Thursday, August 21, 2025
■ Today's Top News
"As the US braces for more extreme heat, wildfires, and hurricanes, the Trump administration has been systematically defunding our communities to give handouts to billionaires," said one organizer.
By Brad Reed
A broad coalition of progressive organizations on Thursday announced that they are uniting for a mass mobilization event aimed at taking on the billionaire class.
The upcoming Make Billionaires Pay marches, scheduled to occur nationwide on September 20, link together multiple crises—ranging from authoritarianism to the climate emergency to US President Donald Trump's mass deportations—by pointing the finger at the ultra-wealthy oligarchs who have been supporting them all.
Candice Fortin, US campaign manager for climate action organization 350.org, said that billionaires are the connective tissue that links together the major problems currently facing the United States and the world.
"This isn't a new story—billionaires have always prioritized profit over people," Fortin said. "This is a system working exactly as it was designed, but now without even the pretense of justice. As the US braces for more extreme heat, wildfires, and hurricanes, the Trump administration has been systematically defunding our communities to give handouts to billionaires. They're dismantling our democracy, attacking immigrants, and feeding the war profiteers."
Tamika Middleton, managing director for Women's March, also emphasized that today's crises are closely linked together.
"Women, migrants, queer and trans people, and communities of color have long been at the center of overlapping crises, from climate disaster to economic injustice to gender-based violence and forced displacement," she said. "These are not separate struggles; they stem from a global system designed by billionaires who exploit our struggles to maintain power."
Organizers said that these planned actions will focus on advocating for taxing extreme wealth, ending Trump's mass deportation program, and transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
The marches are being convened by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Women's March, Climate Defenders, and 350.org, and more than 100 other organizations have endorsed them so far.
The flagship march is set to take place in New York City at the same time the 2025 United Nations General Assembly will be taking place. Other marches are set to occur simultaneously across the country.
"These aggressive policies seek to extend US dominance in Latin America, no matter the human cost," CodePink said.
By Stephen Prager
The White House's announcement Wednesday that it had deployed three warships to the coast of Venezuela has raised fears among antiwar and human rights advocates of the US becoming embroiled in another potential "regime change" quagmire.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of being one of the world's largest traffickers of illegal narcotics and of leading the cocaine trafficking gang Cartel de los Soles.
In 2020, Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine into the US, with the first Trump administration promising a $15 million reward for his arrest. The Biden administration increased that bounty to $25 million before Trump, earlier this month, doubled it to $50 million.
Trump also expanded the litany of accusations against Maduro, alleging that he is the kingpin of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, an allegation that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says there is no evidence to support.
Even before Maduro's indictment, however, Trump had long sought to oust him from power. During his first term, he repeatedly suggested that the US should invade Venezuela to take Maduro out—an idea that his top aides rebuffed.
Trump instead dramatically escalated sanctions on Venezuela, which many studies have shown contributed to the nation's historic economic crisis. His former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explicitly acknowledged that the goal of these sanctions was to push the Venezuelan people to topple Maduro.
In 2023, following his first presidency, Trump lamented at a rally that the US had to purchase oil from Venezuela, saying that if he were in charge, "We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door."
The exact objective of Trump's destroyers, which are expected to arrive on the Venezuelan coast as soon as Sunday, remains unclear. But the Venezuelan government and others in the region have perceived Trump's threats as a serious provocation.
On Monday, Maduro said he would mobilize 4.5 million militia members following what he called "the renewal of extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats" from Trump. After the announcement of approaching warships, those militias began to be deployed throughout the country.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a harsh warning to Trump following the news.
"The gringos are mad if they think invading Venezuela will solve their problem," he said. "They are dragging Venezuela into a Syria-like situation, with the problem that they are dragging Colombia too."
The American antiwar group CodePink condemned the deployment of ships as a "reckless escalation" that "dangerously militarizes the Caribbean and brings our region closer to war."
The group argues that Venezuela's role in drug trafficking is being overblown to justify an invasion. They note that the US's own internal assessments of global drug trafficking have not identified Venezuela as a primary transit country. They also cite the UN's latest World Drug Report, which did not find Venezuela to be a central node of the drug trade.
The Washington Office on Latin America, a DC-based human rights group, has warned that a regime change war would likely be a catastrophe on par with the invasion of Iraq two decades prior.
"The 'victorious' US military would likely find itself governing an impoverished country with broken institutions, trying to hand over power to an opposition weakened by repression and exile, and probably facing an insurgency made up of regime diehards, criminal groups, and even Colombian guerrillas," they said. "There is no evidence that this approach would lead to a democratic transition in Venezuela."
"These aggressive policies seek to extend US dominance in Latin America, no matter the human cost," CodePink said. "The people of Venezuela, like the people of the United States, deserve peace, dignity, and sovereignty, not threats, blockades, and warships."
