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Sanders Spurns Melania Trump's Vision of Robots 'Replacing Teachers'
"We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve."
Mar 27, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday rejected First Lady Melania Trump's vision of a near-future in which artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots do the work of human school teachers, arguing that society should instead do better by its human educators.
The wife of President Donald Trump entered Wednesday's gathering of the Global First Ladies Alliance accompanied by Figure 03, an AI-powered "general purpose humanoid robot" developed by the Sunnyvale, California-based company Figure.
“The future of AI is personified," Trump told attendees, who included Brigitte Macron of France, Sara Netanyahu of Israel, and Olena Zelenska of Ukraine. “It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility.”
“Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato," she said. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. Humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home.”
Responding to Trump's remarks, Sanders (I-Vt.) said Friday on social media: "Call me a radical, but NO."
"We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots," the senator added. "We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve."
Trump and Macron also warned about the dangers technology poses to children in remarks that came the same week that a New Mexico jury ordered tech titan Meta to pay a $375 million penalty for endangering youth and jurors in a landmark social media addiction trial found that Meta and YouTube harmed a child user of their platforms.
The office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom—who is believed to be a likely contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—also slapped down the idea of robot teachers, as did ordinary social media users.
"They want to replace human beings. Where will we work? How do we make money?" asked one X account with tens of thousands of followers. "No one wants this. We did not ask for it. Fuck all of this shit."
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After US-Israel Operation Kills 180 Girls in Iran, Melania Trump Chairs UN Session on Children in Conflict
"For the United States, ‘protecting children’ and ‘maintaining international peace and security’ clearly mean something very different from what the UN Charter provides,” said the Iranian ambassador to the UN.
Mar 03, 2026
As the families of an estimated 180 schoolchildren and staff members killed in an Israeli attack on a girls' school in southern Iran mourned on Monday, first lady Melania Trump presided over a United Nations Security Council meeting where the impact her husband's military operations in the Middle East was briefly addressed—but only in regard to the first lady's pet cause, children and technology.
Trump spoke generally about children living in or fleeing conflict as she opened a meeting on "Children, Technology, and Education in Conflict," saying the US "stands with all children throughout the world."
But the meeting was held as the US Department of Defense and Israeli officials refused to acknowledge what had been widely reported: On Saturday, as the US and Israel began launching airstrikes across Iran despite diplomatic talks that had recently been making progress, Israel struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab as children gathered there for the school day.
The building was destroyed and the roof collapsed, killing at least 180 people, according to PBS NewsHour correspondent Leila Molana-Allen—the majority of whom were girls between the ages of 7 and 12. Nearly 100 people were also injured.
An Al Jazeera investigation on Tuesday found that the strike—which the Trump administration and the Israel Defense Forces claimed they were unaware of—was likely a "deliberate" attack, based on satellite imagery compiled over more than 10 years, video clips, news reports, and official Iranian statements.
The outlet noted that the southeastern region where Minab is located is a hub for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval forces. The school that was hit was part of a broad network of institutions that educate the children of IRGC members.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor emphasized in a statement that "allegations regarding the presence of military facilities elsewhere in Hormozgan Province do not alter the school’s civilian character or justify targeting it."
"Any deliberate attack on a school or on civilians, as well as any indiscriminate or disproportionate attack that violates the principles of distinction and proportionality, constitutes a grave breach and may amount to a war crime where intent to target the school is established or where the attack is indiscriminate or disproportionate," said the group on Sunday. "The military attack on Iran constitutes an act of aggression and violates the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also said the bombing "constitutes a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law."
"Attacks against educational institutions endanger students and teachers and undermine the right to education," said the agency.
Ahead of the UN Security Council meeting led by the first lady, Iranian Ambassador to the UN Amir Saeid Iravani said it was "deeply shameful and hypocritical" for the US to convene a summit on protecting children in conflict as its joint strikes with Israel have killed close to 800 civilians across Iran in recent days.
