Israel committed genocide, as 22 members of Congress have, then it logically follows they would agree to not hire, work with, or otherwise validate those most responsible for that which they themselves argue is a genocide. It’s common sense.”
Sep 17, 2026
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'Outrageous': Sanders Slams FCC for Approving Saudi and UAE Ownership of Paramount-Warner Bros.
"We don't need Middle East dictators to control American media."
Sep 18, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday joined a growing chorus of critics angered by the Federal Communications Commission's approval of foreign investment in the company that would be created if Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery are allowed to merge.
Led by Chair Brendan Carr, an appointee of President Donald Trump, the FCC on Thursday approved Paramount's petition to allow foreign investors to hold over 25% of ownership. The commission concluded it would be in the "public interest" to greenlight a plan for 49.5% foreign ownership, including 38.5% from investment funds based in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
"Trump's FCC just approved Trump pal David Ellison's deal to allow Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE to own nearly 50% of a merged Paramount-Warner Bros," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media Friday, referring to Paramount's chair and CEO—and the son of billionaire Republican megadonor Larry Ellison.
The merged company would include CBS, CNN, HBO, the Discovery Channel, BET, Fandango, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more, the senator noted. He added: "Outrageous: We don't need Middle East dictators to control American media."
Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic commissioner, was similarly critical: "The FCC just let some of the most repressive governments in the world indirectly control nearly all of a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. An investment this large in one of America's biggest media companies doesn't just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and made."
"That's why I called for this new and novel issue to go to a full commission vote given what's at stake," she noted. "Instead, the FCC snuck this ruling out as a staff-level decision, with no public vote and no accountability for a call of this magnitude."
Welcoming Gomez's comments, Michael Sozan pointed to his and Andrew Miller's June article for the Center for American Progress highlighting that "the three Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes have deep financial relationships with Trump and his family, and... long records of human rights abuses and engage in media censorship."
"These autocracies could leverage Paramount's news outlets and other media properties to advance their own interests at the expense of the United States' national security and foundational rights, including press freedoms," the pair warned. "Given these factors, these foreign ownership levels are another reason why regulators must rigorously review this merger and take all lawful actions to block it."
As the Los Angeles Times reported:
Several groups, including the 1st Amendment nonprofit Free Press, asked the FCC to consider additional safeguards to shield the news organizations—CNN and CBS—from foreign control. One suggestion was to spin off CBS and CNN into a subsidiary that would be wholly owned by Americans.
Paramount and the FCC were dismissive, arguing "the concerns raised in the record... are speculative and unsupported," according to the FCC ruling.
While a Paramount spokesperson welcomed the FCC's decision not to block the plan—and pointed out that "when the proposed transaction with Warner Bros. Discovery closes, the Ellison family and RedBird will collectively hold the largest equity stake in the combined company and 100% of the voting shares, with no other equity participant having any governance rights"—fresh outrage mounted over the already widely criticized $111 billion merger.
Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, addressed the questions: "But it's just indirect equity interests, right? What about the condition that the Saudis, UAE, and Qatar cannot interfere with or even comment on any decisions related to content?"
As he explained: "The only way that firewall is conceivably enforceable is if the FCC assigns an independent monitor to sit in on every meeting, taps every burner phone, and is invited to every Signal chat between any representative of Paramount and its new financial backers. The point is not that that should happen, but that this condition is patently unenforceable. Which is all to say, the FCC just approved the sale of a crown jewel of the entertainment and media industry to foreign interests that relish in exercising economic, political, and regional military leverage over the United States. All based on a pinky promise."
"The reality is that ownership alone, even of nonvoting, indirect equity interests, creates its own financial leverage and influence," he warned. "To the extent Paramount's new owners are prohibited from exercising influence, it's patently paradoxical. Paramount won't approve anything that risks losing half of its financial backing, including criticizing a regime that not too long ago ordered the execution of a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, who became an international figurehead for politically persecuted journalists."
"Does anyone think CBS' new leadership has the will, much less fortitude, to prioritize truth over financial ruin?" he added. "If this all sounds like a total mess, that's because it is. And it only becomes doubly worse if Paramount acquires Warner Bros.-Discovery."
Due to legal pushback from state attorneys general and unions, the merger—which some opponents have condemned as an "existential" threat—is on hold until the outcome of a trial scheduled to begin in March.
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Human Rights Group Urges Congress to Block 'Illegal' Sale of 2,000-Pound Bombs to Israel
"A vote to let this sale proceed is a decision to help Israel commit more war crimes."
Sep 18, 2026
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A human rights organization on Friday called on members of Congress to block the Trump administration's proposed $2.8 billion transfer of 40,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, warning that approving the massive weapons package could violate US law and expose lawmakers to potential liability for complicity in war crimes.
In a letter to congressional lawmakers, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) urged legislators to introduce joint resolutions of disapproval under the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) once the administration formally notifies Congress of the sale.