"Hospitals count on Medicaid to keep their doors open," said healthcare advocacy group Protect Our Care. "Medicaid accounts for one fifth of spending on hospitals, one fifth of hospital discharges, and at least one in five inpatient days in nearly every state."
By Brad Reed
The healthcare advocacy organization Protect Our Care has been tracking financially troubled hospitals across the country that are projected to take a big hit thanks to the Medicaid cuts in the massive Republican budget package—and the group has produced a new tool to let people see the damage being done in real time.
The organization on Wednesday launched a new project called "Hospital Crisis Watch" that identifies and provides updates on healthcare facilities around the country at risk of closure thanks to the Medicaid cuts, and produced an interactive map showing exactly which hospitals and medical centers are in danger.
Protect Our Care found that the most vulnerable facilities tend to be in rural areas, identifying 338 endangered rural hospitals throughout the US. The state of Kentucky has the largest concentration of vulnerable hospitals with 35, followed by Louisiana at 33, and California at 28.
In a report about the threats these hospitals face, Protect Our Care explained why Medicaid funding, which the GOP budget package slashed by $1 trillion over the next decade, is vitally important to these institutions' financial well being.
"Hospitals count on Medicaid to keep their doors open," the report said. "Medicaid accounts for one fifth of spending on hospitals, one fifth of hospital discharges, and at least one in five inpatient days in nearly every state."
The report also pointed to an analysis from Commonwealth Fund estimating that more than 475,000 healthcare workers would lose their jobs as a result of the cuts. This would have serious economic ramifications for rural areas given that "hospitals employ 10% of all employees in rural counties that report having any hospital employment," explained Protect Our Care.
Even if these hospitals don't shut down, Protect Our Care warned that they are likely to slash services and increase wait times in emergency rooms.
The potential closure of hospitals isn't the only crisis facing American healthcare. A separate report from Protect Our Care earlier this week documented how health insurance premiums are expected to skyrocket in the coming year unless the Republican-led Congress passes an extension to enhanced subsidies for people who buy their insurance through the exchanges created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
"Because of these GOP policies, insurance companies have already indicated they plan to raise premiums for 24 million Americans by an average of 15%," the group noted. "At the same time, Republicans are ripping away tax credits from 20 million, forcing them to pay an average of 75% more for their coverage. These price hikes will cause countless hard-working families to lose life-saving coverage while millions more will suffer under the already-rising cost of living."
The data show "a proportion of civilian slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare."
By Brett Wilkins
An investigation published Thursday belied Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, as classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence data revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were, in fact, civilians.
A joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, as of May, the Military Intelligence Directorate identified by name 8,900 fighters from Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack—and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as "dead" or "probably dead."
At that time, the official Palestinian death toll in Gaza stood at 52,928, with the Gaza Health Ministry not differentiating between civilians and militants. Israeli officials and independent peer-reviewed studies have either concurred with the ministry's figures or called them an undercount.
The classified IDF data obtained by Abraham and Graham-Harrison show that at least 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces through May were civilians, what Graham-Harrison called "an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare... even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars."
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden, the 83% civilian kill rate in Gaza is far higher than in Bosnia in 1992-95 (57%), the Syrian civil war of 2012-24 (29-34%), the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine (10-22%), or the US-led war in Afghanistan of 2001-21 (8-12%).
One unnamed intelligence source who was in Gaza told Abraham and Graham-Harrison: "People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death. If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200% of Hamas operatives in the area."
In one case, +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed how one IDF battalion stationed in Rafah killed around 100 Palestinians and labeled them all as "terrorists." However, an officer from the unit later testified that all but two of the victims were unarmed.
The new investigation adds to the body of research showing that Israel's assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case filed by South Africa—has, as Abraham put it, "killed civilians at a rate with few parallels in modern warfare."
These studies destroy claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—and members of his government of historically low civilian death rates in Gaza.
"Israel is setting the new gold standard for urban warfare with what appears to be the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in history," Israeli government spokesperson Avi Hyman claimed in May 2024.
Israel's supporters around the world have parroted this false claim. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the US Military Academy at West Point, said in January that "Israel's civilian-to-combatant ratio is still historically low," and that "Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare."
However, the facts show a very different reality. Retired IDF Gen. Itzhak Brik told Abraham and Graham-Harrison that "there is absolutely no connection between the numbers that are announced and what is actually happening. It is just one big bluff."
"They lie non-stop—both the military echelon and the political echelon," Brik said. "In every raid, the IDF spokesperson's announcements said: 'Hundreds of terrorists were killed.' It's true that hundreds were killed, but they weren't terrorists."
Following the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Numerous massacres ensued, including the October 31, 2023 killing of more than 120 civilians in a single IDF bombing targeting one Hamas member in the Jabalia refugee camp.
