Bezos was feted as the savior of the Washington Post in 2013, now he’s reviled for mass layoffs. But it’s also Google who helped crush the paper. Liberal elites are starting to learn about oligarchy.

Matt Stoller Feb 6, 2026

In August of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders faced negative coverage of his Presidential campaign by a vaunted national newspaper, the Washington Post. This publication was revered in D.C., having broken the Watergate scandals and brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. It had delivered a host of important stories over the decades since, seen as a public trust so important that Steven Spielberg made a movie about the publisher’s decision to help publish the Pentagon Papers. But like most newspapers, it had stumbled in the early 2010s.

At the time, newspapers were doing badly due to what they thought was a decline in ad spending due to the financial crisis. Philanthropists were musing on how to save journalism, and tech barons, such as Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, were buying legacy publications and pledging to reinvent them with capital and innovative savvy.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Local elites in D.C. were immensely grateful to Bezos. The paper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and took on a sharp edge against Donald Trump. Bezos had deep pockets, and had saved the town’s pride.

Six years later, Sanders, running for President against what he called the billionaire class, did something unusual in polite liberal society. He said Bezos had an incentive to shade coverage of politicians he didn’t like. Sanders had been discussing how Amazon doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

“See, I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why The Washington Post — which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon — doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection.”

And that comment created a bitter reaction within D.C. towards the populist politician. The executive editor of the Washington Post, a deeply respected man named Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight”), responded the way all of D.C. felt. He called Sanders a conspiracy theorist.

Jeff Zeleny@jeffzeleny

. @PostBaron responds to absurd attack: “Sen. Sanders is a member of a large club of politicians—of every ideology—who complain about their coverage….Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence.”

Jeff Zeleny @jeffzelenyIn NH today, @BernieSanders sounds a lot like @realDonaldTrump as he trashes Amazon: “I talk about that all of the time and then I wonder why the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me I don’t know why.”

1:09 AM · Aug 13, 2019112 Replies · 66 Reposts · 193 Likes

How dare Sanders cast shade on the willingness of a benevolent billionaire to steward a public institution like the Washington Post?!? While most journalists and readers of the Post would in other contexts understand the conflict of interest at issue here, here they felt differently. What newspapers write, they believed, is truthful, and neutral, and objective. Bezos was naught but a kindly check-writer, perhaps ruthless at Amazon, but now ascended to the pantheon of philanthropy. Who is this rag-tag old Jewish socialist to annoy us with his complaining?

What a difference six years makes.

Yesterday, the Washington Post engaged in layoffs across the organization, getting rid of the Middle East team, war correspondents, its entire sports department, and everyone in the West coast office who covers big tech. Local coverage will be cut to just 12 people. Overall, Bezos is firing 300 out of 800 reporters, decimating what is widely regarded as a key newspaper covering government in America. “It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee.

Importantly, the paper also fired the reporter tracking Amazon. The stated reason is that the company is losing money due to a loss of local market power, falling ad revenue, and generative AI.

Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”

Bezos’ change of heart has horrified the D.C. elites who feted him in 2013. It’s so bad that even the local influence peddlers are angry. Here’s a Democratic lobbyist for big tech, a man named Matt Bennett, offering a public and shocking complaint against the founder of Amazon.

Matt Bennett@ThirdWayMattB

Jeff Bezos has $250 billion. The Post, even if it hemorrhages money, is utterly irrelevant to his net worth. Why is he killing one of the few remaining major American newspapers? Why????

Dylan Byers @DylanByersNEW: Massive layoffs coming to Washington Post… rumor inside Post is that sports desk could be shuttered entirely… foreign desk will be hit hard too

2:10 AM · Jan 25, 2026 · 333K Views225 Replies · 448 Reposts · 3.49K Likes

Why the open rage? Some of the anger is coming from a place of delusion and arrogance. I’m not a particular fan of the Washington Post. They helped get us into the war in Iraq and endorsed a series of obnoxious local candidates for as long as I’ve paid attention to politics. Even the vaunted Woodward and Bernstein investigations into Watergate are exaggerated. Also, D.C. writ large is a community that looks down on Trump. The Atlantic called these layoffs “The Murder of the Washington Post, while the New Yorker titled their article How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post.

And what of the executive editor, that Marty Baron fellow? Now retired, he called the layoffs “one of the darkest days” in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” and attacked Bezos for being “gutless.” There was no apology to Sanders, and he even thanked his former boss, saying that he was “personally grateful for Jeff Bezos’s steadfast support and confidence during my eight-plus years as The Post’s executive editor.” It’s remarkable that Baron’s mewling statement expressed less genuine outrage than that of a big tech lobbyist, but it is a belated acknowledgment of a problem.

But mostly, the frustration is reasonable. The Washington Post is a local paper with good coverage of local events and government policy, and there are a lot of reporters who work on national and international questions that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s where people who live in D.C. read their favorite sports columnist, find out stuff about the local industry, and learn about how the snow will be plowed. Like any local community, people here are upset about losing the newspaper.

That’s not to say that the newspaper is doing well, because it’s not. There are financial problems, as there are across the industry. Since 2005, the number of people working at newspapers has dropped by 75%, and a third of U.S. counties now have no daily newspaper. But while most regional papers don’t have the scale to transition to a subscription model, a few – like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal – do. And for a time, the Washington Post did as well.