"Forty thousand of the bombs that flattened Gaza is not a defense package, it is a down payment on the next round of atrocities," DAWN executive director Omar Shakir said in a statement. "Every member of Congress now has the law and the evidence in front of them. A vote to let this sale proceed is a decision to help Israel commit more war crimes."
1/ Members of Congress should introduce and pass joint resolutions of disapproval under the Arms Export Control Act to block the Trump administration's proposed $2.8 billion transfer of 40,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, DAWN said today in a letter to every member of the Senate and House.
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— DAWN (@dawnmenaorg.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 9:39 AM
The proposed package includes 20,000 MK-84 general-purpose bombs and 20,000 BLU-117s, along with 20,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads, according to reporting by The Washington Post. The weapons would be purchased largely through Foreign Military Financing, meaning US taxpayers would pay for Israel's acquisition of the munitions.
The MK-84 is among the largest conventional bombs in the US arsenal. The Post reported that its blast can propel metal fragments thousands of feet, penetrate thick concrete and metal, and create large craters.
"Munitions experts [said] that US forces almost never drop bombs of this size in populated areas," DAWN wrote in its letter. "Israel has used them hundreds of times in Gaza and Lebanon. The Biden administration paused a shipment of these bombs in May 2024 precisely because of the risk of mass casualties in Rafah; President [Donald] Trump released it within days of taking office."
Loosened rules of engagement implemented by the Israel Defense Forces following the Hamas-led attack of October 2023, combined with the IDF's use of artificial intelligence technology to select targets far more rapidly than humans, resulted in a staggering loss of civilian life in Gaza when 2,000- and 1,000-pound bombs were dropped.
"Israel's assault has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 21,000 children, and the killing has not stopped," DAWN said on Friday, adding that the United Nations Children's Fund "said last month that at least 300 children had reportedly been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire, an average of one child every day."
DAWN argued that the proposed transfer would violate multiple US laws, including provisions of the AECA and Foreign Assistance Act governing how American weapons may be provided and prohibiting assistance to governments engaged in consistent patterns of gross human rights violations. The organization also invoked the Leahy Laws, which prohibit certain assistance to foreign military units credibly implicated in gross human rights abuses.
The group further warned that knowingly providing weapons that are subsequently used to commit war crimes could also be "illegal" under the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although Israel and the US are not signatories to the Rome Statute, the treaty stipulates that people from nonsignatory nations who commit crimes in states that are party to the treaty—as Palestine is—can be held criminally accountable for their acts.
The ICC has issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. The Hague-based court also ordered the arrest of three senior Hamas leaders; all three were extrajudicially assassinated by Israel.
The proposed sale has already encountered some congressional resistance. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced Wednesday that he would not clear the transfer, citing the absence of sufficient assurances that the weapons would be used consistently with US and international law and concerns about civilian protection in Gaza and Lebanon. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also vowed to block the sale in the upper chamber.
However, DAWN cautioned that a congressional hold is not necessarily sufficient to stop the transfer. The organization noted that the Trump administration has previously invoked emergency authorities to bypass congressional review of arms sales to Israel.
Under the AECA, Congress can attempt to block a major arms transfer through a joint resolution of disapproval. DAWN is urging lawmakers to bring such resolutions to recorded votes in both chambers and to hold public hearings examining the administration's use of emergency authorities to circumvent congressional oversight.
"The administration is betting that Congress will do what it always does: complain, then look away," DAWN advocacy director Raed Jarrar said on Friday. "Congress should show the administration that it's no longer the rubber stamp it long has been on arms to Israel and block this sale."
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Amid Urgent Demand for Oversight, Analysis Details 105 US Lawmakers Personally Invested in the AI Industry
Despite catastrophic warnings from AI industry insiders, Congress has adjourned until after the midterms without passing any laws to regulate the technology.
Sep 18, 2026
Despite increasingly urgent calls to regulate artificial intelligence, including from industry insiders who warn of potentially catastrophic consequences, the US Congress has continued to drag its feet on meaningful legislation.
A report released Friday by Sludge may shed some light on one potential roadblock. It found that 1 in 5 members of Congress has household investments in AI companies or those producing the infrastructure behind the technology.
Sludge revealed that:
At least 105 members of Congress have disclosed that they, their spouse, or their dependent children hold stocks or other investments in AI developers, chipmakers, cloud infrastructure providers, data center companies, and specialized AI firms, with a total value of between $75 million and $287 million.
Most of the money is invested in large tech companies like Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet. But lawmakers also report their households holding and trading shares in smaller publicly traded AI companies like BigBear.ai, Tempus AI, and C3 AI, as well as little-known private startups whose shares are unavailable to ordinary investors.
Of the lawmakers reporting investments, at least 44 sit on committees with jurisdiction over legislation dealing with AI safety, consumer protections, semiconductor policy, and trade with China.
The report identifies several lawmakers in positions of influence over Congress' AI policy whose households simultaneously have deep investments in the industry.
