‘Yet Another Trump Grift’: Congress Called to Stop US Takeover of Venezuelan Oil Fields

“Handing over Venezuela’s oil wealth to the US contravenes the Constitution and is not in the interest of the Venezuelan people—much more when it is done at gunpoint,” said one analyst.


Oil tankers are seen anchored in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela after loading crude oil at the Bajo Grande Refinery port.
(Photo by Jose Bula Urrutia/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Trump administration officials are claiming that talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Venezuelan government regarding control of the country’s oil fields will ultimately secure “America’s energy future for generations to come”—but analysts on Friday called on lawmakers to halt President Donald Trump’s “colonial” push to take over the reserves.

As Axios reported, officials including Rubio and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have been involved in talks with Venezuelan acting President Delcy Rodriguez about taking an ownership stake in more than a dozen oil fields in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo regions, which have about 90 billion barrels of oil reserves. In all, Venezuela’s vast reserves—the world’s largest—contain about 300 billion barrels.

The deal would double US oil reserves at a time when Americans have seen gas prices skyrocket and oil firms reap profits as a result of Trump’s war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—events to which countries that have expanded renewable energy sources have proven far more resilient, according to data from JP Morgan Commodities research.

Despite that resilience, the Trump administration has reportedly approached the talks as a way to lock the US into generations of continued reliance on planet-heating oil extraction. According to Bloomberg, one deal under consideration is a 100-year lease on the oil fields.

Axios reported that in return for giving the US an ownership stake—something Trump began privately discussing before US forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro in January—Venezuela “would benefit from private companies, including American firms, developing the fields and returning more oil revenue” to the South American country.

Tyler Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, said that if the deal is finalized, “Trump will likely transfer operational control to US oil companies,” which donated heavily to his campaign.

The proposed deal would open “the door to Trump’s typical bilateral transactional corruption” and bestow “lucrative opportunities for the oil companies he chooses to reward,” said Slocum.

“In the nearly eight months since Trump’s illegal January 2026 Venezuelan invasion, the Trump administration has managed a $13 billion slush fund gleaned from its control over Venezuelan oil sales, with zero transparency, and little to no public oversight or accounting,” Slocum continued. “The president has no authority to negotiate a deal where the federal government takes control over foreign oil production facilities, and Congress must intervene and put an end to Trump’s oil-fueled imperialism.”

One opposition leader in Venezuela, where Energy Secretary Chris Wright is expected to travel next week to discuss increasing oil production by US companies, said the deals currently being discussed amount to “a land grab—a massive land grab.”

Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of The Collapse of Venezuela, said the country’s National Assembly “should deny authorization for this predatory deal.”




Following Trump’s invasion of Venezuela in January, energy historian and Eurasia Group analyst Gregory Brew told The Guardian, “US dominance over Venezuelan oil reserves allows the US to regard Venezuelan reserves as its own reserves: a source of oil from which the United States can draw and that nobody else has access to.”

“I think that’s how the administration is conceiving of this—excluding China, excluding Russia, but I think also excluding other potential customers for Venezuelan oil,” Brew said. “It sounds colonial, because it is.”

The president’s “effort to establish a South American kleptocracy is an outrage,” said Slocum. “There’s been no improvement in human rights in Venezuela, so Trump’s move is further evidence that his illegal actions in Venezuela are all about controlling oil with no public accounting, transparency, or oversight. This is yet another Trump gift for Big Oil.”

US strikes deal to control 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's oil reserves, Trump says

Copyright Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By Nathan Rennolds

Published on 29/08/2026 - EURONEWS

Trump has long been candid about his desire for the US to secure Venezuelan oil and has urged oil companies to invest in the South American nation.

The US and Venezuela have agreed terms on a huge oil deal that could see Washington take control of more than 65 billion barrels Venezuela's oil reserves.

US President Donald Trump had announced the agreement on Friday in a post on Truth Social, calling it the "biggest oil deal in world history."

"This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans," he wrote, adding that it would also help "set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity."

Delcy Rodríguez, the acting president of Venezuela - which has the world's largest proven oil reserves - later confirmed the "historic" deal in a statement posted to social media.

According to Rodríguez, the agreement "calls for the development of 17 strategic fields" and could see investment of "more than $100 billion, and more than $209 billion in taxes for the state."

Trump has long been candid about his desire for the US to secure Venezuelan oil and has urged oil companies to invest in the South American nation.

Many firms have remained wary, however, with concerns over aging infrastructure and political uncertainty both at home and in Venezuela.

In a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the deal as a "huge win for both the American and Venezuelan people."

"It demonstrates how President Trump's bold foreign policy is driving America First wins: securing stable reserves and low-cost oil in our Hemisphere and lowering gas prices here at home," he wrote.

"For the Venezuelan people, this deal will bring nearly $100 billion in private investment, support thousands of high-paying jobs, and drive the reconstruction of Venezuela's economy," Rubio added.

Washington has been keeping a close watch on Caracas since US forces conducted an operation to capture former leader Nicolás Maduro in January. Following the operation, Trump pledged to pump billions into Venezuela and said US firms would rebuild the country's oil industry.

Trump's big oil deal lambasted across the

board: 'Corruption at epic scale'

Kathleen Culliton
August 29, 2026  

RAW STORY

Call it socialism, imperialism, corruption or theft — senators, conservatives, journalists, former ambassadors and economists all agree President Donald Trump's "deal" to control 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil is a very bad move.

