Common Dreams

Low-wage US workers have faced multiple rising threats to their economic and personal security over the past year. Aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions have terrorized immigrant workers, who are disproportionately represented at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Congress approved the largest cuts in history to public assistance programs that millions of low-wage workers have to rely on to get by.

As Jewish-Arab American, I feel the responsibility to work to overturn the dominating narratives that divide my people. I can see clearly the manufactured ill will that has fueled ignorance and the murder of ten of thousands of Palestinians and stripping of the survivors’ dignity.

Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous. Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now. As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state.

Jose Chajon-Raxon, an immigrant from Guatemala, died this August at Delaney Hall, a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey. His death marks more than 50 deaths in ICE custody since President Donald Trump took office last year. Despite all the controversies, ICE keeps killing people—a sentence that should never feel normal. We should never find ourselves counting the days between deaths or waiting for the next headline. But somehow, we have.

I was born on July 20, 1944, in the midst of World War II. My father had just returned from Burma where he had been operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos in the China-India-Burma Theater. I, of course, remember nothing about that war—except that my father (on extremely rare occasions) would barely mention what he had gone through but would sometimes take me to World War II movies like The Caine Mutiny and Merrill’s Marauders at local movie theaters.

I paint with a brush held between my teeth or my toes. I was born without arms in 1968 about 100 kilometers from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan. My parents’ generation watched mushroom clouds rise over the steppe without being told what the explosions could do to their bodies or their children. For four decades, the Soviet Union more than 450 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. The fallout left cancers, disabilities, trauma, and contaminated land.

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...

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.

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.

The illegal war with Iran that President Donald Trump said would be over in a matter of weeks entered its sixth month on Friday, and there is little sign of it wrapping up in the near future.