One of them is Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), the co-chair of the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy—created to help direct the party's legislative agenda around the emerging technology.
According to Sludge, Gottheimer's household has investments in several key chipmaking and semiconductor companies, and he has regularly traded in AI stocks while in Congress.
The report draws attention to the "scores of sales" he made on April 9, 2025, when President Donald Trump announced a surprise 90-day pause on his "Liberation Day" tariffs, an announcement that led stocks for many AI companies to surge in value. Gottheimer has previously told Sludge that his investments are managed by a third party and that he does not make the decisions himself.
Gottheimer is one of the Democrats helping shape the party's approach to regulating AI. Earlier this month, amid concerns about the growing capability of "superintelligent" AI agents that can exceed human capability, he joined with Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) to introduce the Stop Rogue AI Act.
This bill would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to adopt a series of standards and best practices that AI companies could implement to track the behavior of agents. However, critics have argued that the bill's voluntary guidelines fall short of what is necessary to rein in the industry.
Gottheimer's proposal is one of several measures Democrats have proposed in recent weeks following warnings from Anthropic researchers Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger that AI systems could wipe out humanity if allowed to escape human control.
Others include a more muscular bill proposed earlier this month by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) that would permanently ban the development of superintelligent AI and pause the development of advanced AI until a federal regulatory body can be established.
Some members of Congress whose households are heavily invested in AI stocks have nonetheless supported stronger regulation. According to Sludge, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) disclosed between $3.4 million and $8.4 million worth of stock owned by his wife in AI companies, including Nvidia and chipmaker Broadcom.
Khanna has said he does not personally trade stocks and has pushed for a congressional ban on stock trading. Despite his household's millions of dollars worth of AI investments, he has also voiced support for blocking the development of superintelligent AI until stronger safeguards are in place, broadly aligning him with the Sanders-Casar proposal.
Sludge found that investments in AI stocks are not concentrated in either party. Among the lawmakers who reported AI-related investments, 62 were Republicans, and 43 were Democrats.
One of the largest portfolios is held by the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who plans to retire at the end of the term.
Paul Pelosi, a venture capitalist, reported holdings in Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Tempus AI worth between $28.4 million and $134.9 million, while also buying an estimated $1.3 million to $2.6 million in Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and Tempus shares in 2026 and up to $12 million in Bloom Energy, which stands to benefit from the AI data-center buildout.
On the Republican side, the report singles out Rep. Lisa McClain (Mich.), the chair of the House Republican Conference and the fourth highest-ranking member of House GOP leadership. Since December, her household has invested as much as $515,000 in AI companies, including private stakes in Elon Musk's company xAI, as well as Apptronik and Saronic.
Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), meanwhile, disclosed holdings in Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. She serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy Subcommittee, which has authority to legislate on energy issues related to the controversial buildout of data centers around the country.
The report comes as members of Congress head home for a seven-week recess that will last until after November's midterm elections.
On Wednesday, more than 100 Democrats—including Gottheimer, Khanna, and Pelosi—sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) urging him to postpone the recess until Congress passes AI safety legislation.
"AI experts and leading companies agree that the United States can lead the world in artificial intelligence while establishing reasonable safeguards that protect Americans and our national security. We can—and must—do both," the lawmakers wrote. "While AI safety experts and Americans increasingly urge action to confront this conflagration of risk, Congress fiddles."
"The House should remain in session until Congress advances meaningful, bipartisan AI safeguards," the letter concluded. "To our children who will have read a post-apocalyptic history, 'Why Congress Slept'—likely written by agentic AI—our inaction will be inexplicable and unforgivable."
Johnson, who has rejected calls for AI regulation and said companies should be in charge of regulating themselves, ignored the request and adjourned the House on Wednesday.
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'Elite Crime Spree': AI Execs Admit Scraping of News Outlets Was 'Largest Theft of Labor' in History
"If a foreign government or terrorist group did the kind of hacking and IP theft being done by AI giants, America would declare a national security emergency and start a war," said one journalist.
Sep 18, 2026
Publicly, billionaire artificial intelligence executives have denied that their product will ultimately replace people in jobs they've spent decades working at, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declaring that "AI won't replace humans, but humans who use AI will replace those who don't," in one effort to convince the public to embrace the deeply unpopular expansion of the technology.
But internal documents from OpenAI and Microsoft, unsealed as part of a lawsuit The New York Times and other news outlets filed against the two companies over their scraping of news content in order to train their AI models, tell a different story—one in which executives and workers at the tech giants were fully aware that the practice was meant to result in a "substitutive" product to replace journalists, after stealing millions of articles they'd written.
As the Times reported, employees at Microsoft wrote that by scraping the news content, they were committing the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
Nick Turley, the head of OpenAI's AI chatbot, ChatGPT, wrote that the technology posed an "existential threat" to news publishers and that the goal was for AI products to get "more and more substitutive"—although other employees said the stealing of news content could ultimately negatively impact the quality of the large language models (LLM) they were creating.