Trump's Truth Social announcement on Friday of a deal with Delcy Rodríguez — who became Venezuela's acting president in January after the U.S. military captured former President Nicolás Maduro — spurred an uproar over cries of corruption.

"Using our troops for a private oil grab is corruption at epic scale," said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA). "Here’s a guarantee—this will pad the pockets of Trump family and Big Oil companies and delay transition to cleaner energy."

Kaine was not the only U.S. senator to condemn Trump's deal with Venezuela — or to claim corruption was the cause.

"This isn't a win," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). "This is proof Trump put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies. Putting our soldiers’ lives on the line for private profit is a gross dereliction of his constitutional duty."

Independent journalist Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News also looked at the deal from a humanitarian perspective.

"Trump is stealing oil from country that just had a catastrophic earthquake and where most of the populace lives in extreme poverty," Jeske wrote on X. "I don’t think he ever really cared about Maduro. He just wanted their oil."

This perspective was shared by Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor of political science who served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014.

"Delcy Rodriguez is a dictator," McFaul wrote. "Cutting a deal with her to steal Venezuelan oil to benefit Americans is both immoral and impractical. The Venezuelan people will never go along with this deal."

McFaul fumed that Trump had yanked the U.S. back to the 19th century and the age of imperialism.

"We are now acting like a typical imperialist empire," McFaul said. "His Venezuelan oil deal is just that- straight-up imperialism, using military force to seize the assets of a country in the south. Deeply regrettable."

CNN's Jim Acosta echoed this concern — arguing the president had taken the U.S. back to the 1700s — but added a jab at Trump's rising gas-price problems.

"Trump is desperate," Acosta wrote. "Trump is choosing oil over freedom for the Venezuelan people. Experts say this won’t lower gas prices right away."

Even some conservatives fumed at Trump's fuel fix, among them conservative think tank Cato Institute economics expert Scott Lincicome.

"So, after taking 31 US government equity stakes in private companies over the last year, Trump just announced a MAJORITY-STATE-OWNED oil company?" wrote Lincicome. "This isn't even 'creeping' socialism anymore."

Independent journalist Aaron Rupar likened the "deal" to a form of socialism as well — National Socialism.

"Nazi Germany also pillaged the natural resources of countries it conquered," Rupar wrote.

US Diplomat Who Resigned Over Gaza Condemns Biden Officials Who Defended Genocide—And Now Claim to Regret It

“They actually had the power to stop unconditional arms assistance to Israel,” said Hala Rharrit. “They enabled it 100%.”


Former State Department official Hala Rharrit speaks during the press conference held by doctors who returned from Gaza at the Council on American-Islamic Relations headquarters in Washington, DC on December 9, 2024.
(Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Recent expressions of regret by top Biden administration officials who vehemently defended the United States’ billions of dollars in military aid to Israel as it was bombarding Gaza have not gone far with former diplomat Hala Rharrit, who was retaliated against for speaking out about the US policy before she ultimately resigned, and who condemned her former colleagues recent “PR game” this week.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Rharrit said the former officials who have mused that they would now support withholding weapons from Israel, or that they should have backed such a move while serving under President Joe Biden, are “just so despicable.”

“They’re so disgusting,” Rharrit said. “Those individuals, particularly [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan and a handful of others, actually had the power to save human lives. They actually had the power to stop unconditional arms assistance to Israel, right? The Israelis were not killing the Palestinians by themselves. The Israelis were killing the Palestinians with American bombs, with American jets, with American everything. We enabled it 100%. They enabled it 100%.”



Rharrit, who resigned as the Arabic language spokesperson for the US State Department in April 2024, six months into Israel’s US-backed assault—which has been called a genocide by leading human rights organizations and Holocaust experts—spoke to MEE months after former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US should have called for a ceasefire earlier than it did, “such that the suffering the people endured, the loss of the children, so many others, could have been averted.”

Sullivan last year said—weeks before a ceasefire was finally agreed to—that he’d had a change of heart regarding providing Israel with weapons, and that he would no longer support the policy.

In November, Sullivan added in an interview with The Dartmouth that “it’s fair to say that there were a lot of objections from a lot of parts of the international community about the US continuing to support Israel over the course of last year—2024—and over the course of this year in 2025. I think a lot about what we could have done differently.”

Rharrit told MEE that “it’s despicable that now they’re trying to make themselves look like, ‘Oh we should have done better and we’re so sorry.’”

The former diplomat emphasized that the apology tour has taken place as it’s become increasingly clear that “America has changed” in terms of its views on Israel, Palestine, and the United States’ decadeslong, unconditional support for the Israeli military—despite US statutes like the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws, which bar the government from providing military aid to countries that block humanitarian assistance and that are accused of human rights abuses.

A poll released this week showed that large majorities of Democratic voters in the first six states that will vote in the 2028 presidential primaries support cutting off weapons aid to Israel, and another survey by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies in March found that just 32% of Americans viewed Israel positively, compared with 47% in 2023.

“America is forever changed,” said Rharrit. “Americans no longer support these forever wars, they no longer support unconditional arms assistance to Israel. They no longer agree with US policy in the Middle East. And so now... they’re doing a PR game. This is just pure PR.”

Rharrit and other officials who resigned over the US policy on Israel and Gaza “were vindicated,” she said. “Of course we were right the whole time, because it’s international law. It’s US law. I abided by my oath to the Constitution... That is exactly what I did. That is exactly why I resigned.”

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Rharrit is one of “a rare breed” of diplomats.

“During this genocide I’ve met courageous diplomats and officials who denounced it at real personal cost,” said Albanese, whom the Trump administration targeted with sanctions earlier this year. “Imagine foreign policy built by more of them. Because the problem is never one unfit minister/head of state: It’s whole spineless cohorts around them.”

After Supreme Court Ruling, 4th Circuit Tosses Verdict Against US Company for Abu Ghraib Torture

“History will show that it was the Supreme Court that denied us justice,” said Salah Al-Ejaili, one of the Iraqi plaintiffs.


Journalist Salah Al-Ejaili was one of three Iraqis tortured at Abu Graib who won a historic verdict against US military contrator CACI Premier Technology, which was overturned on August 28, 2026.
(Photo courtesy of Salah Al-Ejaili via Middle East Eye)

Jessica Corbett
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


The US Supreme Court recently delivered a “lethal blow” to lawsuits filed under an 18th-century law, including a case brought by Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib as part of the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, whose landmark verdict was struck down on Friday by a federal appellate court.

The Iraqis’ case against US military contractor CACI Premier Technology was first filed in 2008, and eventually led to a trial and retrial in 2024. That November, a federal jury found the company liable for torture at the notorious prison in Iraq, and ordered it to pay the three prisoners a total of $42 million.

After unsuccessfully seeking another trial at the US District Court for the District of Virginia, CACI turned to the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which this past March upheld the historic verdict in favor of the three tortured men: middle school principal Suhail Al Shimari, fruit vendor Asa’ad Zuba’e, and journalist Salah Al-Ejaili.

Then came the Supreme Court’s June decision in Cisco Systems v. Doe, which effectively reversed the high court’s 2004 ruling on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), nullifying “a vital law that could check corporate abuses and provide an essential remedy to those whose rights have been violated,” as University of California, Berkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky wrote earlier this week.

As legal experts feared, the 4th Circuit reconsidered the CACI verdict in the wake of the June decision, and determined that “just as the court concluded that the Cisco plaintiffs’ ATS claims—including aiding and abetting torture—must be dismissed, so too must we dismiss plaintiffs’ claims here—conspiracy to commit torture” and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the Iraqis alongside other law firms, responded with a Friday statement calling out both the Supreme Court and CACI.

“As radical and regressive as the Supreme Court’s decision in Cisco is,” Azmy said, “it will never change this fundamental truth: A jury heard voluminous testimony and unanimously concluded CACI was responsible for the torture and abuse of dozens of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, including these plaintiffs, rendering CACI, in the words of a foundational ATS-human rights case, ‘hostis humani generis’—an ‘enemy of all mankind.’”

“We remain in awe of the bravery and dedication of our clients, who fought for 18 years for justice for themselves, their families, and other survivors of horrific human rights abuses,” Azmy added. “This Supreme Court may continue to do great damage to human rights cases, but it cannot take the courage and dignity away from our clients’ historic achievement.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Al-Ejaili, also took aim at the country’s highest court, which is dominated by right-wing justices.

“What we did in pursuing accountability for 18 years for the torture we suffered at Abu Ghraib was a big thing. We trusted a US jury with our stories, and they believed us and sided with us—this is the most important part of the case,” he said Friday. “History will show that it was the Supreme Court that denied us justice.”

Destruction of East India Company Gives US Lawmakers a Blueprint for Confronting Big Tech: Historian

The instruments to take apart entrenched corporate power “still exist,” but current governments are “lacking... the political nerve to use them,” said historian William Dalrymple.


Elon Musk looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)

Brad Reed
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A historian who has written four books about the British East India Company is warning that big technology companies in the US are amassing similar levels of unchecked power and will need to be reined in.

In a New York Times op-ed published on Friday, William Dalrymple described how the British government eventually realized that it had allowed the East India Company—key to the British Empire’s rise in the 18th and 19th centuries—to become too powerful and decided to finally clamp down.

The situation faced by the British Parliament in the 19th Century was strikingly similar to the situation faced by US lawmakers today, Dalrymple explained, as the East India Company had spent decades spending money to capture influence within the government.

“Around one in 20 members of Parliament sat on the East India Company’s board,” the historian wrote, “and more than a fifth of the company’s directors sat in Parliament at some point; about 40% of members of Parliament were shareholders.”

In the contemporary context, the executives of the nation’s largest tech firms are spending lavishly to curry favor with lawmakers and government officials of both major parties

Writing in The Nation last month, investigative journalist David Moore detailed the massive political spending of major tech firms in the 2026 midterms, noting that “Super PACs working on behalf of crypto, AI, and AIPAC donors are the highest-spending groups on independent expenditures to influence voters this cycle—combining to spend more than $180 million so far, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records.”

In addition to political clout, the East India Company in its day also had the power to raise its own army, which at its peak topped 200,000 soldiers, twice the size of England’s own armed services.

Dalrymple pointed out that this is one power that today’s Big Tech firms do not have, although he argued that they have been increasingly integrating themselves into the US military-industrial complex.

“In June 2025 the US Army commissioned the chief technology officers of Palantir and Meta and OpenAI’s chief product officer as lieutenant colonels in a new Reserve unit,” he noted. “The new dispensation puts tech executives straight into a position of federal power, which in one way puts them ahead of their 18th-century counterparts.”

