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As Israel Openly Declares Starvation as a Weapon, Media Still Hesitate to Blame It for Famine
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Original article by Belén Fernández republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted that Republican officials at Mar-a-Lago “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 2 that “Israel has decided to stop letting goods and supplies into Gaza,” where the ongoing Israeli genocide, with the loyal backing of the United States, has officially killed more than 51,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The announcement regarding the total halt of humanitarian aid amounted to yet another explicit declaration of the starvation policy that Israel is pursuing in the Gaza Strip, a territory that—thanks in large part to 17 consecutive years of Israeli blockade—has long been largely dependent on such aid for survival.
Of course, this was not the first time that senior Israeli officials had advertised their reliance on the war crime of forced starvation in the current genocidal assault on Gaza. On October 9, 2023, two days after the most recent launch of hostilities, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Two days after that, Foreign Minister Israel Katz boasted of cutting off “water, electricity and fuel” to the territory.
And just this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proclaimed that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.” Following an April 22 dinner held in his honor in Florida at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Ben-Gvir reported that US Republicans had
expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.
Never mind that the hostages would have been brought home safely as scheduled had Israel chosen to comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas that was implemented in January, rather than definitively annihilating the agreement on March 18. It is no doubt illustrative of Israel’s modus operandi that the March 2 decision to block the entry of all food and other items necessary for human existence took place in the middle of an ostensible ceasefire.
‘Starved, bombed, strangled’
A year ago, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) said it was “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”
While Ben-Gvir’s most recent comments have thus far eluded commentary in the US corporate media, the roundabout media approach to the whole starvation theme has been illuminating in its own right. It has not, obviously, been possible to avoid reporting on the subject altogether, as the United Nations and other organizations have pretty much been warning from the get-go of Israel’s actions causing widespread famine in Gaza.
In December 2023, for example, just two months after the onset of Israel’s blood-drenched campaign, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC scale, determined that “over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse).” The assessment went on: “Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) were in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) were in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).”
A full year ago, in April 2024, even Samantha Power—then the administrator of the US Agency for International Development—conceded that it was “credible” that famine was already well underway in parts of the Gaza Strip. And the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs now warns that Gaza is “likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023”—its population being “starved, bombed, strangled” and subjected to “deprivation by design.”
Disappearance of agency
Typically, even when outlets report sympathetically on hunger in Gaza, they fail to state clearly that it is the deliberate result of Israeli policy, as in this New York Times headline (6/25/24).
None of these details have escaped the pages and websites of corporate media outlets, although the media’s frequent reliance on ambiguous wordiness tends to distract readers from what is actually going on—and who is responsible for it. Take, for instance, the New York Times headline “Gaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments” (6/25/24), or the CBS video “Hunger Spreads Virtually Everywhere in Gaza Amid Israel/Hamas War” (12/5/24). Even news outlets that intermittently undertake to spotlight the human plight of, inter alia, individual parents in Gaza losing their children to starvation remain susceptible to long-winded efforts to disperse blame. (As of April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that 27 children in northern Gaza had already died of starvation and disease.)
In an era in which news consumption often consists of skimming headlines, the phrasing of article titles is of utmost import. And yet many headlines manage to entirely excise the role of Israel in Gaza’s “hunger crisis”—as in CNN’s report (2/24): “‘We Are Dying Slowly:’ Palestinians Are Eating Grass and Drinking Polluted Water as Famine Looms Across Gaza.” Or take the Reuters headline (3/24/24): “Gaza’s Catastrophic Food Shortage Means Mass Death Is Imminent, Monitor Says.” Or this one from ABC News (11/15/24): “Famine ‘Occurring or Imminent’ in Parts of Northern Gaza, Experts Warn UN Security Council.”
It’s not that these headlines are devoid of sympathy for Palestinian suffering. The issue, rather, is the dilution—and even disappearance—of agency, such that the “catastrophic food shortage” is rendered as transpiring in a sort of vacuum and thereby letting the criminals perpetrating it off the hook. Imagine if a Hamas rocket from Gaza killed an infant in Israel and the media reported the event as follows: “Israeli Baby Perishes as Rocket Completes Airborne Trajectory.”
‘No shortage of aid’
NBC‘s headline (4/17/24) gives Israel’s denial of a problem equal weight with aid workers’ description of Gazans’ desperate situation.