“It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” one document says.
Executives painted a picture of the companies gathering up news content from across the internet, ultimately leaving nothing behind.
Brent Hecht, Microsoft's director of applied science, wrote in an internal memo that eventually, an LLM is "a product that destroys its supply chain."
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” Hecht wrote.
Although officials at the two companies expressed these views privately from 2020-24, in response to the lawsuit filed in late 2023 by the Times they have claimed that their use of news content is covered by "fair use" rules pertaining to copyrighted material, and that the articles were turned into new work and are therefore not substitutes for the original articles.
But the unsealed documents, said reporter Shawn Setaro of Complex, show that OpenAI and Microsoft "KNEW they were stealing, and KNEW they were destroying news outlets."
Hecht wrote in one memo that the companies' practice was making “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”
The internal memos were unsealed by Judge Sidney H. Stein of the District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is considering motions for a summary judgment in the lawsuit.
The Times and 11 other outlets that have joined the suit argue that OpenAI and Microsoft violated copyright laws.
One document showed that the companies even developed "a hack" to circumvent paywalls in order to collect paid content.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman replied, "Ah nice" to a note from a staffer telling him about the tool, but Microsoft DEO Satya Nadella said in a deposition that had he been aware that AI teams were scraping paywalled articles, he would have required that OpenAI retrain the models.
"If a foreign government or terrorist group did the kind of hacking and IP theft being done by AI giants, America would declare a national security emergency and start a war," said David Sirota of The Lever. "But because the crime is being done by Silicon Valley billionaires, we’re told by politicians and corporate media that it’s fine, that it should be accelerated, and that we should consider granting them new legal protections/exemptions, as well as new tax subsidies."
In 2020, then-OpenAI policy director Jack Clark wrote to Brockman and Altman that he was concerned the company's AI development practices would "increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.”
While tech executives have spent recent years extolling the virtues of AI—and, recently, threatening that their technology has the capacity to wipe out humanity—Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project said the documents exposed AI as "an elite crime spree."
"From copyright violations to hacking to monopolization to sex trafficking, the companies behind AI violate the law," he said. "The problem isn't a lack of regulations, it's that the law doesn't apply to the powerful."
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'Misled' and 'Strung Along' by Trump, Financial Pain of Farmers Grows as Costs Continue to Skyrocket
"I think a lot of people expected that maybe the war would wrap up and the prices would go down some... then it just skyrocketed," said one farmer of the cost of diesel.
Sep 18, 2026
Farmers across the US are speaking up about their struggles as President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran and trade war with Canada are taking a hammer to their finances.
In an interview with CBS News published Thursday, North Carolina farmer Matt Bell revealed that "I have never worried and stressed like I have the last year," thanks to the soaring costs of fuel, fertilizer, and farm equipment, all of which have gotten more expensive thanks to Trump's policies.
"The fertilizer, fuel, chemicals, seed, parts—you know, the whole nine yards," said Bell, "everything that we touch has gone up."
"We are fighting for survival."
Matt Bell, 52, has been farming for more than half his life in central North Carolina.
He grows soybeans, corn and wheat and raises beef cattle on more than 1,000 acres. But Bell, who voted for President Trump, says soaring prices for fuel,… pic.twitter.com/9ELYXkJywt
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 18, 2026
Bell, who voted for Trump, said he feels "misled" and "strung along" when it comes to the president's rationale for attacking Iran without congressional authorization in February.
The North Carolina farmer said his costs for diesel fuel have doubled in the last year, driven in large part by Trump's war.
According to data released Friday by the American Automobile Association, the average price of diesel in the US now stands at a record-high $6.45 per gallon, a 74% increase of the average price of diesel one year ago.
"We are fighting for survival," Bell emphasized, "and we're running out of options."
Bell is far from the only farmer struggling.
Theresa Sisung, commodity and regulatory relations manager at the Michigan Farm Bureau, said in an interview with Up North Live that farmers in the state are about to "use a ton of fuel on their farms" due to the start of harvest season, making the record-high diesel prices particularly inconvenient.
"We have seen a slight increase in farm bankruptcies across the nation," said Sisung. "We are seeing those farms that are more stressed. We've had some negative margins for farms for a few years now, so there is certainly stress out in the countryside."
Michigan farmer Russell Ketchum told Up North Live that the high diesel prices have made what was already a challenging year and farming even more difficult.
"We started out the year with a lot of cold weather, a lot of freeze damage," Ketchum explained, "so we've been working on short crops all year and then the diesel fuel prices and the gas prices all on top of that, they made everything challenging to say the least."
North Dakota farmer Chris McDonald told the North Dakota Monitor in an interview published Wednesday that diesel prices have climbed so high that they "can erase your profit."
McDonald also tied the increase in diesel costs directly to Trump's war, which the president said would only last a matter of weeks but has since dragged on for more than six months.
