Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.
For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.
Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.
“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.
Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome. “She was found unresponsive in her car,” said Meno. “The medical examiner determined that her death was caused by hyperthermia,” a condition that is the opposite of the more well-known cold-related condition of hypothermia.
Hyperthermia-related deaths have sharply risen over the past decade, a predictable outcome of fossil fuel emissions. Oil companies such as Exxon have long been aware of the devastating impacts their product would have on the climate. “Major oil and gas companies decades ago knew, their own scientists told them internally, that if we kept burning fossil fuels, it would lead to, in the words of one internal Exxon document, potentially catastrophic events, just like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome,” said Meno.
Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome.
Big Oil’s failure to act on this information has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco. Companies like Philip Morris knew about the impacts of cigarette smoking on human health and kept it secret for years. Since that information was made public, individuals suffering from their addictive products have sued repeatedly and won.
A major lawsuit brought by state attorneys general culminated in 1998 in what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement, where dozens of tobacco companies settled to the tune of billions of dollars for public health. Notably, the federal government also sued tobacco companies for violations of racketeering laws over their deception.
Yet while individuals and states are taking action in the case of oil companies, the federal government clearly has no interest in holding Big Oil accountable for climate change. Instead, President Donald Trump says he wants the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies for raising oil prices in the wake of the Iran war. This appears to be a classic case of deflection, given that a majority of voters blame Trump for price increases at the pump. He isn’t interested in holding companies accountable for climate change; he’s upset they made it harder for people to consume oil. Moreover, his administration is suing states for trying to enforce environmental regulations aimed at oil companies.
In addition to keeping their own research secret, fossil fuel companies spent years sowing doubt over the cause-and-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and a warming climate. “What that decades-long deception campaign did is it stole a generation’s worth of time when action could’ve been taken, and we could’ve averted the worst of some of these climate disasters,” said Meno.
This year, more extreme weather records are expected to be broken as climate change intensifies. The first half of 2026 was the third-warmest half-year on record. An El Niño phenomenon developing this year is expected to be one of the strongest in modern history.
Whether or not the Trump administration admits that the climate is changing, Americans know it is. “Anyone of a certain age who can look back over enough time just knows, as a matter of common sense, that the climate we are all living in today is not what we had a few years ago,” said Meno.
The industry knows it too — and, according to Meno, oil companies “are in absolute panic mode, fighting tooth and nail to escape accountability.” Leon’s lawsuit is hardly the only one they fear. Numerous states, counties, cities, and tribal governments are suing Big Oil, and making headway.
Meno explained that companies have “been pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to take up one of these cases for years.” The Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case in Colorado where that state’s supreme court in May 2025 ruled the City of Boulder and Boulder County could move forward with discovery and trial in their suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor.
Not content with leaving it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress to grant the industry immunity over its role in climate change — and conservative lawmakers have complied. In April, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026.”
If Congress were to pass the bill, according to Meno, it “would be a truly unprecedented legal shield that would strip the public of their right to hold these corporations accountable for the harm they’ve caused.” Meno’s Center for Climate Integrity is urging members of the public to demand their elected representatives vote against Hageman and Cruz’s bill.
Big Oil says it deserves immunity because it shouldn’t be penalized for giving the public what it wants. In a joint statement, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said: “These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive.”
What they didn’t say is that they have worked for years to prevent fair competition from renewables. It’s why the state of Michigan launched an antitrust lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and others because they acted “as a cartel … to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy in order to maintain their dominance.”
Fossil fuel companies have long known their products are deadly, kept it secret, unfairly ensured their dominance, then argued that they ought not to be sued for delivering a product the public wants. Now, as climate-related deaths stack up, the industry claims it isn’t responsible. Misti Leon, whose mother might be alive today if governments and courts had reined in Big Oil, told The New York Times: “I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me. There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”
This story originally appeared in Prism on Aug. 03, 2026.
Following the largest nurses strike in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way.
At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant’s website refers to itself as an AI platform.
Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant.
In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.
Shuler’s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added.
Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job demanding a new contract.
“Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.
Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant.
“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”
A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant’s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.
Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions.
“We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism.
Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.
“We have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,” Fergus said. “The younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.”
Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.
“We will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody’s going to know how to read the images,” Fergus said.
Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned to serving a diverse population.
“If there’s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it’s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,” Fergus said.
Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers’ current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings.
But if they don’t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, “then the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,” Fergus said.
Editorial Team: Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor Lara Witt, Top Editor Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Deeply divided by nationalism and deprived of its vast colonies by the last century’s catastrophic two world wars, Western Europe has been in decline ever since. Recently, that decline has become drastic and desperate as Western Europe falls ever further behind — economically, militarily, and politically — today’s two superpowers: the US and China. Mediocre and unpopular leaders reflect Western European decline. They bet and built their careers on accepting junior partner positions vis-à-vis the United States. But Europe’s decline now threatens to split Europe apart. Inside each nation, rich and powerful minorities use their social positions to sustain their wealth and power while the masses bear most of the burdens of decline offloaded onto them by the rich and powerful. The problems flowing from these cumulative developments are approaching points of social explosion. Despite the lessons taught by the two world wars, many Western European leaders once again provoke and prepare for a war, this time against Russia, notwithstanding the awful risks of nuclear weapons. One key question to ask: why is this happening?
From 1945 to 1990, Cold War set Western European nations against the USSR and its Eastern European allies in many ways and on many levels. Yet that war remained cold. In 2026, after more than three decades of post-Cold War peace, a military war between a largely unified Europe (East and West) and post-Soviet Russia seems imminent. Such a war has been prepared by NATO’s growth, its moving eastward toward Russian borders since 1990; by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; and by the escalations of their hostilities by both Russia and Ukraine since that invasion. War between much of Europe and Russia now looms.
US President Donald Trump used both his presidential terms to distance the United States from its European allies in NATO. Among his provocative, unilateral statements and actions were heavy tariffs on imports from European countries. In exchange for some reduction of those tariffs, Trump demanded and obtained tribute from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (over $1 trillion in committed purchases of liquified natural gas plus investments by Europe in the United States). He also reduced US support for the war against Russia in Ukraine. That war thus became a mostly European project.
As the US withdrew from its former close alliances with Europe, the latter’s leaders developed an increasing hostility toward Russia. They demonized the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Where Trump notably lessened hostility to Russia, his European counterparts intensified theirs. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe and the US rushed to bolster Ukraine’s defense beyond the huge assistance they had already provided to Ukraine since at least 2014. After February 2022, Europeans provided Ukraine with still more support in finance and weapons. By 2026, many observers in Europe and Russia and beyond predicted a Russo-European war as imminent. Our goal here is to explain why this dangerous situation arose.
