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Opinion
Why Is US Congress Silent on the Manmade Nightmare It Is Enabling in Gaza?
History will not forgive our complicity. The time is long overdue for us to end our support for Netanyahu’s destruction of the Palestinian people.
May 08, 2025
I want to say a few words about an issue that people all over the world are thinking about—are appalled by—but for some strange reason gets very little discussion here in the nation’s capital or in the halls of Congress. And that is the horrific humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza.
Thursday marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel.
Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities.
Do we really want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars starving children in Gaza?
There is no ambiguity here: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon. Defense Minister Israel Katz said, “Israel’s policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.”
Starving children to death as a weapon of war is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. Civilized people do not starve children to death.
What is going on in Gaza is a war crime, committed openly and in broad daylight, and continuing every single day.
There are 2.2 million people who live in Gaza. Today, these people are trapped. The borders are sealed. And Israel has pushed the population into an ever-smaller area.
With Israel having cut off all aid, what we are seeing now is a slow, brutal process of mass starvation and death by the denial of basic necessities. This is methodical, it is intentional, it is the stated policy of the Netanyahu government.
Without fuel, there is no ability to pump fresh water, leaving people increasingly desperate, unable to find clean water to drink, wash with, or cook properly. Disease is once again spreading in Gaza.
Most of the bakeries in Gaza have now shut down, having run out of fuel and flour. The few remaining community kitchens are also shutting down. Most people are now surviving on scarce canned goods, often a single can of beans or some lentils, shared between a family once a day.
The United Nations reports that more than 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million face severe food shortages.
The starvation hits children hardest. At least 65,000 children now show symptoms of malnutrition, and dozens have already starved to death.
Malnutrition rates increased 80% in March, the last month for which data is available, after Netanyahu began the siege, but the situation has severely deteriorated since then.
UNICEF reported Wednesday that “the situation is getting worse every day,” and that they are treating about 10,000 children for severe malnutrition.
Without adequate nutrition or access to clean water, many children will die of easily preventable diseases, killed by something as simple as diarrhea.
For the tens of thousands of injured people in Gaza, particularly the countless burn victims from Israeli bombing, their wounds cannot heal without adequate food and clean water. Left to fester, infections will kill many who should have survived.
With no infant formula, and with malnourished mothers unable to breastfeed, many infants are also at severe risk of death. Those that survive will bear the scars of their suffering for the rest of their lives.
And with little medicine available, easily treatable illnesses and chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease can be a death sentence in Gaza.
What is going on there is not some terrible earthquake, it is not a hurricane, it is not a storm. What is going on in Gaza today is a manmade nightmare. And nothing can justify this.
What is happening in Gaza will be a permanent stain on the world’s collective conscience. History will never forget that we allowed this to happen and, for us here in the United States, that we, in fact, enabled this atrocity.
There is no doubt that Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this terrible war with its barbaric October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages.
The International Criminal Court was right to indict Yahya Sinwar and other leaders of Hamas as war criminals for those atrocities.
Clearly, Israel had the right to defend itself against Hamas.
But Netanyahu’s extremist government has not just waged war against Hamas. Instead, they have waged an all-out barbaric war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.
They have intentionally made life unlivable in Gaza.
Israel, up to now, has killed more than 52,000 people and injured more than 118,000—60% of whom are women, children, and the elderly. More than 15,000 children have been killed.
Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment has damaged or destroyed two-thirds of all structures in Gaza, including 92% of the housing units. Most of the population now is living in tents or other makeshift structures.
The healthcare system in Gaza has been essentially destroyed. Most of the territory’s hospitals and primary healthcare facilities have been bombed.
Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been totally devastated, including almost 90% of water and sanitation facilities. Most of the roads have been destroyed.
Gaza’s education system has been obliterated. Hundreds of schools have been bombed, as has every single one of Gaza’s 12 universities.
And there has been no electricity in Gaza for 18 months.
Given this reality, nobody should have any doubts that Netanyahu is a war criminal. Just like his counterparts in Hamas, he has a massive amount of innocent blood on his hands.
And now Netanyahu and his extremist ministers have a new plan: to indefinitely reoccupy all of Gaza, flatten the few buildings that are still standing, and force the entire population of 2.2 million people into a single tiny area, where hired U.S. security contractors will distribute rations to the survivors.