The IDF's use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks,w and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths. United Nations human rights officials have said that Israel's use of 2,000-pound bombs likely violates international law by deliberately targeting civilians in disproportionate attacks.
The indiscriminate slaughter is also taking place on the ground, where volunteer American surgeons have described treating—or sending to morgues—young children who appeared to be deliberately shot in the chest and head by IDF snipers. More recently, IDF whistleblowers said they were ordered to shoot or launch artillery shells into crowds of starving Palestinian civilians at aid distribution points run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Responding to the new investigation, the IDF confirmed the existence of the Military Intelligence Directorate database, but claimed that "figures presented in the article are incorrect," without further explanation.
However, in a recording published last week, Aharon Haliva—a former IDF general who was in charge of intelligence operations on and after the October 7 attack—is heard approvingly accepting the official Gaza Health Ministry death toll at the time.
"The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations," Haliva said. "It doesn't matter now if they are children."
Similar statements by Israeli officials are a key component of South Africa's ICJ case, where applicants must prove intent to commit genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention.
The most recent Gaza Health Ministry figures show that Israel's 685-day assault and siege on Gaza have left at least 62,122 Palestinians dead—most of them women and children—and more than 156,700 others wounded, with thousands more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. At least 271 Palestinians, including 112 children, have starved to death.
The dire situation for civilians in Gaza could be about to deteriorate even further as Israel intensifies Operation Gideon's Chariots II, which aims to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians in numbers exceeding even the Nakba, or "catastrophe," during which more than 750,000 Arabs were forcibly expelled, sometimes via massacre and death march, during the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Israeli officials have repeatedly indicated that they would approve of such an annihilation, with Haliva asserted that Palestinians "need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price" of resisting more than a century of dispossession and displacement.
"Young Americans have made their voices clear," said the national president of the College Democrats. "A modern Democratic Party must stand against global injustice."
By Stephen Prager
The national president of the College Democrats is co-sponsoring a Democratic National Committee resolution calling for party members to support an arms embargo and the suspension of military aid to Israel, as well as the recognition of a Palestinian state.
The resolution comes after just 8% of voters in the Democratic Party said in a July Gallup poll that they support Israel's military actions in the Gaza Strip, a dramatic sea change from October 2023, when 36% expressed support.
According to an Economist/YouGov poll from mid-August, 69% of Democratic voters said they believed Israel was committing a genocide against Palestinian civilians.
Disapproval of Israel's actions is most staggering among young voters. Among Democrats ages 18 to 49, Pew Research found that unfavorable views of Israel have shot up to 71% from just 62% in 2022. Just 6% of Americans under 35, across all parties, said they had a favorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Young Americans have made their voices clear," said the national president of the College Democrats, Sunjay A. Muralitharan. "A modern Democratic Party must stand against global injustice."
The College Democrats were joined by a trio of activist groups—Progressive Democrats of America, RootsAction, and Our Revolution—who signed on in support of the proposal Thursday.
"This resolution is a critical step toward aligning our foreign policy with our values," said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution. "By calling for an arms embargo and suspending military aid to Israel, the DNC would be recognizing what grassroots movements have long demanded: that American taxpayer dollars must not bankroll human rights abuses."
The resolution is one of two dueling proposals that will be considered at the DNC meeting on August 26. Another, backed by DNC chair Ken Martin, expresses support for long-held Democratic Party policies of a "two-state" solution and a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
RootsAction political director Sam Rosenthal describes it as a "watered-down resolution that stops far short of calling for an end to arms shipments to Israel."
That proposal closely mirrors the one put forward during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which stopped short of calling for the suspension of weapons sales to Israel and emphasized the importance of maintaining Israel's "qualitative military edge."
Allison Minnerly, the 26-year-old DNC member from Florida who introduced the embargo resolution earlier this month, told The Intercept that Martin offered his resolution as a compromise in the face of her more ambitious one.
Though her resolution now has the support of the College Dems and delegations from Maine, California, and Florida, it nevertheless faces an uphill battle to pass. If it fails, Minnerly says, it will further exacerbate the yawning rift between the Democratic Party and its supporters.
"Our voters, our base, they are saying that they do not want US dollars to enable further death and starvation anywhere across the world, particularly in Gaza," Minnerly said. "I don't think it should be a hard decision for us to say that clearly."
Though the vote is largely symbolic, Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that "the position of the DNC does matter" because "it sets the tone for the entire party."
"There are two Gaza-related DNC resolutions," said Prem Thakker, a reporter and commentator at Zeteo. "A status quo one. And one that recognizes public opinion and events in the past 22 months."