World Wars I and II fatally weakened capitalist colonialism. The British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Russian and Japanese colonialisms had especially escalated competitive clashes into two catastrophically self-destructive wars. This allowed movements of the colonized people finally to defeat the weakened colonizers and win political independence. The different anticapitalist movements that had blossomed earlier in 19th century Europe allied themselves with anticolonialism especially in the Soviet revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949. A complex, shifting relationship between anticolonialism and anticapitalism continues to evolve in both the Global South and the former colonial powers.
As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc.
The private capitalist classes atop each colonialist nation had understood the colonies’ importance for their profits and thus for their imperial economies. They went to war in large part to retain their colonies. After the two world wars, they faced, separately and together, momentous challenges to their existence. As their empires dissolved in wars of independence, capitalists’ profits and their national economies were threatened. Worse still was a potential alliance linking ex-colonies, the Comintern nations, and those capitalists’ own domestic socialist and communist parties and unions. Fearing such developments, nothing less than the survival of 20th century European capitalism seemed at stake for European capitalists and their supporters.
To undo this threat, Western Europe appealed to the post-World War II global hegemon: the United States. Within a few years of 1945, the US had scooped up much of what European and Japanese colonialisms had lost. US capitalists moved into newly independent ex-colonies to widen and deepen their economic dependence via the dollar as world currency, through both US trade and investment. European capitalists had to settle for positions as junior partners of their US counterparts, or else lost everything. Europe as a whole followed suit and became the junior partner of the US in most other dimensions (NATO, geopolitics, financial and cultural institutions, etc.).
Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.
As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc. The US could do this because it had suffered far less than any of the other capitalist colonial nations from the two world wars. Indeed, World War II had extracted the US from capitalism’s worst ever crash. Its economy was stronger in 1945 than it had been for many years, whereas in all the former colonizing nations the reverse was the case. That economic strength contributed to its dominant military power.
US hegemony defined itself as a moral crusade against a great evil, the USSR (equated with communism). The US was “the leader of the free world” pitted against an unfree world — the USSR, Eastern Europe, and, after 1949, China. The latter were all demonized as anticapitalist dictatorships, which made them enemies of “democracy” as championed in and by the free world. On that basis, US hegemony followed as the necessary condition to “contain” the unfree world, to prevent its spread. The US-led “free world” could and would guarantee containment by means of global military bases, the world’s greatest military arsenal, ideological campaigns, political isolation, and economic discriminations. The world thus entered into a Cold War between 1945-1990 punctuated by military — hot — wars when the US deemed them necessary (for example, in Korea and Vietnam).
US hegemony also included domestic campaigns inside both Europe and the US aimed at containment. Those campaigns all featured two parts. One was a set of “welfare state” or social democratic benefits for working classes. Leading politicians in North America, Western Europe, and Japan installed those benefits. Many feared that not doing so would influence working classes toward socialism and communism. In the US, this meant perpetuating the 1930s New Deal into the 1970s. Successive leaders, Republican as well as Democratic, added Medicare to Social Security, regularly raised minimum wages, gave special attention to the non-white and non-male victims of systemic discrimination, subsidized higher education via massive public institutions, and subsidized home ownership loans. Such state interventions delivered a much less harsh life for working classes than any prior private capitalism had ever done. Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.
capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”
The other part of these containment campaigns involved widespread purges of Communists, socialists, and their “fellow travelers.” In the US, a ferocious “anti-communism” project “cleansed” labor unions, schools, mass media, and government of leftist employees. Capitalist employers’ organizations and many individual capitalists collaborated with the state’s repressive campaigns. They mobilized behind Sen. Joseph McCarthy for a few years. His was a particularly extreme version of the old American political style of demonizing political opponents, foreign and domestic, as “of the devil.” The US House of Representatives established an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Such campaigns’ ostensible objective was to destroy the Communist Party. Mass media circuses, newspaper headlines, arrests, prison sentences, deportations, and getting witnesses to betray others — resulting in losing their jobs — were their means. Guilt by association targeted both socialists and independent left-leaning citizens. Purges identified many victims by citing their activities before 1945. It made little difference that at the time those activities (in unions, political parties, schools, churches, and civic associations) were both legal and often patriotically anti-fascist. The systematic repression of the US left after 1945 left deep political scars.
Western Europe dutifully undertook a similarly two-sided project. However, social conditions there imposed different qualities on it anti-Soviet and domestic anti-left campaigns. Europe’s pre-1945 history gave communist and socialist parties and their millions of members much greater social approval than existed in the US. Leftists’ roles in resisting fascism before and during World War II — often heroic — gave them genuine, widespread popularity. They could defend their political views, and themselves, in ways their US counterparts could not. European welfare states were more generous and lasted longer than their US counterparts.
While nothing quite like McCarthyism swept Europe, most Western European nations joined NATO and aligned their foreign policies to the US-led containment agenda. Their defense budgets and capabilities declined, and they relied instead on US military protection. What each European state saved by means of small defense budgets it could then use to provide public services for their working classes. The latter might otherwise have required higher taxes on corporations and the rich (and not only or chiefly on working people). European capitalists supported their welfare states partly because they endorsed containment. Equally important, capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”
For the last 75 years, European politicians who hesitated to embrace the positions and tones consistent with the US-European “consensus” on foreign and domestic policies saw their career opportunities threatened or destroyed. The British sought and found a special role as the closest friend and imitator of the US in this consensus. The rest of Western Europe sometimes mocked Britain’s fawning subordination, but many jealously and secretly approximated it. European capitalists looked longingly at the US’s steadily shrinking welfare state programs that facilitated tax cuts on corporations and the rich. However, those non-Anglo Europeans accepted the political limits that rendered matching the US and UK impossible. They could only hold back the domestic power of their working classes by providing generous social welfare policies. The same was required to make Western Europe a consumerist bulwark against Russia, thereby to contain it and its Eastern European allies.
Breaking from those limits only became thinkable when it was made necessary. This happened when Trump ended the post-1945 US-Europe deal. His “friendliness” with Russia underscored his evident contempt for Western Europe as a junior partner/dependent that was too costly to carry anymore. His trade and tariff wars, pointedly, did not exempt Europe. The tariffs particularly shocked Western European capitalists who had concentrated during reconstruction (1945-1975) on producing goods and services that could compete in the rich US market. The tariffs also occurred just when Trump reduced support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and sharply criticized NATO. For shocked Western European leaders, Trump broke the US-European deals of the post-1945 world.
Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires.
Ever since 1945, Western European capitalists had set themselves to rebuild their economies by producing goods and services of better quality and/or cheaper than the US output that dominated both the US and other markets. This included some investments in their former colonies, rendering them economically dependent notwithstanding their political independence. The latter became more performative than substantive. It remains that way in many areas. The crucially important exception was the spectacular economic growth of the People’s Republic of China. China’s growth changed everything, and continues to do so. It is transforming the world economy as it takes an ever more powerful place therein.
China’s still-export-driven manufacturing economy competes globally and ever more successfully with what remains of manufacturing in the US and in Europe. China competes, as well as an importer of energy and other inputs. Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires. Europe already had had a century of decline, whereas the US was new to decline, with many of its citizens steadfastly committed to denial as their coping mechanism of choice.
Western European capitalism had partly offset its decline first by post-war reconstruction, then by explosions of consumer credit. Then, and especially after 1989, Europe welcomed waves of cheap immigrant labor while expanding eastward to re-absorb Eastern Europe into its economic operations, much as it was doing with its former colonies. Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism. Fantasies swirled about extending those mechanisms eastward to include Russia, perhaps dividing it up into smaller states as manageable as the Eastern European states were. If somehow achieved, that could give Western Europe an immense new geographic expanse to economically colonize. Trump, too, engaged parallel fantasies in his neocolonial gestures toward Panama, Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico.
Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism.
The great break in post-World War II US-European relations came with Trump’s combination trade and tariff war designed to “make the US economy great again.” Trump had effectively dedicated his second presidential term, begun in January 2025, to waging this economic war. Another part of that war was a broad turn away from neoliberal globalization and toward a systematic economic nationalism (“America first”). Trump’s blunt message was disengagement. Europe could no longer count on the US to provide it with military protection. Trump depicted Europe as an ally who had betrayed and cheated the US economically. He demanded payments as compensation. Those took the form of buying US liquified natural gas (LNG) for its energy needs plus committing to invest $700 billion or more in the US over a few coming years. Von der Leyen formally acceded to Trump’s demands. Such payments amounted to either tribute or reparations, depending on one’s viewpoint.
Europe’s required purchase of US LNG emerged from the Russia-Ukraine war. The economic sanctions of that war (since February 2022) plus the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (in September 2022) sharply reduced and then ended the flow of cheap energy from Russia into Germany and other parts of Western Europe. Desperate for access to energy, Europe turned increasingly to imports from elsewhere — and especially from the US — at a much higher cost. Meanwhile, steadily growing trade competition from China and more rapid technical innovations achieved in China and the US further squeezed the European economy.
The shock of Trump’s abandonment of Europe as the US economy’s junior partner accelerated Europe’s decline. Once it had been the dominating center of a planet it had colonized. Now it had fallen to a poor third place in a world economy increasingly dominated by what had once been the poor corners of that planet. On one side stood the declining but still strong US; on the other the rising People’s Republic of China. No wonder the Ukraine war drove Russia to declare its identity shifting from European to Asian.
Europe’s political leaders reflected and exemplified its decline. Burnham, Macron, Merz and Meloni especially — like most of their predecessors after 1945 — had built political lives around loyalty and subservience to the post-World War II deal with the US. They relied on the military, financial, and ideological support from the US, on NATO, on the IMF, the World Bank, and myriad NGO missionaries for US “democracy.” They championed their “close alliance” with the US as a key cause of Europe’s prosperity and peace after 1945. Betrayed by Trump, they were forced by Europe’s decline to pay tribute with monies therefore not available to offset that decline. Trump pointedly forced them to begin financing the huge costs of developing their own military defense (already far behind the military capabilities of the US, on one side, and the China-Russia alliance on the other).
European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both.
Given the deep personal opportunism cultivated in Western European leaders by their subordinate (to the US) situation, they grasped that Trump’s betrayal threatened their careers. Trump’s repeated insults of and disdain for Western Europe risked provoking European voters to turn against leaders seen as slavish toward Trump’s US. Those leaders’ alarm only deepened as much of the US employer class seemed quite supportive of Trump’s anti-Europeanism. Perhaps their greatest fear lay in the possible reactions of European voters once they understood that Trump’s betrayal posed serious economic dangers for them. Voters might ask where the money would come from to finance European rearmament when the US defense umbrella closed. If enhanced, would budget allocations for the military diminish outlays for mass public social services, raise their taxes, or both? Europeans began to wonder out loud whether the Ukraine-Russia war being fought to the last Ukrainian might prefigure a US war with Russia/China fought to the last European. European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both. How that plays out in European politics provides new opportunities for the left and the right and existential threats to the traditional centrist pro-US political leadership trying desperately to retain power.
Nationalist politicians on the European right see their opportunity. Office-holding conservative leaders (like Burnham, Macron, and Merz, for example) can be voted out via guilt by subordination. They perpetuated the post-World War II programs that made Europe vulnerable to its current economic decline because of their subservience to the US. Western European opportunism now incites the suspicion that maybe it bet on the wrong horse. A similar suspicion now arises in some of the Gulf States in the wake of the US-Israel war on Iran. Having “invited” US military bases to be constructed on their land for security, they now see that those bases actually achieved the opposite. The bases and their host nations have become endangered targets vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles.
Anticapitalist politicians on the left also see an opportunity. The US was a partner who mostly pushed Europe to the right. The US undid its New Deal sooner and took that undoing further than the Europeans dared to even try to do to their welfare state.
Among the results of Europe’s left: it abolished the death penalty when the US pointedly did not. Military adventures, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine and Iran, were always started, led, and driven by the US with the Europeans marginally along as “coalitions of the [barely] willing.” Left politicians in Western Europe kept seeking to secure, if not advance, social democratic goals and policies. One way to do that was to limit the US connection as a context for more socialistic development in Europe. The European left positions itself as the way for the mass beneficiaries of the social democratic state to protect it from a US-connected old leadership that always seems to threaten social democracy. Europe’s left likewise rejects the nationalist right politicians because of their pro-capitalist, anti-worker and anti-immigrant tendencies.