Then there is the matter of the media’s incurable habit of ceding Israeli officials a platform to spout demonstrable lies, as in the April 17 NBC News headline “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.” The fact that Israel is permitted to make such claims is particularly perplexing, given Israeli officials’ own announcements that no aid whatsoever may enter the territory, while the “dire conditions” are made abundantly clear in the text of the article itself: “The Global Nutrition Cluster, a coalition of humanitarian groups, has warned that in March alone, 3,696 children were newly admitted for care for acute malnutrition” in Gaza.
Among numerous other damning statistics conveyed in the dispatch, we learn that all Gaza bakeries supported by the UN World Food Programme closed down on March 31, “after wheat flour ran out.” Meanwhile, the WFP calculated that Israel’s closure of border crossings into Gaza caused prices of basic goods “to soar between 150% and 700% compared with prewar levels, and by 29% to as much as 1,400% above prices during the ceasefire.”
Against such a backdrop, it’s fairly ludicrous to allow Israeli officials to “maintain there is ‘no shortage’ of aid in Gaza and accuse Hamas of withholding supplies.” If the press provides Israel with space to spout whatever nonsense it wants—reality be damned—where is the line ultimately drawn? If Israel decides Hamas is using wheat flour to build rockets, will that also be reported with a straight face?
Lest anyone think that thwarting the entry of food into the Gaza Strip is a new thing, recall that Israel’s blockade of Gaza long predated the present war—although the details of said blockade are generally glossed over in the media in favor of the myth that Israel unilaterally “withdrew” from the territory in 2005. In 2010, the BBC (6/21/10) listed some basic foodstuffs—pardon, potential “dual-use items”—that Israel had at different times in recent history blocked from entering Gaza, including pasta, coffee, tea, nuts and chocolate. In 2006, just a year after the so-called “withdrawal,” Israeli government adviser Dov Weissglas outlined the logic behind Israel’s restriction of food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Fast forward almost two decades, and it’s safe to say that the “idea” has evolved; this is a genocide, after all—even if the corporate media refuse to say the word—and starvation is part and parcel of that. But on account of Israel’s extra-special relationship with the United States, US media have institutionalized the practice of beating around the bush when it comes to documenting Israeli crimes. This is how we end up with the aforementioned long-winded headlines instead of, say, the far more straightforward “Israel is starving Gaza,” a Google search of which terms produces not a single corporate media dispatch, but does lead to a January 2024 report by that very name, courtesy of none other than the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
‘Starving as negotiation tactic’
Megan Stack (New York Times, 3/13/25): “Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding.”
That said, there have been a few surprises. The New York Times (3/13/25), for example, took a short break from its longstanding tradition of unabashed apologetics for Israeli atrocities in allowing the following sentence to appear in a March opinion article by Megan Stack: “Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic.” In the very least, this was a vast improvement, in terms of syntactic clarity and assignation of blame, over previous descriptions of Israeli behavior immortalized on the pages of the US newspaper of record—like that time the Israeli military slaughtered four kids playing by the sea in Gaza, and the Times editors (7/16/14) went with the headline “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.”
In the end, Israel’s starvation of the Gaza Strip is multifaceted. It’s not just about physically blocking the entry of food into the besieged enclave. It’s also about Israel’s near-total decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system: the bombardment of hospitals, the targeting of ambulances, the massacres of medical personnel (FAIR.org, 4/11/25). It’s about Israeli military attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and workers, including the April 2024 massacre of seven international employees of the food organization World Central Kitchen.
It’s about Israel razing agricultural areas, wiping out food production, devastating the fishing industry and depleting livestock. It’s about Israel bombing water infrastructure in Gaza. And it’s about Israeli troops slaughtering at least 112 desperate Palestinians queuing for flour on February 29, 2024 (FAIR.org, 3/22/24)—which was at least a quicker way of killing starving people than waiting for them to starve.
In his 2017 London Review of Books essay (6/15/17) on the use of famine as a weapon of war, Alex de Waal referenced the “physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide,” noting that “forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust.” It’s worth reflecting on the essay’s opening paragraph:
In its primary use, the verb “to starve” is transitive: It’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: Today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase “man-made famine” as if such events were unusual.
