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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), then a candidate for Congress, speaks at a rally calling on Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to reject Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court on October 1, 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Wednesday night that the corporate lobbyists who have been working tirelessly to weaken or destroy the Democratic Party's hopes for a sweeping Build Back Better agenda would love nothing more than the American people to stop fighting so that lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other corporate members of the party can succeed in watering down the legislation to the barest minimum.
During the online event dubbed "What's in the Damn Bill" hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and joined by other progressive lawmakers and outside organizers to bolster the fight against Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street interests, and the powerful right-wing lobby groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce, Ocasio-Cortez said people must remain vigilant, especially as the negotiations appear to being reaching a conclusion. The Build Back Better bill envisioned by nearly 98 percent of the Democratic caucus would make lasting investments in elder care, higher education, family leave, renewable energy, ending childhood poverty, and creating a system of universal pre-K and childcare.
The corporate lobbyists, said the New York Democrat, "want you to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching."
\u201c"[Corporate lobbyists] want YOU to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching." - @AOC on the need to stay engaged in the fight for this bill\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1634776693
Ocasio-Cortez noted the "intense presence of corporate lobbyists throughout the process of reconciliation." This is why, she said, "that it's just as important for people at home to be engaged in this process."
The online event took place as President Joe Biden on Wednesday lowered the Democratic Party's ambition on overall spending from the $3.5 trillion that progressives had agreed to and been fighting for down closer to $2 trillion. According to most reporting on the ongoing negotiations this will be achieved by scrapping some programs and reducing the duration or scope of others.
As Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during the call, the pharmaceutical industry is just one prime example of the outlandish influence that corporate lobbyists are playing in this legislative process:
\u201c"The pharmaceutical corporations make so much money that it's hard to comprehend. From 2000 to 2018 they made gross profits of $8.6 trillion. That is an ungodly amount of money. They take a small piece and hand it out to politicians to protect their game." @alaw202\u201d— People for Bernie (@People for Bernie) 1634776535
"Their game," Lawson said in the context of Big Pharma which is campaign ferociously to stop Medicare from being allowed to lower drug prices for U.S. seniors, "is preventing the government from using its leverage to negotiate a better price" on those life-saving medications.
"You'll hear a lot of people say, 'Oh, it's very complicated--how are we going to do this or that?' But it's not complicated," explained Lawson. "Every other country does this. We're the only country that allows pharma to charge whatever they want. We pay the highest prices in the world. And to add to that, we the taxpayers, pay for the vast amount of research and development on all of the drugs!"
With so much corporate money sloshing around Capitol Hill and used to strong-arm politicians of both parties, Lawson said the "only thing to combat that is people."
"We've got people," he said. "They've got money."
Watch the full, approximately 70-minute event below:
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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Wednesday night that the corporate lobbyists who have been working tirelessly to weaken or destroy the Democratic Party's hopes for a sweeping Build Back Better agenda would love nothing more than the American people to stop fighting so that lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other corporate members of the party can succeed in watering down the legislation to the barest minimum.
During the online event dubbed "What's in the Damn Bill" hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and joined by other progressive lawmakers and outside organizers to bolster the fight against Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street interests, and the powerful right-wing lobby groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce, Ocasio-Cortez said people must remain vigilant, especially as the negotiations appear to being reaching a conclusion. The Build Back Better bill envisioned by nearly 98 percent of the Democratic caucus would make lasting investments in elder care, higher education, family leave, renewable energy, ending childhood poverty, and creating a system of universal pre-K and childcare.
The corporate lobbyists, said the New York Democrat, "want you to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching."
\u201c"[Corporate lobbyists] want YOU to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching." - @AOC on the need to stay engaged in the fight for this bill\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1634776693
Ocasio-Cortez noted the "intense presence of corporate lobbyists throughout the process of reconciliation." This is why, she said, "that it's just as important for people at home to be engaged in this process."
The online event took place as President Joe Biden on Wednesday lowered the Democratic Party's ambition on overall spending from the $3.5 trillion that progressives had agreed to and been fighting for down closer to $2 trillion. According to most reporting on the ongoing negotiations this will be achieved by scrapping some programs and reducing the duration or scope of others.
As Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during the call, the pharmaceutical industry is just one prime example of the outlandish influence that corporate lobbyists are playing in this legislative process:
\u201c"The pharmaceutical corporations make so much money that it's hard to comprehend. From 2000 to 2018 they made gross profits of $8.6 trillion. That is an ungodly amount of money. They take a small piece and hand it out to politicians to protect their game." @alaw202\u201d— People for Bernie (@People for Bernie) 1634776535
"Their game," Lawson said in the context of Big Pharma which is campaign ferociously to stop Medicare from being allowed to lower drug prices for U.S. seniors, "is preventing the government from using its leverage to negotiate a better price" on those life-saving medications.