“For the United States, ‘protecting children’ and ‘maintaining international peace and security’ clearly mean something very different from what the UN Charter provides,” said Iravani.
During the meeting, Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN undersecretary for political and peacebuilding affairs, noted that the attacks on Iran have underscored how children are impacted by conflict, specifically pointing to the shifts to remote learning that have been made in countries where US military bases are located, such as Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman.
About the strike on the school in Minab, DiCarlo said, “United States authorities have announced that they are looking into these reports.”
The stated goal of the meeting—protecting children's access to education in conflict zones—has also been undermined by President Donald Trump.
As the Associated Press reported, the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflict was among the UN offices that have suffered funding cuts under the Trump administration, with the White House withdrawing US support for its work in January.
UNESCO and the UN Children's Fund have also faced drastic funding reductions.
The first lady's status as chair of the meeting on children in conflict, said UN diplomat Mohamad Safa, "while the US and Israel killing children in Lebanon and Gaza, and murdered 165 schoolgirls in Iran, is the most hypocritical thing we have seen in the history of the Security Council."
Trump led the session the same day that Democracy for the Arab World Now called for an emergency General Assembly session to "declare the assault a war of aggression in violation of the UN Charter and to demand the immediate cessation of all hostilities.”
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Rights Group Leads Push for UN to Declare US-Israeli Assault on Iran 'War of Aggression'
"No legal framework, international or domestic, can justify this."
Mar 02, 2026
A leading human rights group on Monday urged the United Nations General Assembly to declare the unprovoked US-Israeli assault on Iran—which has already killed more than 500 people in just three days, including many children—a "war of aggression."
In a letter sent to the permanent missions of all UN member states in New York City, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) "called on governments to formally request an emergency special session of the UN General Assembly to declare the assault a war of aggression in violation of the UN Charter and to demand the immediate cessation of all hostilities."
"The [UN] Security Council is unable to make that determination because the United States, as a permanent member and a party to the conflict, will veto any resolution," DAWN explained. "The General Assembly should act in its place."
DAWN's call came as the death toll from three days of US-Israeli bombardment of cities, towns, and sites throughout Iran rose to at least 555, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. Multiple massacres—including a bombing of a girls' school in Minab that officials said killed at least 180 people, many of them students—have been reported.
"The United States has initiated a war of aggression, which UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 defines as 'a crime against international peace' and which the Nuremberg Tribunal—established by the United States itself—called 'the supreme international crime,'" the group noted.
DAWN continued:
The US and Israeli decision to go to war violates the foundations of jus ad bellum, the body of international law governing when a state may lawfully use force against another. Under UN Charter Article 2(4), all member states are prohibited from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. There are only two explicit exceptions: self-defense under Article 51, or authorization by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII. Neither applies here. Article 51 permits self-defense only "if an armed attack occurs," and Iran had not attacked the United States. Even under the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense, the war is unlawful.
"No legal framework, international or domestic, can justify this US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran," DAWN executive director Omar Shakir said in a statement. "This war is patently illegal, and it must be stopped."
DAWN's call came on the same day that US First Lady Melania Trump chaired a UN Security Council meeting about the role of education in "advancing tolerance and world peace."
Just to be clear, sending his wife Melania to preside over the United Nations Security Council is a display of contempt for the UN by Trump.During his first term, Trump similarly sent his daughter Ivanka to multiple United Nations General Assembly sessions.
[image or embed]
— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 1:02 PM
"We've become the laughingstock of the entire world," lamented the social media group Occupy Democrats. "This is an unprecedented appearance by an American first dady and yet another sign that [President] Donald Trump prizes loyalty and proximity to himself over competence."
"In fact, this is the first time that the spouse of ANY world leader has been allowed to take the president's seat on the Security Council," Occupy Democrats added. "It sends a clear signal to the world that the United States is now little more than a nepotistic, tin-pot dictatorship."