As for the current case of the Gaza Strip, US establishment journalists appear to be doing their best to avoid the transitive nature of the verb in question—or any subject-verb-object construction that might too overtly expose Israeli savagery. And by treating famine in Gaza as a subject unto itself, rather than a “technique of genocide,” to borrow de Waal’s words, the media assist in obscuring the bigger picture about this very man-made famine—which is that Israel is not just starving Gaza. Israel is exterminating Gaza.
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Original article by Belén Fernández republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
27 April 2025
So, Are We Just Going to Let Ourselves Die?
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Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.
The elites are blind, the media asleep — but the fuse of revolution has been lit, and history is about to turn.
Shortly before I was imprisoned last year, I had the privilege of joining a Zoom call with a man living in the Central American rainforest. He had been the primary fundraiser for the Social Forum, which, as some readers will recall, was the first international organisation of this century to call for a new global social system: “Another world is possible.” He told me, “Roger, when you go to see funders, tell them two things: First, that the money is not theirs, and second, that it will be worth nothing in ten years.”
This week, I recorded a message for one of the most radical Western companies funding climate crisis activism. I spoke to them about these two realities. Five years ago, perhaps even a year ago, they would have politely—or not so politely—shown us the door. But not now. My colleague was told the presentation was “magical,” information about funding a new global movement was shared with over 100 staff members, and a personal letter from me will be delivered by hand to the company’s founder, whose funds run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, Just Stop Oil announced it would no longer engage in civil resistance. The media response has been significant, but none of it has focused on what really matters. I was sent a series of questions by Justin Rowlatt, the BBC environment correspondent. I replied to him with three main points. First, it is the evolution of a deep culture of respect, service, and trust that took us from three people in a room with a few quid to a household name, with thousands of arrests and millions of pounds in financial support, all within a year. Equally significant has been the unprecedented battering we have received, resulting in hundreds of people being imprisoned, many on multi-year sentences, including nearly all the key organisers. Nothing like this has happened to an open, nonviolent organisation in this country since the Napoleonic Wars.
A day or two later, the police battered down the door of Westminster Friends Meeting House in a raid to arrest a group of young people planning a protest. How many centuries would you have to go back to find this kind of treatment of the Quakers? The point, however, is this: it is only in the face of such state violence that the fearless personality is forged, prepared for the enormous sacrifices needed to bring down regimes.
Then there is the third, least important point, that obviously JSO has not been able to stop the metamachine of universal death that is the British carbon regime. Justin, in true neoliberal style, focused only on the third point: our “failure” – the superficial, the short-term, the flat material plane. He and the media cannot see cultural and spiritual depth.
The key determinants of regime change are now coming into place — large-scale funding, service-based culture, and the spirit of fearless sacrifice. There is one more ingredient. Ignored by the media is the “climate news” of the past 12 months, which is a hundred times worse than what provoked the mass mobilisation of Extinction Rebellion back in 2018. Underlying temperatures have jumped 0.2°C in a single year. We are now over 1.6°C and will be hitting 2°C by 2030. The carbon sinks are collapsing, and the feedbacks are triggered. Buried in the Appendix of the recent British Insurance Industry report is its prediction of 2 billion deaths at 2°C, and 4 billion at 3°C. That is half of the world’s population dead. This reality is about to explode upon us and trigger the fusion of the elements of revolutionary transformation.
Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the New York Times during the 1990s, told me a while ago that the reason why the elites do not see revolutions coming is because they only speak to themselves. They are stuck in their silo. Like Justin Rowlett and the BBC, they can only see what they want to see. The world is falling away beyond our feet. Trump is doing his stuff. They have no alternative but to resort to appeasement. And like in the 1930s, their dream world is about to be swept away.
So are we just going to have ourselves die? The deepest paradox of the present historical moment is that only when we have the courage to answer yes to that question, and so allow ourselves to experience the agonising depths of despair, desolation, and self-contempt, can we come to see and feel reality as it actually is, and so play our part in the coming re-making of the world.
To find out about this new global movement (we’re recruiting!) go to rev21.earth.
Sign Up for Revolution in the 21st Century
Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
26 April 2025
The 89%: New Media Collaboration Calls Attention to ‘Climate Change’s Silent Majority’
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Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Climate activists and supporters displayed placards during a global climate strike rally, part of the Fridays for Future movement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 11, 2025. (Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” one of the project’s organizers said.