The government finally dropped the hammer on the East India Company, Dalrymple said, after the bloody Indian Rebellion of 1857, as they feared the firm’s “greed and self-interest” would cause the British Empire to lose what it considered its most valuable colony.

“The company’s navy was disbanded and its army passed to the Crown,” wrote Dalrymple. “In 1858 the governor general of India announced that the company’s Indian possessions would be nationalized and pass into the control of the British Crown.”

Less than two decades later, what was once the most powerful private corporation in world history shut down after the expiration of its charter.

What this shows, concluded Dalrymple, is that “states can master corporations,” even if those corporations have their own private armies.

However, he said that while the instruments to take apart entrenched corporate power “still exist,” it appears our current governments are “lacking... the political nerve to use them.”

Dalrymple’s op-ed was echoed thematically by a Friday op-ed written by SFGATE travel editor Silas Valentino, who argued that the city of San Francisco has not gotten any benefit from the current artificial intelligence boom, despite being the home of OpenAI and Anthropic, the world’s two biggest AI firms.

In particular, Valentino argued that the AI firms have done nothing to give back to the city and alleviate its affordable housing crisis. In fact, Valentino found that the AI firms’ initiatives in the city appear to be mostly self-serving.

“OpenAI says it has invested in our community, but so far, that’s meant less than a million dollars in ‘SF civic contributions,’” Valentino wrote. “And worst of all, some of that is for things like AI training programs... That’s not improving the city; it’s OpenAI trying to make more money.”

Valentino also noted that Anthropic last year teamed with the Tipping Point Community nonprofit group, which was founded by current San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, to provide free training on the company’s Claude chatbot.

“In the years since language models like ChatGPT and Claude proliferated to usher in the AI boom,” the travel editor wrote, “I’m only counting negatives for nearly everyone trying to figure out a way to live here.”

Valentino concluded by warning that if Lurie and his administration “don’t demand these companies start giving back and enhance our city for the better, they’ll continue ruining our city without pause.”

Watchdog Denounces ‘Staggering and Disgusting’ Hypocrisy of AI Industry Giants

“Put plainly, Silicon Valley is the problem threatening our ways of life.”


Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC
(Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday hit back at the artificial intelligence industry for warning about the dire threats posed by its own technology after it spent years trying to block any government regulations that could have curtailed dangerous AI behavior that experts and progressive lawmakers have warned about for years.

In an open letter sent on Thursday, dozens of tech companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft—claimed that there is a “limited window” to defend against AI-executed cyberattacks, which they said “will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”


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If nothing is done, the companies said, then crucial facilities “from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet” will be at risk.

The companies said that thwarting such AI cyberattacks would require a “global response” where governments will need to “fund cyber defense” and “give hospitals, water utilities, and local governments access to capable defensive AI, authorized testing, and hands-on support through trusted security providers and partners.”

JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, urged lawmakers to be deeply skeptical of Big Tech’s messaging on the issue and the industry’s proposed plan of action, which he said would further enrich Silicon Valley without providing any safeguards for the public when it comes to AI development.

“Big Tech does not get to unleash powerful AI systems, fight tooth and nail against meaningful regulation,” said Branch, “and then cry for help when the dangers they helped create come knocking.”

Branch noted that the tech industry has insisted for years that there should be no government intervention into developing technology, supposedly because it would put the US at risk of “losing” the AI race to China.

Now, Branch said, they are running to the government and demanding fast action to help solve a problem they created.

“That hypocrisy is equal parts staggering and disgusting,” Branch said. “If the threat is serious enough to demand urgent action from the government, then it is serious enough to demand binding rules, independent oversight, and accountability from the companies creating it.”

The AI firms’ open letter comes as the tech industry appears acutely concerned about public backlash to its products. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Big Tech firms who gave heavily to President Donald Trump have been scrambling to donate to Democratic candidates ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

In particular, according to the reporting, many tech companies who donated to Trump’s ballroom and other vanity projects fear that a Democratic majority will start subpoenaing them for records that could lead to criminal investigations.

Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley donor adviser and Democratic strategist, has told Trump-funding tech companies that they will pay a big price unless they repair their relationships with Democrats whom they’ve alienated by going all-in on MAGA.

“You’re going to be totally fucked next year or you’re going to figure it out this year and you’re going to make amends,” Teboe said, “and amends are going to be much more costly than they were previously.”

As Branch put it, “Big Tech knows it has lost public support on AI, and the PR machine is now working overtime.”

Despite industry efforts to control narratives and members of Congress, he said, the American people “aren’t going to forget the harms these companies unleashed, the regulations they fought, or their promises that AI could replace their jobs.”

“Silicon Valley is the problem threatening our ways of life,” Branch concluded. “It’s hard to take them seriously when they invented the problem in the first place.”

‘Sadism’: Trump DHS Boasts of Deportation Flight to Haiti in ‘Propaganda’ Video

“These are our neighbors and coworkers who were legally living and working here,” said one advocate. “Stripping away their protections and then threatening them with deportation is cruel beyond words.”


People attend a rally in solidarity with Temporary Protected Status holders at City Hall Plaza in Boston on July 29, 2025.
(Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

By releasing a video of Black men wearing handcuffs and prison uniforms being hauled onto a deportation flight, the US Department of Homeland Security appeared to be fulfilling a key objective of President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants, said one immigration policy expert on Thursday.

