Open-air drug markets still afflict multiple San Francisco neighborhoods. The police clearly need help. While the city supplements SFPD officers with ambassadors and Sheriff’s staff, an unlikely agency could potentially make a big difference: SFMTA.
How can a transit agency impact drug markets? Drug dealers like the protection of parked cars.
That’s become clear from the Tenderloin Station’s recently blocking parking on blocks with high drug activity. Leavenworth between Golden Gate and Ellis and the longstanding drug market at Hyde and Eddy have been repeatedly targeted.
When barriers to parking are in place in both areas, drug activities steeply decline and even disappear. This occurs without the presence of police.
Why aren’t barriers always in effect on these blocks? Two reasons.
Lost Parking Revenue
First, SFMTA must approve the removal of parking. And that raises fiscal issues. In 1988, when neighborhood after neighborhood was allowed to issue Residential Parking Permits for free parking 24/7, I asked Mayor Agnos’ parking chief why Tenderloin residents couldn’t get such permits as well.
After all, in 1985 the Tenderloin was completely rezoned into a residential district. Its zoning was no different from neighborhoods that got parking permits.
To his credit, the parking chief was honest. He said, “Randy, we make so much money from parking violations in the Tenderloin that we can’t give it up.”
The low-income Tenderloin has long had among the most expensive meter rates in the city. Basically, downtown parking rates. Despite the neighborhood’s almost entirely residential zoning–new non-residential uses are banned above the second floor— when it comes to parking the city still treats the Tenderloin as if new office towers filled the community.
So Tenderloin residents with cars either park at meters and take their chances or rent space in a garage. Most understandably choose the latter option.
This leaves many Tenderloin meters to the drug trade. Residents, patrons of neighborhood businesses and those visiting the neighborhood don’t feel safe parking on drug-filled blocks.
I understand SFMTA and the city face a budget crisis. But the city should not the need for parking revenue to jeopardize public safety.
Will Drug Markets Simply Relocate?
The second issue raised about barriers is that drug activities will simply move to streets that still allow parking. After all, temporarily closing Hyde and Eddy has coincided with expanded drug activities on Larkin Street.
But drug markets already operate on streets near those protected by barriers. Clearing Leavenworth and Hyde and Eddy of drug activities frees up police to focus on closing drug markets in Little Saigon.
The Tenderloin Business Coalition has constantly called for consistency of enforcement. Barriers provide that consistency. Overall, barriers reduce overall drug activities in the Tenderloin.
A Tenderloin Precedent
We’ve been down this road before.
In 2013 the Central City SRO Collaborative (CCSROC) ran a campaign to address drug dealer parking on the first block of Turk Street. As organizer Karin Drucker wrote,
“The first block of Turk Street boasts the Tenderloin’s highest crime and violence, with open drug dealing, drug use, and people crowding the sidewalk. If you are wondering why parking impacts public safety on this block, consider that the cars parked there provide a convenient and comfortable shelter for individuals to buy and sell drugs. The lack of attention from parking enforcement encourages more and more audacious behavior including serious drug use in a neighborhood where children walk to and from school and which is a mere three blocks from the posh Nordstrom’s shopping center.”
The CCSROC then focused on getting SFMTA to agree to a two-month pilot program barring all cars from lower Turk. As Drucker wrote in February 2014:
“This two-month pilot is designed to see how much a simple change in the landscape of the street will affect its activity, and to challenge the ‘containment’ assumption I mention above. Tenderloin police Captain Jason Cherniss waxes rhapsodic about the value of public safety through environmental design; not surprisingly, he championed this pilot to Director Reiskin. Supervisor Jane Kim and her aide Ivy Lee were ardent supporters as well.
But it was pressure from SRO tenants who live in the neighborhood that truly drove this effort.” (emphasis added)
As Drucker points out, shortly before the pilot parking ban began there was a double-shooting on lower Turk. Mayor Ed Lee responded by ordering Chief Suhr to have two officers, 24/7 at Turk and Taylor. The presence of those officers likely did more than the parking ban to close the largest drug market the Tenderloin up to that point had ever seen.
But the parking ban helped. And such bans are clearing longstanding drug markets in today’s Tenderloin.
SFMTA should authorize Tenderloin Station to install barricades where they have proven effective on at least a three month trial basis.
The city still faces a sidewalk drug use emergency. City Hall must implmenent all options to stop this.
