Skip to content

… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Home
About

Tag: fantastically wealthy

UK Government condemns Israel’s launch of tender for the E1 settlement project
Spread the love
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, arrives at 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly Cabinet meeting in London, United Kingdom on July 21, 2026. [Zeynep Demir – Anadolu Agency]
In a rare display of opposition, the UK Government on Wednesday issued a strongly worded statement condemning Israel’s publication of a tender for the E1 settlement, describing the project is an unacceptable and destructive act.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said: “E1 would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution.
“The UK has been clear privately and publicly in our opposition to E1 and our support for a two-state solution as the only way to ensure long-term security and peace for both Palestinians and Israelis. All settlements damage that prospect and are a flagrant breach of international law.
“Today, I made clear to the Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar that the Israeli Government must halt E1 plans immediately, retract the tender and stop all settlement expansion.
READ: Israel issues tender for illegal E. Jerusalem settlement units in breach of promise, rights groups say
“In addition, the Israeli Chargé d’Affaires has been summoned to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, where we set out the UK’s profound objection to this move by the Netanyahu government and demanded an immediate reversal.
“The impact of settler violence and terrorism has been catastrophic for Palestinian communities. Settlement expansion and attempts to create irreversible divisions on the ground threaten peace, security and the prospects for a viable Palestinian state.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the Two-State Solution.
“In the coming weeks we will set out a comprehensive set of measures to respond to Israeli government policies, protect the viability of the Palestinian state, target sanctions at those who participate in illegal settlement expansion and support a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians.”
READ: Pro-Palestine coalition call on UK government to act against genocide
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
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.
21 August 2026
Spread the love
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
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.
21 August 2026
UK, Italy, France, Germany urge Israel to halt plans on occupied West Bank settlement expansion
Spread the love
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Palestinian citizens of Israel referred to as “48 Arabs,” stage a protest demanding that Israel end its violations in Gaza and the West Bank, in Umm al-Fahm, Israel on August 08, 2026. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
The UK, Italy, France and Germany on Thursday condemned Israel’s decision to publish construction tenders for the E1 settlement project in the occupied West Bank, warning they threaten the chance of a two-state solution, Anadolu reports.
The four governments said the expansion was “unacceptable” and warned that the E1 development would “undermine the prospect of the two-state solution by driving a wedge through the West Bank and harming the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian Territories.”
The governments said the international community had long opposed settlement expansion and repeatedly raised its concerns with Israel — privately and publicly.
“International Law is clear that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal,” they said, adding that the position had been reaffirmed by the UN Security Council.
The four countries also expressed concern about the wider situation in the West Bank, citing “unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians” alongside serious restrictions on the Palestinian economy.
READ: Germany criticises Israeli airstrike on Syrian airbase
They urged Israel to withdraw the plans immediately and to end its expansion of settlements in the West Bank.
“Not only will they take us further from peace, but they further undermine Israel’s international standing,” they said.
The governments also urged businesses not to bid for construction tenders connected with the project, warning companies to consider the potential “legal and reputational consequences,” including the risk of involvement as “serious breaches of international law.”
The statement reiterated the commitment of the four countries to a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution.”
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
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.
21 August 2026
‘A Government of the Rich, by the Rich, for the Rich’: Nearly 60 Top Trump Officials Worth $100 Million or More
Spread the love
Article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
US President Donald Trump, alongside Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent (L) and Secretary of Commerce nominee Howard Lutnick (R), signs an executive order to create a US sovereign wealth fund in the Oval Office of the White House on February 3, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration has over 10 times as many of these super-rich appointees as the Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush administrations.
President Donald Trump has created a government “of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.”
That’s what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Monday following the release of a report demonstrating how the president has handed the reins of power over to the ultra-wealthy on an unprecedented scale.
RECOMMENDED…
As Americans Struggled to Buy Basics, These 6 Companies Got $83 Billion in Tax Breaks Last Year
Mamdani Backs Proposal to End Amazon’s ‘Exploitative’ Delivery Model in New York City
The analysis by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that 57 officials working for the Trump administration are worth over $100 million, while eight of them are worth a billion or more.
Seventeen of them are ambassadors, while the other 40 occupy senior posts, including over a third of Cabinet positions. More than half of them were donors to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, giving a combined $65 million in campaign contributions to him or his associated political committees.
The tally does not include Trump himself, who has seen his family’s wealth explode by over $2 billion, mostly from his cryptocurrency venture, since returning to power. His net worth is now estimated by Forbes to be about $6.2 billion.
A new report shows there are 57 Trump officials worth at least $100 million.

