Bernie Sanders

AOC Would Be Formidable 2028 Presidential Candidate, Sanders Says

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) rise and political future on “The Axios Show” on October 23, 2023. (Photo: Axios/screenshot)

In addition to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said the senator, “you’ve got a lot of great young people right now in the Progressive Caucus in the House… And that gives me a lot of optimism about our political future.”

Despite the Trump administration’s increasing assaults on immigrant communities, the political left, and the rule of law, US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday said he is optimistic “about our political future” when he looks at progressive leaders including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In excerpts of the latest episode of “The Axios Show” by the news outlet Axios, which is set to be released in full on Friday, Sanders (I-Vt.) weighed in on the recent news that Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is considering a presidential run in 2028.

When host Alex Thompson asked him whether Ocasio-Cortez would be a “formidable” candidate, Sanders replied, “I think she would.”

He added that a number of other Democratic elected officials would also be good candidates, and said the congresswoman’s future political moves are “her decision to make.” Ocasio-Cortez has also been named as a potential challenger to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2026.

Sanders spoke about Ocasio-Cortez’s ability to connect with voters she meets in person.

“I’ve been out on the streets with her, people come up, and how she responds to people is so incredibly genuine and open,” he said. “It’s just something that’s a gift that she has. It’s a quality that she has, she’s a great speaker out there.”

While progressive electoral successes like Ocasio-Cortez’s have often been dismissed by centrist Democrats and Republicans who claim left-wing candidates don’t have appeal outside of deep-blue urban areas like New York City, the congresswoman—who’s often called by her nickname, AOC—has received warm receptions in conservative, rural parts of the country, including when speaking to crowds of thousands with Sanders on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour this year.

“She comes from the working class, she was a kid who was cleaning houses with her mother,” he said. “She knows what it’s like not to have any money and she’s going out, fighting for working families all over this country.”

Sanders emphasized that the Democratic Party has an increasingly deep bench of left-wing political leaders, naming Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Maxwell Alejandro Frost (Fla.).

“I do want to say, it’s not just Alexandria,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of great young people right now in the Progressive Caucus in the House…I mean literally dozens… And that gives me a lot of optimism about our political future.”

Sanders also spoke about Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who is running a campaign focused on lifting up the working class in the primary against multiple candidates, including Gov. Janet Mills, as the party aims to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Platner has been the subject of controversy in recent days over deleted Reddit posts he wrote in the past and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol—one that he got while serving in the military and that didn’t prevent him from being approved to reenlist. He announced Wednesday that he had gotten the tattoo covered with another image, before continuing his campaign with a town hall where he spoke to hundreds of Maine voters.

When Thompson asked Sanders about Platner’s controversies, he answered that he is “not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, ‘What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest?’”

“Between you and me, there might be one or two more important issues,” he said before speaking about the progressive oyster farmer’s impressive campaign rallies and the “dark period” he went through in the past.

“He went through some very difficult experiences in the military,” said Sanders. “Seeing his friends killed… He went to the VA and by the way, he says they rebuilt his life. He went into a dark period in his life. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period.”

“The guy that I saw up on the stage in Portland, Maine, rather a brilliant guy,” said the senator. “Really a strong fighter for the working class, very articulate, very smart and what he said is, ‘Yeah, I went through a dark period and said stupid things. I am not the person that I was back then.’”

“And I think as a nation,” he added, “especially given the fact that we have a president who was convicted of 34 felonies, maybe we have to do a little bit of forgiveness.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Front Orca supports AOC, urges her to kick some ass.
Front Orca supports AOC, urges her to kick some ass.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.

Continue ReadingAOC Would Be Formidable 2028 Presidential Candidate, Sanders Says

Nationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech’s Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers

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Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An operator works at the data centre of French company OVHcloud in Roubaix, northern France on April 3, 2025. (Photo by Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images)

“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” said Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”

America’s biggest tech firms are facing an increasing backlash over the energy-devouring data centers they are building to power artificial intelligence.

Semafor reported on Monday that opposition to data center construction has been bubbling up in communities across the US, as both Republican and Democratic local officials have been campaigning on promises to clamp down on Silicon Valley’s most expensive and ambitious projects.

In Virginia’s 30th House of Delegates district, for example, both Republican incumbent Geary Higgins and Democratic challenger John McAuliff have been battling over which one of them is most opposed to AI data center construction in their region.

In an interview with Semafor, McAuliff said that opposition to data centers in the district has swelled up organically, as voters recoil at both the massive amount of resources they consume and the impact that consumption is having on both the environment and their electric bills.

“We’re dealing with the biggest companies on the planet,” he explained. “So we need to make sure Virginians are benefiting off of what they do here, not just paying for it.”

NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.

“A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more,” NPR explained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. “They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.”

Data centers’ massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.

This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.

As BBC reported back in August, residents in Mansfield have resorted to buying bottled water because their wells have been delivering murky water, which they said wasn’t a problem before the Meta data center came online. Although Meta has commissioned a study that claims to show its data center hasn’t affected local groundwater quality, Mansfield resident Beverly Morris told BBC she isn’t buying the company’s findings.

