SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Alicia Pierro, Outreach & Advocacy Officer, USCBL,
Phone: +1 (347) 623-2779,
E-mail:
apierro@handicap‑
Zach Hudson, Coordinator, USCBL,
Phone: +1 (917) 860-1883,
E-mail:
zhudson@handicap‑
WASHINGTON - Fifteen past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize delivered a letter to fellow Nobel Laureate President Obama Tuesday urging the U.S. to relinquish antipersonnel landmines and join the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty without delay.
"As this letter demonstrates once again, the world is calling on the U.S. to join the Mine Ban Treaty," said Zach Hudson, the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL). "Over the past year, the administration has received letters of support for the Mine Ban Treaty from 68 Senators, countless NGO leaders, key NATO allies, and citizens from around the world. Now 15 Peace Prize recipients are writing their fellow Laureate to ask him to complete the review and join the treaty. It's time to get on board."
In the letter, the Laureates emphasize that "United States accession to this important instrument would bring great benefits to the U.S. and the world. It would strengthen U.S. national security, international security, and international humanitarian law. It would help strengthen the fundamental goal of preventing innumerable civilians from falling victim to these indiscriminate weapons in the future, and help ensure adequate care for the hundreds of thousands of existing survivors and their communities. U.S. membership would help spur to action the 39 states that remain outside the treaty."
The letter was coordinated by Jody Williams, an American who was awarded the prize along with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) largely for their role in bringing about the Mine Ban Treaty. A total of fifteen individual Nobel Peace Laureates signed the letter to President Obama: Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams (1976), Adolfo Perez Esquivel (1980), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984), Elie Wiesel (1986), Oscar Arias Sanchez (1987), His Holiness Dalai Lama (1989), Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992), F.W. De Klerk (1993), Jose Ramos-Horta (1996), Jody Williams (1997), John Hume (1998), Shirin Ebadi (2003), Wangari Maathai (2004), and Mohamed El Baradei (2005).
"We hope that President Obama, as a fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, will listen to our call to ban landmines and ensure the US takes the necessary steps to accede to the Mine Ban Treaty," said Jody Williams, now ICBL ambassador and chair of the Nobel Women's Initiative. "Anything less than a total ban on antipersonnel landmines would be a half-measure, falling short of the US leadership that is needed."
The letter was delivered during the Tenth Meeting of States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty in Geneva which opened on November 29. This conference takes place one year after the Mine Ban Treaty's Second Review Conference during which the U.S. delegation announced that the Obama administration would begin a formal review of U.S. landmine policy. The Nobel letter expresses hope that the landmine review, which is still underway, "will be guided by the humanitarian concerns that have already led 156 nations to ban the weapon, including nearly all U.S. military allies."
The United States began a comprehensive landmine policy review in late 2009 at the direction of President Obama. The U.S. has not used antipersonnel mines since 1991 (in the first Gulf War), has not exported them since 1992, has not produced them since 1997 and is the biggest donor to mine clearance programs around the world. However, it still retains millions of stockpiled antipersonnel mines for potential future use and has not yet joined the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
Several Nobel Peace laureates have long expressed concern at the humanitarian impact of antipersonnel mines and have worked for their eradication:
*The NGO founded by Adolfo Perez Esquivel (1980), Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ), has worked to ensure that the Mine Ban Treaty is ratified and implemented throughout Latin America.
*Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984) publicly endorsed the call for a ban on antipersonnel mines in March 1995, when he was president of the All Africa Conference of Churches. Tutu opened a regional conference on landmines held in South Africa in May 1997 that proved instrumental in building African-wide support for the creation of a strong treaty to ban antipersonnel mines.
*His Holiness Dalai Lama (1989) endorsed the call for a total ban on landmines in 1995 at the urging of the Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism, Maha Ghosananda, and Cambodian landmine survivors.
*Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992), Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire (1976), and the three other founders (Williams, Ebadi, and Maathai) of the Nobel Women's Initiative, established in 2004, have actively supported the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Activities have included statements to annual meetings of the Mine Ban Treaty, media work, and outreach to governments that have not yet joined.
*Jose Ramos-Horta (1996) spoke out against landmines and other weapons designed to inflict pain and death in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. When he became the Timor-Leste's first Minister of Foreign Affairs, the government acceded to the Mine Ban Treaty, making it the first disarmament treaty that the new country joined after independence.
*Jody Williams (1997) was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her leadership role as founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Williams spearheaded the civil society-based campaign that cooperated with a group of small and medium-sized countries through the "Ottawa Process" to create the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.
*Shirin Ebadi (2003) launched the "Mine Clearing Collaboration Campaign" in 2004 to demand that Iran take greater action to clear mines laid during the Iran-Iraq war, assist mine victims, and join the Mine Ban Treaty.
*Wangari Maathai (2004) participated in several events at the First Review Conference of the Mine Ban Treaty, held in Nairobi, Kenya in November-December 2004.
The United States Campaign to Ban Landmines is a coalition of non-governmental organizations working to ensure that the U.S. comprehensively prohibits antipersonnel mines--by banning their use in Korea--and joins the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, as more than 160 nations have done. It is the national affiliate of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), founded in New York in 1992 and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate together with former ICBL coordinator Ms. Jody Williams of Vermont. We also call for sustained U.S. government financial support for mine clearance and victim assistance.
"They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law," the Minnesota progressive said of the Trump administration.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez on Thursday strongly condemned the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat allegedly trafficking cocaine off the coast of Venezuela as "lawless and reckless," while urging the White House to respect lawmakers' "clear constitutional authority on matters of war and peace."
"Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche," said Omar (D-Minn.), referring to President Donald Trump's day one executive order designating drug cartels including the Venezuela-based group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump—who reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat cartels abroad—said that Tuesday's US strike in international waters killed 11 people. The attack sparked fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US interventions over the past 200 years, and against a country that has suffered US meddling since the late 19th century.
"It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked," Omar cotended. "There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law."
Omar continued:
They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law. The US posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level. In Latin America, even right-wing presidents acknowledge this is true.
The congresswoman's remarks came on the same day that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated a pair of Ecuadorean drug gangs as terrorist organizations while visiting the South American nation. This, after Rubio said that US attacks on suspected drug traffickers "will happen again."
"Trump and Rubio's apparent solution" to the failed drug war, said Omar, is "to make it even more militarized," an effort that "is doomed to fail."
"Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes," she added.
Echoing critics including former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called Tuesday's strike a "summary execution," Ramirez (D-Ill.) said Thursday on social media that "Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale."
"From Iran to Venezuela, to DC, LA, and Chicago, Trump continues to abuse our military power, undermine the rule of law, and erode our constitutional boundaries in political spectacles," Ramirez added, referring to the president's ordering of strikes on Iran and National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, the nation's capital, and likely beyond.
"Presidents don't bomb first and ask questions later," Ramirez added. "Wannabe dictators do that."
"The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening!" said Florida Immigrant Coalition's deputy director.
Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open.
Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams—appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida—ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days.
However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."
Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, issued a brief but scathing dissent. He wrote that the majority "essentially ignores the burden borne by the defendants, pays only lip service to the abuse of discretion standard, engages in its own factfinding, declines to consider the district court's determination on irreparable harm, and performs its own balancing of the equities."
The 11th Circuit's ruling was cheered by the US Department of Homeland Security, Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared in a video that "Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we've always said, open for business."
Uthmeier's communications director, Jeremy Redfern, collected responses to the initial ruling by state and federal Democrats, and urged them to weigh in on social media. Florida state Sen. Shevrin "Shev" Jones (D-34) did, stressing that "cruelty is still cruelty."
In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
"Housing thousands of men in tents in the middle of a fragile ecosystem puts immense strain on Florida's source environment, but even more troublesome, it disregards human rights and our constitutional commitments," Bozzetto continued. "This is a place where hundreds of our neighbors were illegally held, were made invisible within government systems, and were subjected to inhumane heat and unbearable treatment. The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening! The only just solution is to shut this facility down and ensure that no facility like this opens in our state!"
"Lastly, it is imperative that we as a nation uphold the balance of powers that this country was founded on," she added. "That is what makes this country special! Calling judges who rule against you 'activists' flies in the face of our democracy. It is a huge tell that AG Uthmeier expressed this as a 'win for President Trump's agenda,' as if the courts were to serve as political weapons. This demonstrates the clear partisan games they are playing with people's lives and with our democracy."
While Alligator Alcatraz has drawn widespread criticism for the conditions in which detainees are held, the suit is based on the government's failure to follow a law that requires an environmental review, given the facility's proximity to surrounding wetlands.
In response to the ruling, Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that "this is a heartbreaking blow to America's Everglades and every living creature there, but the case isn't even close to over."
The report found that seven of America's biggest healthcare companies have collectively dodged $34 billion in taxes as a result of Trump's 2017 tax law while making patient care worse.
President Donald Trump's tax policies have allowed the healthcare industry to rake in "sick profits" by avoiding tens of billions of dollars in taxes and lowering the quality of care for patients, according to a report out Wednesday.
The report, by the advocacy groups Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst, found that "seven of America's biggest healthcare corporations have dodged over $34 billion in collective taxes since the enactment of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that Republicans recently succeeded in extending."
The study examined four health insurance companies—Centene, Cigna, Elevance (formerly Anthem), and Humana; two for-profit hospital chains—HCA Holdings and Universal Health Services; and the CVS Healthcare pharmacy conglomerate.
It found that these companies' average profits increased by 75%, from around $21 billion before the tax bill to about $35 billion afterward, and yet their federal tax rate was about the same.
This was primarily due to the 2017 law's slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a change that was cheered on by the healthcare industry and continued with this year's GOP tax legislation. The legislation also loosened many tax loopholes and made it easier to move profits to offshore tax shelters.
The report found that Cigna, for instance, saved an estimated $181 million in taxes on the $2.5 billion it held in offshore accounts before the law took effect.
The law's supporters, including those in the healthcare industry, argued that lowering corporate taxes would allow companies to increase wages and provide better services to patients. But the report found that "healthcare corporations failed to use their tax savings to lower costs for customers or meaningfully boost worker pay."
Instead, they used those windfalls primarily to increase shareholder payouts through stock buybacks and dividends and to give fat bonuses to their top executives.
Stock buybacks increased by 42% after the law passed, with Centene purchasing an astonishing average of 20 times more of its own shares in the years following its enactment than in the years before. During the first seven years of the law, dividends for shareholders increased by 133% to an average of $5.6 billion.
Pay for the seven companies' half-dozen top executives increased by a combined $100 million, 42%, on average. This is compared to the $14,000 pay increase that the average employee at these companies received over the same period, which is a much more modest increase of 24%.
And contrary to claims that lower taxes would allow companies to improve coverage or patient care, the opposite has occurred.
While data is scarce, the rate of denied insurance claims is believed to have risen since the law went into effect.
The four major insurers' Medicare Advantage plans were found to frequently deny claims improperly. In the case of Centene, 93% of its denials for prior authorizations were overturned once patients appealed them, which indicates that they may have been improper. The others were not much better: 86% of Cigna's denials were overturned, along with 71% for Elevance/Anthem, and 65% for Humana.
The report said that such high rates of denials being overturned raise "questions about whether Medicare Advantage plans are complying with their coverage obligations or just reflexively saying 'no' in the hopes there will be no appeal."
Salespeople for the Cigna-owned company EviCore, which insurers hire to review claims, have even boasted that they help companies reduce their costs by increasing denials by 15%, part of a model that ProPublica has called the "denials for dollars business." Their investigation in 2024 found that insurers have used EviCore to evaluate whether to pay for coverage for over 100 million people.
And while paying tens of millions to their executives, both HCA and Universal Health Services—which each saved around $5.5 billion from Trump's tax law—have been repeatedly accused of overbilling patients while treating them in horrendous conditions.
"Congress should demand both more in tax revenue and better patient care from these highly profitable corporations," Americans for Tax Fairness said in a statement. "Healthcare corporation profitability should not come before quality of patient care. In healthcare, more than almost any other industry, the search for ever higher earnings threatens the wellbeing and lives of the American people."