Israeli officials are quite open about the goal here: to force Palestinians to leave for other countries “in line with President [Donald] Trump’s vision for Gaza,” as one Israeli official said this week.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” and that its population will “leave in great numbers.”
For many in Netanyahu’s extremist government, this has been the plan all along: It’s called ethnic cleansing.
This would be a terrible tragedy, no matter where or why it was happening. But what makes this tragedy so much worse for us in America is that it is our government, the United States government, that is absolutely complicit in creating and sustaining this humanitarian disaster.
Last year alone, the United States provided $18 billion in military aid to Israel. This year, the Trump administration has approved $12 billion more in bombs and weapons.
And for months, Trump has offered blanket support for Netanyahu. More than that, he has repeatedly said that the United States will actually take over Gaza after the war, that the Palestinians will be pushed out, and that the U.S. will redevelop it into what Trump calls “the Riviera of the Middle East,” a playground for billionaires.
This war has killed or injured more than 170,000 people in Gaza. It has cost American taxpayers well over $20 billion in the last year. And right now, as we speak, thousands of children are starving to death. And the U.S. president is actively encouraging the ethnic cleansing of over 2 million people.
Given that reality, one might think that there would be a vigorous discussion right here in the Senate: Do we really want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars starving children in Gaza? You tell me why spending billions of dollars to support Netanyahu’s war and starving children in Gaza is a good idea. I’d love to hear it.
But we are not having that debate. And let me suggest to you why I think we are not having that debate.
That is because we have a corrupt campaign finance system that allows the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to set the agenda here in Washington.
In the last election cycle, AIPAC’s PAC and Super PAC spent nearly $127 million combined.
And the fact is that, if you are a member of Congress and you vote against Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, AIPAC is there to punish you with millions of dollars in advertisements to see that you’re defeated.
One might think that in a democracy there would be a vigorous debate on an issue of such consequence. But because of our corrupt campaign finance system, people are literally afraid to stand up. If they do, suddenly you will have all kinds of ads coming in to your district to defeat you.
Sadly, I must confess, that this political corruption works. Many of my colleagues will privately express their horror at Netanyahu’s war crimes, but will do or say very little publicly about it.
History will not forgive our complicity in this nightmare. The time is long overdue for us to end our support for Netanyahu’s destruction of the Palestinian people. We must not put another nickel into Netanyahu’s war machine. We must demand an immediate cease-fire, a surge in humanitarian aid, the release of the hostages, and the rebuilding of Gaza—not for billionaires to enjoy their Riviera there—but rebuilding Gaza for the Palestinian people.
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The 2024 Election Was Smothered in Dark Money—How Do We Turn on the Lights?
A new Brennan Center study found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020.
May 08, 2025
Every day brings a new story about the outsized role of private wealth in American politics. Elon Musk slashing and burning his way through federal agencies. Billionaire campaign donors like Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon running cabinet departments. Other Trump patrons reportedly shaping policy on everything from crypto to the Middle East. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, a small group of major donors is organizing to fund the party’s 2026 push to retake Congress.
And these are only the donors we know about.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision ushered in the era of “dark money”—ballooning campaign spending by groups that do not disclose their funding sources. On Wednesday, the Brennan Center published a study by the journalist Anna Massoglia. She found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020. And that’s the money Massoglia could identify—the real total is almost certainly higher, perhaps substantially so.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical.
The term “dark money” as we use it refers to election spending by groups that are not legally required to—and do not—disclose their donors. Most of this spending would have been illegal before Citizens United, which eviscerated many long-standing limits on campaign money and led to the creation of super PACs, political organizations that can raise and spend unlimited money on campaigns.
The justices got many things wrong in Citizens United. One of them was their assurance that all the new campaign spending they had just allowed would be transparent, allowing Americans to be fully informed about who was trying to influence their votes.
The justices seem not to have realized, however, that many of the new groups they were now permitting to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns were not subject to any disclosure rules. There have since been numerous efforts to fix this oversight and require all major campaign donors to be made public—most recently as part of the Freedom to Vote Act, which came within two votes of overcoming a Senate filibuster in 2022—but none of those bills have made it through Congress.
Meanwhile, dark money in federal elections has continued to rise—and become even harder to trace. In the years immediately after Citizens United, groups that didn’t reveal their donors tended to purchase their own campaign ads, which were at least reported to the Federal Election Commission if they ran in the weeks before the election and were therefore fairly easy to track. Even if the source of the money was opaque, we could see the spending itself.
