'Delusional' Trump Threatens to Send Tesla Vandals to Prison for 20 Years... in El Salvador

"If genuine steps are taken to remove U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to prisons in El Salvador," said one legal expert, "this removal would violate not only U.S. law but the U.S. Constitution."

This photograph taken on March 19, 2025 shows a sticker reading "I bought this before Elon went crazy" on a Tesla electric car parked in Hilleroed, Denmark.
(Photo by Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images)

Ian Queally
Mar 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump on Friday morning said anyone caught vandalizing Tesla cars or dealerships would be sent to the notoriously violent prisons of El Salvador for a 20-year sentence, a threat characterized by critics as "delusional" as well as overtly unlawful.

"People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders," Trump stated overnight, adding in all caps: "WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!"

Several hours later, Trump took up the issue again on his TruthSocial platform, saying: "I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!"

"The migrant detentions there are the dry run. He wants to ship U.S. prisoners to El Salvador. We cannot sleepwalk through this."

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said the threat, which follows on Trump's highly controversial deportation of alleged gang members to El Salvador last week, should not be taken lightly.

"Remember that this is where his discussions with El Salvador began," said Ifill in response to Trump's rantings on Friday. "The migrant detentions there are the dry run. He wants to ship U.S. prisoners to El Salvador. We cannot sleepwalk through this."

The #TeslaTakedown movement has gained steam over recent weeks, with people nationwide angered by Elon Musk's wholesale assault on cherished government agencies and programs. The world's richest man, Musk, has been empowered by Trump to spearhead his invented Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

As Axios reports, in response to the popular anger directed at Tesla, "Trump has put the full weight of the U.S. government behind defending and promoting 'first buddy' Elon Musk's car company, which has seen both its sales and stock price slump."

On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi touted the arrests of three people for alleged acts of vandalism against Tesla, saying, "Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars."




Sending U.S. citizens to a foreign country for imprisonment—even if duly convicted of a crime—is not just insane but would be grossly unconstitutional, as Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a former prosecutor and currently the senior director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program, recently explained.

"It is illegal to expatriate U.S. citizens for a crime," Eisen wrote earlier this month in response to previous threats from the Trump administration to deport people to El Salvador for alleged crimes committed in the United States. "There is no modern precedent for sending U.S. citizens who are convicted of crimes to other countries for punishment, or 'banishment' as it has been formerly called and practiced."

Eisen concluded that it remained "unclear whether the Trump administration is still researching the 'legality' of this proposal or thinking through this scenario with any seriousness. But if genuine steps are taken to remove U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to prisons in El Salvador, this removal would violate not only U.S. law but the U.S. Constitution."

Social Democracies Keep Top Spots on World Happiness Report as US Falls to Record Low


In the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."

Children enjoy a soap bubble performance during Helsinki Day in Helsinki, Finland on June 12, 2024.
(Photo: Matti Matikainen/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Mar 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


For the eighth consecutive year, the World Happiness Report on Thursday found that the countries with the happiest people are those that use their resources to invest in social welfare—and documented a precipitous drop in satisfaction among people in the United States, where President Donald Trump is pushing to destroy public services in the interest of further enriching the country's wealthiest people and corporations.

The top four happiest countries in the world were the same this year as in 2024, with Finland taking the top spot followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.

The report, compiled by the Wellbeing Research Center at University of Oxford along with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that the U.S. is continuing to fall down the list—ranking at 24, one spot lower than in 2024. In 2012, when the World Happiness Report was first published, the U.S. held the 11th spot.

The researchers measured several variables that contribute to people's happiness, including social supports, freedom to make life choices, and perceptions of corruption within their country.

Across the world, researchers recorded a drop in "deaths of despair"—preventable deaths from substance use disorders, alcohol abuse, and suicide. But the U.S. was one of two countries—the other being South Korea—where these deaths "rapidly rose," with an average yearly increase of 1.3 deaths per 100,000.

This year's World Happiness Report focuses largely on "the impact of caring and sharing" on people's happiness, noting that the prevalence of volunteering and helping strangers was high in some of the happiest countries, while social isolation in the U.S. was tied to high levels of unhappiness.

"In the United States, using data from the American Time Use Survey, the authors find clear evidence that Americans are spending more and more time dining alone," reads the report's executive summary. "In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day—an increase of 53% since 2003."

But the Costa Rican ambassador to the U.S., Catalina Crespo Sancho, noted at an event hosted by Semafor presenting the annual report, that the way the Costa Rican government invests public funds has helped push it into the top 10 happiest countries for the first time, with Costa Rica ranking sixth in the world.

"We're one of the few countries in the world that does not have an army," said Crespo Sancho. "All that money, they invested in things that our Nordic countries here have been doing for many, many years... Education, social services, health access."




Residents of the happiest countries named in the report benefit from significant public investment in healthcare, education, childcare, and other public services, and live in societies where the divide between the richest households and working people is far smaller than in the United States.

Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands all score below 30 on the World Bank's Gini Index, which measures income inequality, while the U.S. has a score of 41.3, indicating a wider gap between the rich and poor.

The report was released two months into Trump's second term in the White House, which has already been characterized by efforts by Trump and his billionaire ally, tech mogul Elon Musk, to gut public spending on healthcare, education, and the environment in order to fund tax cuts for the richest households. The Republican Party is also aggressively pushing attacks on bodily autonomy in the U.S., passing abortion bans and so-called "fetal personhood" measures as well as laws barring transgender and gender nonconforming people from accessing affirming healthcare.

According to the report, in the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."

The report also contextualized the victory of Trump and rise of far-right movements like the president's nationalist, anti-immigration MAGA movement, noting that far-right supporters of "anti-system" political leaders like Trump "have a very low level of social trust."
For the populist right, this low trust is not limited to strangers, but also extends to others in general, from homosexuals to their own neighbors. The xenophobic inclination of the populist right, well-documented worldwide, seems to be a particular case of a broader distrust towards the rest of society. Right-wing populists throughout the world share xenophobic and anti-immigration inclinations. The Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, Greece's Golden Dawn, the Northern League and Fratelli in Italy, the National Rally in France, and a fraction of the Republican Party in the U.S. are all built on strong anti-immigration foundations.

Meanwhile, "far-left voters have a higher level of social trust," leading them to support "pro-redistribution, pro-immigrant" political groups that offer an alternative to the political establishment with "more universalist values."

In the United States' two-party system, citizens "with low life satisfaction and low social trust" tend to "abstain" from political engagement, according to the report.

"The fall in life satisfaction cannot be explained by economic growth," reads the report. "Rather, it could be blamed on the feelings of financial insecurity and loneliness experienced by Americans and Europeans—two symptoms of a damaged social fabric. It is driven by almost all social categories, but in particular, by the rural, the less-educated, and, quite strikingly, by the younger generation. This low level of life satisfaction is a breeding ground for populism and the lack of social trust is behind the political success of the far right."

Canada the happiest G7 country: International report edited by SFU expert

DSA DYNAMIC DUO

AOC, Sanders Rallying 15,000 Arizonans—With Thousands More Watching Online—Makes Clear 'The Moment We're In'

"People are starting to put the pieces together, and ironically the most divisive forces in this country are actually starting to bring more of us together," said Ocasio-Cortez.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), left, joins Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on stage before speaking at "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" rally Thursday, March 20, 2025, in North Las Vegas.
(Photo: Ronda Churchill for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Eloise Goldsmith
Mar 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

A stop on Sen. Bernie Sanders' nationwide town hall tour "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" in Tempe, Arizona that also featured Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Thursday broke the record for the number of attendees at an event hosted by Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, in the state, according to his director of communications.

"This is a big deal," wrote communications director Anna Bahr on X of the gangbusters turnout.

"Just to be clear about the moment we're in: Bernie Sanders' biggest crowd in Phoenix previously was 11,300 in 2015 when he was running for president. Tonight, in a non-campaign year, when he is running for nothing, 15,000 Arizonans turned out," she wrote. Bahr also said that more than 123,000 people watched the livestream of the event online.



Footage of the event shows a completely packed event space at Arizona State University's Mullet Arena. At least a 1,000 people could not enter the arena because there was no room inside, according to the Arizona Mirror.

Sanders launched his "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" tour, which focuses on working-class districts that President Joe Biden won in 2020 but were won by a House Republican in 2024, in February, with the aim of talking to Americans about the "takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country's move toward authoritarianism."

In their remarks on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders spoke about Republican efforts to target programs like Social Security and Medicaid and billionaire Elon Musk's influence over the GOP.

"The billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country," said Ocasio-Cortez—alluding to Musk's efforts to slash federal spending and personnel with the Department of Government Efficiency, and other billionaires in U.S. President Trump's orbit—"derive their power from dividing working people apart."

"People are starting to put the pieces together, and ironically the most divisive forces in this country are actually starting to bring more of us together," said Ocasio-Cortez.

"Their disdain for working people," she continued, "is a shorthand for the right's entire political agenda and a certain kind of ugly politics in this country—and that is lying to and screwing over working at middle class Americans so that they can steal our healthcare, Social Security, and veterans benefits."

When Sanders took the stage, he said, "Trump and his billionaire friends have never, ever had it so good in the history of this country."



Sanders also argued that if a Republican voiced opposition to Republicans' plan to deliver tax cuts that will primarily benefit the wealthy, "Musk in five minutes would say, 'we are going to primary you'... That is not a democracy."

Musk—who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and other GOP candidates in 2024—has threatened to fund moderate candidates in heavily Democratic districts.

AOC Joins Western Stops of Sanders 'Fighting Oligarchy' Tour

"While Republicans try to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, people across the country are standing up against these attacks on the working class," the congresswoman said.


U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks to a capacity crowd for his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour on March 07, 2025 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Mar 16, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is set to join five stops of Sen. Bernie Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy" tour this week.

Sanders (I-Vt.), who mobilized working-class voters nationwide during his 2016 and 2020 runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, launched the tour in the Midwest last month. Thousands of people have attended his events in cities across Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

"Today, the oligarchs and the billionaire class are getting richer and richer and have more and more power," Sanders said in a Friday statement. "Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and most of our people are struggling to pay for healthcare, childcare, and housing. This country belongs to all of us, not just the few. We must fight back."

Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) are set to join the senator on Thursday, March 20 at the East Las Vegas Community Center, for an event scheduled to begin at 1:30 pm local time. From there, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders plan to head to Arizona State University in Tempe for a 6:00 pm stop.

The pair has two more events on Friday: A 1:00 stop at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and a 5:00 pm stop at Civic Center Park in Denver. They are slated to wrap up the trip on Saturday with Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) at an 11:30 am event at Catalina High School in Tucson, Arizona.

"While Republicans try to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, people across the country are standing up against these attacks on the working class," said Ocasio-Cortez. "They deserve representation that is willing to stand with them. I look forward to hitting the road with Sen. Sanders."

Since Sanders announced the new tour stops and guests on Friday, Republicans and a handful of Democrats on Capitol Hill have given them some new developments to discuss on the road. Ahead of a potential government shutdown on Friday, 10 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus—including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—helped GOP senators advance a stopgap measure that critics warn will further empower President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's attacks.

Schumer's "gutless" handling of the situation sparked calls for him to step down as Senate minority leader and for Ocasio-Cortez to launch a primary challenge against him in the 2028 cycle—something the congresswoman has not ruled out.



As the Senate was sending the stopgap bill to the president's desk, Trump was at the U.S. Department of Justice, delivering a speech that sparked widespread alarm. As Lena Zwarensteyn, senior director of the fair courts program and an adviser at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, summarized, he "sought to undermine faith in our judicial system, attacked lawyers who support due process and the rule of law, and made it clear that he expects the attorney general and other leaders to use the full force and resources of the Justice Department to roll back our civil and human rights, target his enemies, and operationalize a worldview that perpetuates white supremacy."

On Saturday, Trump bombed Yemen and revealed that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. The 1798 law was used during World War II to force thousands of people of mostly German, Italian, and Japanese descent into internment camps.

Meanwhile, Sanders wrote in a Saturday email to supporters that from the tour stops so far, "what I have found is that in these districts, and all across the country, Americans are saying loudly and clearly: NO to oligarchy, NO to authoritarianism, NO to kleptocracy, NO to massive cuts in programs that working people desperately need, NO to huge tax breaks for the richest people in our country."

"There must be meetings and rallies in all 50 states, and they should take place over and over again. And when those rallies are over, we need to organize the people who attend to mobilize in their communities and be in touch with their members of Congress. But that is not all," he wrote. "We need progressives to run for office at all levels. I am talking about school boards, city councils, state legislature, and the races that are not in the news but make a tremendous difference in local communities."

"We need to build community and bring people together even when it isn't about politics first. The Republican Party is always trying to divide us up based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more... we need to come together as one," he continued. "We need to elect a U.S. House and a U.S. Senate that will prioritize the needs of the working people in this country."

Sanders concluded that "we need to be looking for new and creative ways to educate each other in a world where nearly the entire media and communications infrastructure is owned and controlled by the wealthiest people in this country. If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, this is that time."

The Final Hours of Jessie Hoffman, Murdered by the State of Louisiana

The killing of this man, said one of his lawyers, "has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”


This undated photo shows Louisiana death row inmate Jessie Hoffman Jr., who was murdered by the state of Louisiana with a lethal dose of nitrogen gas this week after being sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Mary Elliott.
(Credit: Caroline Tillman/Federal Public Defender's Office For the Middle and Western Districts of Louisiana)

Bill Quigley
Mar 20, 2025

Common Dreams


Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace. He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming. We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.

Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years. I was there to witness the murder of Mr. Hoffman if Louisiana reversed its course and allowed one of the legal team to remain through the whole process.

Already in the room when we arrived was Rev. Reimoku Gregory Smith, a Buddhist priest Hoffman chose to accompany him. Jessie is a practicing Buddhist and has been a leader among those in prison for decades. Reverend Reimoku was in long black robes. He was serene and almost glowing in kindness.

We sat around a big wooden conference table that had the logo of the State of Louisiana carved into the middle of it. Uniformed officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary sat in opposite ends of the room. There were two big pictures on the walls—one of Elijah on a flaming chariot and one of Daniel in the lion’s den.

The room in which Louisiana planned to murder Jessie Hoffman was steps away.

The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

Jessie Hoffman is about six feet tall and muscular. He was wearing a black t-shirt that said Life Row in white letters on it—the name that its 50+ occupants prefer to call what the outside world calls death row. He has been fasting for days and mostly sits quietly with his arms on the wooden table, staring intently at whoever was talking to him.

Jessie was holding his favorite book, "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation" by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, author, poet, and peacemaker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jessie asked Reverend Reimoku to read his favorite passage from the book to us. It was called the Four Immeasurable Minds: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity. He read and reflected as we took in these words together. Jessie occasionally closed his eyes.

Louisiana was scheduled to murder Jessie Hoffman by first immobilizing him by tying down his arms, hands, legs, and torso on a crucifix-like platform. Then, once he was helpless to resist, they would cover his face with an industrial-grade respirator and pump his lungs full of poison high-grade nitrogen gas. Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation in a phenomenon known as hypoxia. This method is so horrible all but two states have stopped using nitrogen gas on animals declaring it inhumane. The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights has condemned the use of nitrogen gas in executions saying its use could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment in violation of international human rights law.

Jessie Hoffman was to be murdered by Louisiana because he had as a teenager, after years of shocking physical, sexual and psychological abuse, committed a horrible murder in 1996.

Now the Louisiana Governor claimed it was necessary for the state to respond to this murder by itself murdering Jessie Hoffman to “prioritize victims over criminals.”

Yet the actual family members of the victim of Jessie’s murder were not asking Louisiana to murder him.

The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

The victim’s husband refused to attend the state execution and said he is now “indifferent to the death penalty vs life in prison without parole.” He also another reason for not attending was he was “just not really feeling like I need to watch another human being die."

Years before, Jessie Hoffman wrote a statement apologizing to the victims. Louisiana refused to deliver it to the family.

Jessie and the victim’s sister-in-law tried to talk by zoom so Jessie could apologize to her directly but Louisiana would not allow it.

As our visit continued, another long-time lawyer arrived. Caroline Tillman, who has been working to save Jessie Hoffman from state murder for 22 years, came directly from federal court in New Orleans. Teams of lawyers tried to stop the state murder of Jessie Hoffman, filing in several state and federal courts. Only the U.S. Supreme Court had not been heard from yet.

More prayers were said. The letter from the sister-in-law asking that the state murder not go forward was read aloud. More prayers. More than 250 faith leaders had recently signed letters asking Louisiana not to revive the practice of state murder with nitrogen gas.

With less than an hour to go before the scheduled murder of Jessie Hoffman, the Warden came in and politely but firmly terminated the lawyers’ visit. He refused permission to allow any lawyer to stay and witness the murder of Jessie Hoffman. Only Reverend Reimoku was allowed to remain.

After the lawyers were escorted out, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the murder of Mr. Hoffman by a vote of 5-4, one vote short of the 5 votes needed for a stay.

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

John Simmerman, a journalist with Nola.com, was one of two media witnesses allowed to view the execution of Jessie Hoffman. He reports that at 6:21 pm the ultra-high-grade nitrogen was pumped into the immobilized Mr. Hoffman. His breathing became uneven. His chest rose. He made a jerking motion. His body shook. His fingers twitched. He pulled at the table. His hands clenched. His breathing slowed. His head moved inside the mask. He jerked slightly around 6:27 pm and stopped moving. Louisiana officials reported the poison gas was pumped into Jessie Hoffman for 19 minutes until he was pronounced dead. The last view of Jessie Hoffman with his face now uncovered showed “his head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.”

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.Samantha Pourciau, who was with Jessie Hoffman on his final day on earth, said: “Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man. The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Bill Quigley is Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years. He volunteers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Bureau de Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port au Prince.
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War Architects Enjoy Top Academic Gigs 22 Years After Illegal Invasion of Iraq

As Gaza’s genocidaires receive plum positions at universities, they’re joining a cohort of experienced warmongers.

By Derek Seidman , 

Truthout

March 19, 2025

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo answer questions during an event hosted by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Stanford, California, on January 13, 2020.JOHN G. MABANGLO/POOL / AFP via Getty Images

Today, on the 22nd anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, key architects and commanders of this monstrous war crime, from Condoleezza Rice to David Petraeus, sit comfortably in cushy positions at top American universities.

At the same time, the overseers of the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment and siege on Gaza, considered a genocide by human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are already settling into equally fancy appointments at elite schools. Just recently, Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Jake Sullivan accepted gigs at Harvard, with Sullivan’s professorship named after none other than former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Both Sullivan and McGurk were key officials who implemented Biden’s Gaza policies, and McGurk’s work stretches back to the Iraq occupation.

Many of these universities — Harvard to Yale, Columbia to Stanford — have made statements around injustices such as Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but have mostly stayed quiet around Israel’s destruction of Gaza and scholasticide against Palestinian universities. These administrations have also aggressively repressed students who protested ongoing atrocities against Palestinians and demanded that universities break ties with Israel’s U.S.-backed war machine that oversees occupation and apartheid. The university response to dissent around the U.S.-Israel war on Palestine has been far more iron-fisted than anything seen during the Iraq War.

“This is the Palestine exception,” Van Gosse, co-founder of Historians Against the War, which formed in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War, and current co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy, told Truthout.

Still, Gosse and others who mobilized academia to oppose the Iraq War are joining a new generation of student activists to push back against university complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.

Related Story

Anniversary of a War Crime

Across the world, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is widely seen as a moral abomination, made possible by a campaign of deceit by the George W. Bush administration, which falsely claimed that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction as pretext for an illegal invasion.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights labelled the invasion a “crime” and said the U.S. “committed war crimes including massacres and torture on a massive scale.” Amnesty International emphasized the “gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law perpetrated by the United States-led Coalition” during the invasion and occupation, which formally ended in 2011.

Gosse, a professor emeritus at Franklin and Marshall College who taught classes on the laws of war, told Truthout that, “Anyone connected to the Iraq War is responsible for the first crime of war, which is aggression.”

“If you make war without a casus belli, it’s a war crime,” he said.

Key architects and overseers of the second U.S. war on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious teaching appointments and lucrative speaking gigs at U.S. universities.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 315,000 Iraqis, overwhelmingly civilians, may have died during the invasion and occupation, though this is likely an undercount. Around 9.2 million Iraqis — 37 percent of Iraq’s prewar population — may have been displaced. All this came after years of devastating sanctions, some of which were implemented as early as 1990, one year before the first U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. occupation oversaw torture and massacres of Iraqis and led to massive sectarian violence and a ravaging of the nation’s educational system and public health. The war and occupation upended the region politically, leading to hundreds of thousands of more deaths and millions more displacements.

Iraq War Architects Flood Universities

And yet, key architects and overseers of the second U.S. war on Iraq have been rewarded with prestigious teaching appointments and lucrative speaking gigs at U.S. universities.

Condoleezza Rice, a war hawk who served as national security adviser during the 2003 invasion and later as secretary of state, has enjoyed a cozy relationship with universities since she left government.

Today, she serves as the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as the director of the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank at Stanford. Rice has also enjoyed distinguished speaking invitations at universities like Pepperdine, Purdue and the University of Minnesota, where she reportedly took $150,000 for the gig.

Few government officials were more aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy. In 2006, just after he left the Bush administration, Feith was handed, without a faculty vote, a teaching position at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

The move “set off a faculty kerfuffle,” noted The New York Times, “with 72 professors, administrators and graduate students signing a letter of protest,” with “some going as far as to accuse him of war crimes.”

David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion before becoming the top U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and later CIA chief, has also been warmly welcomed into academia over the past decade or so.

In 2013, Petraeus was appointed to a visiting position at City University of New York. Set to receive a whopping $150,000 to teach a three-hour weekly class, Petraeus later forwent the payment after it became a public scandal, with his appointment facing protests.

But this was just the beginning of Petraeus’s academic invitations. Around the same time, he joined the University of Southern California (USC) faculty as a Judge Widney Professor, a title “reserved for eminent individuals from the arts, sciences, professions, business and community and national leadership,” according to a USC statement. Petraeus held the position for six years; USC was hush about his salary.

Today, Petraeus continues to enjoy speaking engagements from Rice University to the University of Arizona to Princeton, and he remains a Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Yale also served as a home for Stanley McChrystal, who oversaw special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2022, he held a senior fellow position at the Ivy League school.

Harvard Welcomes Iraq and Gaza War Accomplices

Petraeus has also been a mainstay at Harvard University, serving for six years as a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

As journalist Michael Massing noted, the Belfer Center is a “virtual arm of the military-intelligence complex,” with a slew of top leaders and fellows tied to the Pentagon and weapons companies.


Few government officials were more aggressive in advocating for and overseeing the invasion of Iraq than Douglas Feith. Feith was handed, without a faculty vote, a teaching position at Georgetown.

In 2023, Meghan L. O’Sullivan became the head of the Belfer Center. According to a 2006 profile in The New York Times, O’Sullivan was one of Bush’s top advisers on Iraq and Afghanistan, with colleagues saying she was “instrumental in shaping Mr. Bush’s views,” and “the most senior official working on those nations full time at the White House.” She also spent over a year in Baghdad as an aide to Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority, making him Iraq’s de facto ruler during the early years of the occupation. Bremer single handedly implemented widely reviled free-market reforms and privatization schemes while in charge.

In 2022, O’Sullivan, who was already a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, faced protests from antiwar activists for her position as a board director of weapons giant Raytheon — a lucrative position she held starting in 2017 and only stepped down from in early 2023 after being appointed as the Belfer Center director.

Harvard also just announced that former Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who helped oversee U.S. backing for Israel’s siege of Gaza, will be the inaugural Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, affiliated with the Belfer Center.

Henry Kissinger, who died in 2023, is widely seen as a war criminal for his backing of atrocities in Southeast Asia, Latin America and East Timor throughout the 1970s. Kissinger himself was welcomed by universities until his death, though he often faced protests when speaking at campuses.

Gosse recalls protests against Kissinger’s commencement addresses in the 1980s. “There’s really no great record of institutions recognizing the criminality of the architects of these terrible wars,” he told Truthout.

Additionally, Harvard recently announced that Brett McGurk would join the Belfer Center as a senior fellow.

McGurk was Joe Biden’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa and one of the administration’s key advisers on Israel’s war on Gaza who was deeply involved with negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Reporting by HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed suggests that McGurk’s main concern was achieving Saudi-Israeli “normalization” at the expense of Palestinian human rights.

McGurk also served in the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, where he strongly influenced U.S. policy in Iraq. McGurk has been criticized for his close support of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. One diplomat called McGurk “a consummate operator in Washington” but saw “no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people.”

Harrison Mann, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who resigned in May 2024 from the Defense Intelligence Agency in protest of U.S. policy in Gaza, lambasted Harvard’s hiring of McGurk, who he called “an enthusiastic and influential advocate for the U.S. military support that sustained Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza.”

“Hiring McGurk is a declaration that being party to a litany of war crimes isn’t a deal-breaker at Harvard,” wrote Mann.

Campus Ties to Militarism Are Nothing New

Close ties between U.S. universities and the war machine are nothing new. The military-industrial complex grew interdependently with the boom in higher education after World War II and into the Cold War.

Campus protests today against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this tradition of challenging university ties to the war machine.

From Stanford to MIT, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, defense dollars and corporate money poured into research labs. Key architects of the U.S. war on Vietnam and Southeast Asia like McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger held prestigious roles at Harvard before entering the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

In the late 1960s, however, mass student uprisings across campuses began to openly challenge the tight alliance between universities and the war industry during the U.S. war on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Militant protests against companies like Dow Chemical — maker of napalm — erupted at dozens of campuses. Student movements from Berkeley to Madison to Columbia engaged in building occupations and mapped out their schools’ ties to corporate power and the war machine.

Campus protests today against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are carrying on this tradition of challenging university ties to the war machine.

Dozens of universities and their research labs, from Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon to MIT and the University of Southern California, receive billions in Pentagon funding. Students from Columbia to Cornell have protested against the close ties between weapons manufacturers who supply Israel’s annihilation campaign and their own university boards that welcome representatives of these weapons manufacturers as trustees and donors.

The Palestine Exception

In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. academics decided to resist. Dozens of professors came together at the January 2003 conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) to form a new group, Historians Against the War (HAW).

Gosse, who co-founded HAW, told Truthout that the group’s mission was “to organize historians to speak out and be active on campus and within the larger movement” against the war.

HAW members attended protests, held conferences and teach-ins, and wrote op-eds. At the 2007 AHA meeting they successfully passed a resolution calling for the end of the Iraq war.

Around 2014, Gosse says, HAW started focusing more on Palestine, forming a Palestine-Israel Working Group. The turn caused “a bit of controversy,” he said, and the groups’ efforts to “censure Israel’s manifold violations of academic freedom” at AHA meetings over the next few years were defeated.

After Trump’s first election, the group renamed itself Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD) and took up fights against right-wing “culture wars.” They still organize panels at AHA conferences that fill the room.

It was HPAD that introduced the resolution at the January 2025 AHA meeting opposing scholasticide in Gaza that prevailed with an overwhelming 428 to 88 vote, only to be vetoed by AHA leadership days later. In response, HPAD and the Palestine Historians Group drafted a letter signed by over 1,900 historians, including four former AHA presidents, that the AHA leadership council will discuss in a March 20 meeting. The letter calls for the AHA leadership council to rescind its veto of the Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.

For Gosse, who co-chairs HPAD, the contrasts between the wars on Iraq and Palestine are striking. Some university administrations supported debate over the Iraq War, he says. There was a sense that the Iraq War was “something really important that we should talk about,” says Gosse, which may be attributed to the “long playing out of the Vietnam syndrome” — a catchphrase that refers to popular skepticism toward U.S. military inventions in the decades following the Vietnam War.

But today, many of these same university administrations shun and repress discussion of injustice against Palestinians.

“You hit a wall if you challenge Israel,” says Gosse. “It’s been a third rail that has severely limited the ability of people to speak about the completely illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and the fact that Israel has been, for a very long time, an apartheid state.”

Gosse laments the “horrific capitulation and fear” among university administrations right now and the “complete destruction of faculty governance.” He called Columbia University’s actions around the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil “disgusting” and “utterly shameful.”

“They are debasing themselves,” he said. “They’ve taken all the progress made on academic freedom and free speech on campus and thrown it in the gutter within a few months.”

Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident who is Palestinian, is a recent graduate from Columbia University who participated in campus protests against the genocide in Gaza. He was arrested on March 8 by ICE and transferred to Louisiana, where the Trump administration is attempting to deport him for participating in pro-Palestine protests.

A federal judge temporarily halted the deportation order, and there has been an outpouring of support for Khalil and outrage at the administration’s brazen attacks on free speech rights. Khalil’s arrest follows many months of crackdowns on and criticisms against student protesters under the Biden administration, which the Trump administration has directly intensified.

As the U.S. enablers of catastrophic wars from Iraq to Gaza continue to find homes in the same universities that repress dissent around Palestine, attitudes beyond the heights of power are shifting. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the AHA scholasticide resolution, Gosse says, the push for it has been “a great success.”

“The most venerable learned society in the U.S. has been forced fully and completely to confront the scholasticide in Gaza,” he said.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.



Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a contributing writer for LittleSis.

 

New research reveals how asset owners can leverage ESG shareholder engagement across the world

Study explores how investors can overcome global structural differences to successfully exert influence on investee companies’ sustainability.

City St George’s, University of London

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A new report has uncovered how investors can most effectively foster shareholder engagement on environmental, societal and governance (ESG) issues to overcome differences in structural and cultural climates around the world.

The report, titled Chains of influence, was funded by the Laudes Foundation and authored by Dr Emilio Marti, Rotterdam School of Management, Dr Kevin Chuah, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, and Professor Jean-Pascal Gond, Bayes Business School. It examines how power dynamics between asset owners and asset managers (‘active owners’), companies and other stakeholders vary significantly between different countries, and identifies two chains of influence – company-centric and owner-centric. These chains depict contrasting abilities of asset owners, and the asset managers working on their behalf, to apply pressure on companies to engage in ESG activities. The study outlines opportunities for active owners to influence under-engaged companies across different global contexts.

Company-centric chains are characterised by companies having low dependence on institutional investors. They therefore hold power because active owners are reluctant or unable to exert influence on them to engage on ESG issues. Examples include Brazil, China and India. Owner-centric chains, such as the United Kingdom and France, are more heavily reliant on institutional investment which allows asset owners and asset managers to exert greater pressure on managers and companies.

Each chain of influence can be structured on a five-steps engagement process:

• Structural engagement capabilities – company-centric engagements are largely decentralised, carried out by portfolio analysts with support from professional engagement specialists. Owner-centric engagements, meanwhile, are generally centralised and executed by in-house engagement specialists.
• Setting engagement goals – company-centric engagements are largely carried out to attain ESG insights that can improve portfolio returns for asset managers, leading to increased ESG disclosure. Owner-centric engagements have more focus on influencing companies, with clear distinctions between building ESG insights and pressured engagements.
• Company interactions – engagement specialists regularly join company meetings that discuss non-ESG issues in company-centric chains of influence, so they can share best practices at scale. Owner-centric chains tend to be more in-depth, focussing on relationships and influencing fewer companies in greater detail.
• Pressure on companies – escalation of pressure in company-centric chains are discouraged for fear of appearing disrespectful or ‘burning bridges’. In owner-centric chains asset owners are more willing to exert pressure through votes of no confidence in company directors or going public with concerns.
• Reporting – with less pressure exerted by asset owners in company-centric chains, there is little and basic reporting on ESG activities. Asset owners in owner-centric contexts require deeper, more detailed reporting to showcase to asset owners what asset managers are doing. In some countries this is even required by law.

Bridging these chains of influence, asset owners and asset managers can prompt stronger ESG shareholder interaction with local companies by:

1. Importing pressure through mandates to owner-centric asset managers
2. Funding systemic change for company-centric managers
3. Leveraging the expertise of asset managers in owner-centric models
4. Leveraging the local expert access from asset managers in company-centric chains
5. Mobilising companies to influence peers and suppliers in company-centric countries. Cross-border collaboration, clear expectations, and strong relationships are essential for maximising impact and ensuring accountability

By considering the global and national contexts, these recommendations and findings capitalise on and extend insights from prior studies of the three researchers around ESG engagement.

Professor Gond said:

“Shareholder engagement of companies on ESG issues means very different things in different countries. While asset managers in Brazil or India may describe an activity as ESG shareholder engagement, asset managers in France or the UK may describe the same activity as mere information gathering. Asset owners that pay asset managers for ESG shareholder engagement must understand these differences.

“Active owners in different chains of influence have different types of resources and have built different types of strengths. These different resources and strengths open opportunities for collaborations between active owners from different chains of influence.”

Dr Marti said:

“We found stark differences between countries in terms of how much influence asset owners have on asset managers and companies. Companies’ dependence on shareholders also varies greatly by country. These differences shape how ESG shareholder engagement is done and helps explain why ESG shareholder engagement takes different forms in different countries.

“Pension funds play a critical role in influencing how ESG shareholder engagement is done in a country. In some countries, pension funds are highly active in pushing ESG shareholder engagement, which has a spill-over effect on other active owners. In other countries, pension funds are more passive.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

• Research for this report was carried out through conducting 93 interviews with 100 professionals involved in ESG shareholder engagement across 12 countries, plus extensive reviews of academic and practitioner literature.
• Data was collected between July 2024 and January 2025.

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Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Article Title

Chains of influence

Article Publication Date

20-Mar-2025