CUNY Discloses Investments in Israeli Apartheid After Years-Long Campaign

CUNY has direct investments in weapons manufacturers enabling Israel’s genocide, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin

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By Shireen Akram-Boshar ,

Truthout

September 10, 2026

City University of New York (CUNY) students occupy the central quad of the CUNY campus with a Gaza Solidarity encampment, on April 26, 2024, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis

On Wednesday, September 9, activists from CUNY4Palestine broadcast their findings regarding the City University of New York’s (CUNY) investment portfolio in a press conference in front of New York City Hall.

“Following years of campus organizing and after a wave of demonstrations that erupted to protest CUNY’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the students have won disclosure!” the student group said in a statement shared with Truthout.

CUNY has now disclosed its ties to companies profiting from Israel’s crimes – including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

The fight for disclosure is just a stepping stone in the larger struggle across the U.S. to compel academic institutions to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s crimes.

In mid-August, CUNY agreed to settle and disclose its stock and bond holdings by September 2, following a two-year battle with activists. The legal battle began with CUNY4Palestine and CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine filing a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request in 2024, which was quickly denied by the university. The activist groups then filed a lawsuit demanding that CUNY disclose its investments in companies involved in Israeli apartheid and genocide dating back to January 2020. A judge ruled in 2025 that CUNY could not withhold its records, but the university appealed the ruling. Finally, in August 2026, the university agreed to a settlement that included disclosure.


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Corinna Mullin, who was among four adjunct professors fired by CUNY for speaking in solidarity with Palestine in June 2025, spoke at the Wednesday press conference. (Three of those professors have since been reinstated, including Mullin.)

“Let’s be clear – CUNY did not volunteer this information,” Mullin said. “They fought us every step of the way.”

“It took a FOIL lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court, an encampment, speakouts, protests, petitions, demonstrations at board of trustee hearings, and a relentless campaign of pressure” to get the university to disclose, she went on.

“And this campaign, although accelerated by the urgency of the genocide against the Palestinian people started in October 2023, dates back years,” she added.

CUNY4Palestine “has identified numerous investments in CUNY’s portfolio,” the organization explained in the statement, “that confirm CUNY’s direct complicity in colonization, genocide, war crimes, prison labor, border militarization, imperialist military interventions, mass incarceration and fascist attacks on our immigrant communities.”

The university has direct investments in multiple weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the activists announced, including over $212,407.10 in unsecured Boeing stocks, $107,488.89 in Boeing common stocks, $141,201.34 in Raytheon stocks, and $65,302.74 in Lockheed Martin stocks.

“Boeing in particular facilitates ongoing massacres in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine through its manufacturing of F-15 fighter jets, Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, and the notorious bunker-buster bombs,” the activists went on.

The activist group also noted that CUNY has holdings in GEO Group and CoreCivic, private contractors who operate immigration jails including Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. These corporations “profit from prison labor, ICE detention, deportations, and surveillance,” Mullin said in her speech.

“Even as CUNY management claims to support immigrant students, it has invested the funds of our public university in terrorizing their communities and detaining them and their families,” Mullin added.

She then called for CUNY to respond to the needs of the diverse community it serves.

“We shouldn’t have had to fight for this. This is a public institution. This is the so-called ‘People’s University,’” Mullin said.

Veronica Salama of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the student activists in the legal fight, noted in a press release in August that investment records disclosure “is a basic responsibility and function of a public institution.”

CUNY is the largest urban public university in the country. It now joins the only other U.S. universities that have disclosed their investments in companies complicit in Israel’s crimes – the University of Minnesota and the University of California, both of which disclosed in 2024 due to the pressure of pro-Palestinian student encampments that spring.

In May 2025, the University of San Francisco announced that it would divest from four companies that contract with the Israeli military by June 2025 – Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace, and RTX Corporation, also after a persistent campaign by student activists.

In 2024, students across the country set up at least 130 encampments at colleges and universities in order to bring attention to the U.S.’s role in Israel’s genocide. One of the primary demands of the encampments was divestment.

In her speech on Wednesday, Mullin referred to the encampment as central to the fight for disclosure and divestment, and for a better university.