"You'll hear a lot of people say, 'Oh, it's very complicated--how are we going to do this or that?' But it's not complicated," explained Lawson. "Every other country does this. We're the only country that allows pharma to charge whatever they want. We pay the highest prices in the world. And to add to that, we the taxpayers, pay for the vast amount of research and development on all of the drugs!"
With so much corporate money sloshing around Capitol Hill and used to strong-arm politicians of both parties, Lawson said the "only thing to combat that is people."
"We've got people," he said. "They've got money."
Watch the full, approximately 70-minute event below:
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Wednesday night that the corporate lobbyists who have been working tirelessly to weaken or destroy the Democratic Party's hopes for a sweeping Build Back Better agenda would love nothing more than the American people to stop fighting so that lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other corporate members of the party can succeed in watering down the legislation to the barest minimum.
During the online event dubbed "What's in the Damn Bill" hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and joined by other progressive lawmakers and outside organizers to bolster the fight against Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street interests, and the powerful right-wing lobby groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce, Ocasio-Cortez said people must remain vigilant, especially as the negotiations appear to being reaching a conclusion. The Build Back Better bill envisioned by nearly 98 percent of the Democratic caucus would make lasting investments in elder care, higher education, family leave, renewable energy, ending childhood poverty, and creating a system of universal pre-K and childcare.
The corporate lobbyists, said the New York Democrat, "want you to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching."
\u201c"[Corporate lobbyists] want YOU to give up before the deal is done, because it's way easier for them to try to get away with the things that they're lobbying for and against if people at home aren't watching." - @AOC on the need to stay engaged in the fight for this bill\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1634776693
Ocasio-Cortez noted the "intense presence of corporate lobbyists throughout the process of reconciliation." This is why, she said, "that it's just as important for people at home to be engaged in this process."
The online event took place as President Joe Biden on Wednesday lowered the Democratic Party's ambition on overall spending from the $3.5 trillion that progressives had agreed to and been fighting for down closer to $2 trillion. According to most reporting on the ongoing negotiations this will be achieved by scrapping some programs and reducing the duration or scope of others.
As Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said during the call, the pharmaceutical industry is just one prime example of the outlandish influence that corporate lobbyists are playing in this legislative process:
\u201c"The pharmaceutical corporations make so much money that it's hard to comprehend. From 2000 to 2018 they made gross profits of $8.6 trillion. That is an ungodly amount of money. They take a small piece and hand it out to politicians to protect their game." @alaw202\u201d— People for Bernie (@People for Bernie) 1634776535
"Their game," Lawson said in the context of Big Pharma which is campaign ferociously to stop Medicare from being allowed to lower drug prices for U.S. seniors, "is preventing the government from using its leverage to negotiate a better price" on those life-saving medications.
"You'll hear a lot of people say, 'Oh, it's very complicated--how are we going to do this or that?' But it's not complicated," explained Lawson. "Every other country does this. We're the only country that allows pharma to charge whatever they want. We pay the highest prices in the world. And to add to that, we the taxpayers, pay for the vast amount of research and development on all of the drugs!"
With so much corporate money sloshing around Capitol Hill and used to strong-arm politicians of both parties, Lawson said the "only thing to combat that is people."
"We've got people," he said. "They've got money."
Watch the full, approximately 70-minute event below:
Aharon Haliva, the former head of military intelligence in Israel, said in his vengeful remarks that it "doesn't matter now if they are children."
Those who listened to the 22-minute speech given by a South African attorney as part of the country's genocide case against Israel at the United Nations' top court in January 2024 have long been well aware that Israeli officials have openly made genocidal statements about their military assault on Gaza—but a recording broadcast by an Israeli news channel on Sunday revealed what The Guardian called an "unusually direct description of collective punishment of civilians" by a high-level general.
Aharon Haliva, the general who led Israel's military intelligence operations on October 7, 2023 when Hamas led an attack on the country, was heard in a recording broadcast by Channel 12 that "for everything that happened on October 7, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die."
"The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations," said Haliva in comments that were made "in recent months," according to Channel 12. "It doesn't matter now if they are children."
More than 62,000 Palestinians have now been killed in Israel's airstrikes and ground assault on Gaza since October 7, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, with more than 250 people having died of malnutrition due to Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid. The official death toll figures put out by officials in Gaza is believed by many to be a severe undercount.
The Israel Defense Forces' own data recently showed that only about 20,000 militants are among those who have been killed by Israeli forces—even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and both Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States, the top international funder of the IDF, continue to insist that the military is targeting Hamas.
Haliva, who stepped down from leading military intelligence in April 2024, added in his comments that Palestinians "need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price"—a reference to the forced displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, the killing of about 15,000 people, and the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian towns when the state of Israel was created in 1948.
Notably, The Guardian reported that Haliva is "widely seen as a centrist critic of the current government and its far-right ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir," whose genocidal statements about Gaza and the West Bank have been widely reported.
