5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Latest News
Israel's US-Backed Assault on Gaza Set Stage for Collective Punishment in Cuba, AOC Says
"This is a new kind of era of depravity opened up," said the congresswoman. "There was this stated commitment on human rights—that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades."
Feb 10, 2026
As the Cuban government announced Monday that the Trump administration's oil blockade on the country would soon leave airlines without jet fuel, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that the international community has become far too accepting of acts of economic warfare that collectively punish an entire population, not just government officials.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone that the stage for the worsened suffering of Cuban people was set in Gaza, where both Republican and Democratic US officials have backed Israel's starvation policy and military assault since October 2023.
"This is what we've seen with Gaza, right, this is a new kind of era of depravity opened up, where there used to be—or there was this stated commitment on human rights—that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades," Ocasio-Cortez said.
🎥 WATCH | Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) reacted to Drop Site News reporting on internal divisions in the Trump administration’s Cuba policy by pointing to Gaza as evidence of a broader collapse in Western human rights norms.
She said the “entire Western world” is looking… pic.twitter.com/SnI4niD8JH
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) February 10, 2026
Cuban people have long been victimized by the US government's decadeslong, illegal trade embargo. But Trump's decision to cut off Cuba's oil supply from Venezuela, which was its largest energy supplier, and threaten to slap tariffs on any country that provides oil to the island nation, has left families facing lengthy blackouts and the threat that Cuba's healthcare system could soon grind to a halt without fuel to keep hospitals running.
Trump has claimed he aims to punish the Cuban government, which he said last month constitutes "an unusual and extraordinary threat" to the US. He accused the country, without evidence, of harboring terrorists. Cuban officials have vehemently condemned the accusations.
Ocasio-Cortez compared Trump's economic attack on Cuba to the catastrophe the US-backed Israeli military has imposed on Gaza since 2023, when it began its assault and humanitarian aid blockade in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. A "ceasefire" deal was reached in October, but hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces since then and Israel has continued to block aid.
While persistently claiming Hamas is the target of the assault—which international experts and human rights groups have called a genocide—the Israeli military, with US support, has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians and has bombed homes, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.
"What has transpired is that now it's kind of become acceptable that the entire Western world will look the other way as they starve and deprive a people because they find political actors or political regimes in that country to be objectionable," said Ocasio-Cortez. "What we are seeing here is the possible precipice of hospitals running out of fuel... We're talking about innocent children, women that could be put in harm's way."
"It's incumbent upon all of us to defend human rights no matter where they are," she added.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, agreed with the congresswoman's analysis.
"Gaza was not just a genocide," he said, but was meant to further Israel's goal "to destroy much of international law and the norms around the use of force in order to make increasingly inhumane use of violence and coercion against CIVILIANS permissible."
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, added that Ocasio-Cortez was "rightly picking up the banner of a rules-based international consensus" on human rights, which was abandoned by the Biden administration when it gave financial and political support for Israel's assault on Gaza.
Ocasio-Cortez echoed the concerns voiced earlier this week by Pierre-Emmanuel Dupont, an international expert on sanctions law, who told the Cuban storytelling outlet Belly of the Beast that the Trump administration was "posing the risk of imminent humanitarian collapse in relation to the lack of fuel, which may gravely affect basically all human rights of the civilian population there."
“Sanctions should be expected to be limited to officials," said Dupont. "They are not supposed to apply bluntly to the whole population—which they do. They constitute collective punishment to the extent that they hit each and every Cuban citizen irrespective of their relationship with the government or regime.”
Keep Reading
Show Less
'This Is Your Money': Trump Assault on CFPB Has Cost Consumers $19 Billion
"When you're counting the way that costs have gone up for American families over the last year, be sure to include the cost of getting cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Feb 10, 2026
The Trump administration's ongoing effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cost Americans nearly $20 billion in just a year, according to a report released Monday as Democratic lawmakers and campaigners marked the anniversary of the White House's hostile takeover and gutting of the CFPB.
The new report was assembled by Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an architect and champion of the CFPB. Citing bureau documents, publicly available data, and federal analyses, the report estimates that the Trump administration's mass dismissal of enforcement actions against abusive corporations, failure to distribute settlement payments, rescission of CFPB rules and guidance, and attack on the bureau's Consumer Complaint Program have collectively cost US consumers $19 billion over the past year.
That figure, the report emphasizes, "does not even begin to cover costs Americans could have been scammed out of due to a sidelined CFPB."