President Donald Trump “hates Haitians,” said American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “and the White House wanted videos of Black people in chains, so they stripped them all of status.”



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Reichlin-Melnick said the video, which also features a Haitian song and the text “Temporary Meant Temporary. Leave Now” on screen, was “propaganda for an audience of people that thrills to the sight of Black men being led in chains” and whom Trump’s mass deportation agenda and racist attacks on Haitians, Somalis, and other refugee populations are aimed at satisfying.



The video was released a week after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a charter flight with 161 Haitians on board to Haiti, where gang violence, kidnappings, and humanitarian crises that have continued more than a decade after the 2010 earthquake have pushed the US State Department to maintain its highest “Do Not Travel” warning for Americans.

The administration said that flight would be the first of many, following the US Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed DHS to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

The National Office of Migration in Haiti said last week that the Haitians aboard the ICE flight had not benefited from TPS, but were people who were facing removal proceedings due to criminal convictions or who had entered the US without authorization.

In the video—as in the Trump administration’s persistent rhetoric about its mass deportation operation, which it claims is targeting “the worst of the worst” violent criminals—DHS suggested the Haitians who have been granted TPS for years pose a danger to the US public, despite the fact that criminal convictions make people ineligible for the protected status.

“TPS holders had been living and working legally and paying taxes,” said Drop Site News—taxes, Reichlin-Melnick stressed, that do not permit them to benefit from federal assistance programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Medicaid.

David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the “sadism” depicted in the DHS video was “unrelenting.”



The video was released as Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami called on the Trump administration to “rethink” its decision to end TPS for Haitians following an August 23 gang attack outside the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince, in which at least 47 people were killed and at least 50 were kidnapped.

“The country is not safe, that Haiti is still a house on fire,” Wenski told OSV News. “This should cause our administration to rethink its decision to send back into Haiti over 300,000 Haitians.”

A bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) would extend TPS for Haitians through early 2029, and “would pass very easily” if Trump “would voice his support,” said Wenski.

Cory Archibald of the anti-Zionist group Track AIPAC called for prosecutions of top White House officials including Trump, Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, “all the way on down to the masked chuds joyriding in this video and loading these men onto planes.”

“All of them are guilty,” she said, “and all of them should be prosecuted.”

In Trump’s Second Term, Average US Family Forced to Spend $3,800 More on Essentials

“Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have made life more expensive for everyday Americans in virtually every area—all so they could give billionaires another massive tax break.”


Shoppers scan groceries at Walmart checkout on October 10, 2025 in Miami, Florida.
(Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Aug 27, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The average family in the United States has had to pay a total of $3,800 more for housing, groceries, utilities, and other essentials during President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

Grocery prices were more than 4% higher in July than when Trump took office in January 2025, the new analysis notes, and the average family spent an additional $310 for groceries last year than in 2024.

The JEC report—which provides state-by-state and district-level fact sheets—also points to energy costs, which have surged due in large part to Trump’s illegal war on Iran. Since the start of the conflict in late February, the average family has spent an additional $604 on gas while the president has added millions to his personal fortune due to fossil fuel stock holdings.

“Every trip to the grocery store, every tank of gas, and every electricity bill costs families more under President Trump,” Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), ranking member of the JEC, said in a statement. “Americans shouldn’t have to drain their paychecks just to cover the basics, but Trump’s tariffs, war with Iran, and other misguided actions continue to drive up everyday costs and leave hardworking families to foot the bill.”

The updated analysis underscores Trump’s utter failure to fulfill his campaign pledge to “end inflation” and “bring down the prices of all goods.”

The JEC attributed rising costs to deliberate policy decisions by the Trump administration and his Republican allies in Congress, including the Iran war, erratic tariffs, and the refusal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which has sent premiums skyrocketing.

The Unrig Our Economy coalition said in a statement that the JEC report “makes clear that Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have made life more expensive for everyday Americans in virtually every area—all so they could give billionaires another massive tax break.”

“From reckless tariffs to an unnecessary war in Iran to cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, Republicans in Washington have done everything they can to make life less affordable for working families,” said Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the coalition. “This latest JEC report puts a number to the reality that millions of Americans are feeling: Life keeps getting more expensive, while the rich keep getting richer.”

‘Break Up Big Medicine’: Taking On Healthcare Industry Greed Could Save US Families $6,000+ a Year

One expert said the options are to “watch the US healthcare system spiral into profit-driven chaos or finally treat the Big Medicine disease to create a healthcare system that puts patients and clinicians in control of care.”

A doctor and a nurse hook up monitoring equipment for an injured patient in the United States on July 29, 2024.
(Photo by SDI Productions/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Aug 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As millions of working-class Americans suffer from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ cuts to the already dysfunctional US healthcare system, a leading anti-monopoly group this week released a report with recommendations to restore “affordability and control to patients, clinicians, and communities across the country.”

“The healthcare crisis didn’t happen by accident, it is the direct result of decades of neoliberal policy choices that handed more power to corporate healthcare giants while families paid the price,” said Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP).




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‘Utterly Unsustainable’: Employer-Sponsored Healthcare Costs Set to Keep Surging

“The choice now is clear: Continue to watch the US healthcare system spiral into profit-driven chaos or finally treat the Big Medicine disease to create a healthcare system that puts patients and clinicians in control of care,” she explained. “This agenda presents a roadmap for how to do it.”

Harper and Emma Freer, AELP’s senior policy analyst for healthcare, co-authored the new report, “Break Up Big Medicine,” with contributions from a trio of other experts. One of them is Dr. Will Flanary, an independent ophthalmologist in Portland, Oregon.

“The US healthcare system, once made up of mostly independent practices like mine, is now dominated by Big Medicine behemoths—including private insurance conglomerates, Big Pharma manufacturers, pharmaceutical middlemen, megahospitals, and private equity-backed practices—whose only fiduciary duty is to executives and investors,” he wrote in the foreword. “This makes it increasingly difficult to keep my practice afloat and uphold my oath, resulting in moral injury.”

“So, I now have a second career as an advocate,” who goes by “Dr. Glaucomflecken” on social media. “What my patients need most is bold policy reforms to break up Big Medicine and build a better healthcare system, one where they can access affordable, high-quality care and independent physicians like me can thrive.”

The report notes that “between 2005 and 2025, the annual cost of employer-sponsored family coverage nearly tripled, from $12,214 to $35,119,” US patients pay nearly three times as much for prescription drug prices as people in other countries, and “the United States spends more than $15,000 per person on healthcare each year—roughly one-fifth of our entire economy, and more than twice what peer nations spend, in return for worse patient outcomes on a variety of metrics.”



Costs continue to rise, with The Wall Street Journal reporting last week that, according to benefits consulting giant Aon, US workers with employer-sponsored insurance are expected to spend an average of $5,297 on healthcare this year, or $388 more than last year. Another consultant, WTW, found that US employers expect their healthcare costs will rise 11.1% next year.

Meanwhile, six “corporate behemoths” in the sector—Cardinal Health, Cencora, Cigna, CVS Health, McKesson, and UnitedHealth Group—“now rank among the Fortune 15, making nearly $34 billion in annual profit,” collectively, as AELP detailed Thursday. “Big Medicine now employs more than four in five US doctors,” and practices must spend time completing, “on average, 40 prior authorizations per physician per week, time that would be better spent on patient care.”



“Our current healthcare crisis is the result of several decades of federal policymaking by both political parties based on the flawed premise that empowering private insurers to ration access to healthcare, rather than addressing the underlying root causes of high prices, would effectively contain costs,” the AELP report says.

The publication lays out a four-part “treatment plan” to save Americans $795 billion annually, or more than $6,000 per household: break up Big Medicine, bring down healthcare prices, build capacity, and bolster enforcement of existing laws.



The first section highlights how some solutions already exist in Congress, pointing to various bills, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) Break Up Big Medicine Act, their Patients Before Monopolies Act with Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) and Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Val Hoyle’s (D-Ore.) Patients Over Profits Act, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon’s (D-Pa.) Take Back Our Hospitals Act, and the Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act, introduced by Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-NH) and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Merkley, and Warren.

The second section calls for standardizing and capping “healthcare prices across public and private payers using traditional Medicare reimbursement rates for inpatient and outpatient services and negotiated drug prices as benchmarks.” It urges a ban on prior authorization, an end to patient cost-sharing obligations, investments “in public options that eliminate Big Medicine administrative waste,” and passage of Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-Mich.) Medicines for the People Act.

The third section calls for investments in the US prescription drug manufacturing base as well as in providers, “especially safety-net hospitals in rural and low-income metro areas, independent medical and dental practices, community pharmacies, and primary care physicians.”

The final section calls on Congress to “close loopholes that allow anti-competitive business practices, which Big Medicine uses to drive up prescription drug costs,” specifically promoting the repeal of the 1987 safe harbor for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and other pharmaceutical middlemen, and the prohibition of “price discrimination, spread pricing, self-preferencing, network discrimination, and sole-source or exclusive contracting terms across all payers.” It further advocates for an increase in funding for antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice.

“For decades, healthcare reform has focused on expanding private coverage and putting more money into a broken system while allowing corporate giants to consolidate power and drive up costs,” said Freer. “Working families have paid more only to receive lower-quality care.

“Americans need a new policy paradigm that actually takes on the root causes of the crisis: consolidation, corporate control, and lack of competition,” she argued. “This agenda is about moving beyond the status quo to build a healthcare system where patients come first, clinicians can thrive, and every American can afford the care they need.”

The report comes amid renewed scrutiny of the president’s “most favored nation” deals with Big Pharma, with Peter Maybarduk, access to medicines director for the watchdog Public Citizen, saying last week that “Trump has three kinds of drug pricing policy: fake, exaggerated, and not-real-yet, probably-won’t-happen.”

After pointing out on social media Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in April agreed to publicize the deals for medicines listed on the direct-to-consumer website TrumpRx, and “months later, still crickets,” Warren wondered, “Why should Americans believe this isn’t just another Trump handout to fatten Big Pharma’s pockets?”

Additionally, as Americans have started contending with the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans in Congress and signed by Trump last year, as well as the GOP’s refusal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which has caused premiums to skyrocket, there have also been renewed calls for shifting the United States to a universal healthcare system.

A study published earlier this month by researchers at Yale University suggests the Medicare for All Act that’s been repeatedly introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would save more than $1 trillion and over 114,000 lives annually.

“At a time when 15 million Americans are being thrown off the healthcare they have and 20 million Americans have already seen their premiums double, on average, as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ we need Medicare for All now more than ever,” Sanders said in response to the study. “The time is now to end the greed of the big insurance and drug companies and pass Medicare for All.”

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect and the author of books including Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, noted in his Thursday coverage of AELP’s report that “while it’s complementary to a Medicare for All approach, single-payer insurance is not mentioned.”