But Bezos himself ruined this opportunity for the paper. In 2024, Bezos intervened in the editorial page to prevent an endorsement of Kamala Harris, which was a violation of the promise he made in 2013 when he bought the paper. That decision led to 200,000 subscription cancelations. We don’t know how many the paper has left, but the guess was that it had 2.5 million before Bezos’s intervention. So the drama aside, that’s… not a bad number of customers. And actual traffic to the Washington Post is still pretty good. Here’s a chart from the New York Times.

The Washington Post has 40 million people visiting the website every month, it is a credible and trustworthy brand, and the region needs, if nothing else, local news. Those 200,000 subscribers are clearly willing to pay for news, they are just not willing to pay for news delivered in an untrustworthy manner.

So most observers don’t think the layoffs are some sort of inevitable choice, but a discrete decision to destroy the paper. Why would Bezos ruin this asset instead of selling it to someone else? There are likely two big reasons. The first is that the Washington Post used to be an extremely useful political tool for Bezos, but it no longer is. And the second is financial and political – the Washington Post is being pillaged by Google’s illegal adtech monopoly. Interestingly, many media outlets are suing Google over this situation, such as Vox, The Atlantic, Business Insider, McClatchy Media Co., Slate, and Advance Publications. But the Washington Post, owned by a foe of antitrust law, is not.

And this curious fact that the Washington Post is leaving money on the table to avoid litigating on antitrust suggests that Bezos never had any good intentions with the Post in the first place. To understand why, let’s go back to the original purchase of the paper in 2013. While most saw Bezos as a savior, there was a less magnanimous interpretation of his acquisition.

There have always been media barons, but those barons made their money in media. Bezos, however, was making his money elsewhere, and subsidizing media. At the time of the purchase, Amazon was starting to be in the crosshairs of regulators and media outlets over its consolidation of the book industry, as well as its advantages over retailers due to sales tax loopholes. Here’s the cover of The New Republic in 2014:

The year before buying the paper, Bezos made other moves to fortify his political power. He put the deeply wired super-lawyer Jamie Gorelick on the Amazon board, likely because she had pull with the Obama Department of Justice. A few years later, he bought a giant mansion in D.C., with the assumption he would assume the role of the Graham family as a local social leader. Then he awarded Amazon’s “second headquarters” to the D.C. area.

In other words, the purchase of the Washington Post in retrospective appears like part of a campaign to curry favor with political and media elites in D.C. in order to get government contracts, protect Amazon’s business, ward off scrutiny, and manipulate politics. It looks exactly as Sanders suggested.

Just a few years after Bezos bought the Post, Donald Trump said in campaign speeches that Bezos had an “antitrust” problem. If elected, he said he’d go after the company. In 2017, Lina Khan’s famous law review article, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, went viral. Trump, despite prodding from allies in real estate, angry that Amazon had hurt their shopping mall investments, didn’t attack Amazon. But Joe Biden did, appointing Khan to run the Federal Trade Commission. In September 2023, the FTC sued Amazon for monopolization, a case that is still in process. The Washington Post became less useful, once the case got filed.

When Trump ran again in 2024, he made it very clear that he would retaliate against business leaders who were hostile and reward those who were deferential. So the political value of the Washington Post disappeared, and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” turned into a sick joke, like Google’s “Don’t Do Evil.” In other words, one interpretation is that Bezos bought the Washington Post to delay an antitrust case and curry favor with politicians. He failed at blocking the case, and so now it’s important to shut down ongoing critical coverage of both his company and the Trump administration.

And that’s where we get to the monopoly problem, which the Washington Post itself reported last April.

As Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled, Google has been systematically monopolizing the technology and process for selling advertising on the open web, exactly the kind of ads the Post sells. Google controls ad revenue and distribution, and it has used that power to kill thousands of newspapers in America by monetizing the work they do and taking that money for itself. And it is this behavior, the diversion of revenue from publishers to tech monopolies, that led to the Washington Post becoming the plaything of a billionaire, who then threw it away.

In 2022, I described the basic dynamic that allows Google to appropriate billions from newspapers and divert it to its own properties.

By 2014, Google was no longer just a search engine; if you bought advertising, sold advertising, brokered advertising, tracked advertising, etc, you were doing it on Google tools. It tied its products togethers so you couldn’t get access to Google search data or YouTube ad inventory unless you used Google ad software, which killed rivals in the market. It downgraded newspapers who tried to negotiate different terms.

This leverage came from Google’s control of both the distribution of news and the software and data underpinning online ad markets. Roughly half of Americans report getting news from social media, while 65% get it from a search engine like Google. That means newspapers are getting a lot of their customers from entities who compete with them to sell ads, often to their same audience. And they must use the software offered by Google to sell those ads, and often display content on Google News under the terms that Google demands, which includes allowing Google to display much of the article itself on its own properties. (If you want a good example of how Google steals content, read this piece on what it did to Celebrity Net Worth.)

Over these years, Google introduced Google News and standards for web pages that privileged its own services, cut favorable deals with adblockers, and fought against things like header bidding, which was an attempt by publishers/advertisers to get better prices than Google was offering for ad inventory. Google began demanding terms for data and formatting that publishers had no choice but to supply. In 2017, for instance, the Wall Street Journal refused to allow Google search users to read its content for free, instead locating its content behind a paywall. Google downgraded the status of the newspaper in its search rankings. While subscriptions went up, traffic to the newspaper dropped by 44%.