"I think a lot of people expected that maybe the war would wrap up," said McDonald, "and the prices would go down some, and they never really did drop very much. Then it just skyrocketed.”
The Iran War isn't the only Trump policy that's hurting US agriculture and bringing pain to US farming families, as a Tuesday NPR report highlighted the impact that the president's trade war with Canada is having on farmers in Montana.
As noted by NPR, Canada is Montana's biggest trading partner, as it accounts for "$1 billion in cross-border sales." But the tariffs imposed by Trump, and the counter-tariffs imposed by Canada, have both harmed Montana farmers' sales and made the equipment they buy more expensive.
Steve Sheffels, a Montana wheat farmer, told NPR that he'd like to buy "a new drill" and some "grain bins that come out of Canada," but now fears that "I won't be able to afford them" thanks to the trade war.
Sheffels, whose wife is Canadian, also told NPR that he was not happy to see America's relationship with its largest trading partner deteriorate throughout Trump's second term.
"You don't treat your neighbors like this," he said.
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Working-Class Taxpayers Subsidize Billionaires' Climate-Killing Private Jets: Report
"It’s time to stop making taxpayers subsidize luxury private jet travel and use our resources to green other industries," said one of the report's authors.
Sep 18, 2026
A handful of the world's wealthiest people are traveling aboard some of the planet's most polluting vehicles while receiving substantial public subsidies, according to a new report documenting how taxpayers and commercial airline passengers are funding billionaires' private jet lifestyles due to corporate lobbying, tax breaks, and other policies.
The Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) "High Flyers 2026: The High Cost of Private Jet Excess," released on Friday, notes that only about 256,000 people around the world—roughly 0.003% of the global population—fly on private jets. Yet these ultrawealthy travelers account for a disproportionate share of aviation activity while paying a fraction of the taxes that fund air traffic infrastructure.
According to the report—which is co-authored by Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Kalena Thomhave, and Emily Wagner—private jets and charter services account for roughly 16% of flight operations handled by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), while noncommercial private jets account for about 7% of airspace activity.
NEW: Private jet travel — the most ecologically destructive form of transportation — is increasing among the wealthiest 0.003% of people. Taxpayers and commercial flyers are subsidizing it.It's time to tax this reckless consumption. REPORT:
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— Institute for Policy Studies (@ips-dc.org) September 18, 2026 at 6:05 AM
However, private jets contribute less than 0.6% of the taxes flowing into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which helps finance FAA operations.
"We all pay for the harms of private jet excess," the report states. "US taxpayers and commercial air travelers subsidize the luxury private jet transportation sector. Private jets fail to pay their fair share of their use of airspace and the costs of their carbon pollution, shifting the burden to everyone else."
The disparity is particularly stark when the climate consequences of private aviation are taken into account. IPS found that a passenger traveling by private jet is responsible for roughly 10 to 14 times the emissions of a passenger on a commercial airline and around 50 times those of a passenger traveling the same route by rail. On some low-carbon rail systems, the disparity can exceed 200-fold.
"Private jets are the super-polluters. On a warming planet, private jet operations are indefensible," the report's authors wrote. "Private jets account for a small sliver of aviation activity, but they are the most polluting form of transport and represent the fastest-growing segment of aviation emissions."
The report also found that at least half of private jet operations are for recreational, vacation, and personal luxury travel.
"The ultrarich and greedy corporations are private jet-setting at the expense of the rest of us," Collins told The Guardian on Friday. "The rest of us should not have to pay for the luxury excess of the private jet billionaire class."
The report comes amid increasing criticism of tax policies that have made private aircraft particularly lucrative investments for wealthy Americans. Last year, US President Donald Trump signed legislation permanently implementing 100% bonus depreciation for qualifying business assets, allowing full tax deductions for certain purchases—including private aircraft—in the year they are acquired.
In a May opinion piece published by Common Dreams, Collins and Wagner slammed what they described as "a massive tax break for billionaires and centimillionaires that use the most polluting form of transportation on the planet."
A corporation that buys a $50 million private jet could potentially deduct the entire purchase price from its taxes in the year of acquisition, meaning "ordinary taxpayers pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers," according to Collins and Wagner.
The Trump administration has also recently declined to close another tax loophole benefiting wealthy private jet users. A proposal by Democratic senators would have changed the rules governing the so-called Standard Industry Fare Level method for calculating the taxable value of personal flights aboard corporate aircraft. The lawmakers argued that the system allows wealthy executives to substantially undervalue their personal use nof company jets.
"While working families struggle to afford groceries, housing, and gas," Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said earlier this month, the Trump administration "focuses on tax breaks for billionaires—including tax breaks for private jets. What a disgrace."
The private jet industry has also benefited from efforts to shield aircraft owners from scrutiny. Earlier this year, House Republicans sought to restrict government use of flight tracking data that can help identify privately owned aircraft for taxation purposes.
“Oh look—Republicans helping private-jet billionaires avoid paying taxes," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) quipped in June. "If only they worked that hard for consumers.”