“In tandem with moving toward a Medicare for All system, we have to address consolidation that is the cause of healthcare being so expensive, with degraded quality, and the squeezing of healthcare professionals,” Freer told Dayen. “Otherwise we end up with something like Medicare Advantage for All, which would be disastrous.”

Interview 

Backlash Against Anti-Racism Is a Constant Force Shaping US Politics

Philosopher George Yancy analyzes the contemporary expression of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “entrails of whiteness.”

By Josh Friedberg ,

Truthout

August 26, 2026

Blank walls and empty brackets mark the spots where National Park signs memorializing historical facts about slavery were once mounted, before they were removed by the Trump administration, March 14, 2026, at the Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images
Blank walls and empty brackets mark the spots where National Park signs memorializing historical facts about slavery were once mounted, before they were removed by the Trump administration, March 14, 2026, at the Independence National Historical Park in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images

In the United States, the presidential administration is actively working to erase past gains in civil rights and environmental justice. This tendency is manifesting in many ways, including curtailing voting rights, whitewashing U.S. history teaching materials, and rolling back social services that disproportionately affect people of color. In this context, one of the most important books I’ve read from the last decade is George Yancy’s Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America. I strongly believe that every white person needs to read and reckon with the ideas in Yancy’s book. Backlash is a tougher but more necessary book than most popular books on race, especially in the context of 2026 being the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence. At a time when many cling to the myth of this nation as fair and equal while white supremacy continues to dominate national and global politics, Backlash is a stern yet compassionate reminder of the importance of defining racism in terms of power. Within this context, I conducted this exclusive interview with George Yancy, who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University, a frequent contributor to Truthout, and the author, editor, and coeditor of over 25 books.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Josh Friedberg: Let’s start with the letter you wrote in 2015, “Dear White America.” What motivated you to write it?

George Yancy: In terms of context, the letter itself was my essay contribution to a series of popular interviews that I conducted with philosophers on race for The New York Times philosophy series, “The Stone.” The motivation had to do with the desire to find a critical discursive format for addressing the issue of whiteness. How does one speak to white people about something that is so familiar to them, like water is to fish, so normative and yet opaque, and thereby invisible? Indeed, how does one deploy a mode of address that attempts to speak the truth about their whiteness without resulting in forms of irrational defensiveness on their part? I wanted to communicate something about whiteness that critiqued its normative structure and how it falsely equates itself with humanity per se.

In his book Performing Purity (2003), whiteness scholar John T. Warren argues that “like layers of sand constituting a rock, the repeated enactments of [white] identity become sedimented and seemingly fixed, as if they had always been there.” I wanted to communicate to white people that their identity as white — along with the tropes of whiteness as “superior,” “virtuous,” and “pure” — was historically constructed, and that it is through their complicity that whiteness is sustained as a process of racial privilege, domination, and oppression. And I wanted them to own this hard truth. I thought that through my own show of vulnerability — where I talk honestly about my own sexism — I could perhaps touch the souls of white readers. I wanted to get them to use my capacity to expose my own complicity with sexism as a bridge that encouraged their own capacity to be honest about their whiteness and its link to anti-Blackness.


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By George Yancy , Truthout April 4, 2026

I saw the letter as one grounded in love. Like James Baldwin, I wanted to demonstrate a form of love “not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” I was asking for nothing short of self-confrontation. As you know, the invitation was met with hatred and denial. I was called by the n-word more times than I would like to remember. Being called that word, and so many other despicable words, lends credence to my pessimism vis-à-vis white America’s honesty with itself and its history of anti-Black violence. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, I possess “a hope not hopeless, but unhopeful.”

You later wrote a booktitled Backlash about the responses you received to your letter. In my blog, I related your book to America 250 and our current incarnation of white supremacy in the U.S. Do you think Donald Trump’s presidency has affected the presence of racism in the U.S.? In other words, is racism worse with him in office or is it more of the “same old, same old?”

Writing Backlash was cathartic for me. I’ve been told that the book is hard to read — not because of its philosophical jargon, but because I don’t withhold sharing the raw vitriol that was directed at me by so many white readers. The responses were vile projections spewed from the historical formation of the white imagination — an imagination imbued with myths of “white purity.” Racialized xenophobia and white fear and resentment were unambiguous:

“He should f*** off to Africa if he doesn’t like living in a white country.”

“You’re going back to Africaaaaaa!”

“Deport him to Africa to ponder racism there.”

The irony is that I never asked white people to bring me here, to take me from Africa, to enslave me, to brutalize me, to lynch me, to make me the object of white anti-Black fantasies and desires. It was never about me, about Black people. It was about whiteness and the historical fact that white people created a fictionalized conception of Blackness to conceal their own lack. Whiteness is a structural lie that underwrites and perpetuates its delusions of ontological supremacy.

Linking Backlash to the U.S.’s 250th birthday and to Donald Trump’s presidency (2.0) is important as neither one speaks to the eradication of the toxicity of whiteness. This country’s founding is predicated on the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the denigration of Black people. Those realities speak to the ontological binary structure of whiteness. In short, whiteness creates conditions of ontological apartheid.

For me, whiteness is not anti-Black or racially xenophobic because it has gone awry; whiteness is anti-Black because its very being is anti-Black; this is how it thrives. Racism is not “worse” because of Trump. He is just its latest manifestation, the latest conduit through which the ugliness of white supremacy expresses itself shamelessly. The U.S. is either a white supremacist state, or it isn’t. There is no in-between.