Over the course of these twenty years, under Republican and Democratic administrations, neither Congress nor the FTC created mandatory public rules over the use of data, and enforcers pursued no meaningful antitrust suits to stop big tech firms. In 2012, the FTC Bureau of Economics, in one of the all time most embarrassing episodes for economics, actively killed a suit that could have stopped the monopolization of the search market. So Google became a monopoly in the advertising industry, not just over search ads, but over most online advertising markets. Last year, Google’s global revenue amounted to $257.6 billion, which is nearly all from advertising. That’s a huge amount of money, some of which used to go to finance journalism but now goes to private jets in Palo Alto.

The financial problems Google has fostered have turned a business based on credibility into a charity based on the dependency on an oligarch’s goodwill. Consider that if the Washington Post could profit by producing good journalism, Bezos would be less likely to gut its operations. And even if Bezos did gut it, it would be easy to create a competitive newspaper, as has happened for 200 years of American history.

The situation in D.C. has been mirrored in newspapers in cities across the country, though it’s less noticeable elsewhere. We’ve known about this problem in various forms for around 15 years, and there have been a number of attempted policy interventions to save newspapers. In 2018, then-Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley announced an antitrust investigation into Google. In 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, a suit which is still ongoing after many procedural delays by the courts. In 2022, the Antitrust Division sued Google along similar lines as Paxton, and won earlier this year. Unfortunately, the remedy phase is still ongoing, and there are likely to be years of appeals.

A different attempt was the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill sponsored by Amy Klobuchar that allows newspapers to band together and negotiate with platforms like Google and Meta over data and ad revenue, a sort of collective bargaining approach. That bill did have some movement in the Senate, but ultimately failed due to the lobbying of big tech. In California, lawmakers proposed something similar, but Governor Gavin Newsom, operating on behalf of Google, ultimately killed it.

In Australia, a similar law did pass, this law fostered so much revenue for newspapers that the job market for journalists there was buoyant. Google and Meta put $1 billion into the media ecosystem over three years, which those companies then could use to support their search and social media operations. There are problems with the law, and it needs modification, but it has basically kept journalism viable in that country.

Another policy change is the emergence of generative AI. In 2022, big tech platforms, seeing OpenAI’s ChatGPT product, pursued a specific model to commercialize generative artificial intelligence. They began sucking up all journalism and creative content without compensation to journalists. They built AI-powered chatbots who could take what newspapers reported, repackage it, and give it to users. By monetizing the work of others without giving them compensation, these products have undermined the business model underpinning ad-funded journalism. Google’s AI Overviews, which summarize the web on search queries, has crushed web traffic. Here’s the Economist with a viral article and chart published last year.

For companies that sell advertising or subscriptions, lost visitors means lost revenue. “We had a very positive relationship with Google for a long time…They broke the deal,” says Neil Vogel, head of Dotdash Meredith, which owns titles such as People and Food & Wine. Three years ago its sites got more than 60% of their traffic from Google. Now the figure is in the mid-30s. “They are stealing our content to compete with us,” says Mr Vogel. Google has insisted that its use of others’ content is fair. But since it launched its AI overviews, the share of news-related searches resulting in no onward clicks has risen from 56% to 69%, estimates Similarweb.

Generative AI is not just a politically neutral innovation, it’s technology engineered with certain political assumptions in mind, notably that copyright holders have no rights. Plenty of judges are wrestling with copyright as it pertains to large language models. Now-Senator Hawley has a bill to prohibit big tech from using copyrighted works to train AI models without permission from the creator. That bill hasn’t moved. And in the Google search antitrust remedy case, the Antitrust Division asked to allow publishers to opt-out of AI Overviews, but Judge Amit Mehta didn’t listen. The political pressure has forced some deals between AI firms and bigger content producers, but with a lot less value for the content than they should have received.

You might think, and many would, that forcing big tech to license content would make AI non-viable. But I know of at least one AI firm that uses licensed content, and their models can do things that big tech models can’t, and their compute needs are a tiny fraction of the hyperscalers. It turns out, incorporating lots of crap data requires a bloated inefficient approach, while actually working with creators is a far more efficient process. The point, however, isn’t that one policy choice is better than another, it’s that the path of AI development is a political choice that has technological implications. And we chose, as a society, to kill local journalism, just as we are choosing to eliminate cattle ranchers, movie producers, local bankers, independent pharmacists and dentists, and basically anyone who works for a living.

Bezos’s attack on the D.C. community is doing something I thought I’d never see – the liberal class is waking up to oligarchy. Now I don’t want to overstate the dynamic. Take Marty Baron. Like many boomer liberals, Baron is an intelligent fool. He is, for instance, on the board of a Google-backed think tank, the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation, and almost certainly doesn’t realize that his beloved newspapers have been decimated by the entity he currently helps. The fact, however, that even Baron has been forced to reckon with the dangers of the superrich, is meaningful.

Taking a step back, the stakes of our politics are becoming undeniable. Even the rich are becoming afraid of the superrich. Wealthy Hollywood producers are terrified of the Silicon Valley takeover of their livelihood, and the second tier of Wall Street is scared, as the wealth protection industry itself is under attack from the oligarchs who want to automate their servants away. Chris Hayes, a wealthy TV personality, made the point in a viral tweet, saying essentially that Jeff Bezos and billionaires believe that everything that is ours should be theirs.