Europe’s old US-linked political leaders have now found a way to arrest, or maybe even reverse, Europe’s frightening decline. It is the only way to do that they can see or imagine. That way can, they believe, both keep them in power in the short run and give them a new economic growth opportunity in the longer term. That way provides a convenient public justification for shifting state budget expenditures from public social services to big-business defense firms, from social democracy to pro-employer (pro-capitalist) austerity. By minimizing any extra taxes upon their employer classes, Western European leaders serve them very well. They will cover the costs of rearmament and tribute obligated to the US by diverting funds from the welfare state plus state-guaranteed borrowing plus heightened mass-based taxes, if needed, on working classes. Domestic austerity will be intensified across Western Europe while wages are brought downward toward southern and eastern European levels.
The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.
Europe’s leaders believe they can accomplish this by pumping up mass anxiety and fear around urgent preparations for a war against Russia. To that end, they demonize Russia beyond even the levels achieved against Stalin and Stalinism during the Cold War. Those leaders hope that an adequately terrified Europe will keep voting for them for a while. Longer-run hopes entail imagining Russia’s military defeat and consequent de jure or de facto dismemberment. The resulting subunits of old Russia would then offer Western Europe a new colonial opportunity, a vast expanse for profitable investment to obtain food, raw materials, and possibly workers to rejuvenate Western European capitalism. The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.
All wars are overdetermined by both domestic and international causes intertwined. Europe’s current drone and missile warfare against Russia escalated from the Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine that began in 2022. Its local overdeterminants began earlier. Local concerns woven into global shifts — NATO toward the east and China toward the west — shaped Russia’s changing international position, concerns, and “red lines.” The whole world watches as China, Russia, and their allies square off against the US and whatever allies it retains. The world sees the wars in Ukraine and Iran today as conflicts among proxies of the two great powers of our time.
The danger inherent in both wars is that Europe or the US or Russia or Israel might resort to nuclear weapons if “existentially” threatened. The question is whether global masses and leaders can recognize the danger. This essay is one effort toward that recognition. The solution is a serious commitment to international collaboration. What began as the League of Nations and was rebuilt as the United Nations needs still another incarnation with real powers and real global respect. Otherwise we risk World War III and its mad, mutual assured destruction.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 04, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
As wildfiresravaged large swaths of the Western US, a group of Democratic senators on Monday called on federal regulators to rein in prediction markets offering contracts tied to such disasters, warning that turning climate-fueled extreme weather into financial wagers creates “perverse incentives” that could motivate arson and other crimes.
In a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig, Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Adam Schiff (Calif.), Jacky Rosen (Nevada), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), Martin Heinrich (NM), Ron Wyden (Ore.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote that “prediction markets have been enabled to expand rapidly, increasingly inviting speculation on war, political violence, disasters, and public emergencies that raise ethical and public policy concerns.”
These markets risk creating perverse incentives, undermining public trust, and commodifying human suffering in ways that warrant careful scrutiny,” the lawmakers continued. “Recent public reports have highlighted how Polymarket—the largest prediction market platform in the world—accepted more than $1.2 million in bets surrounding the Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025. These fires devastated the Los Angeles area, claiming the lives of 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.”
“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter argues. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”
Allowing prediction markets on wildfires is outrageously dangerous and will incentivize bad actors to spread or even start fires themselves. Frankly, this is betting on the suffering of our neighbors and families.
“By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading,” the senators added.
The CFTC controversially considers Polymarket and Kalshi designated contract markets (DCMs)—over which the federal agency has control versus state gambling regimes—and is currently developing nationwide rules.
The letter’s signers asked Selig:
Is the CFTC considering prohibiting DCMs from offering event contracts on wildfires as part of the rulemaking process currently underway, given they are against the public’s interest?
Does the CFTC have any plans to curb bets on wildfires on prediction markets in the United States?
Does the agency have plans to address these contracts being offered on offshore markets?
Does the CFTC believe event contracts offered on the following wildfire-related events are in the public interest?
Does the commission have guidance or planned enforcement related to these wildfire event contracts?
“As the United States faces yet another record-breaking fire season this year, the [CFTC] cannot allow these prediction markets to offer unrestricted betting on wildfires,” the senators stressed. “While these bets appear to be offered only on the offshore Polymarket site, it is only a matter of time before other US-based designated contract markets try to offer these. The CFTC must lead the charge to rein in these contracts in the US and offshore and put in place commonsense guardrails to prevent people from profiting as wildfires threaten communities.”
In addition to wildfires, Polymarket users can place wagers related to earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.
Polymarket responded to the senators’ letter in a statement to Claims Journal saying, “When tragedy unfolds, people turn to the news for commentary and to Polymarket for information.”
“While we recognize the risks associated with these markets, removing them does not prevent a tragedy,” the company added. “It only makes timely, market-based information less accessible to those seeking to understand what may happen next.”
The senators’ letter came days after Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit targeting Polymarket competitor Kalshi for operating as “an illegal gambling operation” in “flagrant disregard” for the Empire State’s “Constitution, penal laws, and other statutes.”
Last month, a coalition of consumer advocacy groups condemned the CFTC’s attempt to allow platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket “a green light to bypass state gambling regimes.”
“Calling a sports wager an ‘event contract’ does not transform it into a legitimate tool for managing economic risk,” said Eric Naing, communications director for Demand Progress Education Fund, one of the groups decrying the regulator’s approach to such companies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated our workplaces, where many employers have sought to boost productivity, cut labor costs, and eliminate jobs via the technology. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that 1 in 5 workers now use AI in their jobs.
Organized labor’s response to the AI has been fraught. Where some see an inevitable shift that simply needs to be regulated and could potentially even create jobs, others see a dangerous trend that will result in further job losses along with a variety of other problems.
The tension is succinctly summarized by a recent Politico headline: “Voters fear AI. Unions want the jobs.”
The ongoing debate over data centers encapsulates this tension. Across the country, community members have spearheaded efforts to block their construction over concerns about water depletion, higher utility bills, noise, and air pollution.
In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) introduced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act, which would institute a pause on data center construction until federal safeguards can be established. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue,” said Sanders in a statement on the bill. “The time for action is now.”
The legislative effort is backed by multiple unions including National Nurses United (NNU), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the Association of Flight Attendants. “The unchecked explosion of AI data centers is a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis,” declared NNU co-president Jamie Brown at a press conference announcing the bill.
However, there are also many unions that oppose any moratorium on data centers, particularly building trade unions that believe such construction can stimulate economic growth for struggling communities and provide members with work.
“We need the guardrails on AI, we just don’t think that a moratorium is the way to get there,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler toldPunchbowl News in June.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is even calling on members to contact their congressional representatives and make social media posts connected to the issue. “I’m a proud IBEW member and I oppose any bans on data center construction since these bans would eliminate good-paying union jobs,” reads suggested text for a social media post.