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
The sun sets over container ships and oil platforms off the coast of Huntington Beach, California on January 12, 2021. (Photo: Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
Ben van Beurden’s doubling down on fossil fuels came a month after he was directly confronted over his company’s role in the climate emergency.
Declaring that “cash comes from our legacy business,” the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell has asserted that continuing the company’s oil operations is necessary to help it transition away from non-oil energy operations.
Ben van Beurden made the remarks in an interview with the BBC published online Thursday.
“If we have to build a hydrogen plant from a wind farm that we build in the North Sea for a billion dollars, that is not going to be funded by a hydrogen business–it will be funded by the oil and gas business,” van Beurden told the outlet.
The executive also pushed back against climate activists’ demands, as well as scientific studies and international warnings, against pursuing new oil fields–like the proposed extraction in the Cambo oilfield off the coast of Scotland.
“Why would you say: Let’s not get our oil and gas demands from our own resources but let’s import from somewhere else, probably with a larger carbon footprint,” he said, adding that such a move “also will not help the carbon footprint of the world.”
Van Beurden made similar comments at an energy conference last month.
“Upstream, integrated gas, and the mature businesses like marketing and chemicals, they have to provide the cash for the future,” he said at the online Energy Intelligence Forum.
“Investing in these businesses is going to be needed to keep them the strong cash engines that they currently are,” he said, adding that “upstream needs to be a strong cash engine into, and probably through, the 2030s, and we need to invest to keep it there.”
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‘Landslide Victory for Climate Justice‘: Court Rules Shell Must Cut CO2 Emissions 45% by 2030
Those remarks came just a week before he was confronted at the TED Countdown forum in Edinburgh, Scotland by a local climate activist over his company’s links to human rights abuses in Nigeria, pursuit of new fossil fuel operations, and its appeal of a May court ruling that said Shell must decrease its carbon emissions 45% by 2030.
“I hope you know that as the climate crisis gets more and more deadly, you will be to blame,” said activist Lauren MacDonald.
BBC noted in its reporting that Shell “plans to spend four times as much on oil and gas development as on renewables next year.” The company announced plans earlier this year to hit net zero emissions by 2050, with a reliance “heavily on carbon offsets”–a scheme climate activists denounce as harmful greenwashing.
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Dear San Francisco Democrats,The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (SFDCCC) met on February 25, 2026 and after deliberation, voted to endorse the following local Democratic candidates and measures for the June 2026 Primary Election:
District 2 Supervisor: Stephen Sherrill District 4 Supervisor: Alan Wong Board of Education: Phil Kim Superior Court Judge, Seat 16: Phoebe Maffei Yes on Bond Measure – Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Yes on Charter Amendment – Term Limits
Read on below to learn more about how you can support each endorsed campaign.
We’ll be voting to endorse all remaining ballot measures at our March 2026 meeting later this month. Encourage your friends and neighbors to stay in the loop by subscribing to our newsletter here. Contribute to the party to help us support our endorsed candidates & campaigns win in June!
Candidates for Federal and State offices are endorsed by the California Democratic Party. You can find their endorsements here.
Research indicates that Walmart often has a detrimental effect on local, independent, and small-chain retailers, a phenomenon frequently called the “
Walmart Effect.” When Walmart opens, it often forces surrounding mom-and-pop stores to close due to superior competitive pricing, leading to reduced overall economic output and sometimes, increased community poverty levels. Facebook +4
Impact on Small Businesses: Studies show Walmart’s entry can lead to a decrease in local, independent, and regional discount stores. It tends to trigger a shift where local, independent, and specialty shops are replaced, as these businesses cannot match the low prices of a corporate giant that also often sources most of its inventory from international suppliers.
Economic Decline in Communities: Research suggests that five years after a Walmart enters a county, total employment in that area may decrease, with a significant decline specifically in “goods-producing establishments”. Some findings indicate that the net impact on communities is a reduction in overall wealth and lower average wages.
Shifting Retail Landscape: Walmart’s presence often changes local traffic patterns, encouraging suburban sprawl, making towns more automobile-dependent, and sometimes leading to the decline of downtown shopping districts.