IPS noted the private aviation industry's substantial political influence. The National Business Aviation Association spent approximately $2 million lobbying for the sector in 2025, including on policies concerning tax breaks and private flight secrecy.
The report's authors list policy changes they say would help "decarbonize private jet users' indefensible behavior."
"A luxury tax of 10% on used jets and 5% on new jets could have raised more than $3 billion in 2025, funds that could be invested in sustainable ground transportation," they asserted.
"Congress should strip a private jet tax avoidance provision from the pending air traffic safety legislation, the ALERT Act," the authors argued.
The report also calls for:
- Stopping another pending private jet tax break;
- Repealing accelerated bonus depreciation of private jet purchases and passing the End Subsidies for Private Jets Act;
- Increasing taxes on private jet fuel;
- Rolling back secrecy provisions; and
- Ending funding and construction of new private jet infrastructure.
“Since we first released our analysis on the costs of private jet travel to taxpayers and the planet in 2023, we’ve seen a shocking and irresponsible rise in the use of private jet travel,” Ocampo said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the private jet lobby has worked hard to lower the tax obligations of the ultrawealthy," he added. "Meanwhile, the aviation industry pushes false solutions on the climate crisis. It’s time to stop making taxpayers subsidize luxury private jet travel and use our resources to green other industries.”
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Markey, Merkley, and Sanders Lead Charge Against Trump's $5 Billion Saudi Weapons Deal
The effort comes as senators also sound the alarm about a possible nuclear energy agreement and the administration continues to greenlight arms sales to the kingdom.
Sep 18, 2026
A trio of progressive US senators this week introduced legislation to block a $5 billion conventional weapons sale to Saudi Arabia while also pushing for the release of more details about President Donald Trump's proposed nuclear cooperation agreement with the Middle Eastern kingdom.
"The United States must not send thousands of conventional weapons to Saudi Arabia or allow it to develop a nuclear program," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in a Thursday statement—a day after he partnered with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to introduce the joint resolution of disapproval, which was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"I am deeply concerned by the kingdom's human rights abuses, the security of the region as the war in Iran rages on, and the proxy war that is escalating between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen," Markey explained. "Further escalation in the Saudi-Iran proxy war will worsen an already dire humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and risks setting off a nuclear arms race between Iran and Saudi Arabia."
The resolution targets a sale approved by the US State Department on September 4 that includes over 10,000 joint direct attack munition (JDAM) guidance kits. As Breaking Defense detailed, "The prospective transaction includes a similar number of dumb bombs—split almost evenly between 500 lb. and 2,000 lb. munitions—which, when equipped with a JDAM, can be used as a precision weapon."
The bill does not apply to the other possible sale to Saudi Arabia endorsed by the department that same day—$750 million for AGT-1500 engines and related equipment—or the $24.3 billion deal for F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, which the Trump administration greenlit Thursday, after the resolution was introduced.
The latest approval "comes nearly two months after Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman traveled to Washington to lobby senior Trump administration officials on the sale, with Riyadh hoping to advance the deal ahead of the midterms," Semafor noted. The upcoming US elections could lead to Trump's Republican Party losing control of Congress.
The warplanes sale could also face pushback from Congress. According to Politico, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, warned that "it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party."
US approves $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 stealth warplanes to Saudi Arabia.US intelligence analysts have raised the possibility that China could acquire F-35 technology through its partnerships with Saudi. Israel had been the only country in the Middle East to operate the jetsu.afp.com/SjRn
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— AFP News Agency (@en.afp.com) September 17, 2026 at 9:41 PM
In addition to unveiling their resolution about the JDAMs and bombs on Wednesday, Markey and Merkley, co-chairs of the bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, led a bipartisan group of senators—including Sanders—in urging a pair of Trump Cabinet members to declassify two side letters associated with the administration's proposed nuclear deal.
The administration submitted the pending 30-year agreement—which would allow US companies to share nuclear power technology with the kingdom—to Congress after it was signed by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman in July.
Under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act, Congress has 90 days of continuous session to review the deal and either move to block it or let it take effect. The senators' new letter to Wright and Secretary of State Marco Rubio notes that "in previous 123 agreements, the executive branch publicly released the agreement along with side letters and related documents."
"Access to the full text is required for the Senate and the public to have a clear understanding of the commitments being made on the nation's behalf and those being made by Saudi Arabia to the United States," the senators argued. "Their public release would also allow civil society, independent experts, and other affected stakeholders to scrutinize the deal."
"Transparency and open debate are cornerstones of our democracy," they emphasized. "Congress and the American public must have a meaningful opportunity to review and debate the key components of the US-Saudi nuclear deal before it potentially enters into force. To that end, we call on you to declassify and release the two side letters without delay."
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Abbas Barred From US by Trump While Netanyahu, Wanted by ICC for War Crimes, Gets Welcome Mat
A director at Amnesty International said the US had made clear it was seeking to “punish the state of Palestine for pursuing international justice and accountability at international institutions.”