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes

I think it’s best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

7:40 PM · Feb 4, 2026 · 1.39M Views367 Replies · 2.7K Reposts · 16.6K Likes

As Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

That is a lesson Jeff Bezos is helping to impart to all of us, once again.

---

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

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Matt Stoller

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Double Down News Nov 19, 2023 Avi Shlaim served in the IDF. Ghada Karmi fled the Nakba. Two exiles, one history

The U.N. was founded in SF. Thanks to Trump, it’s nearly bankrupt in New York. Why can’t SF give it space and bring it back?

By Joel Schechter

February 3, 2026 (48hills.org)

As if the world didn’t have enough trouble already, with wars, climate catastrophe, and the Donroe Doctrine, a recent news report warned that the United Nations soon may go bankrupt and close its New York headquarters. Instead of convening diplomatic meetings there to negotiate ceasefires, urge disarmament, and respond to earthquakes and famine with international rescue operations, the UN itself appears to be in need of a rescue.

California could solve this problem: Offer the UN funds and space in San Francisco, where it began.

We have ample, empty downtown space for a new headquarters, maybe around Union Square if Macy’s moves out. Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Daniel Lurie can hold a joint press conference and invite the United Nations to take up residence in the city where the UN charter was first signed by member nations in 1945.

It all began in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, across from City Hall, and City Hall could now welcome it back. New York’s loss would be our gain.

I can see the headlines now: “UN moves to San Francisco. California offers to pay the dues Donald Trump refused.”

Two billion dollars owed to the UN by the United States account for a large part of its financial crisis. Fortunately, San Francisco, as a city run by and for billionaires, has plenty of wealthy men who can help pay the bills and finance a new or renovated building’s construction to accommodate the UN.

Consider the worldwide publicity that money would buy for the city, and consider all the downtown restaurants, shops and hotels that will find business booming once hundreds of UN diplomats begin to work and live here. And what’s a couple of billion given to the UN by Nvidia or Meta or Google, compared to the astronomical sums their companies and new A.I. industry in town are valued at these days?

A high-end UN sponsor like Nvidia might ask for the new West Coast assembly hall to be named after it — it would become the Nvidia United Nations (NUN)—and another sponsor might require a new luxury office complex it builds for UN delegates to be called Salesforce Tower Two. But I suspect the UN’s General Secretary would accept these names if it enables his organization to survive a New York closure and re-open in San Francisco.

Sponsored link

Local voters who complained in the past that our Board of Supervisors should confine its business to city matters, and not take positions on international issues such as genocide in Gaza, could now agree that wars abroad, and global climate catastrophe  are local issues: “It’s something our city should address,” the supervisors will agree, “take it up the street to the UN.”

San Francisco already offers sanctuary to refugees from other countries. But now we have an opportunity to welcome hundreds of nations, the whole United Nations. 

Mayor Lurie already has turned to some of his friends and friendly foundations for grants to improve city life; surely, he can find a few local billion dollars to lure the UN here and keep its peace-seeking assembly alive.  And the UN may well accept the invitation. ​San Francisco already has a U.N. Plaza. How about bringing the rest of the U.N. here?

Donald Trump may object, because the newly relocated and generously endowed UN will rival his own new organization, The Board of Peace, which requires its members to pay him a billion dollars for a permanent seat on the board. That fee—$1 billion less than Trump owes the UN in dues—may seem like a bargain to some state leaders, but since Trump has given himself veto power over all Board of Peace decisions, joining with him also means surrendering final control to him.

San Francisco’s U.N. will be more democratic than the Board of Peace, and its delegates won’t have to brave ice and snowstorms every winter, as they do at the in New York. 

Speaking of Trump, which I am reluctant to do any more than necessary, there’s one line in the recent Times report on the UN that I consider comic journalism of the first order. Farnaz FassihiI writes for theTimes that the UN “warned it would run out of money by July and have to close its New York headquarters if countries, namely the United States, did not pay annual dues that amount to billions of dollars.” That phrase, “if countries, namely the United States,” sums up the problem faced by the United Nations without mentioning the president by name, briefly denying him the attention he lives for.

Following Fassihil’s commendable example, I too will omit a certain well-known name here as I speculate that the U.N. might not face so many crises if countries, namely the United States, spent less of their budget on gunboat diplomacy, deployed fewer naval armadas like those now threatening Venezuela and Iran, and instead more generously funded peaceful international meetings among diplomats. 

United Nations, won’t you please come home?

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Joel Schechter

Joel Schechter is the author of several books about satire, including ‘Durov’s Pig’, ‘Satiric Impersonations’, and ‘The Congress of Clowns’.

Yesterday, February 3, the House passed a package of six funding bills, ending the partial government shutdown and temporarily funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through February 13. 

This vote buys time to negotiate a DHS funding bill that protects communities from two DHS agencies that have been terrorizing and brutalizing our communities: ICE and Border Patrol. 

It’s critical we use that time to put pressure on every Member of Congress — especially Democrats — to insist on real guardrails that put an end to ICE and CBP’s lawless thuggery and get them out of our cities. We can’t settle for insufficient reforms like body cams — we’ve all seen that Trump’s goons are perfectly happy to gas, tackle, and kill innocent people on film. 