When arguing South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice in January 2024, attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi catalogued a number of statements made by Netanyahu, the IDF, and his top Israeli ministers, including:
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, which said last month that it had determined Netanyahu's government is committing genocide in Gaza, said Haliva's remarks "are part of a long line of official statements that expose a deliberate policy of genocide."
"For 22 months, Israel has pursued a policy of systematically destroying Palestinian life in Gaza," said B'Tselem. "This is genocide. It is happening now. It must be stopped."
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor added that Haliva openly admitted "what Israel tries to deny: genocide is not a byproduct of war but the goal."
Haliva's remark about the necessity of repeating the Nakba in Gaza "reveals a clear intention: The bloodshed is not meant to stop, but to be repeated."
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Haliva's statement "is not just evidence of genocidal rhetoric, it is a blueprint for genocidal action" that must push the US government to end its support for Israel.
"The Trump administration and the international community can no longer turn a blind eye," said Awad. "President [Donald] Trump and Congress cannot continue to claim they do not know or deny what the entire world is seeing every hour of every day. The United States must immediately halt all military aid and support to Israel and demand accountability for war crimes committed in Gaza. Silence is complicity."
Any such effort, said one democracy watchdog, "would violate the Constitution and is a major step to prevent free and fair elections."
In his latest full-frontal assault on democratic access and voting rights, President Donald Trump early Monday said he will lead an effort to ban both mail-in ballots and voting machines for next year's mid-term elections—a vow met with immediate rebuke from progressive critics.
"I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election," Trump wrote in a social media post infested with lies and falsehoods.
Trump falsely claimed that no other country in the world uses mail-in voting—a blatant lie, according to International IDEA, which monitors democratic trends worldwide, at least 34 nations allow for in-country postal voting of some kind. The group notes that over 100 countries allow out-of-country postal voting for citizens living or stationed overseas during an election.
Trump has repeated his false claim—over and over again—that he won the 2020 election, which he actually lost, in part due to fraud related to mail-in ballots, though the lie has been debunked ad nauseam. He also fails to note that mail-in ballots were very much in use nationwide in 2024, with an estimated 30% of voters casting a mail-in ballot as opposed to in-person during the election in which Trump returned to the White House and Republicans took back the US Senate and retained the US House of Representatives.
Monday's rant by Trump came just days after his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump claimed commented personally on the 2020 election and mail-in ballots. In a Friday night interview with Fox News, Trump claimed "one of the most interesting" things Putin said during their talks about ending the war in Ukraine was about mail-in voting in the United States and how Trump would have won the election were it not for voter fraud, echoing Trump's own disproven claims.
Trump: Vladimir Putin said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting… he talked about 2020 and he said you won that election by so much.. it was a rigged election. pic.twitter.com/m8v0tXuiDQ
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 16, 2025
Trump said Monday he would sign an executive order on election processes, suggesting that it would forbid mail-in ballots as well as the automatic tabulation machines used in states nationwide. He also said that states, which are in charge of administering their elections at the local level, "must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do."
Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, which tracks voting rights and issues related to ballot access, said any executive order by Trump to end mail-in voting or forbid provenly safe and accurate voting machines ahead of the midterms would be "unconstitutional and illegal."
Such an effort, said Elias, "would violate the Constitution and is a major step to prevent free and fair elections."
"We've got the FBI patrolling the streets." said one protester. "We've got National Guard set up as a show of force. What's scarier is if we allow this."
Residents of Washington, DC over the weekend demonstrated against US President Donald Trump's deployment of the National Guard in their city.
As reported by NBC Washington, demonstrators gathered on Saturday at DuPont Circle and then marched to the White House to direct their anger at Trump for sending the National Guard to Washington DC, and for his efforts to take over the Metropolitan Police Department.
In an interview with NBC Washington, one protester said that it was important for the administration to see that residents weren't intimidated by the presence of military personnel roaming their streets.
"I know a lot of people are scared," the protester said. "We've got the FBI patrolling the streets. We've got National Guard set up as a show of force. What's scarier is if we allow this."
Saturday protests against the presence of the National Guard are expected to be a weekly occurrence, organizers told NBC Washington.
Hours after the march to the White House, other demonstrators began to gather at Union Station to protest the presence of the National Guard units there. Audio obtained by freelance journalist Andrew Leyden reveals that the National Guard decided to move their forces out of the area in reaction to what dispatchers called "growing demonstrations."
Even residents who didn't take part in formal demonstrations over the weekend managed to express their displeasure with the National Guard patrolling the city. According to The Washington Post, locals who spent a night on the town in the U Street neighborhood on Friday night made their unhappiness with law enforcement in the city very well known.
"At the sight of local and federal law enforcement throughout the night, people pooled on the sidewalk—watching, filming, booing," wrote the Post. "Such interactions played out again and again as the night drew on. Onlookers heckled the police as they did their job and applauded as officers left."
Trump last week ordered the National Guard into Washington, DC and tried to take control the Metropolitan Police, purportedly in order to reduce crime in the city. Statistics released earlier this year, however, showed a significant drop in crime in the nation's capital.