Sep 18, 2026
While the Trump administration bars Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his delegation from entering the US to attend the United Nations General Assembly for the second year in a row, it is welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza by the International Criminal Court.
In November 2024, the ICC found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu bore criminal responsibility for the use of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, including intentionally targeting civilians.
Since October 2023, Israel's assault on Gaza has killed at least 73,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children, while reducing much of the landscape to rubble and leaving most of the population displaced. Meanwhile, Israel's restrictions on food, water, medicine, electricity, and other essentials have created conditions of severe hunger, dehydration, the collapse of medical care, and civilian deaths.
President Donald Trump has previously assured Netanyahu that he would not be arrested while visiting New York on the basis of the ICC warrant. The US and Israel are not parties to the Rome Statute, meaning that they are not obligated to enforce the ICC's warrant.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani examined whether his administration had the legal authority to detain Netanyahu earlier this year. Officials determined they did not, but Mamdani called on the federal government to execute the ICC warrant and said, “Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large."
As The Jerusalem Post reported earlier this week, there has been "unusual involvement" from the US Secret Service with the prime minister's visit next week, with more than 60 New York Police Department security officers and detectives expected to participate in his security detail.
Netanyahu is set to take the podium on Thursday, September 24, amid intense international scrutiny and condemnation of the aggressive US-Israeli war against Iran, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements across the West Bank and the explosion of settler terrorism against Palestinians, and Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon.
The US State Department has emphasized that it barred Abbas and around 80 other Palestinian officials from attending—forcing Abbas to appear at the UNGA remotely via video call—partially in response to Palestinian leaders bringing evidence of Netanyahu's crimes before international tribunals including the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel has been accused of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention in Gaza.
The State Department described the use by Palestinians of international legal bodies like the ICC and ICJ as part of an effort to "internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Incidentally, around two-thirds of the weapons Israel has imported between 2021-25 have been from the US.
Erika Guevara Rosas, a senior director at Amnesty International, said on Thursday that “the State Department’s statement makes it obvious: This decision is designed to punish the state of Palestine for pursuing international justice and accountability at international institutions, including through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).”
"This measure is part of a relentless campaign of reprisals against the very notion of international justice," Guevara Rosas continued.
The Trump administration has also sanctioned ICC personnel over its case against Netanyahu, as well as Palestinian human rights organizations that provided evidence that assisted in the prosecution of Israeli nationals.
In July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was launching a “whole-of-government response” intended to “systematically disable” the ICC's ability to operate and threatened to dismantle the institution “brick by brick, if necessary.”
Guevara Rosas argued that the ban on Abbas constituted a "clear violation" of the 1947 UN Headquarters Agreement, which states that the US cannot block individuals from entry simply because of poor relations with their home government.
The State Department acknowledged this explicitly on Thursday when it announced that it would allow the president and foreign minister of Iran—a nation with which the US has been at war for more than six months—into the country “consistent with our host country obligations,” though they have faced some shopping and travel restrictions.
Guevara Rosas said the Trump administration was "setting a dangerous precedent in which the US instrumentalizes its privilege as the host country of the UN to impose arbitrary restrictions on attending the UNGA, and other UN meetings."
On Thursday, the General Assembly voted 152-3 calling on the US to reverse its decision to deny entry to the Palestinian delegation in person and allow them to participate via a pre-recorded message.
Itay Epshtain, an Israeli international humanitarian law expert who works with the Norwegian Refugee Council, argued that the UN could do much more, including voting to move part of the General Assembly to a location where the Palestinians would be allowed to participate.
“The [UNGA] decision to allow President Abbas to speak remotely is welcome,” he wrote on social media. “But precedent is more exacting: In 1988, when the US barred PLO chairperson [Yasser] Arafat, the assembly moved its Palestine debate to Geneva.”
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‘Time We Send Her Packing,’ Troy Jackson Says of Collins Voting to Confirm 2 Anti-Abortion Judges in a Week
"Does she think that people in Maine are stupid?" said Jackson of the Republican senator, who has long claimed to be a supporter of reproductive rights.
Sep 18, 2026
"Enough is enough," Democratic US Senate candidate Troy Jackson declared on Thursday after Republican Sen. Susan Collins voted once again for an anti-abortion judge to join a federal court for a lifetime appointment—a frequent action taken by the five-term Maine lawmaker despite her persistent claims that she supports reproductive rights.
Collins' vote on Thursday was for Kasdin Miller Mitchell, a litigator and former solicitor general of Alabama who also served as a clerk for far-right US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She was confirmed in a 49-45 vote to serve on the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
But Mitchell wasn't the only anti-choice judge Collins voted to confirm this week, Jackson noted with scorn.
