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bernie sanders
Sanders Slams 'War Criminal' Netanyahu Ahead of New Meeting With Trump to Plan Gaza Ethnic Cleansing
The progressive senator underscored that the Israeli leader has been indicted by the International Criminal Court "for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza."
Jul 08, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as the fugitive from the International Criminal Court met with lawmakers ahead of a second White House meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump to advance plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the embattled Gaza Strip.
"As President Trump and members of Congress roll out the red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let's remember that Netanyahu has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court for overseeing the systematic killing and starvation of civilians in Gaza," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.
"This is the man Trump and Congress are welcoming this week: a war criminal who will be remembered as one of modern history's monsters," the senator continued. "His extremist government has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians and wounded almost 135,000, 60% of whom are women, children, or elderly people. The United Nations reports that at least 17,000 children have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded. More than 3,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated."
"At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people are starving after Israel prevented any aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months," Sanders noted. "In the last six weeks, Israel has allowed a trickle of aid to get in, but has tried to replace the established United Nations distribution system with a private foundation backed by security contractors. This has been a catastrophe, with near-daily massacres at the new aid distribution sites. In its first five weeks in operation, 640 people have been killed and at least 4,488 injured while trying to access food through this mechanism."
Trump and Netanyahu—who said Monday that he nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize—are expected to discuss ongoing efforts to reach a new deal to secure the release of the 22 remaining Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, as well as plans for giving Gazans what the prime minister described as a "better future" by finding third countries willing to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians.
Critics said such euphemistic language is an attempt to give cover to Israel's plan to ethnically cleanse and indefinitely occupy Gaza. Observers expressed alarm over Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz' Tuesday affirmation of a plan to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp at the southern tip of the strip.
"There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid," Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the advocacy group Refugees International and a former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters.
Most Palestinians are vehemently opposed to what they say would amount to a second Nakba, the forced displacement of more than 750,000 people from Palestine during and after the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel.
"This is our land," one Palestinian man, Mansour Abu Al-Khaier, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. "Who would we leave it to, where would we go?"
Another Gazan, Abu Samir el-Fakaawi, told the newspaper: "I will not leave Gaza. This is my country. Our children who were martyred in the war are buried here. Our families. Our friends. Our cousins. We are all buried here. Whether Trump or Netanyahu or anyone else likes it or not, we are staying on this land."
Officials at the United Nations—whose judicial body, the International Court of Justice, is weighing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by around two dozen countries—condemned any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
"This raises concerns with regards to forcible transfer—the concept of voluntary transfers in the context that we are seeing in Gaza right now [is] very questionable," Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday.
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When More Hospitals Start Closing, Says Warren, 'Every Single American Needs to Know' Trump's GOP Is to Blame
"When thousands more people die from not getting care, we know who to blame," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Jul 07, 2025
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Monday that the American public "needs to know" that the blame will lie squarely at the feet of President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers if and when hospitals across the country are forced to shut their doors due to the unprecedented Medicaid cuts included in the new budget law.
"Every single American needs to know what Donald Trump and Republicans did in the 'Big Beautiful Bill,'" Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media, referring to the budget reconciliation package that the president signed late last week.
"When hospitals close their doors, we know who to blame," Warren continued. "When thousands more people die from not getting care, we know who to blame. When kids go hungry, we know who to blame."
The nation's rural hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid reimbursements, are expected to bear the brunt of the pain from the Republican law, which includes more than $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts as well as destructive changes to federal nutrition assistance and other programs. Nursing homes, community health centers, Planned Parenthood clinics, and other facilities are also at risk, and states are now scrambling to prevent catastrophe.
An analysis published by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform prior to passage of the GOP legislation estimated that more than 700 rural hospitals across the U.S. are at risk of closing due to "serious financial problems."
"Republicans will try to ignore the devastation their disastrous reconciliation bill will cause. We won't."
The health policy organization KFF notes that federal Medicaid spending in rural areas is projected to fall by $155 billion under the GOP law over the next decade—an amount that far exceeds the $50 billion that Republicans allocated to a "Rural Health Transformation Program" over the next five years.
Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, warned in a statement following the Senate's passage of the legislation earlier this month that the bill would "limit access to care for all rural patients by ending healthcare coverage for rural residents nationwide and putting financial strain on rural facilities who care for them."
Already, as Common Dreams reported last week, a healthcare clinic in rural Nebraska has announced it is shutting its doors in part due to the expected impacts of the GOP Medicaid cuts. The closure is predicted to be the first of many.
A recent analysis by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill warned that more than 330 rural hospitals are at risk of closing or reducing services due to the Trump-GOP assault on Medicaid.
Over the weekend, Trump administration officials defended the budget law in talk show appearances by attempting to downplay its impact on Medicaid and other healthcare programs.
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said Sunday that he believes "nobody is gonna lose their insurance"—a claim that dramatically conflicts with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's estimate that around 17 million people will lose health coverage under the Trump-GOP law.
"He is only off by 17,000,000," quipped Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) in response to Hassett's comments.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote over the weekend that "Republicans will try to ignore the devastation their disastrous reconciliation bill will cause."
"We won't," Sanders added. "We're going to make them explain what happens when 16 million lose their healthcare and nursing homes and hospitals are forced to shut down or limit services."
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The $50 Million Venetian Wedding of Robber Baron Jeff Bezos
Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Jul 07, 2025
With all the fawning coverage of Jeff Bezos’ storybook $50 million Venetian wedding, the news media lost sight of fact that Bezos—the third-richest person in the world—is hardly worthy of veneration. He’s been exploiting Amazon workers for years.
Historians have drawn parallels between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and what we are experiencing today. Like the first Gilded Age, Gilded Age 2.0 is marked by increasing economic inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a rise in populism and social unrest.
Jeff Bezos fits the profile of a latter-day robber baron to a T. Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Amazon terrorizes its workers
With their manifestly unsafe working conditions, Amazon warehouses are a 21st-century version of a Gilded Age sweatshop. Despite the company’s claims that it protects its workforce, an 18-month investigation released last December by a Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer risks its workers’ health and safety by prioritizing speed and profit, and it is doing quite well on that score. Last year, the company outpaced Walmart, the largest private-sector employer, by netting $59.2 billion—a 95 percent increase from 2023.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders said in a statement. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business.”
Based on Amazon’s own data, the Senate committee found its warehouses recorded 30 percent more injuries in 2023 than the warehousing industry average and that the company systematically underreported injuries to hide the fact that its facilities are significantly more dangerous than that of other companies. It also found that Amazon workers, who represent about 29 percent of the U.S. warehousing industry workforce, were nearly twice as likely to be injured as other company warehouse workers in each of the previous seven years.
The committee, which contacted nearly 500 former and current Amazon employees, also uncovered evidence that Amazon is aware that its oppressive productivity demands are causing frequent injuries. The company drafted plans to lower injury rates but never implemented them because it feared they would undercut profits.
Amazon pays its workers peanuts
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains the company’s executive chairman and biggest shareholder, paid himself a salary of $81,840 in 2020 and earned $1.6 million in compensation. That may not seem so excessive, but he makes the bulk of his money from stock. All told, between 2023 and this year, he made about $8 million an hour.
By contrast, Amazon’s 1.2 million warehouse workers are just scraping by. They make anywhere from $8.41 to $20.19 an hour, according to data compiled by Zip Recruiter. Their average hourly rate—$16.35—amounts to only $34,000 a year.
Roughly half of nearly 1,500 Amazon warehouse workers surveyed in the spring of 2024 by the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois Chicago reported that they struggle to afford enough food or a place to live. A third of them had to rely on public assistance, mainly in the form of SNAP benefits.
“Many Amazon associates cannot pay their bills, they can’t afford proper housing,” one survey respondent told CUED researchers. “Some of my coworkers have been forced out of their homes. We are stuck in a nightmare, living in an economy that puts no cap on worker exploitation, while our wages can’t keep up with the increase in our cost of living. This cycle has to stop.”
Most of the Amazon warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize have been squelched by the company, which spent more than $17 million on anti-union consultants from 2022 through 2023. In 2021, a labor activist group, the Congress of Essential Workers, founded the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully organized an 8,300-person warehouse on Staten Island in March 2022. ALU affiliated with the Teamsters Union in June 2024, but to date, no other warehouses have been unionized.
Amazon slapped with tens of millions in fines
Since 2000, lawsuits by government authorities and private parties have cost Amazon (including Whole Foods) more than $283 million for a range of violations, notably consumer protection, employment, environment, government contracting, and workplace safety offenses, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit group that promotes government and corporate accountability. Nearly 60 percent (101) of the 173 violations in those five categories involved workplace safety.
Amazon warehouse and delivery operation violations since 2020 are staggering.
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Amazon more than $1.35 million for 23 workplace violations. Three state agencies collectively fined the company nearly $600,000 for similar health and safety offenses.
- Federal and state authorities fined the company nearly $74.2 million for five wage and hour violations, while private lawsuits forced the company to pay $26.45 million in restitution.
- The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice fined the company $25 million for privacy law violations, including illegal surveillance and unauthorized medical inquiries. A similar privately brought case in federal court forced Amazon to pay $95 million.
Less enforcement under the Trump administration?
Will the Trump regime be as aggressive as previous administrations in prosecuting Amazon for its labor infractions? Given the efforts by Bezos and Amazon to curry favor with Donald Trump, probably not.
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and in January, it was widely reported that the company will pay a whopping $40 million to license an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump to be released in theaters and streamed on Prime Video. The first lady will serve as executive producer.
In February, Trump nominated Amazon’s former senior safety executive, David Keeling, to head OSHA. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, the company was cited numerous times for failing to meet the OSHA requirement “to furnish a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees,” according to the Department of Justice. (The Senate has yet to confirm his nomination.)
Since then, Bezos has gone even further to placate Trump. In late April, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon planned to display on its website how much Trump’s tariffs are inflating the price of each product. In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “a hostile and political act” and Trump phoned Bezos to complain. Bezos backed down immediately.
Then there’s what Bezos has been doing to wreck one of the top newspapers in the country—The Washington Post—which he bought in 2013. But that’s a column for another day.
Suffice it to say, the rap sheet on Bezos is long—and damning. Like his fellow robber barons of the day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a man who deserves our reverence. Uncritical worship of billionaires like Bezos just may exacerbate an already dangerous level of social inequality. So let’s not go gaga over Bezos’ grandiosity.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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