“When we organized against all of this – when we built that beautiful encampment at City College in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and against the genocide – we created something extraordinary,” she said. “We showed what a People’s University could actually look like.”

But the university’s response — and the response of universities across the country to the student-led encampment movement — was repression.

“They called in the [New York City Police Department Strategic Response Group], with the full support of the governor and mayor at the time, to repress our peaceful encampment. Over 100 protesters were arrested that evening,” Mullin recalled. “They attacked and punished student organizers.”

Despite the repression, activists intend for the disclosure to become a blueprint for a divestment campaign at CUNY, and a model for other universities.

The State University of New York (SUNY) BDS chapter echoed this sentiment in a statement sent to Truthout, saying, “Our goal is to develop a SUNY-wide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that reaches across all 64 SUNY campuses.”

Fiasco: Trump's contractor confesses to Reflecting Pool train wreck

(Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

Adam Lynch

September 11, 2026

ALTERNET

The New York Times reports that the contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in its repair plan, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, not vandalism.

The Times reviewed government documents showing the company took responsibility for the decay and damage to the pool liner, despite the administration’s insistence — and prosecutions —claiming the damage was done by delinquents

“President Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals wielding knives or box cutters for damage to the pool’s ‘American flag blue’ liner, even after the Justice Department dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the national landmark,” reports the Times. “But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.”


Atlantic apparently held its own errors liable in an Aug. 14 report, and then provided additional detail on Sept. 2, according to documents.

The Justice Department, which had charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, began moving to dismiss the cases on July 31, according to the Times.


In documents, the company blamed “human oversight” in some patches of the renovation, saying workers did not apply enough chemical primer to gel the layers of the liner together. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan itself laid out in the contract actually called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that are incompatible.

“The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way,” reports the Times. “The failure illustrates the consequences of the Trump administration’s rushed effort to renovate the pool this spring. In a hurry to finish the work before the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, the government bypassed competition and gave Atlantic a no-bid contract to carry out an untested approach designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs.”

The Times reports the government has agreed to pay Atlantic $14.7 million for its work, but the contractor has said the pool is under warranty and eligible for additional repair.


Regardless, the Times reports Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin appeared to insist vandals were to blame for the damage, saying that they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”

In July, federal prosecutors acted on President Donald Trump’s claims of vandalism and announced the indictment former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for pulling up a piece of the liner, on a felony vandalism charge.

But in a reversal, prosecutors pushed to dismiss the charges against Hearn and three others alleged vandals.


“Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, wrote that the Interior Department had misled her staff about the extent to which the damage had stemmed from vandalism rather than a ‘botched installation,’” reports the Times.

WSJ analysis proves it: MAGA is the party of (NATIONAL) socialism

REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Nick Hilden

September 11, 2026 

ALTERNET

On Friday, a new report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the MAGA movement has embraced the very “socialist” policies for which President Donald Trump attacks his Democratic opponents. According to the Journal’s chief economic commentator, Greg Ip, MAGA’s “disdain for capitalism and centrism” has it looking more “socialist” by the day.

Ip raises the example of Vice President JD Vance, who dismissed Milton Friedman during an interview in June as irrelevant “in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites." This sort of statement is a far cry from traditional free market Republican economics. According to Ip, such thinking tracks with the “Horseshoe theory,” in which “the similarities between communism and fascism” begin to overlap to the point where they are almost indistinguishable. Like the “communists” and Democratic socialists the president so often rants about, writes Ip, Trump, Vance, and other MAGA figures “disdain free markets and globalization while embracing big, coercive government" and "are obsessed with identity."

According to Ip, these ideas began to shape the Republican Party in 2016 “with Trump’s populist takeover of the Republican Party. ‘Trump has re-educated, or mis-educated a lot of Republican voters into thinking everything is rigged. It’s how Bernie Sanders thinks about the economy,’ said Andy Laperriere, policy analyst at Piper Sandler. ‘The foreigners, the big companies, the system, whatever, is ripping us off.’ Laperriere noted that many ideas that originated on the left now command considerable backing from Republicans. Limiting drug increases to the rate of inflation, banning large investors from buying single-family homes, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and capping credit-card interest rates at 10 percent all command support of around 70 percent or more, according to polls.”