Mixed Results: Some research, however, shows that the net effect might be limited to a small number of lost, direct-competitor, small discount stores, rather than a total destruction of all local retail, as niche boutiques or specialized shops may survive. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis +7
Overall, the prevailing research suggests that while consumers might benefit from lower prices, the local business community and the broader local economy often suffer significantly, with the overall economic impact on the community frequently described as negative. Reddit +1
Cut the military budget in half. Bloated war spending remains a sacred cow for far too many
Eric Blanc Mar 2, 2026 (laborpolitics@substack.com)
Donald Trump is setting Iran and the world on fire. And there’s every reason to think he’ll keep escalating abroad as his regime gets weaker and less popular at home.
But we should be honest: this didn’t start with Trump. For decades, both parties have shared the same basic commitment to U.S. military dominance over the world. Fifty-five percent of House Democrats voted in favor of the most recent US armed forces budget.
Establishment liberals like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prefer a more stable and less erratic version of empire. That’s why their objections about the Iran attack are about process and “strategic clarity,” not a break with the underlying goal of U.S. supremacy. For her part, Kamala Harris on the campaign trail promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
What almost never gets seriously questioned in mainstream US politics is the premise itself: that Washington has the right to bomb, invade, or attack any country across the globe whenever it decides it has a sufficiently good reason. There are important exceptions — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, James Talarico, and others have taken clearer antiwar stances.
But it’s not enough just to oppose this war on Iran. Nor is it enough to demand an end to US aid to Israel. As long as the United States spends almost $1 trillion a year on the military, there will be overwhelming institutional and political pressure to use that machine, justify that machine, and keep expanding that machine — while insisting that there’s no money at home to make life affordable for working people.
Anti-MAGA forces need to stop treating military-budget cuts like a fringe talking point. In the midterms and in 2028, we should agitate for serious reforms to the US war machine. What’s a reasonable-but-ambitious starting point? Cut the armed forces’ $886 billion budget in half.
That’s not pie in the sky. A military budget of “only” about $443 billion would still leave the United States the biggest military spender in the world. But it could mark a real step away from the strategy and practice of imperialism.
Humanity needs international cooperation, not conflict. The United States’s deepening rivalry with China threatens to push the globe into another catastrophic great-power spiral at precisely the moment we need to confront actual existential questions like climate breakdown and how to develop AI slowly and carefully enough that it doesn’t wreck our livelihoods or human civilization.
And with so many working-class Americans barely hanging on, freeing up roughly $500 billion every year would go a long way toward making life in this country livable again.
We are constantly told that universal childcare is too expensive, housing is too expensive, healthcare is too expensive, public transit is too expensive, climate adaptation is too expensive. One simple solution is to cut the military budget in half.
Image by Golden Cosmos
Better Ways To Spend Half a Trillion Dollars
So many life-changing policies would become possible if America halved its military budget. Here’s what $443 billion yearly could fund if directed fully toward each item:
1. Medicare for All — Most estimates put the net new federal cost at $300-400 billion/year (replacing premiums, copays, and deductibles currently paid privately). $443 billion/year would essentially fund the transition to a single-payer system, covering every person in the country while eliminating out-of-pocket costs.
2. End hunger — Making breakfast and lunch free at every school costs about $20 billion per year. Expanding SNAP and WIC to fully eliminate food insecurity would run another $50-100 billion. $443 billion could end hunger in America and completely transform the school nutrition system with money to spare many times over.
3. Build millions of public housing units — Average cost to build a quality affordable unit is roughly $200,000-$300,000. At $443 billion/year, you could build 1.5 to 2 million new public housing units every single year. The entire estimated national shortage is about 4-7 million units, so you’d close the gap in three to four years and then have an ongoing budget for maintenance, renovation, and continued construction.
4. Cancel all medical debt — Total medical debt in active collection is estimated around $195 billion. You could eliminate every dollar of it in the first year and still have over $240 billion left for other health investments that same year.
5. Cancel all student debt — Total outstanding student debt is roughly $1.8 trillion. You could wipe it all out in about four years, then fund free public college permanently going forward with money to spare.
6. Make public college and trade school free — Total tuition revenue at all public colleges and universities is around $80-90 billion per year. $443 billion covers that almost five times over. You could eliminate tuition, massively expand capacity, and fund living stipends for students.
7. Universal childcare and pre-K — Estimated cost for a universal, high-quality system is roughly $70-100 billion per year. $443 billion would fund a system where every family in America has access to free or near-free childcare from birth through age five, with well-paid unionized staff, and still leave $340+ billion on the table.
8. Green energy transition jobs program — The entire Inflation Reduction Act was about $370 billion in climate spending spread over a decade. $443 billion per year would be roughly twelve times that annual rate. You could retrofit every building in the country, build out renewable energy infrastructure nationwide, and fund union-wage jobs for every displaced fossil fuel worker many times over.
9. National high-speed rail network — California’s single high-speed rail project is estimated around $100 billion. $443 billion/year could build a comprehensive national network connecting every major metro area within a decade, something comparable to what China and Europe have built.
10. Repair all deteriorating infrastructure — The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US infrastructure gap, the gap between the amount of money needed for basic infrastructure maintenance versus how much is actually allocated for it, at roughly $2.6 trillion over ten years. $443 billion yearly covers that completely — every bridge, road, dam, water system, school building, and electrical grid — and leaves room for new construction.
11. Universal home and community-based care — There are roughly 800,000 people on Medicaid waiting lists for home care for elderly and disabled people. A comprehensive universal program would cost an estimated $150-200 billion per year. $443 billion fully funds this with well-paid caregivers and eliminates every waitlist in the country.
12. Federal jobs guarantee — Most estimates for a program guaranteeing a $15 per hour job with benefits to anyone who wants one range from $300-500 billion/year depending on uptake. $443 billion lands right in that range, potentially employing 10-15 million people in public works, caregiving, environmental restoration, and community development.
13. Expand and strengthen Social Security — Eliminating the taxable earnings cap is the usual funding mechanism, but $443 billion/year could increase average benefits by roughly 35-40%, lower the retirement age, and extend the trust fund indefinitely. That would lift virtually every senior out of poverty.
14. Community health centers and mental health services — There are currently about 1,400 federally qualified health centers. Estimates suggest we need roughly 8,000-10,000 more to provide universal primary and mental health access. At roughly $5-10 million per center for construction and staffing, $443 billion could build out the entire system in a single year and fund operations for decades.
15. Weatherize and retrofit every home — Average cost to fully weatherize a home is roughly $5,000-$10,000. There are about 35-40 million homes that need it. Total cost: $200-400 billion. $443 billion/year does the entire country in one year, cutting energy bills for tens of millions of families immediately — and reducing carbon emissions.
16. Universal paid family and medical leave — A comprehensive 12-week paid leave program is estimated at roughly $50-75 billion/year. $443 billion funds this nearly six times over. You could offer six months of paid leave and still have hundreds of billions remaining.
17. Fully fund and transform veterans’ care — Veterans Affairs’ (VA) current budget is around $400 billion but is plagued by staffing shortages, long wait times, and crumbling infrastructure, with Congress consistently failing to fund it adequately. $443 billion a year could double VA healthcare staffing, eliminate every wait list, build state-of-the-art facilities in every region, fully fund mental health and suicide prevention programs, end veteran homelessness (roughly 35,000 veterans are unhoused on any given night), and guarantee every veteran world-class care without bureaucratic delays — all while keeping the existing VA public healthcare system rather than privatizing it.
The staggering thing about this list is that even the most expensive items rarely exceed $443 billion individually. You could fund several of them simultaneously with half the military budget. For context, the US spends more on its armed forces than the next nine countries combined.
Peace Is Possible
Even though more Americans want to cut the military budget than expand it — and even though this war on Iran is widely opposed — the military itself as an institution remains remarkably popular. Cutting the military budget in half is ambitious and would be controversial, since so many communities across the US economically rely on supplying goods and services to the military. Why not start with a smaller proposed cut? This is a reasonable question.
My response is, first, that $443 billion a year is still a huge amount of money. Second, there’s a huge amount of fat that can be quickly and easily cut because military spending is rampant with waste, irrationality, and lack of financial accountability. Third, there is strong precedent for a massive military cut: military spending was cut in half from 1945 to 1946 in the wake of World War II. By 1948, the armed forces budget had been cut 89 percent from its wartime total, as factories converted to peacetime use. The same conversion strategy used then — deep Pentagon cuts combined with job guarantees, wage protections, retraining, union-led transition planning, and long-term public contracts for civilian production — can be used to transition us today away from an economy oriented towards destruction, towards one based on producing services and providing goods that humans actually need.
Finally, along the way to our goal of halving the budget, we should also support intermediary military budget cuts like the 10 percent proposed by Bernie Sanders. Realistically, it will probably be through the accretion of such partial steps forward that we’ll achieve our goals. In part, that’s because it will take time to reconfigure and transition the plants currently being used to produce weapons and military goods. But in that process, it’s crucial we keep the public’s eye on the prize of a dramatically different US military.
The problem with modest proposed military budget cuts on their own isn’t just that they don’t free up enough money for domestic programs. It’s also important that we spark a serious national debate about how the United States can begin relating to the world in a way that does not hinge on domination and exploitation.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the US government was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That remains true today. But it doesn’t have to remain true tomorrow.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks next to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) at a town hall event on February 20, 2026 in Stanford, California.
(Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
“In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer.”
The US economy has reached a breaking point, suggested Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday as he and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced legislation to force billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.
“We can no longer tolerate a corrupt tax code that enables billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than the average worker,” said Sanders (I-Vt.) “In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer. We cannot continue a trend in which, over the past 50 years, $79 trillion in wealth in our country has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Enough is enough. Billionaires cannot have it all.”
The taxes of fewer than 1,000 people in the US would be impacted by the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, but just a 5% annual wealth tax on those households would be able to raise an estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue over the next decade, said Sanders’ office—a fact that underscores the immense wealth of the 938 billionaires who would be targeted by the bill.
Those 938 people have a collective net worth of $8.2 trillion, and Sanders and Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed out how the immense fortunes of some high-profile billionaires would be affected by the bill.
According to the lawmakers, Tesla CEO and President Donald Trump ally Elon Musk, whose $833 billion net worth makes him richer than the bottom 53% of US households, would owe $42 billion in taxes—an unfathomable amount to the vast majority of Americans, but a comparatively tiny tax bill for Musk, who would be left with about $792 billion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would each owe just $11 billion compared to their $220 billion and $218 billion net worth.
The wealth of billionaires has risen rapidly in recent years, increasing by about 20% in 2025, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
“We have a deep economic divide in this country. On one side, places like Silicon Valley are generating extreme wealth. On the other side, families are struggling to cover the cost of healthcare, housing, and basic needs,” said Khanna. “We can tax billionaires a modest amount to make sure everyone has a fair chance while keeping our innovative engine. That is why I am proud to join Sen. Bernie Sanders to lead the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act.”
With the revenue collected from the wealth tax, said Sanders and Khanna, the federal government would:
Provide a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less;
Reverse the $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which are estimated to cause more than 50,000 unnecessary deaths;
Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for millions of seniors;
Build, rehabilitate, and preserve over 7 million affordable homes to eliminate the affordable housing gap and end homelessness;
Ensure no family pays more than 7% of their income on childcare;
Establish a $60,000 minimum annual salary for every public school teacher in America; and
Expand Medicaid home health care for seniors and people with disabilities.
Khanna and Sanders emphasized that “no one who has a net worth of less than $1 billion would pay a penny more in taxes under this bill.”
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at University of California, Berkeley, released an analysis Monday that found the bill “would raise approximately $4.4 trillion over a decade and close the gap between wealth growth for billionaires and income growth for the average American family that has existed since the early 1980s.”
“Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated,” said the economists. “The US has now reached an unprecedented level of top wealth concentration. US billionaire wealth has exploded in recent years, more than doubling since 2019. A billionaire wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth among the billionaire class in the United States.”
“Combining top wealth taxation with policies to rebuild middle class economic security,” said Saez and Zucman, “is what the United States needs to ensure vibrant and equitable growth for the future.”
As Jeff Stein wrote at theWashington Post, the proposal of a wealth tax—which is supported by roughly two-thirds of Americans, according to polls—could become a litmus test in the 2028 presidential election, in which Khanna has been named as a potential candidate.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also been named as a possible Democratic contender and has expressed vehement opposition to a billionaire tax that’s been proposed in his state, putting him at odds with about 90% of Democratic voters there and three-quarters of all Californians.
Sanders—who supports the California measure—said that “it is time to enact a wealth tax on billionaires and use this revenue to address some of the major crises facing working families, the children, the elderly, the sick, and the most vulnerable.”
“At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality,” he said, “this legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share of taxes so that we can create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”
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The Spanish government has blocked the US military from using its bases to launch attacks on Iran, forcing American aircraft to leave the country.
Speaking at the annual Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona on Sunday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denounced that US war on Iran, which was completely unprovoked.
“Remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime,” Sánchez said, “and at the same time be against a military intervention that is unjustified, dangerous, and outside international law. That one should be against a war initiated without authorization from the US Congress or the UN Security Council.”