DAWN also sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to pass a pair of war powers resolutions that would bar US forces from waging an unconstitutional war on Iran. H.Con.Res.38 and S.J.Res.59—introduced last year respectively by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)—would direct Trump to withdraw US forces from unconstitutional attacks on Iran.
"The question before Congress is not whether to authorize this war retroactively," the letter states. "Given that... this war has been illegal under US domestic law from the moment it began... the question before you is whether to end it now, and Congress has the power to do so."
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Trump Is Right to Discuss His Gaza Peace Plan and the Melania Film in the Same Speech
Ironically, his framing of his plans for Gaza as in some way like the Melania film displays a Freudian slip, a rare moment of complete honesty, since both are just for show, with no reality behind them.
Feb 20, 2026
President Donald J. Trump convened his so-called “Board of Peace” in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Some two dozen formal member states attended, and a similar number of international observers.
Trump again lied in saying that he had resolved eight wars, even as he seemed intent on fomenting one against Iran. Of Gaza, where the Israeli genocide continues with less visibility, he said, “Gaza is very complex. It’s been amazing. I want to thank Steve and Jared for an amazing job. Marco’s over there watching. Everybody’s fantastic. And JD, what a job they’re all doing.”
The Gaza so-called “ceasefire” has never actually been implemented, with continued Israeli occupation of over half the strip and continued bombardment and throttling of food and medical aid. It has not moved to the “second stage,” much less the third.
Trump’s Gaza project is like most of his gaudy con games, such as his university, which never educated any students and for which he had to settle out of court; or such as his border wall with Mexico, which will never be built nor will Mexico pay for it; or such as his regime change gambit in Venezuela, where he simply colluded in a coup with Nicolas Maduro’s vice president; or such as the Jeff Bezos film about Melania that has lost at least $60 million. As we will see, he more or less admits the justice of this last comparison. That is, his Gaza plans have no concrete reality, consisting of a mere Potemkin Village. In the meantime, the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are sleeping rough and suffering food and medicine shortages and their children are not receiving an education, since Israel destroyed all the schools and universities.
Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists.
He said:
Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan have all committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza. Egypt and Jordan are likewise providing very, very substantial help, troops, training, and support for a very trustworthy Palestinian police force.
Andrew Roth at The Guardian reports that Morocco and Indonesia have also agreed to send troops. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said he would be willing to send 8,000 soldiers, and even more. President Prabowo, a former general, leads the world’s most populous Muslim country and is seeking a higher profile on the world stage.
The Guardian explains, “Maj Gen Jasper Jeffers III, the US officer appointed to command the future international stabilisation force (ISF), said the board planned to deploy 20,000 soldiers in five different sectors of Gaza, beginning with Rafah.”
This colonial military arrangement is a recipe for disaster. The foreign troops will almost certainly come into conflict with Hamas. And Israel has a long history of shelling United Nations peacekeeping troops in Lebanon. Since Trump cannot conceive of a genuine political solution that gives basic rights to the Palestinians, this overlay of foreign troops is simply a Band-Aid over a deep wound that will certainly break open again.
According to the computer-generated transcript at C-SPAN, which I had ChatGPT clean up, Trump announced:
But together, we’re committed to achieving a Gaza that is properly governed throughout the whole area is going to be, you know, so many countries that have really nothing to do with the Middle East, but they’re maybe somewhat close by.They’re all involved. They want to go in and fight. They tell me all the time, "We’d like to send soldiers to fight if it’s necessary."
And I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.
We have two countries that want to go in and do a number on Hamas.
I said, "I really don’t think it’s I hope it’s not going to be necessary because they made a promise and they promised me get rid of their weapons."
Looks like they’re going to be doing that, but we’ll have to find out.
But it’s no longer a hot bed of radicalism and terror.
And to end that we have uh today and I’m pleased to announce that Kazakhstan, Azerban, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Usbekistan, and Kuwait have all contributed more than 7 billion dollars toward the relief package.
Trump said that he would also put in $10 billion. That is $17 billion, if it ever actually materializes. Trump’s $10 billion almost certainly will not. In fact, it is not clear where he would get it from. I presume that the US Constitution has not yet been entirely abolished and that Congress is the body that appropriates funds. In any case, it is insufficient. The United Nations estimates that rebuilding Gaza will cost $70 billion.
The premise, that the conflict is resolved, is also faulty. Israeli cabinet members continue to push for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Hamas leaders have said that they will only lay down their arms if a Palestinian government is established in Gaza. Trump instead plans a colonial administration that in some ways resembles the one established by the League of Nations after WW I, which started the whole Mideast catastrophe.
Trump said in introductory remarks:
When I took office, the war in Gaza was raging with thousands of people being killed and no end in sight.
Today, thanks to unrelenting diplomacy and the commitment of many of the great people in this room, we have 59 countries signed up on Gaza.Think of that. We have uh it’s amazing. But all the people, many really so many in this room, the war in Gaza is over. It’s over. There are little flames. Little flames.
Hamas has been I think they’re going to give up their weapons, which is what they promised. If they don’t, it’ll be, you know, they’ll be harshly met. Very harshly met. They don’t want that.
You know, all the stuff like they don’t mind dying. They told me that’s not true. Everyone said, “Oh, they don’t mind dying.” No, they don’t want to die. They said, “We don’t want to die. People don’t want to die.”
The ceasefire was held and every last remaining hostage, both living and dead, has been returned back home. Think of that. That was an impossibility.
And we did hundreds of hostages, but the last 20, and I always said to Steve and Jared, I said, “The last 20 are going to be very tough. Very, very tough.” And we got them back.
We got the living back. And then we only got about 16 of the dead. And we said, “Well, you got to get them all. You promised them all.”
And they dug and dug and dug. You can imagine it’s a job that’s brutal.
And Hamas really did a lot of that work. And you got to give them credit for that. They uh they brought the last last one home a week ago.
And we got all 28 of them living and dead.
The amazing thing because I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The the parents of the dead, they knew their boy was dead. This case boys, all boys, men. But to the parents’ boys, they knew their boy was dead.
They wanted that dead body as much as if he were alive.
And when they got them back, there was great sadness, but there was great joy, too.
They wanted it as much as the people that got their sons back alive.
But we got a lot of people before those 20, Steve, what nobody talks about, but you know, hundreds of people.
Uh we did a good job and you guys did a fantastic job.
I want to thank every nation that helped us achieve this monumental breakthrough saving countless lives and really bringing peace and bringing the concept of peace because nobody thought peace in the Middle East.
I’ve always heard peace in the Middle East is impossible and it’s turned out not to be.
And we do have some work to do with Iran. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple. They can’t have you can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.
And they can’t have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been told that very strongly.
Since the hard one ceasefire of last October, the United States and our partners have facilitated the delivery of vast amounts of humanitarian aid, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before.
In November, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved the Board of Peace.
And last month in Davos, we welcomed over two dozen members to this very important new organization and we are very closely working with the United Nations...
First I had an escalator that stopped. You know that it’s going up. Boom.
It’s lucky my movie star first lady was in front of me because I put my hand on a certain part of her body and I was able to stop my fall. otherwise because she had no trouble.
I said, “Boy, that was a very sharp stop, Johnny.”
So, I said, “That was strange. I’ve I’ve been on a lot of escalators. It’s never happened before. Usually, it stops very slowly. This was just boom, but our first lady was right in the proper location for me.”
I’m waving to people and uh she was holding on a little tighter. She knew what was happening. She did. She said she
That’s a very successful movie out right now. like number one. Can you believe this? And it’s a big movie big movie star.
And I always say it’s trouble because I always say there’s not room in one family for two stars. I told that we can’t have two stars in one family.
So I don’t know what that means, but it’s not it’s not good.
But it is good because we’re proud of her. She did a People in the United States love the first lady and she did the movie and it’s become the biggest selling documentary in 20 years. Can you believe?