Ip argues that Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) – long the standard bearer for American socialist politics – “have a lot in common.” Ip writes that “Sanders wanted to nationalize oil companies in the 1970s and proposes 50 percent state ownership of AI companies now. Trump used to call for seizing Middle Eastern oil or being paid to defend it, and just grabbed control of a chunk of Venezuela’s reserves. He has taken stakes in numerous companies and discussed doing the same with AI.”

And when it comes to moving MAGA’s identity away from the broader tolerance typical of centrism, says Ip, “Vance has gone further than Trump in arguing that religion and national origin, not an idea, are the basis of American identity. ‘We cannot rebuild Western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States of America or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted illegal migrants come into our country,’ he told a conservative audience in early 2025. Vance has also led the charge against Republican economic orthodoxy.”


While MAGA may be increasingly socialist, Ip argues that it will never merge with Democratic socialists because “they may agree that identity matters, but disagree vehemently on why.” Most of the president’s policies simply don’t resonate beyond MAGA. As Ip notes, “Outside of his core base, support for Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration have plummeted.”

MAGA’s deathgrip on Gen Z was severely overstated: report

Attendees pray during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 20, 2025. REUTERS

Adam Lynch

September 10, 2026 

ALTERNET


There’s been plenty of attention on Gen Z voters since they swung right in 2024, but apparently assumptions were a little too premature, says Gen Z culture analyst Rachel Janfaza. They’re not the “red-pilled MAGA hardliners” they were sold to be.

“In 2020, as Gen Z voters came of age, the culture war was at its peak and it felt like every candidate, race and issue was a reflection of our values,” wrote Janfaza. “But today, young voters’ concerns are more material and far less ideological. There’s a common set of issues unifying Gen Zers across the political spectrum: the cost of living, inflation, AI, war, corruption.”

To get a sense of how young voters — including 8.5 million potential first-time voters — are feeling about the 2026 midterm elections, Janfaza and company spoke to them in a series of focus groups. And what interviews with 70 young people aged 17 to 33 in 28 states and Washington D.C. revealed was that they were not MAGA’s future as earlier reported.


“They care a lot less about being woke and a lot more about being able to get a job and pay their rent — let alone buy a home. And they’re looking for candidates who get that,” said Janfaza. “Gen Z voters really just want their politicians to be good, honest people, who work hard for their community and country. That means tackling the cost of living, working on government programs like SNAP and WIC, embracing social policies when it comes to healthcare, jobs, education, and regulating AI. It’s not that complicated. And it’s party agnostic.”

The generation doesn’t identify easily with the two political parties, but they certainly don’t identify with MAGA. In fact, according to interviews, when young voters support socialist candidates or say they favor socialism writ large, it’s really because they feel the status quo isn’t working.


“Life feels totally unaffordable, but young people believe that it doesn’t have to be this way. They want the government to provide Americans with a social safety net and endorse policies like universal or at least affordable health care, affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, affordable education, paid family leave, taxes on corporations, etc.,” Janfaza said.

And unlike other movements rotted in the past or worse, Gen Z appears to have “a hunger for forward looking policies.”

Call it “Hopemaxxing,” said Janfaza, but it means Gen Z wants to hear what a candidate’s plan is to fix the status quo, rather than preserve it. And don’t bother coming at them with the intent to “just blame the other side,” they say. This generation is “looking for candidates to inspire.”

Want to know how New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani cut inroads with the generation? He talked “pothole politics,” complete with on-the-ground repair policies for infrastructure and other endeavors.

And while MAGA isn’t about to benefit from this particular state of mind, Janfaza said Democrats shouldn’t rest easy on their laurels either. This is a results-minded generation.

“How people vote in the midterms will be all about the cost of living, but if young people don’t believe that any of the candidates can make a difference, they may not even show up,” she said.

The old order is dying as America faces a full-blown political reckoning

REUTERS/Eric Lee

Thom Hartmann

September 11, 2026 

ALTERNET

“The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci

While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year.

At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.

Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.

Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.


And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.

The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.

So, which side will prevail?


The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.

He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working class people gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantel and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.


President Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.

Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs to do it today.

Like the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.

On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the over 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.


They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.

Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Theil wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:
“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”


On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.


Multiple polls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beat Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged Sanders. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered them was Trump.

They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.

In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.

Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).


During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.

Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).

On both sides, the message is similar:
“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”


The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.

We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.

So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.

Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people and voters know it.

Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.

This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.

Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.
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Ex-federal judge reveals Trump’s plan for 'catastrophic end' of democracy

Nick Hilden

September 10, 2026 

ALTERNET

On Thursday, a former federal judge detailed what he deemed “the final battle for America’s democracy,” laying out President Donald Trump’s plan to seize power on January 3, 2027. This is according to attorney and former U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who warns that “Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all.”

“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” asserts Luttig. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”

Over the course of his second term, says Luttig, Trump has taken steps to “seize control of the midterms” to ensure that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress. As Trump himself declared in February, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’ ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And the Republicans, notes Luttig, “have dutifully fallen in line … So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.”


The core of the plan involves a Republican plot to claim the election was rigged after they lose. According to Luttig, “This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-LA) removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”

“he constitutional crisis will begin, warns Luttig, when “sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.” Such action will be met with lawsuits arguing that the clerk must perform its mandated action, which will work their way through appeals. “The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when,” says Luttig, the court orders the elected Democratic representatives be seated and the clerk refuses. “Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”


From there, the matter would end up before the Supreme Court, which would be forced to answer “perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?” Should the Court decide to side with Republican claims of fraud, Luttig concludes, “two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America.”

‘Collective Punishment’: Mother of Jailed Palestine Action Activist in UK Was Denied Mortgage Over Daughter’s Case

Emma Kamio’s daughter, Ellie, was also “debanked” by Lloyds Bank before she was criminally convicted for her sabotage of Israeli military equipment.


Emma Kamio, the mother of Ellie Kamio, locks herself to a heavy metal tube outside Parliament in protest at her daughters detention on July 2, 2025 in London, England.
(Photo by Guy Smallman/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Sep 09, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

One of the UK’s largest financial institutions, Lloyds Bank, reportedly targeted a jailed Palestine Action protester and her family for financial punishment before she was ever convicted of a crime, according to a report out Wednesday from Novara Media.

The outlet reported that activist Leona “Ellie” Kamio had her account shuttered by Lloyds, a process known as “debanking,” while she was being held on remand for her role in destroying Israeli military equipment at a factory owned by the technology firm Elbit Systems.

Ellie and four other activists were convicted of criminal damage earlier this year. But although a jury never convicted them of terrorism, they were sentenced as terrorists after a judge made an unprecedented ruling that their actions had a “terrorist connection,” due to their political motivation. She and other members of the so-called “Filton Four” have appealed their sentences.

Ellie was held in prison on “remand” for more than 18 months before her first trial concluded in February 2026 although she was never charged with terrorism.



In February 2025, a year before her trial for criminal damage, Novara reports that Kamio was sent a letter by Lloyds informing her that it was closing her bank account because it was “unable to maintain a banking relationship.” It did not give an explanation for the decision.

In June 2026, after Ellie had been convicted of criminal damage but before she was slapped with a terrorism sentence, her mother, Emma Kamio, learned that Lloyds had denied her request for a new mortgage on the commercial properties for her small business.

Lloyds made it clear that it was because of her daughter’s case.

“We’ve now assessed the deal and consulted with our credit sanction team,” a business development manager for the bank told Emma’s mortgage broker. “Unfortunately, due to the adverse media, it’s not something they’re comfortable supporting at this time.”

When the broker offered an alternative plan to transfer the properties into her sister’s ownership, Lloyds also rejected it.

Emma told Novara that she lost her properties as a result of Lloyds’ decision. Her businesses, she said, “had to slip down the list of priorities as for the past two years, she’s ”spent every waking moment dealing with the trauma of my wrongful arrest or fighting for my daughter’s campaign and her release.“

Emma was herself arrested in July 2025 after she locked herself to a suitcase outside Parliament to protest as members voted to enact the ban on Palestine Action. She was acquitted in April 2026.

“Thankfully, my drive for justice is more important to me than money,” Emma said.

In the UK, banks are not allowed to cancel customers’ accounts based on religion or belief. But they can be closed if the bank suspects a user is engaged in money laundering, terrorism financing, fraud, or other criminal activities that could pose a risk to the financial institution.

Emma contends that Lloyds “debanked my daughter Ellie with no reason at all, and while she was on remand and therefore innocent until proven guilty.”

A spokesperson for Lloyds told Novara that the bank does not “close customer accounts or make lending decisions based on political or personal beliefs.”

“Our decisions are based on relevant laws, regulations, account conditions, or lending requirements,” the spokesperson said. “We’re unable to comment on individual cases.”

Anas Mustapha, the head of public advocacy at CAGE International, a UK-based organization focused on state abuses under terrorism laws, described the actions committed against Emma as “collective punishment.”

“Emma Kamio has nothing to appeal against—just a bank’s discriminatory risk assessment, applied because her daughter took action to stop the supply chain of deadly weapons used in a genocide,” Mustapha told Novara.



The highly controversial sentencing of Ellie and the rest of the “Filton Four” as terrorists was widely condemned by civil liberties and human rights activists, who described it as a dramatic escalation of the British government’s effort to punish pro-Palestinian speech.

Last July, the Labour government of then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer used the Terrorism Act to ban Palestine Action, which has engaged in “direct action,” including property destruction against entities activists believe are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Not only is membership in the group now considered a terrorist offense, but nonviolent expressions of support for the group have also been criminalized.

Since the ban came into effect, 3,500 arrests of peaceful protesters have taken place across the country, according to Amnesty International, including more than 1,200 who’ve been charged with terrorism-related offenses.

Separately, official Home Office figures show that as of March, 92% of terrorism-related arrests in the UK over the previous year were linked to suspected support for Palestine Action.



Ellie and the other members of the Filton Four have defended their acts of sabotage against Israeli military equipment—including dozens of drones—as a justifiable response to Israel’s destructive military campaign in Gaza.

That campaign, which many human rights organizations have described as a “genocide,” has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including over 20,000 children, according to official tallies from the Gaza Ministry of Health, while independent analysts have argued the true death toll since October 2023 is much higher.

Elbit is one of the companies that provides much of Israel’s drone fleet, which has been involved in attacks that have killed Palestinian civilians.

“Ellie was sentenced as a terrorist after she was convicted of criminal damage for destroying 40 Israeli weapons, including quadcopter drones,” said Huda Ammori, one of the co-founders of Palestine Action, in a post on X. “For saving lives, she was deemed a terrorist, and her family is also being targeted.”

Guess What Happened After New York Raised Taxes on the Rich? More Millionaires Moved In

“Tax flight is nothing more than a myth, and should be given as much credence as flat-earthers.”


US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shares a laugh with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during Mamdani’s 100 Day Address in Maspeth, New York on April 12, 2026.
(Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Sep 10, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


The threats came in a steady stream last year from Fox News, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Gristedes grocery chain CEO John Catsimatidis, who insisted that wealthy New York City residents were “panicking” at the possibility that then-state Rep. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, could become the mayor and ensure rich locals pay more in taxes to help fund crucial services.

“It only takes a handful of successful people to leave to decimate the city’s tax base,” cautioned Ackman, while Catsimatidis suggested many rich New Yorkers would likely join him in fleeing to “the promised land”: Florida, which has no state income tax.

But the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative said Thursday that new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data should be “the final nail in the coffin” of the evidence-free, perennial claim that higher taxes cause wealthy residents to leave their cities and states.

The agency released its 2023 Statistics of Income (SOI) data, covering the period before Mamdani became mayor and introduced a tax on second homes, ranging from 0.8% to 1.3% for properties valued at $5 million or more, which he estimated will raise $500 million annually.

The data shows how the tax base was impacted after the state imposed a separate tax policy in 2022, raising its top tax rate on the highest earners.

Poking a giant hole in the persistent theory that wealthy people won’t want to live in states that require more from them in taxes, the number of New Yorkers reporting more than $1 million in income grew by about 3% after the tax rate was raised, the SOI data shows.

“If there was any merit to the myth that tax increases on New York’s wealthy drive them away, the new IRS data should show it. It doesn’t.”

The number of millionaires nationwide went down in 2023, but New York counted 2,000 more than it had the previous year. The number of tax filers earning between $500,000 and $1 million also grew by over 8,500—more than 7%.