Whether or not you’ve already called or emailed: We need EVERYONE to be loud over the next nine days and make capitulation politically impossible.

Take ActionUse our updated call scripts and email tool to demand a DHS funding bill that halts the ICE and CBP terror machine.Call Your SenatorsCall Your RepresentativeEmail Your Members of Congress

More often than not, we’ve seen Congress fail to stand up to Trump with Republicans falling in line with his cruel agenda, and Democrats forfeiting their leverage in critical funding fights. But there have also been moments where the grassroots pressure and the public backlash have been so strong that Democrats find their spines and Republicans start to peel away from the regime.

We saw this when Congress defied Trump and passed a bill requiring the release of the Epstein files. We saw it again last month (at least initially), when five Republican senators joined with Democrats to advance a war powers resolution after Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. 

The killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti has created a backlash against ICE that spans parties. And if we keep up the pressure, we could see Congress defy Trump again and rein in his lawless secret police force. 

And whether or not Republicans listen to their constituents who are clamoring for action, DHS funding cannot pass without Democratic votes. 

There are only nine days to go, so we need to act quickly. Contact your Members of Congress and demand they vote no on any DHS funding bill unless, at a minimum, it:

• Pulls ICE and Border Patrol out of Minneapolis and the rest of our communities
  
• Prevents ICE or Border Patrol enforcement at designated “sensitive locations” such as houses of worship, day cares, and hospitals
  
• Restricts ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to target people based on their race, language or accent, place of employment, or location at the time of the apprehension
  
• Ends the administration’s unlawful practice of warrantless home entry and arrests

Use our updated call scripts and email tool to contact your Members of Congress today:

1️⃣ Call your senators.

2️⃣ Call your representative.

3️⃣ Email your Members of Congress to drive the point home.

4️⃣ Check out our explainer for the latest updates, our full list of demands, and answers to common questions about ICE/CBP funding and a potential shutdown.

Ultimately, there’s no reforming ICE. When we regain power, we need to strip the entire Department of Homeland Security down to the studs. But we don’t have to wait that long to rein in ICE and CBP. We have a chance to do it now, and we have to take it. 

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team

As oysterman Graham Platner handily outraises Republican Susan Collins, the pro-Israel lobby collected nearly 20% of her donations for her.

Minnah Arshad, Andrew Perez, and Prem Thakker

Feb 04, 2026 (zeteo.com)

America’s pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, accounted for nearly 20% of the money that Republican Senator Susan Collins raised last year in the lead-up to Maine’s all-important US Senate election.

The total collected for Collins by AIPAC’s political action committee far outpaces what she raised from small donors, in another show of the Israel lobby’s outsized influence on US elections.

Collins, 73, is widely expected to run for her sixth term. She is one of the longest-serving sitting senators, having taken office in 1997. Oysterman Senate candidate Graham Platner and Governor Janet Mills are running in the Democratic primary to face Collins, with Platner leading both of them in fundraising last year.

Collins is a major supporter of Israel. Last year, when Zeteo asked if she knew how many Americans the Israeli military had killed since Oct. 7, Collins responded simply: “I am pro-Israel.”

Mourners react following the death of Palestinians killed by an Israeli strike at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on February 4, 2026.

 (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It comes as nearly 20,000 Palestinians are being denied the ability to leave Gaza for medical treatment, in what activist Muhammad Shehada called “a slow-motion massacre.”

Stephen Prager

Feb 04, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Israeli bombings across Gaza have killed at least 23 Palestinians since dawn on Wednesday, including at least two infants, according to hospital officials and other health authorities.

“Where is the ceasefire? Where are the mediators?” asked Dr. Mohamed Abu Salmiya, director of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, which received the bodies of 11 people—mostly from the same family—who were killed after Israeli soldiers fired upon a building in northern Gaza.

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Israel said the attack was in retaliation after Hamas militants fired at an Israeli soldier, badly wounding him. The Associated Press reports that among the Palestinians killed were “two parents, their 10-day-old girl Wateen Khabbaz, her 5-month-old cousin, Mira Khabbaz, and the children’s grandmother.”

Another attack on a tent in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three more people: Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies, said they included a 12-year-old boy. Another strike killed five more people, including a paramedic named Hussein Hassan Hussein al-Semieri, who was on duty at the time.

A total of 38 Palestinians were wounded in the series of attacks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

آثار القصف الإسرائيلي لخيمة نازحين في منطقة مواصي خان يونس جنوبي قطاع غزة#الجزيرة #رقمي pic.twitter.com/DDQz1Sw4Jp

— الجزيرة فلسطين (@AJA_Palestine) February 4, 2026

Since a “ceasefire” agreement went into effect on October 10 last year, the Gaza Government Media Office says Israel has committed at least 1,520 violations, killing at least 556 people—including 288 children, women, and elderly people—and wounding 1,500 others.

In comments to Al Jazeera, the Palestinian human rights advocate Muhammad Shehada said a ceasefire that is violated so consistently “is no ceasefire at all”.

“At most, [the deal] can be just described as some sort of mild diplomatic restraint,” Shehada said. “Whenever the world’s attention is elsewhere, Israel escalates dramatically.”