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Iran:
“Remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime … and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention outside of international law.” pic.twitter.com/Nv0V4pfXeG
According to a Monday report in the Guardian, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares emphasized after Sánchez’s speech that Spanish military bases will not be used “for anything that is not in the agreement [with the US], nor for anything that isn’t covered by the UN charter.”
In the wake of the Spanish government’s announcement, anti-war campaigners demanded that other European nations take similar stances.
“Europe should close all of the US bases on its soil,” wrote David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International. “There can be no ‘strategic autonomy’ while the United States maintains the ability to commit wanton violence from imperial installations on European territory.”
Alex Soros, chairman of Open Society Foundations, said that more nations should follow in Spain’s footsteps in trying to curb US aggression.
“Why aren’t more Europeans standing up to an illegal war!” Soros wrote. “Same with Canada! They make nice speeches at conferences, but do little. Spain is becoming the leader of the free world!”
Clare Daly, an Irish former member of European Parliament, encouraged her country to do its part to deny the US a base for airstrikes.
“Spain has denied the US military any use of its territory to carry out unlawful acts of aggression against Iran,” Daly wrote. “Yesterday [Human Rights Organization] Shannonwatch documented two US Air Force Hercules C-130H aircraft landing at Shannon Airport. Is the government going to do anything to uphold Ireland’s international responsibilities?”
Alan McLeod, senior staff writer at MintPress News, quipped that the Spanish government “continues to provide more resistance to Trump’s agenda than all Democrats combined.”
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Protestors stand on an image depicting US President Donald Trump during a gathering to protest against the US and Israel attack of Iran and the killing of the Supreme leader in front of the US Embassy in Ankara on March 1, 2026.
(Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images)
“Trump’s illegal war on Iran and the rule of law,” said one pair of campaigners, “establish an intolerable pattern of egregious abuses of power, directly threatening our constitutional order, our safety, and our way of life.”
After the unprovoked bombing of Iran over the weekend by the United States and Israel—strikes that included the unlawful assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei—the call for US President Donald Trump to be impeached and removed from office has grown as the straightest path to hold the US leader to account for the attacks which policy and human rights experts have condemned as a serious war crime.
With a regional war in the Middle East that was already boiling from Gaza to Lebanon and from Syria to Yemen now exploding in the wake of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Globe and Mail columnist Debra Thompson on Sunday called Trump “the most dangerous man on the planet.”
“Rather than ending wars,” Thompson notes, “Trump has initiated military action eight times, carrying out attacks in seven countries (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, and Venezuela) in 2025.” Such a pattern of violence and warmongering should make clear that failure to restrain Trump has only emboldened him.
“The recurring danger in this latest presidential aggression is that there are no guardrails, no constraints, and no post-hoc justification,” writes Thomson, “other than that Mr. Trump is the President of the United States and can do whatever he wants.”
But American presidents cannot simply do whatever they want. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll out Sunday, less than 25% support the president’s aggression against Iran. In the first wave of the US military attack, an Iranian school for girls was bombed, killing over 108 civilians, mostly children.
While some congressional lawmakers are pushing for a vote this week on a War Powers Resolution to curtail US military operations against Iran, others are demanding more robust action from Congress to bring Trump’s war-making to an end.
“Under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, as well as to raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, and fund and regulate the military,” declared novelist and political activists Stephen King on Saturday. “Impeach the SOB.”
Mike Hersh and Alan Minsky, respectively the communications director and executive director of the Progressive Democrats of America, argued in a Sunday op-ed for Common Dreams that “Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also a profound constitutional crisis.”
According to Hersh and Minsky:
Trump’s illegal war on Iran and the rule of law establish an intolerable pattern of egregious abuses of power, directly threatening our constitutional order, our safety, and our way of life. These intertwined crises cry out for an immediate, decisive response by the Congress and the US public.
Therefore, PDA demands that all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, uphold their oath of office to defend our constitutional republic. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy when President a repeatedly breaks the law and arrogantly refuses to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. That remedy is impeachment, followed by removal from office.
Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy, said that US lawmakers, as well as the American people they represent, “must also be ready to hold the president and his administration accountable for this breach of US and international law.”
“The failure to hold past presidents liable for war crimes and related violations of our own laws has helped lead to this dangerous moment, with a seemingly unrestrained president endangering millions of lives with impunity,” warned Duss. “The forever wars and the imperial presidency must finally come to an end.”