“My everyday life, everything has been affected,” she said, in reference to the presence of the data center. “I’ve lived through this for eight years. This is not just today, but it is affecting me from now on.”

Anxieties about massive power consumption are also spurring the backlash against data centers, and recent research shows these fears could be well founded.

Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans’ electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024.

“The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products,” Jacobs explained. “People deserve to understand the full extent of how data centers in their communities may affect their lives and wallets. This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies’ profits.”

While the backlash to data centers hasn’t yet become a national issue, Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), predicted in an interview with Semafor that opposition to their construction would be a winning political issue for any politician savvy enough to get ahead of it.

“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” he said. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”

Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingNationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech’s Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers

Under Pressure From Anti-Oligarchy Protests, Bezos Moves Venice Wedding Party Venue

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Activists drape a “No Space For Bezos” banner from Venice’s iconic Rialto Bridge on June 13, 2025 to protest a party celebrating the wedding of multicentibillionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sánchez. (Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images)

“We’re just citizens who started organizing and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world,” said one protest organizer.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez on Tuesday relocated their upcoming lavish Venice wedding celebration, a move cheered as an “enormous victory” by protesters whose recent demonstrations in the northeastern Italian city have highlighted the socioeconomic and climate damage caused by billionaires.

Bezos—who is currently the world’s fourth-richest person, according to lists published by Bloomberg and Forbes—is set to marry Sánchez, a journalist, later this week, and the couple is planning to celebrate the occasion with a three-day extravaganza costing an estimated $46-56 million, according to Reuters.

Around 90 private jets are scheduled to land in area airports and local yacht harbors are fully booked, underscoring the climate and environmental impact on a city struggling to survive on one of myriad frontlines of the planetary emergency.

“We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!”

The nuptial celebration has been relocated from the Scuola Grande della Misericordia to the Arsenale di Venezia, a historic fortified palace about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) away from the original location. Officials cited concerns for the security of guests including several members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s family.

Members of groups including No Space for Bezos, Greenpeace Italy, and Everyone Hates Elon—which targets Elon Musk, the world’s richest person—have staged a series of demonstrations, including one on Monday at which protesters laid out a massive banner with Bezos’ face and the message “If You Can Rent Venice for Your Wedding You Can Pay More Tax” in Piazza San Marco.

Responding to the celebration’s relocation, Tommaso Cacciari of No Space for Bezos told the BBC Wednesday: “We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!”

“We’re just citizens who started organizing and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world,” Cacciari added.

Wedding-related festivities are set to kick off Thursday evening, and city officials have blocked off parts of central Venice. While some residents have welcomed the money and fanfare the event will bring to a city with a long and storied history of oligarchs and opulence, others bristle at what they see as the transformation of their home into a playground for the superrich.

“There’s only one thing that rules now: money, money, money, so we are the losers,” Venice resident Nadia Rigo told Reuters. “We who were born here have to either move to the mainland or we have to ask them for permission to board a ferry. They’ve become the masters.”

In the United States, critics contrasted the stratospheric cost of Bezos’ celebration with the multicentibillionaire’s history of personal and corporate tax dodging—and the hyper-capitalist system that enables it.

“Jeff Bezos is worth $230 billion and is reportedly spending $20 million on a three-day wedding in Venice while sailing around on his $500 million yacht,” former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Wednesday on the social media site X. “If he can afford to do that, he can afford a wealth tax and to pay Amazon workers a living wage. Hello?”

This is oligarchy. This is obscene.While 60% live paycheck to paycheck & kids go hungry, Jeff Bezos, worth $230 billion, goes to Venice on his $500 million yacht for a $20 million wedding & spends $5 million on a ring while his real tax rate is just 1.1%.End this oligarchy.

— Senator Bernie Sanders (@sanders.senate.gov) 2025-06-24T16:04:35.475Z

While No Space for Bezos organizers are celebrating their victory and have canceled plans to fill Venice’s canals with inflatable crocodiles in a bid to block celebrity guests from accessing the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, they said they still plan on protesting the festivities by holding a “No Bezos, No War” rally and march.

“It will be a strong, decisive protest, but peaceful,” Federica Toninello of the Social Housing Assembly network toldEuronews Wednesday. “We want it to be like a party, with music, to make clear what we want our Venice to look like.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingUnder Pressure From Anti-Oligarchy Protests, Bezos Moves Venice Wedding Party Venue

After Trump’s Bombing, Sanders Condemns ‘Lies’ Over Iran Nuclear Threat

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies.”

While a number of statements by members of Congress in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities focused largely on the fact that the White House acted without congressional authorization—a constitutional violation—U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed anger over another aspect of the unilateral military action: the “lies” that the Trump administration is telling the public to justify the bombing.