“Donald Trump promised to lower costs for Americans ‘On Day One.’ Instead, he is trying to shut down an agency that protects Americans from getting scammed out of their money by big banks and giant corporations,” Warren said in a statement. “As a result, Trump’s attempt to sideline the CFPB has cost families billions of dollars over the last year alone. We're going to keep fighting for the CFPB and against the billionaires who want to get rid of it.”
The report was released to mark one year since Russell Vought, the White House budget chief and acting CFPB director, ordered the bureau to effectively shut down its operations, including rulemaking and investigations into corporate wrongdoing.
Lawmakers have not confirmed Vought—a Project 2025 architect who has been explicit about his desire to kill the CFPB—as bureau chief, but he has remained in the acting director role thanks to White House legal maneuvers. In recent months, Vought has tried to starve the CFPB of funding—an effort that, for now, has been stymied in court.
"We want to put it out," Vought said in an interview late last year, boasting about mass firings that have left the consumer agency skeletal. "We will be successful probably within the next two or three months."
Another ridiculous price tag that Trump is forcing you to pay.
This is YOUR money.
You deserve a government that works for you, not against you and your financial interests. https://t.co/yd6hpYriXw
— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) February 9, 2026
Prior to the start of President Donald Trump's second White House term, the CFPB had returned around $21 billion to US consumers scammed by banks and other corporations since the bureau's creation in the wake of the Great Recession.
"When you're counting the way that costs have gone up for American families over the last year, be sure to include the cost of getting cheated, because Donald Trump has driven that cost through the roof," Warren said during a rally with fellow Democratic lawmakers and advocates in Washington, DC on Monday.
"We are here today to remind Donald Trump and to remind all those Republicans who support him and enable him, to remind every one of them that they can kick this agency, they can try to hold this agency down, they can try to starve this agency, they can try to tie up the people who work at this agency, but at the end of the day, they will not kill this agency," said Warren. "We will stay in this fight, and we will win."
Keep Reading
Show Less
US Forces Board Tanker in Indian Ocean as Trump Targets Venezuelan Oil
"The Donroe Doctrine is not simply a vision for the hemisphere. It is a doctrine of global domination," said one critic.
Feb 09, 2026
President Donald Trump's blockade of Venezuelan oil—condemned as "piracy" by critics around the world—continued on Monday, with the US Department of Defense announcing that overnight, "military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II without incident" in the Indian Ocean.
"When the Department of War says quarantine, we mean it. Nothing will stop DOW from defending our homeland—even in oceans halfway around the world," the Pentagon declared on social media, using Trump's preferred department name. "The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump's established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean. It ran, and we followed."
"The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean," the department continued. "No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain. By land, air, or sea, our armed forces will find you and deliver justice."
"You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us," the Pentagon added. "The Department of War will deny illicit actors and their proxies the ability to defy American power in the global maritime domain."
The department also shared a video and photos from the operation, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged during a visit to the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine, a stop on his national Arsenal of Freedom tour.
According to the Associated Press:
Following the US raid to apprehend then-President Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight.
Hegseth vowed to eventually capture all those ships, telling a group of shipyard workers in Maine on Monday that "the only guidance I gave to my military commanders is none of those are getting away."
"I don't care if we got to go around the globe to get them; we’re going to get them," he added.
Citing an unnamed dense official, the AP also reported that "the Aquila II has not been formally seized and placed under US control," unlike seven other Venezuela-linked tankers previously taken by the Trump administration. Instead, the news agency explained, the Panamanian-flagged ship "is being held while its ultimate fate is decided by the US."
Reuters noted that Aquila II "was carrying about 700,000 barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude bound for China," based on schedules from the Venezuelan state oil and gas company, PDVSA.
In addition to Trump's efforts to hand Venezuela's nationalized oil industry over to fossil fuel companies that helped him secure another term, the president is ramping up US pressure on the Cuban economy by depriving the island nation of Venezuelan oil.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Monday, David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International, accused Trump of "laying siege to the island of Cuba: asphyxiating its people, shuttering its hospitals, starving them of food."
After news of US forces boarding the Aquila II broke, Adler added: "Jesus christ. The United States is now intercepting oil tankers in the INDIAN OCEAN that dare to carry oil to starving Cuba. The Donroe Doctrine is not simply a vision for the hemisphere. It is a doctrine of global domination."
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular