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Children smile and waves at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camp located in Khan Yunis, Gaza where displaced Palestinian families take shelter and try to maintain their daily lives under harsh conditions amid the Israeli attacks on Gaza, on November 15, 2023.
A cease-fire and the immediate release of all hostages in Gaza must urgently be followed by a political process that would end decades of violence, repression, and misery.
It is urgent to free the hostages in Gaza; stop the bloodshed in Israel and Palestine; establish lasting security for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples; achieve the aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state; and establish a process of true sustainable development in the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East (EMME) region. The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 and the devastating Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza after that, have shocked the world and intensified the global search for a path to long-term peace in Israel and Palestine.
Fortunately, an overwhelming majority of UN member states, including Israel’s Arab neighbors, strongly agree with the possibility of a just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution. Peace with mutual security for Israel and Palestine can and should be implemented through the unanimous backing of the UN Security Council (UNSC), based on its powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and with the overwhelming majority support of the UN General Assembly.
This peace would not be the result of direct Israel-Palestine negotiations, which have repeatedly been stymied by hardliners on both sides and by Israel’s long-standing illegal policy of building settlements in the occupied territories that now include more than 700,000 Israeli settlers. The peace would instead be secured through the powers of the UNSC and UN General Assembly. Enforcement would be secured with UN-supervised peacekeepers and UN-backed economic incentives and sanctions as needed. Neither Hamas nor the Netanyahu government would be permitted to block a peace arrangement backed by the world community.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
The UN Security Council would act on the basis of multiple existing resolutions dating back more than 50 years, including UNSC Resolutions 242, 238, 1397, 1515, and 2334. Peacekeepers under UNSC supervision would be drawn from the Arab nations to disarm the violent militia groups that threaten Israel, including Hamas, and to provide security for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which steadfastly rejects and undermines the two-state solution, nor to Hamas, a terrorist organization that also rejects a two-state solution and seeks the elimination of Israel.
Nor can it be left to the outcome of the current fighting. Netanyahu’s war has killed more than 11,000 innocent Gazans to date, including more than 4,500 children, and has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war is unleashing vigilante violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, isolating Israel diplomatically, and threatening world peace.
A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s war is manifestly not in pursuit of a just peace. Netanyahu and his cabinet explicitly reject the two-state solution, aim to subdue the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and propose more Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine and permanent Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Their policies amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Precisely because of these injustices, the war is likely to escalate into a regional war, drawing in Hezbollah, Iran, and others, unless a just political solution is established.
Before October 7, Netanyahu sought to “normalize” relations with Arab states without also addressing the need for a Palestinian state, yet this cynical approach was doomed to fail. A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu should have resigned on October 7 to take responsibility of his flagrant failure to protect Israel’s border with Gaza on that day. His cabinet is filled with religious zealots—including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who propounds a Greater Israel that includes Palestinian lands—who are more than content with Apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. As the Israel Policy Forum said of him in March 2023, “Smotrich has long expressed views that are abhorrent to the vast majority of American Jews, from anti-Arab racism, to virulent homophobia, to a full-throated embrace of Jewish supremacy. To this list, we can now add his endorsement of violence against innocents based on their ethnic heritage.”
There is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution.
True leaders for peace on both sides have repeatedly been martyred, including the great Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and the brave Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, both of whom were killed because they preached peaceful co-existence. Countless more Palestinians and Israelis—many whose names we don’t even know—have also died in the quest for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, victims of terrorism often by extremists of their own communities.
Despite these serious obstacles, there is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution. In the Extraordinary Joint Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, the Arab and Islamic leaders made the following declaration in favor of a two-state solution:
As soon as possible, a credible peace process should be launched on the basis of international law, legitimate international resolutions and the principle of land for peace. It says this should be within a specific time frame and based on the implementation of the two-state solution with international guarantees, leading to an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, the occupied Syrian Golan, the Shebaa Farms, the Kafr Hills, Shoba and the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Al-Mari. (English translation of Arabic original)
Importantly, the Arab-Islamic leaders drew specific attention to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, that already twenty-one years ago affirmed that:
a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic option of the Arab countries, to be achieved in accordance with international legality, and which would require a comparable commitment on the part of the Israeli government… [and] Further calls upon Israel to affirm (inter alia) [t]he acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The Arab countries stated clearly back in 2002 that such an outcome would lead to peace between the Arab nations and Israel, specifically that the Arab nations would “Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.” Alas, Netanyahu has been in power most of the period since 2009 and has done what he could to ignore the Arab Peace Initiative and keep it out of the view of the Israeli public.
The UN Security Council, including all permanent (P5) members, and operating in close coordination with the Arab-Islamic leadership, should quickly adopt a peace settlement based on the two-state solution, and commit to provide operational and financial support to its implementation. In particular, the UNSC resolution should commit the UN and neighboring states to help Israel and Palestine to establish mutual security, a demilitarization of militia forces in the region, and a move to Palestinian statehood.
The resolution would include the following eight points:
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It is urgent to free the hostages in Gaza; stop the bloodshed in Israel and Palestine; establish lasting security for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples; achieve the aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state; and establish a process of true sustainable development in the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East (EMME) region. The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 and the devastating Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza after that, have shocked the world and intensified the global search for a path to long-term peace in Israel and Palestine.
Fortunately, an overwhelming majority of UN member states, including Israel’s Arab neighbors, strongly agree with the possibility of a just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution. Peace with mutual security for Israel and Palestine can and should be implemented through the unanimous backing of the UN Security Council (UNSC), based on its powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and with the overwhelming majority support of the UN General Assembly.
This peace would not be the result of direct Israel-Palestine negotiations, which have repeatedly been stymied by hardliners on both sides and by Israel’s long-standing illegal policy of building settlements in the occupied territories that now include more than 700,000 Israeli settlers. The peace would instead be secured through the powers of the UNSC and UN General Assembly. Enforcement would be secured with UN-supervised peacekeepers and UN-backed economic incentives and sanctions as needed. Neither Hamas nor the Netanyahu government would be permitted to block a peace arrangement backed by the world community.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
The UN Security Council would act on the basis of multiple existing resolutions dating back more than 50 years, including UNSC Resolutions 242, 238, 1397, 1515, and 2334. Peacekeepers under UNSC supervision would be drawn from the Arab nations to disarm the violent militia groups that threaten Israel, including Hamas, and to provide security for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which steadfastly rejects and undermines the two-state solution, nor to Hamas, a terrorist organization that also rejects a two-state solution and seeks the elimination of Israel.
Nor can it be left to the outcome of the current fighting. Netanyahu’s war has killed more than 11,000 innocent Gazans to date, including more than 4,500 children, and has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war is unleashing vigilante violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, isolating Israel diplomatically, and threatening world peace.
A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s war is manifestly not in pursuit of a just peace. Netanyahu and his cabinet explicitly reject the two-state solution, aim to subdue the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and propose more Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine and permanent Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Their policies amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Precisely because of these injustices, the war is likely to escalate into a regional war, drawing in Hezbollah, Iran, and others, unless a just political solution is established.
Before October 7, Netanyahu sought to “normalize” relations with Arab states without also addressing the need for a Palestinian state, yet this cynical approach was doomed to fail. A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu should have resigned on October 7 to take responsibility of his flagrant failure to protect Israel’s border with Gaza on that day. His cabinet is filled with religious zealots—including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who propounds a Greater Israel that includes Palestinian lands—who are more than content with Apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. As the Israel Policy Forum said of him in March 2023, “Smotrich has long expressed views that are abhorrent to the vast majority of American Jews, from anti-Arab racism, to virulent homophobia, to a full-throated embrace of Jewish supremacy. To this list, we can now add his endorsement of violence against innocents based on their ethnic heritage.”
There is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution.
True leaders for peace on both sides have repeatedly been martyred, including the great Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and the brave Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, both of whom were killed because they preached peaceful co-existence. Countless more Palestinians and Israelis—many whose names we don’t even know—have also died in the quest for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, victims of terrorism often by extremists of their own communities.
Despite these serious obstacles, there is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution. In the Extraordinary Joint Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, the Arab and Islamic leaders made the following declaration in favor of a two-state solution:
As soon as possible, a credible peace process should be launched on the basis of international law, legitimate international resolutions and the principle of land for peace. It says this should be within a specific time frame and based on the implementation of the two-state solution with international guarantees, leading to an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, the occupied Syrian Golan, the Shebaa Farms, the Kafr Hills, Shoba and the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Al-Mari. (English translation of Arabic original)
Importantly, the Arab-Islamic leaders drew specific attention to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, that already twenty-one years ago affirmed that:
a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic option of the Arab countries, to be achieved in accordance with international legality, and which would require a comparable commitment on the part of the Israeli government… [and] Further calls upon Israel to affirm (inter alia) [t]he acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The Arab countries stated clearly back in 2002 that such an outcome would lead to peace between the Arab nations and Israel, specifically that the Arab nations would “Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.” Alas, Netanyahu has been in power most of the period since 2009 and has done what he could to ignore the Arab Peace Initiative and keep it out of the view of the Israeli public.
The UN Security Council, including all permanent (P5) members, and operating in close coordination with the Arab-Islamic leadership, should quickly adopt a peace settlement based on the two-state solution, and commit to provide operational and financial support to its implementation. In particular, the UNSC resolution should commit the UN and neighboring states to help Israel and Palestine to establish mutual security, a demilitarization of militia forces in the region, and a move to Palestinian statehood.
The resolution would include the following eight points:
It is urgent to free the hostages in Gaza; stop the bloodshed in Israel and Palestine; establish lasting security for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples; achieve the aspiration of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state; and establish a process of true sustainable development in the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East (EMME) region. The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 and the devastating Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza after that, have shocked the world and intensified the global search for a path to long-term peace in Israel and Palestine.
Fortunately, an overwhelming majority of UN member states, including Israel’s Arab neighbors, strongly agree with the possibility of a just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution. Peace with mutual security for Israel and Palestine can and should be implemented through the unanimous backing of the UN Security Council (UNSC), based on its powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and with the overwhelming majority support of the UN General Assembly.
This peace would not be the result of direct Israel-Palestine negotiations, which have repeatedly been stymied by hardliners on both sides and by Israel’s long-standing illegal policy of building settlements in the occupied territories that now include more than 700,000 Israeli settlers. The peace would instead be secured through the powers of the UNSC and UN General Assembly. Enforcement would be secured with UN-supervised peacekeepers and UN-backed economic incentives and sanctions as needed. Neither Hamas nor the Netanyahu government would be permitted to block a peace arrangement backed by the world community.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
The UN Security Council would act on the basis of multiple existing resolutions dating back more than 50 years, including UNSC Resolutions 242, 238, 1397, 1515, and 2334. Peacekeepers under UNSC supervision would be drawn from the Arab nations to disarm the violent militia groups that threaten Israel, including Hamas, and to provide security for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The solution to the crisis certainly cannot be left to the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which steadfastly rejects and undermines the two-state solution, nor to Hamas, a terrorist organization that also rejects a two-state solution and seeks the elimination of Israel.
Nor can it be left to the outcome of the current fighting. Netanyahu’s war has killed more than 11,000 innocent Gazans to date, including more than 4,500 children, and has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war is unleashing vigilante violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, isolating Israel diplomatically, and threatening world peace.
A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s war is manifestly not in pursuit of a just peace. Netanyahu and his cabinet explicitly reject the two-state solution, aim to subdue the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and propose more Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine and permanent Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Their policies amount to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Precisely because of these injustices, the war is likely to escalate into a regional war, drawing in Hezbollah, Iran, and others, unless a just political solution is established.
Before October 7, Netanyahu sought to “normalize” relations with Arab states without also addressing the need for a Palestinian state, yet this cynical approach was doomed to fail. A real and lasting peace can only be achieved together with political rights for the people of Palestine.
Netanyahu should have resigned on October 7 to take responsibility of his flagrant failure to protect Israel’s border with Gaza on that day. His cabinet is filled with religious zealots—including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who propounds a Greater Israel that includes Palestinian lands—who are more than content with Apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. As the Israel Policy Forum said of him in March 2023, “Smotrich has long expressed views that are abhorrent to the vast majority of American Jews, from anti-Arab racism, to virulent homophobia, to a full-throated embrace of Jewish supremacy. To this list, we can now add his endorsement of violence against innocents based on their ethnic heritage.”
There is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution.
True leaders for peace on both sides have repeatedly been martyred, including the great Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and the brave Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, both of whom were killed because they preached peaceful co-existence. Countless more Palestinians and Israelis—many whose names we don’t even know—have also died in the quest for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, victims of terrorism often by extremists of their own communities.
Despite these serious obstacles, there is a clear way forward to peace through the UN because the Arab and Islamic nations have long called for peace with Israel based on the two-state solution. In the Extraordinary Joint Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, the Arab and Islamic leaders made the following declaration in favor of a two-state solution:
As soon as possible, a credible peace process should be launched on the basis of international law, legitimate international resolutions and the principle of land for peace. It says this should be within a specific time frame and based on the implementation of the two-state solution with international guarantees, leading to an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, the occupied Syrian Golan, the Shebaa Farms, the Kafr Hills, Shoba and the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Al-Mari. (English translation of Arabic original)
Importantly, the Arab-Islamic leaders drew specific attention to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, that already twenty-one years ago affirmed that:
a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic option of the Arab countries, to be achieved in accordance with international legality, and which would require a comparable commitment on the part of the Israeli government… [and] Further calls upon Israel to affirm (inter alia) [t]he acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The Arab countries stated clearly back in 2002 that such an outcome would lead to peace between the Arab nations and Israel, specifically that the Arab nations would “Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.” Alas, Netanyahu has been in power most of the period since 2009 and has done what he could to ignore the Arab Peace Initiative and keep it out of the view of the Israeli public.
The UN Security Council, including all permanent (P5) members, and operating in close coordination with the Arab-Islamic leadership, should quickly adopt a peace settlement based on the two-state solution, and commit to provide operational and financial support to its implementation. In particular, the UNSC resolution should commit the UN and neighboring states to help Israel and Palestine to establish mutual security, a demilitarization of militia forces in the region, and a move to Palestinian statehood.
The resolution would include the following eight points:
"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."