The White House’s act of war against Iran, said the Vermont independent senator, was just the latest in a long line of military boondoggles that followed lies powerful politicians told about the threats posed by foreign countries—before taking action that ultimately killed millions of people while doing nothing to protect U.S. security.

“In the 1960s the United States government lied to the American people and took us into a terrible war in Vietnam,” said Sanders. “The result of that war was that over 58,000 young Americans died and many more came back wounded both in mind and in spirit. Millions of Vietnamese were also killed.”

Decades later, Americans were told by then-President George W. Bush that the U.S. must act quickly to stop Iraq from building “weapons of mass destruction”—with U.S. officials following the guidance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The United States invaded Iraq and became embroiled in a long civil war there. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That war was based on a lie—a lie which cost us 4,492 young Americans, 32,000 wounded, over half a million Iraqis and trillions of dollars,” said Sanders.

“The American people are being lied to again today,” he added. “We cannot allow history to repeat itself.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran is not attempting to build a nuclear weapon with its enriched uranium stockpile, backing up repeated statements from Iranian officials who have said the country’s nuclear program is used only for peaceful civilian purposes.

Sanders’ statement came several hours after he learned while speaking at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Trump had bombed Iran, authorizing strikes on three nuclear facilities, which Iranian officials condemned as a violation of international law.

At the rally, supporters erupted in a chant of “No more war!” after Sanders read Trump’s statement on the attack.

The spontaneous display of outrage over the latest U.S. attack on the Middle East underscored the reality of the moment, said The Nation writer Jeet Heer, as one poll released Thursday showed that just 8% of Americans favored the U.S. becoming directly involved in Israel’s attacks on Iran that began earlier this month.

“There is only one off-ramp from Trump’s mad rush to war: the quick mobilization of an anti-war opposition,” said Heer. “The people are ready.”

As the Trump administration boasted about the “severe damage” the strikes had done to Iran’s nuclear program, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid called on Democratic lawmakers to tap into voters’ palpable outrage—not about Trump’s failure to seek congressional authorization for the strikes, but about the fact that the U.S. is pursuing a war in Iran at all while repeating Netanyahu’s unsubstantiated claims about the Iranians’ ability to produce a nuclear bomb.

“No one ever won a fight yelling, ‘Congressional authorization.’ Voters need clarity amid the chaos,” said Shahid. “Lead with this: No more blank checks for corrupt and endless foreign wars, we’re here to focus on fighting for working Americans.”

Shahid’s comments echoed Sanders’ statement decrying Trump’s lies.

“The U.S. faces enormous problems here at home, which we must address,” said Sanders. “We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

Continue ReadingAfter Trump’s Bombing, Sanders Condemns ‘Lies’ Over Iran Nuclear Threat

Top 19 ‘Truly Superwealthy’ US Families Grew $1 Trillion Richer Last Year: Analysis

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Priscilla Chan, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend President Donald Trump’s inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Families including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg now control a combined $2.6 trillion in wealth, according to renowned economist Gabriel Zucman.

A new analysis by a leading chronicler of the United States’ exploding inequality shows that the 19 richest American households added $1 trillion to their collective fortunes last year and saw their share of the nation’s wealth jump at a record-shattering pace.

The analysis by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the 19 wealthiest U.S. families now control 1.8%—or $2.6 trillion—of the nation’s total household wealth.

In 2024, those ultrarich households saw the largest single-year wealth increase on record.

The Wall Street Journal noted in its Wednesday write-up of Zucman’s analysis—based on data from Forbes, Fortune, and the Federal Reserve—that the families in his “research on the top 0.00001% in the U.S. are worth at least $45 billion per household and include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and private-equity investor Stephen Schwarzman.”

Their wealth is largely tied up in the U.S. stock market, which rose more than 23% in 2024. The richest 10% of U.S. households control 93% of stock market wealth, according to the Federal Reserve.

(Source: Gabriel Zucman via The Wall Street Journal)

Zucman, whose analysis dates back to 1913, told the Journal that the U.S. has recently seen a “dramatic acceleration in the rise of the share of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy”—a trend that would continue if President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress pass tax legislation largely benefiting the rich.

“If there’s one glimmer of hope it is this,” Zucman wrote on social media last month, pointing to a packed “Fighting Oligarchy” rally held in Denver by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“There is a strong anti-oligarchic current in America, and it has a formidable champion,” Zucman added. “Fight!”

The Journal reported Wednesday that “a household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average of $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars.”

“In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average of $450,000 per household, per year,” the Journal added.

Meanwhile, families at the bottom of the U.S. income and wealth distribution have struggled due to what the Economic Policy Institute recently described as “policy-induced wage suppression.”

A February working paper by the think tank RAND estimated that the bottom 90% of U.S. workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone had the income distribution been more even rather than flowing disproportionately to the top.

“Since 1975, nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%,” Sanders said last month in response to the paper. “The massive income and wealth inequality in America today is not only morally unjust, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Continue ReadingTop 19 ‘Truly Superwealthy’ US Families Grew $1 Trillion Richer Last Year: Analysis