Since its genocidal war in Gaza began in October 2023, nearly 72,000 Palestinians have been killed and 171,000 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) recently conceded are accurate after more than two years of denial. Independent estimates suggest the true death toll is much higher.

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Wednesday’s onslaught came as Israel began to slowly open the Rafah crossing—the main point of entry and exit from the strip—for those in severe need of medical attention to leave.

Gaza’s hospitals have been rendered largely inoperable by two years of relentless bombing and a lengthy blockade on medical supplies entering the strip, which has left more than half the population without medical treatment.

The World Health Organization said last week that 18,500 Palestinians are in need of medical treatment abroad, including hundreds in need of immediate treatment.

According to Egyptian officials, 50 patients were expected to enter through the crossing each day. However, on Monday, just five Palestinians were allowed to leave Gaza for treatment, followed by 16 on Tuesday, according to Al Jazeera reporters on the ground.

Around 4,000 of those awaiting treatment are children. According to health officials, one of them, 7-year-old Anwar al-Ashi, died of kidney failure on Wednesday while on a waitlist.

Meanwhile, those attempting to cross have been met with treatment described as “humiliating” by reporters who witnessed it. Israeli troops have subjected patients to strip searches and interrogations—some were blindfolded and had their hands tied.

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“The Rafah crossing continues to be a cruel and severely restricted ‘passage’ of pain and humiliation,” said the Palestinian politician and activist Hana Ashrawi. “This continues to be a multifaceted war of aggression, based on the deliberate manipulation of the pain of a captive people.”

Salmiya said that at the rate Israel is allowing them to leave, “it will take about five years on average for all patients to be discharged.” He referred to Israel’s actions as “crisis management, not a solution to the crisis.”

On Tuesday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for “the facilitation of rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief at scale—including through the Rafah crossing.”

He added that Israel’s recent suspension of dozens of aid organizations—including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Save the Children—defies humanitarian principles, undermines fragile progress, and worsens the suffering of civilians.“

Shehada, who said he and his family were eagerly awaiting the end of travel restrictions, told Al Jazeera that “Israel hollowed [it] out of any substance or meaning.” Instead, he said, “it’s basically a slow-motion massacre.”

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Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos delivers remarks during the opening ceremony of the media company’s new location January 28, 2016 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be.”

Brad Reed

Feb 04, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

The Washington Post announced massive cuts to its newsroom staff on Wednesday, unleashing a wave of disgust directed toward its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

As reported by Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers at the paper that it would be closing its sports department “in its current form,” and would also be “killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.”

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With hundreds of journalists expected to lose their jobs, Murray told Post employees that the cuts were needed to help the paper “become more essential to people’s lives” in “what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that.”

Many critics, however, scoffed at claims that cuts at the paper were needed to make it profitable, suggesting the real motivation came from Bezos’ desire to take an ax to the US free press.

Brian Phillips, senior writer at The Ringer, rejected the notion that one of the richest men in the world couldn’t afford to keep what was once a revered newspaper fully staffed.

“Bezos isn’t destroying the Washington Post because it isn’t profitable,” he wrote in a social media post. “He’s destroying the Washington Post because he’s calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests.”

Phillips also implored other journalists to not report on the Post layoffs as “a straightforward business story,” but rather “a story about coercive social transformation being imposed by people so rich they’ve ceased to see the rest of us as legitimate stakeholders in our own lives.”

David Sirota, founder of The Lever, said the layoffs should end journalists’ fantasies that billionaire owners will rescue journalism in an era of mass consolidation by corporate conglomerates, slashed newsroom budgets, and wave after wave of layoffs.

“The media world’s stunned/shocked reaction to the awful WaPo layoffs shows that even now, so many in journalism still can’t believe billionaires aren’t going to rescue them,” he wrote. “This is a wake-up call: Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be.”

Adam Serwer of the Atlantic also raised concerns about the power of wealthy oligarchs to buy and destroy historic media institutions.

“I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore,” he wrote. “Bezos fucked the paper and instead of fixing it he’s destroying it despite the fact that he could spend the money to make things right without even noticing its absence.”

Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Mass, noted that the Post isn’t the only media organization that’s being gutted by a billionaire owner, referencing billionaire Larry Ellison, a major donor to President Donald Trump, who recently acquired CBS News alongside other media properties.

“What we are seeing with WaPo and with CBS News is that the mega-rich see real financial value for themselves in destroying journalism,” he wrote. “Let that sink in.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a post written before the Post layoffs were announced, drew attention to billionaire control over not just traditional media, but social media as well.

“When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump,” wrote Sanders. “[Elon] Musk owns X. Bezos owns Twitch. [Mark] Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook. Larry Ellison controls TikTok. Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read.”

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Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on October 27, 2025, in New York City.

 (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

“This is a red alert moment,” said Sen. Ed Markey. “We have to start working to protect polling places from Trump’s paramilitary ICE goons before it’s too late.”

Stephen Prager

Feb 04, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Days after President Donald Trump suggested that Republicans should “nationalize the voting” in Democratic districts, his former White House adviser telegraphed another way Trump may seek to prevent a free and fair election later this year: illegally flooding polling places with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Tuesday.