In June, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the groundbreaking ceremony for Oracle and OpenAI’s planned 1.4-gigawatt data center in the state’s Saline Township. Alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Whitmer told the assembled crowd that the state was setting an example for “the rest of the world” by ensuring the “responsible adoption” of AI.
The project was opposed by many residents and local lawmakers. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) called it “disgusting” and said she was “disappointed” with Whitmer, while Democratic State Rep. Dylan Wegela of Garden City said it was a “complete betrayal of the working class” and that the governor had sold out “Michigan to big tech billionaires.”
However, the data center was backed by North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), and its president, Sean McGarvey, was present at the groundbreaking. “America’s ability to lead in the next era of innovation depends, in part, on America’s ability to build, and our members are proud to be helping make that future possible,” he told the crowd.
Speaking to Politico in June, Senator Sanders’s chief political adviser, Faiz Shakir, said that the data center jobs heralded by certain unions won’t necessarily establish lasting occupations.
“It’s fine to say that [data centers will] be built with good-paying union jobs now — and I hope that that’s the case — but what we’re also looking for on behalf of the working class of America is long-term sustainability of jobs,” he said. “It doesn’t help a lot in our view if you have a short-term infusion of good, union paying jobs at the cost of the decimation of many, many long-term jobs.”
Support for AI within organized labor is receiving a boost from AI companies themselves. Last year, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced that it would create an AI training hub in New York City via $23 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
“The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots,” notedTheNew York Times. “These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.”
AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was inspired by the work of other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, and that the idea for the National Academy for AI Instruction sprang from a partnership established between Microsoft and the AFL-CIO in 2023.
“AI holds tremendous promise but huge challenges — and it’s our job as educators to make sure AI serves our students and society, not the other way around,” declared Weingarten. “The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies, but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.”
The way Weingarten is selling the hub is seemingly at odds with that of Roy Bahat, who first proposed the idea. In a LinkedIn post made shortly after the announcement, Bahat, who heads the venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta, essentially admits that the center can serve as a test case for applying AI more broadly — or, as Nolan Higdon put it in Truthdig: “Teachers are guinea pigs in Big Tech’s broader project to reengineer labor, one profession at a time.”
“If we can figure out how teachers should teach with and about AI, we can affect the lives of millions of educators, and millions and millions of young people,” explains Bahat in the post. “And if we can figure out how to train teachers on using AI, maybe we can figure it out for other occupations.”
The training hub, and union leadership’s wider connections to AI, have sparked criticism from labor activists and rank-and-file members.
“Using AI compliments, intensifies, and accelerates privatization of the public sector, and that’s in addition to any harm that it’s doing to work.”
“Using AI compliments, intensifies, and accelerates privatization of the public sector, and that’s in addition to any harm that it’s doing to work,” author and teacher union activist Lois Weiner told Truthout. “The labor movement should be contesting the idea that the imposition of AI is inevitable. That’s the labor movement’s responsibility.”
“What makes this so disturbing is that it raises fully the problem of union democracy,” she added. “These decisions were made without informed debate with union members. They have a moral responsibility to community and the kids we serve to have a voice.”
Trevor Griffey, a labor historian, lecturer at UCLA and UC Irvine, and vice president of legislation for AFT Local 1474, told Truthout that, since the collaboration was established, the AFT national has focused too much on trying to help teachers adapt to AI, and too little on organizing worker power in school districts. He believes unions should go on the offensive and push for deeper reforms, as AI is already having a dramatic impact. He points out that groups like the California Federation of Labor Unions are trying to bring together statewide unions in California to lobby on a range of bills targeting the dangers of Big Tech.
“The question is less where unions stand on AI or other forms of technology, and more how they organize to resist the unsafe and unethical use of automation at work,” he told Truthout. “Unions need to invest in strategic research and organizing to support workers most likely to be negatively impacted by employers’ adoption of AI-powered technology — both at work, and in building political power sufficient to prevent the unethical and unsafe use of new technology. Beyond just regulating AI, unions should push for full employment and/or universal income policies to mitigate the disruptions to people’s lives that AI-related layoffs are already having.”
These sentiments were echoed by Vishal Reddy, a union negotiator for nursing home workers and the executive director of WorkFour.
“Unions at the local, international, and federation levels need to put real money and organizing capacity into figuring out which affirmative AI-related demands — four-day workweek, UBI [universal basic income], AI dividends, and so on — actually resonate with a wide swath of workers,” he told Truthout. “Just like in bargaining, we want to know which affirmative policy would be most deeply and widely felt, so we can prioritize it in the fights ahead, including May Day 2028.”
“That means cross-union convenings, issue campaigns, commissioned polling and research, and real resourcing behind the bargaining fights where these policies are already surfacing,” Reddy added. “For example, if a fight over a 32-hour workweek is on the table somewhere, that’s exactly where the labor movement should be throwing its weight.”
This story originally appeared in Prism on July 27, 2026.
Hundreds of noncitizens detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gone on hunger strikes across the country to protest the widespread denial of due process and deteriorating conditions in detention centers during the Trump administration, according to advocates and detainees.
Conditions in ICE detention facilities have never been good, typically prompting around a dozen hunger strikes a year, said Josefina Mora-Cheung, director of organizing at La Resistencia, a grassroots organization that supports detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWPIC) in Tacoma, Washington. Last year, La Resistencia documented 16 such protests, mostly carried out by single detainees. But this year, the group has already documented 18 hunger strikes involving about 25 individuals at NWPIC, the most recent of which ended July 20.
“This year we’ve seen such a skyrocketing of numbers that indicates how much people are willing to put their lives at risk in order to call attention to these conditions that are ultimately life-threatening for people,” Mora-Cheung said. “People are not willing to give up so easily or to have their spirits broken.”
Hunger strikes in ICE jails have also been reported at Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California; North Lake Processing Center in Michigan; Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania; Prairieland Detention Center and Camp East Montana in Texas; Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico; the ICE unit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary or “Angola”; and Delaney Hall in New Jersey. About 500 noncitizens have reportedly joined the strikes.
Advocates say there have likely been more hunger strikes across the 425 jails administered by ICE and its network of private contractors, but the agency denies they are taking place and, according to the advocates, quickly tries to break them up through threats or coercion.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Detainees complain about inhumane conditions—including unsanitary food and water, lack of medical care, widespread physical abuse, and retaliation for filing complaints—along with racist abuse and a complete absence of justice and due process.