The theaters are all packed. Women especially, they go back and they see it two or three times, four times.
I include the comments about the escalator and Melania and the part of her body and Trump losing his balance and his description of her as a movie star because Jeff Bezos funded a boondoggle flick that has earned $16 million on a $75 million production budget. These sorts of passages, which suggest mental imbalance, are usually edited out by the MSM. This one speaks eloquently about how the Trumps are at the center of his thinking even when he is discussing Gaza.
Ironically, his framing of his plans for Gaza as in some way like the Melania film displays a Freudian slip, a rare moment of complete honesty, since both are just for show, with no reality behind them.
I’m glad, and I think everyone is glad, that the living Israeli hostages were released and the remains of the dead were returned to their grieving families. Hamas’ hostage-taking, targeting innocent civilians for the most part, was an egregious war crime.
But it is astonishing that this man could jabber on like that about Melania and about his so-called ceasefire in Gaza for all that time and never mention the way its Palestinian population has been genocided, Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and tens of thousands of its innocent civilians slaughtered, including 19,000 children. And while it is true that he, unlike Joe Biden, forced the Israeli government to reduce the intensity of its campaign substantially, he hasn’t actually brought peace to the strip, where Israel has killed hundreds in recent months and where it continues to brutalize the civilian population.
Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Uzbekistan are founding members of the BOP, and the following countries have indicated an intention to join: Albania, Belarus, Cambodia, Egypt.
The list consists for the most part of small countries or medium powers hoping to ingratiate themselves with the president for their own reasons. The US is the only democracy, if it is one anymore. Turkiye has become a competitive authoritarian regime and Israel rules 5 million Palestinians militarily without affording them any right to vote on their own destinies. Western Europe indignantly rejected Trump’s overtures.
Critics have complained that Trump, who made himself chairman of the board for life, is attempting to replace the United Nations—which he has defunded in an attempt to destroy it—with a body under his personal control.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists. Palestinians are huddling in tents atop the rubble of their former homes, and babies are dying of hypothermia. We can talk about the “ceasefire” when that situation has been remedied.
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Seeking Pentagon Contracts, Bezos Rolls Out Red Carpet After Dropping $40 Million on ‘Melania’
"Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed," said one congressman.
Feb 03, 2026
The $40 million film Melania, a biography of the first lady that was purchased by Amazon, has been panned as a "bribe disguised as a documentary," an "expensive propaganda doc," and a "journey into the void."
But despite the reviews, the tech firm has poured an unprecedented $35 million into a marketing campaign for the documentary, and one government watchdog group suggested Monday that the investment by the third-richest person in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is already paying off.
Bezos welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin facilities in Florida on Monday as part of Hegseth's "Arsenal of Freedom" speaking tour, which is aimed at overhauling the Pentagon's relationship with defense tech companies.
"Blue Origin is committed to supporting national security to, through, and from space," said Bezos at the event.
Speaking during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour at Cape Canaveral, Jeff Bezos says U.S. national security now hinges on industrial speed, scale, and space-based capability.
READ MORE: https://t.co/cOUQii31TJ#amazon #jeffbezos #nationalnews #florida pic.twitter.com/uaFGaoMhnI
— KRCR News Channel 7 (@KRCR7) February 3, 2026
Blue Origin, Bezos' space exploration firm, has received billions of dollars in defense contracts to build technology that uses space lasers, nuclear-powered spacecraft, and a processing facility for satellites.
Hegseth said during his tour that Blue Origin is likely to do "plenty of winning" as the Pentagon hands out additional contracts.
Late last month, Amazon Web Services was also awarded a $581 million contract to support the US Air Force's Cloud One program.
Greg Williams, director of the Project on Government Oversight's Center for Defense Information, told USA Today that on its face, Hegseth's visits to Blue Origin as well as SpaceX, the space technology firm owned by Trump administration associate and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, were not "particularly novel."
But considering Bezos' purchase and promotion of the documentary spotlighting President Donald Trump's wife, said Williams, Hegseth's hobnobbing with the tech mogul raises new questions about Bezos' desire to curry favor with the White House.
"By spending a tiny amount of money to buy the rights," said Williams, Bezos "potentially gets a much larger return."
As such, Hegseth's visit to Blue Origin called attention to a situation of "unprecedented conflict of interest," Williams added.
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) summarized the apparent transaction involving the documentary rights and the government contracts: "Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed."
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'Melania': Of Course It's an Outright $75 Million Bribe
If America still had a Department of Justice, Jeff Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions.
Feb 02, 2026
I haven’t seen it. I hope you don’t, either.
This, from one of the kinder reviews:
“Across some 104 minutes, the first lady delivers these blatantly scripted and meaningless narrations with all the conviction of someone who just woke up from a two-hour nap and can’t remember what day it is.”
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times sees a “glossy, curiously impersonal” portrait of a woman who “rarely drops her Sphinxlike deadpan.” Nick Hilton of The Independent calls the first lady a “scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.” Guardian critic Xan Brooks says it “doesn’t have a single redeeming quality” and compares it to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”
Not since The Washington Post music critic Paul Hume observed that Margaret Truman’s singing voice in Constitution Hall in 1950 was “flat a good deal of the time” has a performance by a member of a sitting president’s family generated such averse reviews.
Yet because the The Washington Post is now owned by the man who spent $75 million on the movie ($40 million to make it, $35 million to promote it), I somehow doubt The Post will crap on it. (At least Monica Hesse, in her review for The Post, had the honesty to confess that “if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president, which was bankrolled by the company owned by the man who also pays my salary—NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron?”)
My purpose today is less to highlight this inane excuse for a film than to talk about its real excuse—allowing Jeff Bezos to give a big fat bribe to the president of the United States.
Why would Bezos bribe him? Please.
Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, owns Amazon and many other businesses that depend on the whims of the sociopath in the Oval Office. (Trump sold the idea of the documentary to Bezos when he dined at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024, just after the election, according to the The Wall Street Journal.)
Bezos’s Amazon Web Services has a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration for cloud services, which presumably Bezos would like renewed. His rocket company, Blue Origin, has over $2.3 billion in contracts from the U.S. Space Force.
Several of Bezos’s companies are subject to potential tariffs on goods from China. Amazon is under the cloud of a major antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (when the FTC was still independent—before it came under the putative control of the Oval Office). The trial is expected in 2027.
And so on.
Friends, when the history of this sordid period of America is written—assuming it’s not written by historians trying to curry favor with a future fascist regime—I hope the leaders of American business are condemned to the hellfire they deserve for helping destroy American democracy.
The outer ring of hell will be reserved for CEOs who stayed silent so as not to rile the narcissist-in-chief.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase will reside here because, notwithstanding his assumed role as spokesman for American business, Dimon has uttered no criticism of Trump other than to suggest, in the vaguest possible terms, that Trump’s attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence “is probably not a great idea.”
The middle ring will be reserved for business leaders who surrendered to Trump’s extortionist demands for personal payoffs.
The Ellisons, père Larry (the world’s third-richest person) et fils David, will be there, along with Shari Redstone and the board of Paramount, for paying Trump $16 million to settle his utterly baseless lawsuit against CBS.
Also in this middle ring will be Bob Iger, CEO of Disney (which owns ABC) and Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, for giving Trump $15 million to settle his equally spurious lawsuit against ABC News.
In the inner ring, where hell fires burn especially hot, will be business leaders who went beyond acquiescing to Trump’s extortion and decided to pay him big fat bribes.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will have pride of place here, after spending a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will get a spot here for lavishing on Trump a custom-designed glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base.
We’ll also find here the CEOs who coughed up $300,000 each for Trump’s ballroom — including crypto magnates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, oil tycoon Harold Hamm, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and every Big Tech mogul.
But Jeff Bezos, with his $75 million bribe of Trump, will deserve a special place in the innermost ring of hell.
The $40 million he paid Melania Trump’s production company is at least $35 million more than the cost of typical high-end documentaries. (By way of comparison, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films produced “RBG,” a documentary about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for around $1 million.)
Melania Trump pocketed more than 70 percent of that $40 million—or more than $28 million—the Journal reported.
The additional $35 million Bezos shelled out for marketing “Melania” is 10 times what other high-profile documentaries spend on marketing. The promotional budget for “RBG” was about $3 million. (To be sure, Melania Trump is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I suppose you might argue that Melania needed a larger promo budget. But this much larger?)
All this, at a time when Bezos is slashing the newsroom at the Post—it’s heart and soul—in order to “economize.” Forget the inner ring. Bezos deserves to be at the center of the inferno.
The promo money apparently worked, at least in the U.S., where opening-weekend ticket sales for “Melania” totaled $7 million.
But let’s be realistic. A $35 million promotional budget will get people into theaters to see paint drying.
If all goes well—given that opening weekend is usually about 25 percent of total box office and that movie houses pocket half — Amazon could end up with about $14 million on its $75 million investment. A pittance.
Yet this was never a financial investment. It was an investment in kissing Trump’s derriere. As Ted Hope, who was instrumental in starting Amazon’s film division, wondered aloud to The New York Times: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”
Of course it’s an outright bribe.
If America still had a Department of Justice, Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions. Penalty: imprisonment for up to 15 years.
(Also note: TheU.S. Constitution lists taking a bribe as an impeachable offense for a president.)
There’s a statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of such bribes: Prosecution must begin within five years of the deed.
So, my friends, if America gets a true Justice Department starting in January of 2029, Bezos’s inferno may become a reality.
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'Scowling Void of Pure Nothingness': Critics Destroy $75 Million Melania Trump Documentary
"It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality," said one critic.
Jan 31, 2026
Critics have weighed in on Amazon MGM Studios' documentary about first lady Melania Trump, and their verdicts are overwhelmingly negative.
According to review aggregation website Metacritic, Melania—which Amazon paid $40 million to acquire and $35 million to market—so far has received a collective score of just 6 out of 100 from critics, which indicates "overwhelming dislike."
Similarly, Melania scores a mere 6% on Rotten Tomatoes' "Tomameter," indicating that 94% of reviews for the movie so far have been negative.
One particularly brutal review came from Nick Hilton, film critic for the Independent, who said that the first lady came off in the film as "a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness" who leads a "vulgar, gilded lifestyle."
Hilton added that the film is so terrible that it fails even at being effective propaganda and is likely to be remembered as "a striking artifact... of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly."
The Guardian's Xan Brooks delivered a similarly scathing assessment, declaring the film "dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing."
"It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality," Brooks elaborated. "I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne."
Donald Clarke of the Irish Times also discussed the film's failure as a piece of propaganda, and he compared it unfavorably to the work of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
"Melania... appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energizing them into massed marching," he wrote. "Triumph of the Dull, perhaps."
Variety's Owen Gleiberman argued that the Melania documentary is utterly devoid of anything approaching dramatic stakes, which results in the film suffering from "staggering inertia."
"Mostly it’s inert," Gleiberman wrote of the film. "It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called 'Day of the Living Tradwife.'"
Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter found that the movie mostly exposes Melania Trump is an empty vessel without a single original thought or insight, instead deploying "an endless number of inspirational phrases seemingly cribbed from self-help books."
Kevin Fallon of the Daily Beast described Melania as "an unbelievable abomination of filmmaking" that reaches "a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review."
"It's so expected," Fallon added, "and utterly pointless."
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Creators of Melania Trump Meme Coin Accused of Fraud as Value Has Tanked By 95%
Investors trusted that no one of the first lady's stature "would knowingly associate with a fraudulent venture,” alleges a lawsuit.