The average adjusted gross income of New Yorkers who left the state from 2022-23 fell 15%, from over $125,000 to $106,900.

“If the past is prologue, the SOI data suggest few, if any, of the city’s wealthiest residents will leave as a result of a modest tax. Instead they are likely to remain rooted in the social, business, and economic networks that make New York uniquely valuable to them,” said Groundwork Collaborative. “The New Yorkers actually at risk of leaving the city are the lower-income workers who power the economy.”

Lindsay Owens, president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, said the new data makes clear that “tax flight is nothing more than a myth, and should be given as much credence as flat-earthers.”

“If there was any merit to the myth that tax increases on New York’s wealthy drive them away, the new IRS data should show it,” said Owens. “It doesn’t—New York’s millionaire population kept climbing years after the state raised taxes on top earners.”

Wealthy New Yorkers, said Groundwork, are shown by the data to be “a settled population that may squawk about a tax increase, but not pack up and leave.”

Trump imperils 'US-led order' worldwide with single 'incredible' snub: analysts

Alexander Willis
September 11, 2026 
RAW STORY

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives on stage at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, U.S., September 10, 2026. REUTERS/Callaghan O'Hare

President Donald Trump’s recent refusal to provide military support to a major U.S. ally marked a turning point for the post-World War II era, geopolitical analyst Brandon Weichert argued on Friday, one in which the United States no longer leads as the world’s top superpower.

As the United States continues to wage war against Iran, Yemen’s Houthis made significant gains in their efforts to control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a major chokepoint for global shipping alongside the Strait of Hormuz. Amid the Houthis’ advances, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia repeatedly called Trump on Thursday with pleas for military assistance.

Trump declined those requests, according to a U.S. official who spoke with Axios on the condition of anonymity.

With the U.S. military already stretched thin amid the deeply unpopular war against Iran, and with U.S. stockpiles of long-range missiles critically low, Weichert, the senior national security editor for The National Interest, declared that U.S. global dominance had officially reached its end.

“It's over. The US-led order is done,” Weichert wrote Friday in a social media post on X to his more than 74,000 followers. “Saudis need to start cutting deals with Houthis and the rest of the region needs to do the same (unless Washington comes to its senses and negotiates a reasonable off-ramp now).”

Middle East geopolitical analyst Firas Modad called Trump’s refusal to provide support to MBS a “total abandonment of the Saudis” and “incredible,” and Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA intelligence officer and national security analyst, was taken aback by Trump’s refusal, particularly given Saudi Arabia’s extensive investments in Trump-linked businesses, his family's ventures and figures within his administration.

“So the US fails to assist Riyadh in their time of need? The Saudi investment in the Trump relationship gets them, what?” Polymeropoulos asked aloud.

Polymeropoulos also questioned how the Trump administration failed to foresee such a scenario developing.

“We [are] so overstretched [on] Iran, I presume that this front is a problem for us, but did we not plan for this possible [Houthi] scenario when launching the Iran campaign?” Polymeropoulos continued.

“Ultimately, I find it hard to believe we will let the [Houthis] keep rolling. That’s a disaster for us strategically. Iran has huge leverage now. Like it or not, we in this. And the Saudis likely will see this as a huge betrayal, if we do not actively participate. Yes, with air strikes. Lots to ponder as a huge wrinkle now emerges in Trump’s war of choice.”




Trump stiffs major US ally after ignoring pleas for help as Iran war spirals: report

Alexander Willis
September 11, 2026

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, as he meets with Bahrain's Crown Prince and Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa (not pictured), in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 16, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

President Donald Trump declined a request for military support from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia on Thursday, a U.S. official told Axios on the condition of anonymity, as analysts warn that the U.S. war against Iran is starting to spiral out of control.

On Wednesday, Yemen’s Houthis captured a critical town near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, which, like the Strait of Hormuz, is a critical chokepoint for global shipping. The Houthis are also inching closer toward capturing the entirety of Yemen’s west coast, sparking fears that a “second front” in the U.S. war against Iran may soon open.

As the Houthis made additional advances on Thursday, MBS called Trump to brief him on the developments, Axios reported, and “several hours later,” called the president again and “urged” him to “order U.S. strikes against the Houthis.”

“Trump declined, but a U.S. official said the administration will provide Saudi Arabia with intelligence on the Houthis and targeting data,” Axios’ report reads. “A senior Trump administration official signaled that Washington's priority is keeping the Red Sea open while leaving the broader fight to its regional partners.”

Also on Thursday, reports circulated that the Houthis may have inflicted damage on Saudi Arabia’s “strategically important” East-West oil pipeline, a development that could have major ramifications for global oil prices.

Diesel prices in the United States reached their highest levels in history last week, and the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline reached $4.15. On Thursday, gas prices jumped by 13 cents over the course of the previous week.

The development also comes after the U.S. had used up “virtually all” of its long-range precision missiles amid its bombardment of Iran, which raised major “concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts,” Reuters previously reported.

“With Iran already disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Houthi control of Bab al-Mandab [Strait] could give Tehran a powerful new point of leverage over the U.S. and its Gulf allies,” Axios’ report reads. “The U.S. is concerned about the rapidly escalating fight in Yemen and is stepping up support for Saudi Arabia while trying to avoid direct military involvement.”

‘Outrageous and Backwards’: Trump Officials Plot Raid on Childcare Funds Amid Affordability Crisis

“Raiding an underfunded program solely to score culture war points is not pro-family—it’s a wasteful grift that I will fight every step of the way,” said Sen. Patty Murray.


US Vice President JD Vance speaks during a news conference on June 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Sep 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The top Democratic appropriator in the US Senate responded with alarm and outrage on Tuesday to news that the Trump administration is preparing a rule change that would siphon federal dollars away from a chronically underfunded program that helps working-class parents afford childcare.

The diverted funds would be used to finance a new federal subsidy for “married couples with one stay-at-home parent in certain income brackets,” The New York Times reported late last week. The proposed change, a top priority of Vice President JD Vance, is “outrageous and backwards,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday. Murray argued it would be illegal and immoral for the administration to shift taxpayer money away from the Child Care and Development Fund, which serves around 1 million families nationwide in a typical month.

“It’s not the 1950s in America—our government shouldn’t punish people for being single parents or choosing not to marry,” said Murray. “Nobody cares what JD Vance thinks constitutes a ‘real’ family—single parents and parents who aren’t married pay taxes, too. Raiding an underfunded program solely to score culture war points is not pro-family—it’s a wasteful grift that I will fight every step of the way.”

The Times reported that “the policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.” Unmarried couples with one stay-at-home parent would not qualify for the newly proposed subsidy.

“The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their childcare providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a childcare crisis in the country,” the newspaper added. “About 80% of the 870,000 families who currently get the childcare subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), House Democrats’ top appropriator, said in a statement that “supporting stay-at-home parents should never come at the expense of working families.”

“At a time when families are already struggling to find and afford childcare, this proposal would force more parents to compete for the same inadequate pot of money, threaten childcare providers, and disproportionately hurt single working parents, most of whom are mothers,” said DeLauro, “If Republicans want to support families, they should join Democrats in passing the expanded Child Tax Credit and increasing access to affordable childcare—not rob Peter to pay Paul while imposing their preferred definition of what a family should look like.”

Childcare costs—which run many families tens of thousands of dollars per year—are a major concern of US voters. One recent survey found that more than 80% see childcare costs as part of the nation’s broader affordability crisis, and 76% view them as “a crisis or major problem” for families with young children.

But the Trump administration has so far done nothing to lower childcare costs—and has taken steps that could raise them and deny low-income families badly needed relief.

Earlier this year, roughly a month after launching his costly and destructive war on Iran, President Donald Trump suggested that the federal government should not provide any funding for childcare.

“We’re fighting wars,” the president said. “We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.”

Amy Matsui, vice president for childcare and income security at the National Women’s Law Center, said it is “outrageous that the administration would propose siphoning money away from families who are struggling to afford childcare to send cash to married couples with a stay-at-home parent, when hundreds of thousands of families are on childcare waiting lists around the country.”

“If this administration really wanted to support families,” Matsui added, “it would invest more—not less—dollars in childcare, create a national paid family and medical leave program, expand access to a fully refundable Child Tax Credit, and restore health care and nutrition assistance.”