Take the case of Rogelio Bolufé Izquierdo, a Cuban national who has gone on multiple hunger strikes, including one that lasted nine days in Torrance. Initially sent to the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, Bolufé was transferred nine times in retaliation for his organizing, according to La Resistencia.
Bolufé spoke with Prism over the phone from Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he was deported in June despite having an open asylum case and a pending appeal before an immigration court.
He claimed that detainees are denied access to legal counsel at the Torrance ICE jail and very likely at the other jails where he’d been detained. He also claimed that his legal court documents were taken from him and that facilities do not provide mail service, which is the only way detainees can follow their deportation proceedings or request asylum.
“That was one of the main reasons we went on hunger strike,” Bolufé said.
“The legal proceedings do not follow due process. They are a farce,” he added. “The Fifth Amendment does not exist in U.S. immigration proceedings.”
Torturous conditions in ICE jails have been well-documented by advocacy groups over the past two decades. These conditions have not only persisted during the current Trump administration but have worsened, according to advocates.
At least 52 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year. According to Human Rights Watch, this mortality rate is nearly four times that of the Biden administration and more than two and a half times that of the first Trump administration.
In the largest documented hunger strike of the year, at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, more than 300 men and women participated in a weekslong labor and hunger strike that ended in June. They denounced degrading conditions and a lack of due process, including arbitrary denials of bond and coercion to sign legal documents that would result in deportation.
“We see with profound helplessness and frustration that the right to due process & legal counsel were violated, and benefits granted in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution were unacknowledged,” wrote 25 of the Delaney Hall hunger strikers in a public letter. The author, identified as Leonardo Villalba, was summarily transferred to another ICE jail, according to the letter’s postscript.
ICE could not simply deny that the massive hunger strike at Delaney Hall was happening, so agents resorted to violence, said Jenny García, a campaign coordinator at the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee’s New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program. ICE officers cut off the detainees’ external communication, repeatedly threatened to sabotage their cases, and brutally assaulted and pepper-sprayed them, García said.
Hunger strikers at Torrance were stripped naked and sent to cold cells, where they were exposed to 24-hour lighting, according to Bolufé, who spent seven months in that prison. Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant and refugee justice organization, has documented these cold chambers at Torrance, calling them torture.
At some point during his strike, Bolufé said he asked himself, “Why should I go on if it makes no sense? No one will find out. It’s a lawless situation; the law isn’t respected here, no one will know.”
Despite the odds, strikes have brought individual victories: answers about cases from ICE officials, release from solitary confinement, and release from detention altogether at NWPIC and Delaney Hall, which also secured $12 million in pro bono legal services, said Mora-Cheung.
“This is strong,” García said about the ability of detainees to organize and encourage one another amid the horrific and inhumane conditions in which they are confined. “What’s happening inside is the best of humanity.”
World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a new request they filed today that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal’s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.
Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, “each attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,” argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Grote told Truthout the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the “failures of the criminal legal system” in Abu-Jamal’s case, including an “unfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.”
The UN determination of whether someone faces “arbitrary detention” is interpreted “more broadly” than simply being “against the law.” It also considers “elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.”
Abu-Jamal’s lawyers say he was in “continuous solitary confinement” from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania’s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal’s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team’s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later “developed a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated” by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock “due to untreated hyperglycemia” caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.
Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight.
Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight.
“I have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,” Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called “Mumia’s Vision: A Message for the Movement.” He explained he had “been reluctant to talk about my eye problems” because “any sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs” in prison, since it “brings predation.”
His legal team’s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal “began experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery” that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to “suffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.”
“He is old and he is sick,” Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout. “This is someone who should not be incarcerated.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal’s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the United Nations. In 2023, they also asked the UN Human Rights Committee to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for “a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,” which opponents often call “death by incarceration” because of the lack of opportunity for review and release.
Political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal is currently incarcerated at a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care.
Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, “We are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.”
In 2020, the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was asked by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he — like Abu-Jamal — faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded in 2022 by calling on the U.S. government to “immediately” release Peltier after concluding the “cumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies” he “suffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.” In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement.
Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team’s submission to the UN. She notes how “international pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.” For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says “a lot of the work” that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole “happened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.”
Left to right: Noel Hanrahan, Robert Saleem Holbrook, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Bret Grote, and Lumumba Bandele stand together during a visit at SCI Mahanoy on March 20, 2026.
Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but “thankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,” Grote told Truthout.
In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented “an undue risk of escape or danger to the community.”
The UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms.”
Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout, “Mumia’s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.” She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India’s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill.
Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted “second look” policies to allow judges to review a person’s sentence, so Abu-Jamal’s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal “if new evidence justifies it,” Grote told Truthout, noting Abu Jamal’s case is 44 years old and “even more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.” Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms” and “offer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.”
Correction note: This article was edited to clarify that the petition for Leonard Peltier was filed by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and that the 2023 moratorium on LWOP recommendation came from the UN Human Rights Committee.
After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US. As a result, this latest outbreak is unfolding in a system that is even more diminished and underresourced than it was in 2020.
After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US.
First, it is worth noting that fecal contamination can happen when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks. Rather than protecting farm workers, however, the Trump administration has made it harder for them to challenge unsafe conditions. In June 2025, the Labor Department suspended enforcement of a rule that expressly protected H-2A agricultural guestworkers from retaliation for filing workplace safety complaints or consulting with worker advocates. The administration subsequently proposed rescinding those protections altogether.
Another example of the second Trump administration’s handiwork is their changes to the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet. FoodNet is useful because it conducts active surveillance of foodborne diseases. Rather than waiting for private laboratories to send results, FoodNet staff regularly inquire about new disease cases and conduct audits to ensure cases are not missed. This proactive, standardized approach helps public health officials identify more cases earlier than systems that wait for reports to move passively up the chain. FoodNet is a joint program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the state health departments where the sites are located. There are FoodNet surveillance sites in ten states, covering 62.6 million people (Figure 1).
Unfortunately, FoodNet’s reach was already limited, covering only about 16 percent of the US population. The CDC maintains that FoodNet is not intended to detect individual outbreaks, and is geared more toward measuring disease burden over time. Rather than expanding it to make it more useful for monitoring active outbreaks, however, the Trump administration significantly weakened the program by reducing the number of diseases it was required to track, undermining even its utility as a historical dataset. This will also make it difficult to determine whether foodborne illness increased under their watch.
Many of these cuts were initiated at the direction of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE’s handiwork should certainly allow for more efficient spread of diseases like cyclosporiasis. Given the cost of such outbreaks, however, the more economically sensible path would have been to invest in public health rather than shortchanging it. In any case, there is no evidence that the Trump administration slashed programs based on some careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, the cuts appear to be part of the administration’s reckless and shortsighted pattern of hollowing out the federal government’s ability to serve the public.
Cyclospora is exactly the kind of pathogen for which timely, comprehensive surveillance matters. The incubation period for cyclosporiasis is 2 to 14 days after exposure, making it difficult to track because people often struggle to remember exactly what they ate during that period. Active surveillance is better equipped to compensate for this, however, because it both picks up more cases and collects more complete records. This enables officials to identify clusters sooner despite shaky recollections from individual patients. Making active surveillance optional removed an important source of systematic, standardized data just before a major surge that has proved difficult to characterize and trace.
In public health, it is important to have robust systems in place before a crisis occurs. An outbreak that can be contained in its early stages may become difficult or impossible to control once it spreads. Yet these systems often become victims of their own success. Successful prevention means that the public never sees the disasters that were averted and may underestimate the scale of the danger those systems were designed to contain. The Trump administration appears to have doubled down on this terrible inclination, and people are paying for it with their bowels.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 23, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Press freedom groups are issuing dire warnings on Thursday that House Republicans’ efforts to subpoena the nonprofit left-wing news organization BreakThrough News represent a dangerous new step in a McCarthyite war on political dissent.
On Wednesday, Fox News reported that BreakThrough, a New York-based outlet, was one of three nonprofits that had been issued subpoenas by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee as part of an investigation into $39 million worth of donations from tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, a self-described socialist who has used his wealth to fund left-wing nonprofits.
In letters sent Tuesday, the committee, led by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), said that BreakThrough, as well as two other organizations—the People’s Forum Inc., a New York-based activist hub, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—had not turned over any documents that had been requested as part of an investigation into whether rules around tax exempt status for nonprofits should be tightened to protect against foreign influence.
The committee has accused Singham, an American who now lives in Shanghai, of exploiting the tax code and using shell companies and donor-advised funds to hide foreign money that has been used to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. It does not, however, make any specific accusation of legal wrongdoing.
The subpoena requires BreakThrough News to turn over records about its finances, foreign donors and grant recipients, fiscal-sponsorship arrangements, and communications with Singham and any foreign entities.
BreakThrough News is under attack.
The House Ways and Means Committee has made us the target of its latest witch hunt. We're not going down without a fight.
In a statement on Wednesday, BreakThrough News said it was “under attack.”
“For years, Republican lawmakers have painted a target on our backs, falsely claiming that our political views and reporting are part of some foreign plot,” the outlet said. “Now, the MAGA-dominated House Ways and Means Committee has issued us a subpoena—demanding internal communications, financial records and more. Make no mistake, this is a flagrant abuse of power, and a direct attack on our work as journalists and on the First Amendment generally.”
BreakThrough said it does not receive any funding from foreign governments or institutions and that it already complies with all the tax and public reporting requirements that nonprofits have to follow.
“We are not charged with any crime, because our only ‘crime’ has been to tell the truth–by covering the activities of the Palestinesolidarity movement, unmasking the truth of ICE’s terror in our streets, and exposing Washington’s crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo,” the outlet said. “That’s the journalism they want to shut down. Their goal is to saddle us with legal proceedings and hostile media to drain our resources and stop this important work.”
While the committee stated that they are investigating BreakThrough over its financing rather than its politics, letters sent to the organization have treated the content of its reporting as circumstantial evidence of malign foreign influence, referring to it as “anti-American” and claiming that its negative coverage of Israel was “sowing division within the United States.”
Chip Gibbons, the policy director of the free speech advocacy group Defending Rights & Dissent, told Common Dreams that the subpoena of BreakThrough was a “deeply chilling assault on the First Amendment.”
“Such tactics are, quite literally, a throwback to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which today is mostly viewed as a disgrace,” Gibbons said. “I say mostly, because just three days ago [Secretary Marco] Rubio’s State Department released a report preposterously attacking the US left, including some of these groups, as Cuban fronts that cited old HUAC reports.”
He further emphasized in a press release that there was “no plausible need” for a news organization to provide documents as part of a broad congressional inquiry.
“The only thing these groups are accused of is essentially receiving donations from a US citizen who has been the subject of an intensive campaign of demonization,” Gibbons said. “It is lawful for Americans to donate to activist causes and media projects while holding views disfavored by Congress. This is clearly not a valid legislative inquiry at all, but an attempt to intimidate and chill dissenting opinions.”
Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, agreed that “Congress shouldn’t be using a tax investigation as a pretext to dig through a newsroom’s internal communications or financial records.
“Freedom of the press,” he said, “applies to all journalists, regardless of whether politicians like their editorial slant or their politics.”
House subpoena of @BTnewsroom threatens press freedom.
We strongly urge the House Ways and Means Committee to withdraw its subpoena against BreakThrough News and stop using congressional oversight as a tool to retaliate against independent media.https://t.co/xPZgHkLPZd
— Freedom of the Press Foundation (@FreedomofPress) July 23, 2026
In what it has portrayed as a fight against “left-wing terrorism,” the Trump administration has increasingly blurred the lines between violent activity and protected political speech that they claim “incites” violence.
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed by Trump in September, designates large swathes of left-wing viewpoints on race, gender, immigration, and other topics as “indicators” of domestic terrorism that have been used to link entire groups of people to violent acts they themselves did not commit.
Rubio said last week that the administration would soon be designating more left-wing organizations as terrorist groups, while senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said that the full force of the state would be used to “disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute” those deemed to “foment” political violence, not just those who actually commit it.
He has previously pledged to use the law to “dismantle” organizations that use heated rhetoric to refer to their right-wing opponents, including calling them “fascist” or “authoritarian.”
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, described the subpoena of BreakThrough as an extension of a “retaliatory ethos” Trump has taken towards critical journalists “with the goal of shutting down criticism and dissent.”
She told Common Dreams, “BreakThrough News is not the first, nor will it be the last, to come under official attack for bringing people alternative and useful news coverage about ICE abuses, foreign policy, Palestinian rights, and other topics.”
“Allowing a congressional committee to harass an independent newsroom with a broad subpoena sets an awful precedent,” Stern said. “If lawmakers can abuse tax oversight to single out outlets whose reporting offends them today, no newsroom in America is safe from government intimidation tomorrow.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 24, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.
The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.
The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump’s Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.
The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that “extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America.”
“House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard,” the labor group said earlier this week. “That’s the wrong direction when workers’ lives are on the line.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation “would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities.”
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities,” the coalition wrote. “More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard.”
“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the groups added. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it.”
The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.
“Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations,” the report noted. “As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) issued a stark warning this week about a congressional measure that would merge the U.S. and Israel’s military technology industrial complexes, saying that it represents an “existential threat” to U.S. democracy.
The provision — called the “U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” or Section 219 — is included in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House in a 216 to 212 vote on Wednesday. Six Democrats broke from the party to vote “yes,” and seven Republicans voted “no.” The bill is still stalled in the Senate, however, after Democrats voted against its advancement last week.
The NDAA “includes a provision to merge parts of our military with the [Israeli military],” Ocasio-Cortez said in a post on social media on Tuesday. “This [provision] is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy. Every member of Congress must vote NO.”
The provision, if included in the final bill, would entrench Israel’s enmeshment with the U.S. military, mandating cooperation with regard to technology and intelligence with Israeli forces even when the U.S. gets little in return. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has advocated for the measure as public scrutiny over the U.S.’s monetary military aid to Israel has increased amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Some lawmakers in Congress have waged a bipartisan effort for Section 219 to be stripped from the NDAA. Representatives Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) have introduced an amendment to the bill to remove Section 219.
However, these efforts have been quashed by pro-Israel lawmakers, who make up the vast majority of Congress. When it published its list of proposed amendments to the bill this week, the House Rules Committee didn’t even include the Khanna/Massie proposal — barring it from being considered by the full chamber.
In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Khanna pledged to continue to advocate for the proposal. He said that the lawmakers will now seek to fight against Section 219’s inclusion in the bill during the conference between the House and Senate, during which the two chambers reconcile differences in their versions of the legislation.
“It’s shocking that this even has to be explained. It’s about American sovereignty,” Khanna said. “We do not even have the chance to vote in the House to stop Israel and the United States from co-producing weapons.”
Last week, the House voted overwhelmingly to kill another Massie amendment to strip a State Department funding bill of $3.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. However, the measure did garner 103 votes from Democrats, marking a shift within the caucus.
Ahead of the House vote on Wednesday, progressive lawmakers vowed to vote against the NDAA due to its inclusion of Section 219.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) said the provision is an “outrageous threat to our country’s security and autonomy.”
“Americans want no part in Netanyahu’s genocidal regime. Congress cannot continue to bankroll Israel’s campaign of terror,” she went on.
“Despite Americans demanding an end to genocide, this bill deeply merges the U.S. and Israeli militaries, fuels Trump’s immoral war on Iran, and enriches billionaire arms dealers,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). “Hell no.”
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.
Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)
While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.
On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation. A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men. Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”
Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.
Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction. Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.
Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety. Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life.
From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.
The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.
The State Department has released a report that labels Cuba as the “ideological capital” of left-wing politics in a document seemingly imitating Cold War politics published amid the Trump administration’s fascistic crackdown on the left.
The 99-page report is entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It argues that, since the rise of Fidel Castro and left-wing revolutionary thought in the Caribbean country in the 1950s and ‘60s, the country’s brand of left-wing politics “now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony both within and beyond the West.” Though Cuba itself is a “failed state,” the report says, its political project has still spread to the point of threatening “Western civilization itself.”
The ultimate goal for the small island state is “conquering the neighboring United States,” the report asserts. “Since 1959, Cuba has been — and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be — less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States,” the report says.
In reality, the report comes as the U.S. is seemingly preparing for an invasion of or assault on Cuba. For months, President Donald Trump has threatened that Cuba is “next” on the U.S. military’s hitlist. And CBS reported last week that Pentagon officials have been preparing a “range of options” including an air assault of the country — which is already on the brink after the Trump administration’s months-long total oil blockade has caused wave after wave of nationwide blackouts.
Indeed, the report hits on two of the Trump administration’s goals: the vilification of Cuba ahead of potential military action against the country, as well as the creation of a myth of an organized and violent left that is prepared to destroy the U.S., as administration officials kickstarted last week.
The sprawling document names numerous American left-wing groups, some of which have not been active or prominent in decades, as “front groups and fellow travelers” of Cuba.
This includes groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and Cuba solidarity groups The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples and the National Network on Cuba. The document also ties racial solidarity movements with Cuba, flimsily insinuating that Cuba is the driving force behind much of the Black Lives Matter movement and pro-immigrant, anti-ICE movements.
The report cites “examples” that are often just symbolic declarations of support for the Cuban people, taking them to improbable logical extremes.
DSA, for instance, isn’t under any control of the Cuban government, the report says. Yet, it is still a major part of the “Cuban influence operation,” the State Department claims, solely because its members espouse left-wing ideals and have expressed solidarity with the population of Cuba amid the U.S.’s sanctions regime on the country.
State Department officials also call out individual Americans who have expressed opposition to the U.S.’s policies on Cuba or otherwise participated in the Cuba solidarity movement, including prominent figures like Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, Chris Smalls, Isra Hirsi, and Amy Goodman.
The report does not discuss the U.S.’s decades of meddling and suppression of Cuba’s government. In that context, the report only brings up left-wing groups’ condemnation of the failed Bay of Pigs operation and the sanctions regime as supposed proof that they are controlled by Cuba — rather than motivated by credible human rights concerns such as those raised by the United Nations.
The document is reminiscent of Cold War-era assessments and propaganda against the Soviet Union and other countries vilified by the U.S. at the time, even quoting Cold War-era reports on the supposed threat of “Communist subversion” — a key difference being that the Soviet Union was actually taking substantial action to back political movements in other countries.
At the time, President Harry S. Truman reoriented U.S. foreign policy toward combating the growing influence of the Soviet Union and China, and spoke of the need for the U.S. to combat such “aggression.” This spiraled into decades of proxy wars ranging across the world, from Cuba to Afghanistan to Korea to Vietnam, as well as the McCarthyist campaign to silence and imprison left-wing dissidents at home.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 16, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coalhas made fires more frequent and extreme.
Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”
There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.
As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.
People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.
This is near Armstrong, Ontario.
When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0
Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.
“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”
Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.
“This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we’ve been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface,” she told BBC News.
Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.
“Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder,” Morin wrote.
On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.
Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.
“We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns,” the Sunrise Movement said.
We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.
The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3
As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: “Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal.”
Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q
“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires,” Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. “Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”
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