Oct 22, 2025
The creators of the official meme coin of First Lady Melania Trump are being accused of engaging in a sophisticated fraud scheme in a lawsuit filed by cryptocurrency investors.
As reported by Wired on Tuesday, the allegations against the creators of the Melania coin came as part of a proposed amended complaint that had been filed by investors earlier this year against Benjamin Chow, cofounder of crypto exchange Meteora, and Hayden Davis, cofounder of crypto venture capital firm Kelsier Labs.
According to the proposed complaint, Chow and Davis conspired to run pump-and-dump schemes on over a dozen meme coins they launched, including the Melania coin.
Pump-and-dump schemes involve asset owners who knowingly use false information to hype up the value of their assets before selling them off en masse just before their prices crash.
The plaintiffs claim that the alleged scammers have developed a "repeatable six-step ‘playbook’ for pump-and-dump fraud" that had already been used before it was employed on behalf of the first lady's coin, and that inflicted millions of dollars in losses on investors.
The complaint does not name the first lady as a conspirator, but says that she was merely used as "window dressing for a crime engineered" by Chow and Davis.
Despite President Donald Trump's history of financial fraud, which he was found guilty of in New York in 2024, the complaint states that "investors reasonably interpreted the use of Melania Trump’s name and likeness as evidence of legitimacy and due diligence—trusting that no one of her stature would knowingly associate with a fraudulent venture."
Chow and Davis were also responsible to launching the cryptocurrency promoted by Argentine President Javier Milei earlier this year that collapsed in value shortly after its launch.
Max Burwick, an attorney whose law firm Burwick Law is representing the plaintiffs, told Wired that the case "could clarify basic expectations for token launches and disclosures in the US" if it is successful.
According to cryptocurrency news website 99Bitcoins, the Melania meme coin has lost more than 95% of its peak value since its launch in February, and is now trading at under 10 cents per unit.
While Melania Trump was not directly involved in the creation of the now nearly-worthless meme coin, the Trump family was accused last month of the "greatest corruption in presidential history" when it was reported they had added $5 billion in cash to their fortunes when President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency was opened to the public market.
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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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'He's in on the Racket': Watchdog Slams Trump's Crypto Executive Order
The cryptocurrency token that U.S. President Donald Trump launched right before his inauguration, $TRUMP, is now worth billions.
Jan 24, 2025
Following a torrent of executive orders issued in his first few days back in the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump added another one to the list Thursday, this time aimed at promoting U.S. leadership in cryptocurrency—an industry he now holds a considerable stake in.
Co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, Robert Weissman, decried the move, writing in a statement Thursday that "Trump is pushing crypto because he's in on the racket."
This executive order "will help super-inflate what's already a dangerous speculative bubble in an artificial, unregulated asset that will, eventually, burst. The inevitable crash will badly injure millions of everyday Americans," Weissman wrote.
The executive order calls for the establishment of a working group on digital assets to explore the possibility of creating a "national digit asset stockpile"—something that crypto industry has pushed Trump's administration to create. That group would also "propose a federal regulatory framework governing the issuance and operation of digital assets." The order, however, didn't go as far as some in the crypto industry had hoped, remarked The New York Times.
Just prior to his inauguration, Trump launched a so-called meme coin—"$TRUMP"—which as of Thursday afternoon had a market cap of about $7 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The digital asset bitcoin also surged to new heights Monday, the day of Trump's inauguration, buoyed by expectations that the incoming administration will be friendly to the crypto industry.
Trump's decision to launch his crypto coin has been criticized on ethics grounds.
Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, wrote in an MSNBC op-ed published Friday that having wealth linked to cryptocurrency will "obviously impact" how Trump's administration approaches regulation the market.
What's more, Hauser warned, "crypto markets are frequently believed to be subject to manipulation by 'whales,' i.e., large investors. Having a Trump asset so susceptible to manipulation is highly concerning. Consider whales who might manipulate the Trump coin's worth to buy influence with the president by intervening with purchases at strategic moments."
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