For Black people, this doesn’t mean that juridically there has not been any progress. But what is juridical progress when one remains part of a white state — that reinforces collective white psychic life — that needs you to remain abject? Let’s face it. Trump’s white nationalist xenophobia and anti-Blackness — from his discourse about Black “shithole countries,” to his expressed desire for the U.S. to accept more immigrants from Norway, to his false claim that there is genocide against white South Africans, and to his claim that Haitian immigrants are eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors — is unashamed. I can easily imagine Trump saying to me: If Yancy doesn’t like America, which is the greatest country the likes of which we’ve never seen before, then he should take his woke and radical left ideas to one of those shithole countries. In short, for me, contemporary white supremacy is more of the same old, same old.

Something that struck me in your book was your compassion and empathy, as well as tough-mindedness, for whites, as you acknowledged your own sexism as a man. You see racism as being about power and privilege, not value — your approach is not,“This person is a racist and is therefore a bad person.” Can you expand on that, addressing the tension between the compassion and the toughness in your writing?

Sure. My position is grounded in the prophetic love of James Baldwin when it comes to critiquing whiteness. This doesn’t mean that I love white people because of their whiteness. That is part of the lie and seduction of whiteness, that somehow BIPOC people are expected to love whiteness, its symbolism, its aesthetics, its tropes of “greatness.” I refuse to be a consumer of that poison, to wear a white mask and forget the fact that I’m seen as a “problem” by the white state. That seduction — that act of mask-wearing — can cost me my life.

Baldwin didn’t forget that he was Black. Rather, he resisted the derogatory definitions that white people imposed upon him. So, I would say that the compassion or empathy that you’re talking about is, for me, a manifestation of Baldwinian love that will, as he says in The Fire Next Time, “force [white people] to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” That is Socratic to the core. When white people begin to truly interrogate their whiteness, this will place them within a state of danger. Why danger? Because this will or should generate a powerful form of disenchantment with themselves and the world that has come to accept the lie that whiteness is innocent.

I have had BIPOC students ask me, “Why do you spend so much time talking to white people about their whiteness, when you should be talking to Black people and people of color?” Well, I can do both. More importantly, I talk to white people — I place the ethical burden upon them — because they must take responsibility for the violence of whiteness and its structural binary, its us-versus-them mentality. To get white people to face the lie of their white innocence is to — perhaps — save the lives of Black people.

Also, I would add that it is too easy to say that to be racist is to be a bad person, but white people must, because of their complicity with white supremacy, carry the weight of how their whiteness denigrates me and how they are thereby positioned within a network of social relations that holds them collectively responsible. In this way, white people don’t escape the unethical dimensions of whiteness.

With the current controversies around ethnic studies and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), how do you think the ideas in Backlash have held up since its publication? Is there anything you would change or add to them now?

I think that Backlash captured the unmitigated aspirations that white people possess when it comes to desiring “white purity” and evading the reality of structural white anti-Blackness. Hence, since its publication, I’m reminded that whiteness will do anything to survive, especially through the deployment of the social, political, and existential chimera of being a target of “anti-white racism.”

In his book Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads (2026), George Lipsitz — writing about the fiction of reverse racism — writes: “Once affirmative action was invalidated by the Supreme Court and [critical race theory] lost its luster as privileged villain, it quickly became supplanted by opposition to DEI programs. Beneath the surface, this succession of moral panics about an imaginary ‘reverse racism’ entails opposition to the project of ethnic studies and indeed to any visible manifestation of larger antiracist social formations.” Lipsitz goes on to mark the difference between what I would call a form of political patchwork vis-à-vis racism as opposed to something far more substantive: “It is not that nothing ever changes in history, but that when it comes to racism the changes are often more cosmetic than substantive. W.E.B. Du Bois compared white supremacy in the U.S. to a crack in a plate that was once broken but had been patched up. Whenever the plate was dropped again, it broke along the lines of the patched-up crack because the weakness was structural, not surface.” If I was to add anything different, I would make explicit the insights of historian Jeanelle K. Hope regarding the historical and contemporary ways in which U.S. whiteness and U.S. fascism are inextricably linked.

Does your work in Backlash relate to any current or upcoming projects you are working on? Are there any parts of it that you’d like to see other thinkers and scholars reckon with?

I am currently editing a book under contract with Temple University Press that explores how Black and white philosophers and public intellectuals interpret James Baldwin’s view that white America invented the N*****. So, I continue to explore and expose what W.E.B. Du Bois, in “The Souls of White Folk,” called the entrails of whiteness. In terms of other scholars, I would especially like to see more white philosophers come to terms with their structural positionality as white and how their whiteness manifests as anti-Black. Perhaps how I write — bringing the pain and suffering close — might inspire that kind of deep psychic work, the work of lived experience, that is courageous and honest without resulting in white “innocence” framing race/racism as a distant conceptual object, buried in arcane philosophical works written by Anglo-American and European philosophers of the past.


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.

Josh Friedberg
Josh Friedberg is an author, TEDx speaker, storyteller, and music historian. He has over 100 articles published, including as a staff writer at the web magazine PopMatters. He has won many awards from Illinois and national communications contests since 2017. He holds a master’s degree in English from Northeastern Illinois University and lives in Chicago, where he tutors college students in writing.