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg: "This government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Donald Trump: A government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 17, 2026
The ultra-rich officials include Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the wife of former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO Vince McMahon, who has little experience working in education but is worth between $413 million and $1.3 billion and has spent over $20 million supporting Trump; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is worth at least $723 million and spent over $9 million to back the president; and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who spent about $1.15 million in 2024 supporting Trump.
The Trump administration has more than 10 times as many “ultra-millionaires” as previous administrations, the report found. The Biden administration had just five members with over $100 million; the Obama administration had three, and the George W. Bush administration had five.
“The enormous wealth of Trump administration officials raises questions about whether they are driven by their sweeping personal financial interests or the interests of the American public at large, which they have an obligation to serve,” writes its author, Doug Pasternak, the head of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has not only employed the super-rich but has also enacted a slate of policies benefiting them.
The administration has facilitated what has been described as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history, with over $1 trillion in tax cuts for the top 1% paid for by brutal cuts to programs that benefit the poorest Americans, like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
On top of this, he has gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protected Americans against abuse by powerful financial institutions, and enacted sweeping deregulation of cryptocurrencies. His Labor Department has systematically dismantled worker protections while he’s stripped collective bargaining rights from over 1 million federal employees.
The report also notes that many of Trump’s wealthy appointees retain financial ties to companies or industries directly affected by the agencies they now control, creating significant potential conflicts of interest.
Lutnick’s Commerce Department, for example, has a role in regulating the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which is now controlled by his sons and was chosen to handle a $1.5 billion stock offering tied to a mining company receiving federal support from the department. Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg’s former firm, Cerberus, meanwhile, owns companies that have received at least $90 million in Pentagon investments and contracts.
Read our report on Trump’s billionaire boys club: https://t.co/O49E9jGlPN
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 17, 2026
“When the people holding the reins of government are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the ultra-rich, it leads to misplaced incentives and corruption, and begs the question whose interests they are truly serving,” said Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of Public Citizen.
The report points out the enormous chasm between the extraordinary wealth of the average Trump appointee and that of the Americans they represent, whose average annual salary is about $64,500.
“This disconnect,” the report says, “has ripple effects throughout the government and across the entire nation.”
In a June poll conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, 62% of registered voters said corruption in US politics and government was “a very big problem.” More than two-thirds described Trump as corrupt, while over 4 in 5 said the Cabinet was.
“The breadth and depth of the economic divide we quantified in this report,” Pasternak said, “should be deeply troubling to anyone concerned about the welfare of our democracy.”
Article by Stephen Prager 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.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
18 August 2026
Why sanctions are needed on Israel
Spread the love
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/why-sanctions-are-needed-israel
NAKBA 78: Protesters on the huge London rally on the anniversary of the Nakba in May
History suggests apartheid ends not through appeals to conscience alone but through sustained economic and political pressure, says HUGH LANNING
…
With every red line it crosses from the Nakba to genocide, Israel reveals its contempt for international law. It revels in the impunity the Western world grants that result partly from guilt rightly felt for the horrific crimes we inflicted on Jewish people in our countries, not just in the second world war, but over centuries of antisemitism, which is still ongoing.
But also, because Israel is a major part of the West’s colonial and now neoliberal strategy in the Middle East.
Under the protective wing of an increasingly authoritarian US and led by the ever-stronger fascist and racist tendencies within, Israel believes it has a generational opportunity to conquer Palestine completely and establish the zionist dream of a “greater Israel” from the river to the sea.
The mentality is: “If we got away with genocide in Gaza, we can get away with anything.”
How is this avalanche of violence, death and atrocity to be stopped? Well, not by the mealy mouthed “sanctions” recently announced by Yvette Cooper. When is a sanction not a sanction? When it does nothing to the perpetrators of the crime. Under international law the official role of sanctions is to bring pressure to bear on the miscreants to achieve compliance.
The token measures announced “target individuals and entities involved in financing and enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank.” No mention of the Israeli state.
The Israeli government is a settler government; the forcible settlement of the West Bank is its official policy. It legalises and legitimises even the outlier settlements illegal under Israeli law. The IDF either stands idly by or actively protects and supports the settlers as they go about their violent business. Not surprisingly as many of the soldiers are themselves settlers — brothers and sisters of those committing the crimes.
The government itself is riddled by members of extreme settler parties. Indeed, Israel is a settler colonial entity, all but a few of its citizens are settlers.
…
Apart from an arms embargo on the two-way trade with Israel, the new Burnham government ought to institute an audit of all government, local and national, expenditure, contracts and co-operation to identify and stop any support for companies engaged in supporting the settlements and the occupation — Oracle and Palantir being obvious examples.
As the US has done with Russia and supporters of Palestine — follow the money. The war, the occupation, the settlements are all funded with much investment and finance coming from abroad and being channelled through British financial institutions. This should be stopped.
The EU has a positive trade agreement with Israel treating it an as associate member which Britain is trying to replicate following Brexit. These trade agreements should be ended.
The government and its representatives ought to support, not block, moves in international bodies to ban and boycott Israel — be it Fifa or Eurovision — Israel should be treated as the apartheid state it is.
So complicit has the British state been for decades, the list of what could be done is almost endless.
…
Hugh Lanning will be among the speakers at a Labour and Palestine online event on Tuesday July 7 looking at ending Britain’s role in crimes against the Palestinian people. Find out more and register for the meeting at bit.ly/endukcomplicity.
Join the National March for Palestine July 18 in central London at noon. Visit palestinecampaign.org for more details.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/why-sanctions-are-needed-israel
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/
Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
7 July 2026

←Previous Page

1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 16

… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

A UK Socialist's blog

Blog
About
FAQs
Authors

Events
Shop
Patterns
Themes

Twenty Twenty-Five

Designed with WordPress