"We have a moral obligation to do what we can to stop the slaughter, but most people feel powerless," said Alan Minsky, the executive director of Progressive Democrats of America. "However, it is well understood that Israel would not be able to maintain the siege of Gaza without the steady flow of US weapons."
Update: This article has been updated to include comments from Our Revolution, RootsAction, and the Progressive Democrats of America and note their endorsement of the resolution.
"At a time when many American workers are struggling with high costs for groceries and housing, the nation's largest low-wage employers are fixated on making their overpaid CEOs even richer," said the author of a new report.
By Julia Conley
Detailing the widening gap between outrageously high CEO compensation and the median wages of employees at some of the world's largest and most profitable companies, a progressive think tank on Thursday warned executives will continue to enrich themselves at the expense of their lowest-paid workers unless policies are adopted to curb such corporate greed.
"Across the political spectrum, Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs," said Sarah Anderson, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and author of a new report out Thursday. "Policymakers should take long overdue action to push Corporate America in a more equitable direction."
The report, Executive Excess 2025, finds that absent federal policies forcing corporations to rein in their spending on stock buybacks and exorbitant CEO pay packages, the average CEO-to-worker pay gap widened by 12.9% last year at what IPS calls the "Low-Wage 100"—the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay.
The average gap between executive and worker pay now stands at 632-to-1 at these firms, up from 560-to-1 in 2023.
Between 2019-24, the average CEO at a Low-Wage 100 company saw their pay rise 34.7%, unadjusted for inflation, while the average median worker pay rose just 16.3%.
CEO compensation increased by 22.6% over the time period, far outpacing inflation. Meanwhile, wage hikes by these same companies didn't even match inflation, including for warehouse workers at software company Aptiv, where the CEO-to-worker pay gap was 2,072-to-1 last year, or cashiers at Ross Stores, where the gap was 1,770-to-1.
"We can curb this runaway source of inequality by taxing corporate greed."
Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $18.8 million last year while the median worker at the firm made just $9,052. Ross Stores' pay ratio was similar, with CEO Barbara Rentler taking home $17 million compared to the company's median worker, who made just $9,602.
Starbucks, which has made headlines in recent years both for its store employees' fight to unionize across the United States and for its executives' illegal union-busting tactics, had far-and-away the largest gap between CEO and median worker pay in 2024, with CEO Brian Niccol taking home $95.8 million and the median employee earning just $14,674.
That makes the wage gap 6,666-to-1 at the coffee chain.
A petition organized last year by Starbucks Workers United, which has unionized at hundreds of stores since a landmark victory in Buffalo, New York in 2021, warned Niccol that the cost of living across the US "is skyrocketing while you continue to make millions" and the employees "who actually make your Starbucks run can't make ends meet."
IPS said the petition reflected its report's main finding: "At a time when many American workers are struggling with high costs for groceries and housing, the nation's largest low-wage employers are fixated on making their overpaid CEOs even richer."
Contributing to the growing wage gap at the Low-Wage 100 is the companies' focus on stock buybacks, in which firms buy back their own shares to "artificially inflate executive stock-based pay and siphon resources out of worker wages and productive long-term investments."
The 100 companies spent $644 billion on stock buybacks from 2019-24, according to IPS, with home improvement giant Lowe's ranking as the "stock buy back leader," spending $46.6 billion buying its own shares over the past six years.
"That sum could've instead covered the cost of giving each of the firm's 273,000 global employees an annual $28,456 bonus for six years," reads the report. "In 2024, Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison enjoyed total compensation of $20.2 million, which is 659 times the retailer's $30,606 median annual worker pay."
Anderson said the report highlights "how America's largest low-wage employers are funneling profits into their CEOs' pockets—at the expense of both their workers and their companies' long-term growth."
IPS pointed to "three particularly promising areas for CEO pay policy reform," including:
- Subjecting corporations to higher tax levies if they have excessive levels of CEO pay;
- Taxing and restricting stock buybacks; and
- Using federal contracts and subsidies to discourage wide corporate pay gaps.
Congress should pass the Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (CEO) Act, which would apply an excise tax to companies with CEO-to-worker pay ratios exceeding 50-to-1, or the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, said the group.
"A May 2024 survey suggests that such taxes would be enormously popular," reads the report. "Overall, 80% of likely voters favor a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs over 50 or more times more than what they pay their median employees. Large majorities in every political group support this approach: some 89% of Democrats, 77% of independents, and 71% of Republicans. In swing states, 83% of likely voters give this proposal a thumbs up."
Other legislation, the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, would quadruple the 1% federal excise tax currently in effect for stock buybacks, and would have raised $6.3 billion from the Low-Wage 100 if it had been in effect in 2023 and 2024—enough to cover the cost of 327,218 public housing units each year for two years.
"We can curb this runaway source of inequality," said IPS, "by taxing corporate greed."