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“We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again,” he continued. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Steve Bannon: “We‘re gonna have ICE surround the polls…We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.” pic.twitter.com/9R9tZdolHx

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) February 4, 2026

What Bannon proposed would be in direct violation of state and federal law. As Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program, explained back in October:

The law is crystal clear: It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. In fact, it is a federal crime for anyone in the US military to interfere in elections in any way. More specifically, it is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to deploy federal “troops or armed men” to any location where voting is taking place or elections are being held, unless “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” …

It is also a federal crime for anyone, including federal agents, to intimidate voters. Anyone who does so may be liable for a number of different federal criminal offenses.

While Trump has not explicitly said ICE should be deployed in 2026, he has said he regrets not deploying the National Guard to seize voting machines during the 2020 election, which he attempted to overturn with a litany of disproven fraud allegations.

He has since followed through somewhat on this desire, sending the FBI to seize 2020 election materials from a voting hub in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of what the FBI said was an “investigation” into election fraud, which he said caused him to lose the election to former President Joe Biden.

It’s unclear how, if at all, ICE may figure into his goal, stated earlier this week, to have Republicans “take control of the voting in at least 15 places,” which would violate the constitutional right for states and localities to administer their own elections.

He has, however, used ICE to demand that Minnesota—a key swing state in 2026—turn over its voter rolls to the federal government in exchange for a withdrawal of agents who have killed three US citizens over the past month and unleashed a wave of violence and civil rights violations.

Expressing fear that Republicans will be trounced in November’s midterm elections—which polls currently indicate is likely—Trump has also recently suggested on multiple occasions that the elections should simply be “canceled” outright.

https://twitter.com/i/status/2018841948082032846

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) said all of this adds up to a frightening picture.

“Donald Trump can’t win the 2026 election, so he’s putting in place a plan to steal it,” he said in a video posted to social media. “That is not hyperbole. That is not conspiracy. He is literally doing it, and telling you he’s going to do it every single day.”

Murphy said, “He wants the federal government, meaning Donald Trump’s MAGA loyalists, to run elections in places like Georgia and Minnesota, and probably Pennsylvania and Texas and Maine—anywhere that there’s a race that might determine control of the House or the Senate.”

Trump’s threats come amid negotiations in Congress over whether to provide additional funding to ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Democrats have said they will not provide the necessary votes to fund DHS unless certain reforms are put in place to rein in the agency’s abuses—such as requiring agents to wear body cameras, carry identification, and obtain judicial warrants before making arrests.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who voted against the bill Tuesday to extend DHS funding for two weeks while negotiations continue, has said Democrats must also pursue guarantees that ICE will not be used to interfere with elections.

“We must not agree to another dollar for ICE until we add my amendment blocking the federal government from seizing voter rolls, ballots, or voting machines,” he said on Tuesday. “If the House GOP is serious about election integrity, they will agree that elections must remain run by states, not rigged by a wannabe dictator.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) agreed: “This is a red alert moment… We have to start working to protect polling places from Trump’s paramilitary ICE goons before it’s too late.”

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She was a legal secretary, a topless dancer, a senior VP in the financial services industry, a college professor and a dream worker.

by Judy Wells Feb. 4, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)

Ground-breaking feminist activist and early proponent of women’s studies at UC Berkeley, Marsha Hudson Ph.D., 80, died at her home in Santa Cruz on Dec. 14, 2025.

In 1969, when higher learning was still largely the province of men, Marsha, a graduate student in the Comparative Literature Department, posted notices across the Cal campus proposing a feminist literary salon in her Berkeley apartment. The purpose was to discuss women’s literature, since female writers were largely ignored in the classroom.

Marsha eventually brought her salon to campus and founded the Comparative Literature Women’s Caucus, an activist collective that established the first women’s literature classes in Comparative Literature, conceived and taught by graduate student women. Caucus members helped produce the first major translation anthologies of women’s world-wide poetry, encouraged women to write feminist dissertations on women authors, and researched discrimination against women in the department. 

This energy resulted in the creation of a women’s studies major and program at Cal, an effort led by Gloria Bowles, Ph.D. Comp Lit, and eventually an interdisciplinary department now known as Gender and Women’s Studies.  

On hearing of Marsha’s death, Lisa Gerrard, Emerita Faculty in UCLA Writing Programs, wrote, “Marsha was my first friend in the Comp Lit Department, and we stayed close for many years. She was a bravely outspoken critic of the patriarchy and a model for how women could work together with generosity and kindness instead of with the competitiveness fostered by academia and the culture at large. Thank you for all you’ve given us, Marsha.”

Another early Comp Lit colleague, Ann Freeman, Emerita Professor of English, San Mateo College, echoed this sentiment: “I am thinking about how much she did for all of us, as our leader and raiser of consciousness. But I am also thinking about how far she went in her own personal growth, her inner strength and spiritual development. I am grateful to have known her.” 

Marsha received her B.A. at Cal in 1968, a double major in English and Anthropology. In her sophomore year, she was arrested in the Free Speech Movement demonstration and had to take a semester off from school to pay the $166 fine as she was solely self-supporting throughout her entire academic career.

She received both her M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1978) in the Comparative Literature Department, supporting herself with jobs ranging from legal secretary to topless dancer-barmaid. As Hudson stated in her personal essay, “Dancing in a Cage,” in The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon (McFarland 2005), “Patriarchal stereotypes prevailed in respect to women’s work whether I was clothed and behind a typewriter or unclothed and carrying a beer. … In either capacity men perceived me in terms of my utility to them and related to me according to their projected fantasy.” Marsha did not mince words in defining patriarchal culture. 