On Tuesday, the former logger and Maine state Senate president recorded a video responding to her tie-breaking vote in support of Judge Matthew Byrne to join the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
Byrne sits on the board of an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center and said in 2020 that he opposed allowing pregnant patients to access abortion in nearly all cases, without any exceptions for rape or incest. He said he supported exceptions—which, in reality, often do little to protect access to care—for cases in which a pregnant patient's life is at risk, but said that the term “life of the mother” should be “strictly defined so as to avoid creating loopholes.”
Jackson asked in his video on Tuesday, "Does she think that people in Maine are stupid?"
"It's time that Mainers had somebody that's going to fight for their reproductive rights every damn time," he added.
On Thursday, Jackson expressed disbelief that for the second time in four days, Collins had voted in favor of an anti-choice judge.
Mitchell helped defend the state of Alabama as it tried to terminate Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, arguing in a brief that the state had "inherent sovereign authority to determine which providers qualified" for Medicaid, "based on their own unchecked assessment of an organization’s ethics," according to Reproductive Freedom for All.
Mitchell also signed letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of other anti-abortion judges and served as the counsel of record for the Independent Women’s Law Center, an anti-choice group that has opposed the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage, equal pay and family leave legislation, and the Violence Against Women Act.
Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan said Collins' votes this week "show she’s not going to stand up for Maine women any time soon.”
“Susan Collins confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and said herself she still doesn’t regret it," said Linnehan. "Now, she’s falling in line with Trump once again to put fanatical anti-abortion judicial nominees on the bench for life."
The Maine Democratic Party highlighted more than a dozen federal judges Collins has backed in recent months, including Judge Whitney Hermandorfer of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, who defended Tennessee’s total abortion ban; Judge Joshua Dunlap of the US Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, which includes Maine, who advocated for a "fetal personhood" bill in the state; and Judge Maria Lanahan to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who defended Missouri’s near-total abortion ban and pushed for restrictions on medication abortion.
"For the second time this week, Susan Collins has voted to confirm ANOTHER anti-abortion, MAGA judge," said Jackson on Thursday. "It’s time we send her packing."
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Watchdogs Sue to Stop Wall Street's 'Pay-to-Play' Access to Trump Truth Posts
"This brazen scheme is illegal many times over and is an affront to the basic principle that the government exists to serve the people, not to enrich cronies and insiders," said their lawyer.
Sep 18, 2026
A pair of watchdog groups on Thursday sued President Donald Trump and other US officials over their "pay-to-play" scheme that gives subscribers who fork over a monthly fee of up to $100,000 early access to key decision-makers' posts on Truth Social.
The president's Trump Media & Technology Group announced the social media platform's program in July, drawing swift criticism from ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers—including House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who opened a probe. Despite corruption concerns, Truth Application Programming Interface (API) launched early last month.
Because Truth API covers the accounts of Trump, as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel, they are all named in the new suit—as is the president's executive assistant, Natalie Harp.
"It is no accident that the Truth API covers so many official government accounts," says the complaint, filed by American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. "Information the Trump administration disseminates on Truth Social through its official accounts can have significant consequences for the global economy."
"Truth API subscribers—who now receive this potentially market-moving information before the rest of the public—can profit on their early knowledge of what the Trump administration says, does, and believes," the filing stresses.
In other words, "the president is selling Wall Street faster access to official government announcements and lining his own pockets in the process," said American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu. "Like so much of his agenda, this scheme is built to benefit the wealthy and well-connected while the rest of us are pushed to the back of the line."
Gerstein Harrow attorney Samuel Davis, who is representing the groups, declared that "this brazen scheme is illegal many times over and is an affront to the basic principle that the government exists to serve the people, not to enrich cronies and insiders."
Specifically, "this two-tier system of access" not only "serves no legitimate public purpose" but also "is irrational, inequitable, and illegal under the First and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution and the Paperwork Reduction Act," the complaint argues. After outlining the alleged violations of federal law, the filing asks the court to declare the scheme unconstitutional and unlawful.
"If President Trump has one talent, it is finding new and creative ways to monetize his presidency," Campaign for Accountability executive director Michelle Kuppersmith said of the man who has pocketed at least $2.2 billion—over half of it from his family's cryptocurrency endeavors—during his first year back in the White House, according to recent disclosures.
"In another era, Congress would be outraged and take immediate action, but since that's out of the question, a lawsuit offers the only possible remedy," Kuppersmith continued. "We look forward to discovery so the American public can learn exactly which companies are willing to pay up."
The suit—filed less than two months ahead of the November midterm elections in which Democrats aim to take control of both chambers of Congress from Trump's Republican Party—is not the first filed over Trump API. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and the media outlet The Intercept sued last month in the Southern District of New York.
That pair—represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the Public Integrity Project, and Altshuler Berzon—filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction earlier this month. The Intercept's CEO, Annie Chabel, said that "Trump doesn't get to charge people for his own public statements."
"The First Amendment doesn't have a paywall, and we're not going to let him build one," Chabel added. "Journalists and the public shouldn't have to pay the president for news he's constitutionally obligated to share with everyone."
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