Now, as our new analysis shows, reported campaign ads account for just a tiny fraction of dark money spending. Most of it now goes directly into the coffers of super PACs, and some of it pays for online ads and early-cycle TV and radio ads not subject to any legally required disclosure. We are able to track down some of that money due to voluntary disclosures and research using services that monitor TV advertising, but our overall tally of dark money spent in 2024 is an undercount, possibly by a large margin.
Both Republicans and Democrats benefited from significant dark money support in 2024, but the majority of traceable dark money backed Democrats. Most of those funds went toward enormous spending in the presidential race—$1 out of every $6 in dark money that we can track was funneled to Future Forward, the super PAC backing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Trump’s dark money support that we know about was not as high, although it still amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars (including more than $35 million that paid for apparent “false flag” ads in swing states designed to look like they came from Harris).
Ultimately, neither party will have any incentive to curb reliance on secret spending absent a change in the law. To congressional Democrats’ credit, they included a fix in the Freedom to Vote Act. It was among the most popular provisions in the bill, enjoying broad public support among voters from both parties.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical. Regaining Americans’ trust must include concrete steps to make it easier for them to hold political leaders accountable. Providing the transparency that even Citizens United promised 15 years ago would be a good place to start.
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How Trump Promotes Grotesque Corporate Lawlessness
Dropping corporate cases en masse, as the Trump administration is doing, portends a return to recklessness and greed that fueled corporate catastrophes like Wall Street’s 2008 financial crisis.
May 08, 2025
“Corporations First.” That’s the slogan that would truthfully describe the Trump administration’s approach to law enforcement, not “America First.”
A new investigation by my organization shows that the Trump administration is dropping investigations and enforcement actions against corporations that showered money on Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.
Seventy-one big businesses, which were facing at least 102 ongoing federal enforcement actions at the time of Trump’s inauguration, collectively gave a whopping $57 million to the Trump-Vance inaugural fund, we found. And many may now be collecting special favors.
Time will tell whether the payments by other big corporate inauguration donors—like Amazon, Apple, Boeing, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Nvidia, and Pilgrim’s Pride—will see enforcement go away, too.
Trump’s inaugural haul from corporations facing investigations and lawsuits alone is comparable to the total amount raised for the inaugurations of former Presidents Barack Obama in 2009 ($53 million) and Joe Biden in 2021 ($62 million). And it’s just a third of the record-breaking $239 million Trump collected overall, $153 million of which came from corporate donors.
Regardless of president or party, private funding for the presidential inauguration poses a serious threat of corrupt influence buying by corporations and the wealthy. Unlike the vast majority of Americans, they can ingratiate themselves to an incoming administration with six- and seven-figure checks.
Donations by for-profit corporations are particularly suspect—corporations’ purpose, after all, is to amass wealth for private investors, an agenda that frequently pits them against laws and regulations that protect consumers, workers, and the broader public interest.
We may not know exactly what favors corporations might seek. But it’s reasonable to assume that getting rid of penalties or investigations for ripping off consumers, exploiting workers, polluting our environment, and engaging in illegal and unfair business practices would be high on the list.
Public Citizen has compiled a list of more than 500 enforcement actions against corporations that the Trump administration inherited from the Biden administration. During President Trump’s first 100 days alone, federal agencies halted or dropped at least 126 of these enforcement actions.
These include actions against 15 corporate inauguration donors whose cases were dismissed or withdrawn, plus six whose cases were halted. These 21 corporations collectively donated $18 million to the inaugural fund.
These include companies accused of violating consumer financial protections, such Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan, and Walmart; some crypto businesses accused of violating securities laws, such as Coinbase, Crypto.com, Kraken, and Ripple; private prison corporations that allegedly mistreated inmates, like CoreCivic and GEO Group; and businesses accused of engaging in illegal bribery schemes in foreign countries, including Cognizant, Pfizer, and Toyota.
Time will tell whether the payments by other big corporate inauguration donors—like Amazon, Apple, Boeing, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Nvidia, and Pilgrim’s Pride—will see enforcement go away, too.
To be fair, some cases against corporate inauguration donors do appear to be proceeding unhindered. The antitrust cases against Google and Meta are proceeding, the FTC’s case against Uber for deceptive billing practices has been filed, and Gilead Pharmaceuticals is being required to pay $202 million to settle allegations of paying illegal kickbacks to doctors.
These signs of ongoing enforcement are a good thing. But among the more than 100 cases being dropped and halted, they’re exceptional. Because of the mass firings of federal workers at enforcement agencies, they likely represent the conclusion of past enforcement efforts, not the continuation of an ongoing trend.
Dropping corporate cases en masse, as the Trump administration is doing, is a greenlight for corporate lawlessness. It portends a return to recklessness and greed that fueled corporate catastrophes like Wall Street’s 2008 financial crisis, the Oxycontin-fueled opioid crisis, BP’s oil spill disaster, and Boeing’s deadly 737 Max crashes.
It is the definition of “corporations first.”
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Can We Build a World of Sanctuary Cities?
A sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. This is the first step to true collective safety.
May 08, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants—“the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized—much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on.
The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him), he’s above the law! Court rulings don’t apply to him—not when he’s busy keeping America safe from the boogeymen. To be an exalted leader, you need to keep a serious percentage of the populace in a state of simple-minded fear: The enemy are very, very bad people. They belong to gangs. They eat our pets. But I will protect you.
I’ll reopen Guantánamo. I’ll reopen Alcatraz. And the electorate can sigh with a sense of relief and safety. He’s bringing back our greatness—that is to say, our racist certainty. He’s recreating a country that real Americans can understand... one that’s like them.
Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe.
At least this is how it seems. But before I get too deeply immersed in Trump-inspired sarcasm, let me grapple with some deeper reality as well. American “greatness” has primarily been military in nature: us vs. somebody! The nation’s mainstream consciousness, be it Democratic or Republican, cannot stop playing war. At least this has been the case throughout my lifetime.
As Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out at Huffington Post, for instance, the Bush-era War on Terror helped give birth to Trump’s war on migrants: today’s terrorists, the “invaders” of the present moment. They quote J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented Gitmo detainees under Bush. He notes that Trump’s initial plan to open Gitmo was “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law. It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”
However, to Trump’s frustration, there was “too much rule of law” at Gitmo, making matters too difficult to turn the hellish site into a dumping ground for thousands of migrants. Trump’s waging war! The last thing he needs is rule of law. So his next step was to work out an agreement with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, allegedly paying El Salvador some $6 million to send American migrants to the country’s maximum-security hellhole, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. This would allow Trump’s war to continue.
As Schulberg and Blumenthal write:
On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had “invaded” the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.
Some good—or at least hopeful—news from all this is that the opposition to Trump’s war-gaming isn’t sheerly marginal. The opposition is also politically structural, such as, for instance the existence of sanctuary cities—whose governments refuse to cooperate, or allow their police departments to cooperate, with ICE, despite the risks they face for doing so.
For instance, a few days ago, the Trump administration sued Colorado and the city of Denver “for allegedly,” according to Truthout, “obstructing federal immigration enforcement. The suit objects to sanctuary policies—local initiatives to protect immigrant communities from federal deportation efforts—and argues that such policies encroach on federal authority.”
“This move follows Donald Trump’s recent executive order instructing the DOJ to penalize sanctuary cities, including threatening to withhold federal funding.”
Obviously, this is no small challenge to face. Maybe Trump will wind up succeeding with his authoritarian agenda—God help the migrants, God help all so us—and if that happens, humanitarian opposition will have to continue nonetheless, no matter how difficult things get. But opposition is also present right now. So is political belief in a higher value than waging war and defeating an “enemy.”
In response to the federal lawsuit against Denver, a statement from the mayor’s office declared that the city “will not be bullied or blackmailed, least of all by an administration that has little regard for the law and even less for the truth.”
This is not simply an “us vs. them” confrontation between the Trump-MAGA world and progressives. The confrontation is both pragmatic and spiritual: What keeps us safe? Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe. What we must embrace and learn to understand, both individually and collectively, is what I call empathic sanity: the ability to live as one, to value everyone’s full humanity.
Turns out there are more than 200 sanctuary cities in the United States. As George Cassidy Payne writes at Medium, a sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. All people are equal.
“In this context,” he writes, “sanctuary cities offer more than a geographical claim. They challenge us to look past a person’s nationality and recognize their humanity. They call us to prioritize their place of residence, viewing them as global citizens, not by their place of birth. In the sanctuary, people are treated with radical respect; here, no one has the right to harm another without their consent, nor to judge anyone based on their skin color, accent, citizenship status, or nation of origin.”
This sounds like a first step in the creation of international security.
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