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Tonight: Join MoveOn’s emergency mass call – Iran in Focus: Stop Trump’s War (7pm ET/4pm PT). Indivisible and several other national partners are co-hosting MoveOn’s mass, movement-wide call to discuss what’s at stake, map out next steps, and launch a nationwide push to tell every elected official: no more endless wars. We’ll hear from activists, foreign policy experts, and Members of Congress calling for immediate de-escalation in Iran and demanding immediate action to keep Trump in check.
Call your senators, call your representative, and email them all: They must stop Trump’s war! The Constitution is clear: Congress holds the power to declare war. Trump’s reckless and unconstitutional Iran escalation has already led to the deaths of, as of this writing, six US servicemembers and hundreds of Iranians civilians. Americans didn’t ask for this war and we absolutely don’t support it. Members of Congress must use every lever in their toolbox to put an immediate end to it. Let all your Members of Congress know: We won’t accept anything less.
Tell Congress: Halt the ICE terror machine. GOP lawmakers have been quick to exploit Trump’s war as an excuse to insist Democrats drop their opposition to new funding for ICE and Border Patrol (details, below). Use our call scripts and email tool to contact your Members of Congress and demand that they refuse to expand Trump’s capacity to terrorize our communities just because he decided to bomb Iran. Demand serious guardrails be placed on those agencies as a bare minimum for any DHS funding deal.
Register for the ICE Out for Good Funding Fight weekly phonebank. On Tuesday (1pm ET/10am PT), we’ll be calling voters in key states to encourage them to call their Members of Congress and urge them to hold the line and demand that ICE’s terror tactics be stopped for good.
Find your March 28 No Kings Day event. March 28 was already set to go down in history as America’s biggest single-day protest ever, but Trump’s war has made it even more urgent that we turn out in numbers too great to ignore. There are nearly 2000 events registered! If you don’t find anything within an hour of your home, consider hosting an event yourself.
UPDATE: REPUBLICANS’ DHS SHUTDOWN
Today is Day 17 of the GOP’s DHS shutdown — a shutdown that happened only because Republicans aren’t willing to hold ICE and Border Patrol to the same sort of standards as law enforcement — and now the GOP wants to use Trump’s war to get Democrats to cave and let them shovel billions more into those agencies’ coffers.
So far, Dems have stood firm, refusing to vote on the Republicans’ DHS funding bill. Democrats have even put forward a bill that would fund every part of DHS other than ICE, Border Patrol, and Kristi Noem’s office. But no, the GOP would rather let their shutdown drag on and keep ICE unaccountable.
Americans have been clear: No more ICE terror, and no more wars. Indivisibles in particular have made sure Democrats hold the line on DHS, making a record-breaking number of calls to Congress — but the fight really isn’t over. We need to keep up the pressure and make sure elected officials know their constituents are still watching closely.
That means more calls, more emails, more rallies at their offices — more making your voice heard above the noise of the ICE machine.
Plan a nonviolent rally or visit to your Members of Congress’ local offices – Protests and rallies are protected free speech under the First Amendment, and constituents have a right to visit electeds’ offices even when they’re not in their districts (and staffers are sure to let their bosses know if they had visitors).
The longer the shutdown lasts, the more time skittish Democrats will have to back away from our demands. Let them know what you think!
Despite Trump calling SF’s Anthropic a “Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about” and banning government use of their AI tool Claude, the administration still had to use Claude in its Iran attacks.
When the Trump administration banned all government use of Anthropic and its well regarded tool Claude, Trump declared on Truth Social that “Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War,” and that “I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”
That is all quite hilarious when considered in the context that the US military still used Anthropic’s Claude tool anyway in this weekend’s attacks on Iran, according to a report in the Sunday Wall Street Journal. That Journal article is behind a paywall, but the same information was also reported in a free article at Axios separately at about that same time.
The Journal’s reporting says the Pentagon used Claude in the Iran attacks to select targets, conduct theoretical battlefield simulations, and for general intelligence assessments. According to Axios, despite Trump’s bans and tantrums, “The Pentagon still sees Anthropic’s Claude as superior to other models.”
Image: CHONGQING, CHINA – DECEMBER 29: In this photo illustration, a person holds a smartphone displaying the logo of “Claude,” an AI language model by Anthropic, with the company’s logo visible in the background, illustrating the rapid development and adoption of generative AI technologies, on December 29, 2024 in Chongqing, China. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a cornerstone of China’s strategic ambitions, with the government aiming to establish the country as a global leader in AI by 2030. (Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
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