When Marsha finally qualified to be a university instructor in the Comp Lit Department, after completing her M.A. and passing her Permission to Proceed to the Doctorate exam, she reflected that her topless dancer-barmaid job was more lucrative than her academic post! She received her Ph.D. in 1978 on completion of her dissertation on American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser, known for her commitment to social justice and feminism.

Marsha did not obtain her life-long dream of being employed as a full-time academic professor of literature and poetry (similar to many Ph.D.’s who also did not obtain full-time jobs in the late 1970s in the humanities). Pained but undaunted, she developed a career in the financial services industry rising to the level of senior-vice president with responsibility for an $11 billion portfolio. Hitting the glass ceiling in that career, she returned to her academic roots, teaching composition, critical thinking, and women’s studies part-time at various California colleges, ending with Santa Cruz. 

Marsha embarked on a third career as a certified gestalt practitioner and dream worker, studying under the (late) Jeremy Taylor, using his archetypal projective method and Jungian methodology. With her Comparative Literature background in classical and modern poetry, Marsha liked to make the connection between the figurative language of poetry and the metaphorical imagery of dreams. 

Marsha’s core belief about dreams was, “I agree with Sandor Ferenczi that ‘dreams are the workshop of evolution’ and that the more we bring our dreams into our awareness and share them with others, the more we are participating in our personal and collective evolution. Today dream working is more important than ever across the planet at this critical juncture brought on by climate change.” For many years she facilitated dream groups, workshops, and individual sessions from her home office in Santa Cruz. 

In 2018, Marsha co-founded The Love and Power Institute for Planetary Sustainability in Santa Cruz with her partner Norman Brown, Ph.D. The Institute’s stated mission was “to support the evolution of human consciousness as a critical path toward resolving the global climate crisis.” They recognized a missing link in most environmental and justice movements: the inner emotional world of human beings, and sought to facilitate workshops to help people become more empathic in order to create a more loving human presence on the planet. And to change the conversation around traditional emotional roles for men and women.

Marsha’s background in feminism, leading women’s groups, teaching, gestalt therapy, and dreamwork and Norman’s background in leading men’s groups, years of psychotherapy practice, teaching, and commitment to feminism, and their mutual love of the natural world, made for an effective and loving partnership, that ended all too soon with Marsha’s sudden death in December 2025 from pancreatic cancer.

On hearing of Marsha’s passing, another Comp Lit colleague, Carol Urzi, attorney, wrote, “She was a huge and courageous soul, so influential to me and so many others, by her outspoken leadership. I’m sure that, in recent years, she continued to influence people’s lives in her Love and Power Institute.” 

Survivors include Marsha’s beloved partner/husband, Norman Brown, Ph.D., and her many colleagues and friends in her endeavors over a lifetime.

Recently, an archive on founding women’s studies in the Comparative Literature Department has been established at the Bancroft Library at Cal by Gloria Bowles, Ph.D., Bridget Connelly, Ph.D., Carol Urzi, M.A. J.D., Kathleen Weaver, M.A., and Judy Wells, Ph.D. 

A Celebration of Life is planned for Marsha Hudson on Sunday Feb. 15, 2026, 2 p.m. to 4-4:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Santa Cruz County, 6401 Freedom Boulevard, Aptos, CA 95003 (831-684-0506).

Donations in Marsha’s memory can be made to the Love and Power Institute.

on Feb 03, 2026 02:30 am

Alfred Lambremont Webre ,  Staff Writer  –  NewsInsideOut.com

Stephan: We are now seeing yet another, quite predictable fascist move by tyrant Trump and his billionaire buddy, Jeff Bezos. Trump is secretly working with Bezos who owns Amazon to stop Amazon from publishing or putting up for sale books that are critical of Trump. Concurrently, we see Bezos gutting The Washington Post, once one of the most important papers in the United States. Reporters, columnists, and editors have walked away from the paper by the dozens. Controlling media, publications, and education, to stop criticism of a fascist administration is one of the universal moves of aspiring dictators.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA — In a Legal Demand Letter for $25,000,000.00 USD in Compensatory and Punitive Damages against Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com by the major Los Angeles, California, Litigation Law firm of PARKER-STANBURY LL.P., Attorney and Author Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, a dual Canadian and American citizen, reveals that, at U.S. President Donald John Trump’s secret direction, billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner Of Amazon.Com, is suppressing Author Alfred Lambremont Webre’s  Books sold at Amazon.Com.

Several such books of Author Alfred Lambremont Webre reveal hard evidence documenting Donald Trump’s participation in a high-level international criminal conspiracy  to commit crimes against humanity, thereby ending American Democracy & the American Constitutional Republic.

PARKER-STANBURY LL.P.’s Demand Letter against Trump-Bezos conspirator Jeff Bezos reads, in part, as follows:

“(b) Defendants Amazon.com, Kindle Direct Publishing, and Jeff Bezos published 25 premiere books, in eBook, Paperback and Hardback status, and many foreign languages and had sold 8505 books since September 26, 2009, through Sept 26, 2025, for total revenues in excess of $24,000.00USD. Shortly after January 20, 2025, when Donald John Trump held a series of […]

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