According to a global survey, 89% of people worldwide want their government to do more to address the climate crisis, yet current national policies put the world on track for 3.1°C of warming.
To explore this disconnect, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) launched the 89% Project on Monday to encourage coverage of “climate change’s silent majority” and ask some key questions.
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. “Why is that? What’s to be done about it? Where do we go from here?”
‘A Media Problem’
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada’s National Observer, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don’t need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories “focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?” its website explains.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things.”
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow’s emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright “climate silence” from newsrooms, as well as “both-sidsing” the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of “leaving climate out of stories where it should be.” For example, the bulk of coverage of January’s catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
“They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that’s really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn’t true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this,” he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a “confluence” of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an “overwhelming majority” of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
“Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem,” Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things,” he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
“One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn’t think they’re in the majority,” Pope said. “They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That’s not true. You’re not an outlier. You’re just like most people in your community.”
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is “pluralistic ignorance.”
“It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads,” he said, whether this is family members, strangers we’ve just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
“What we see consistently,” he continued, “and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, “‘is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves.”
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper’s authors.
“Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action,” the study authors wrote. “The prevailing pessimism regarding others’ support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions.”
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
“The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue,” he said. “Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That’s not how they’re going to learn about it.”
Therefore, he said, CCNow’s effort to “really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we’re talking about it.”
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
“Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
However, Pope said, the project did become “more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy.”
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale’s post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, “This is not what people want.”
“It’s pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change,” he added. “Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
While Pope acknowledged that “U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious,” about half CCNow’s collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
“This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it’s a hot-button topic, that it’s something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again,” he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banningThe Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
“I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it’s not a fear-based idea,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like we’re all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let’s not cower.”
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
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.
22 April 2025
Birmingham Bin Strikes: the Media is missing the point
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19 April 2025
‘Extremely Dangerous Time’: Sanders Warns of Oligarchs’ War on Working Class
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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) attends a Senate hearing on January 29, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“Does anyone really think that the oligarchs give a damn about ordinary Americans?” the senator asked. “Trust me, they don’t.”
As U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday continued their effort to gut the federal government, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that “the oligarchs, with their unlimited amounts of money, are waging a war on the working class of our country, and it is a war that they are intent on winning.”
A week after delivering a speech that sounded the alarm about “America’s dangerous movement toward oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy,” Sanders (I-Vt.) took the Senate floor again to target the world’s three richest people—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—and the politicians who serve them.
“We are living in an extremely dangerous time,” the seantor said Tuesday. “Future generations will look back at this moment—what we do right now—and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism.”
As chair of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s targets have included the U.S. Agency for International Development, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Education, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a critical U.S. Treasury Department payment system. Reporting—and remarks from the billionaire—suggest that the agencies responsible for Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are next.
“As we speak, right now, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged,” said Sanders. “These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, to reform them, or to end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional—and must be ended.”

Sanders also detailed Trump and his allies’ attacks on the federal judiciary, which has delivered a series of blows to the Republican president’s agenda since he took office last month.
“Mr. Trump and his friends are not just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government—Congress and the courts—they are also going after the media, in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country,” the senator said. While recognizing that the media “makes mistakes every day,” he added that “I do hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy, you cannot have a free flow of information, you cannot have the pursuit of truth, without an independent press.”
The senator also how the top three billionaires impact what information reaches people by buying news outlets and social media platforms—as Musk did with Twitter, which he rebranded X, and Bezos did with The Washington Post and Twitch. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has made his money through Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
“They will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they ‘entertain us to death,’” Sanders warns. “They and their fellow oligarchs will continue within our corrupt campaign finance system to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.”
“Does anyone really think that the oligarchs give a damn about ordinary Americans?” he asked. “Trust me, they don’t.”
Sanders warned that “if we do not stop them, they will soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country—all so that they can raise they money they need to provide huge tax breaks for themselves and for others billionaires. As modern-day kings who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people in order to protect their power and their privileges.”
However, he also stressed that “the worst fear of the ruling class of our country is that the American people—whether they are Black or white or Latino, whether they are urban or rural, whether they are young or old, gay or straight, whatever—the fear of the ruling class is that the American people come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.”
“The oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation, or country of origin and will come together and have the courage to take them on,” he declared. “If we stand together, we’re gonna win this fight, and not only will we save American democracy, we’re gonna create the kind of nation that I think most of us know we should become.”
Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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