Trump’s “Board of Peace” Has No Funds for Gaza Reconstruction

Where are the billions that have been collected? The ballroom? The arch?

By Shireen Akram-Boshar

This article was originally published by Truthout

Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” fund has no money for the reconstruction of Gaza, despite raising billions of dollars since January. According to the Guardian, they are also planning to grant themselves sweeping immunity for any crimes or civil liability they may incur.

The Financial Times reported that “Zero dollars have been deposited” into the board’s financial fund — but that the body has received donations directly into its JP Morgan bank account, which allows it to override transparency regulations. 

At its inaugural meeting in February, member states pledged $7 billion for the Board of Peace’s relief and reconstruction package for Gaza, and Trump promised an additional $10 billion.

The Financial Times reported that earlier this year, Morocco contributed $3 million and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) $20 million to the board’s JP Morgan account, and that this funding has helped cover the position of Nickolay Mladenov, the “director-general” of the Board of Peace, as well as salaries for the Palestinian technocrats selected by the board to govern Gaza. The UAE also provided $100 million to train a new police force in Gaza — but the funds are frozen and the program has not started. 

In April, a U.S. official traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask its leaders to follow up on its $1 billion pledge to the board, as it had become concerned that funds were not materializing, according to Middle East Eye. Officials claimed that the U.S. has been relying on the Gulf region to fund the board. 

Who profits from Trump's newest war?

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner for one

Judd Legum

In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.

The lobbying campaign achieved success on Saturday, when Trump announced he had begun “major combat operations in Iran.” Trump launched a war even though U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. In June 2025, Trump publicly declared that more limited strikes “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”

MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.

The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. PIF invested $2 billion in Affinity Partners in 2021, even though the PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “inexperience” and “excessive” fees. The committee’s recommendation was overruled by MBS, who heads PIF’s Board of Directors.

PIF pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million, annually. The Senate Finance Committee estimates that Kushner will be paid $137 million in management fees from PIF by August 2026. Further, in September 2025, PIF, Affinity Partners, and others jointly acquired Electronic Arts, the publisher of iconic video games like The Sims and Madden NFL, for $55 billion. The deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout in history, will likely be very lucrative for Kushner.

After raising billions for the Saudis and other foreign governments, Kushner dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, pledging he would not be involved in Trump’s second term. 

In February 2024, Axios’ Dan Primack asked Kushner whether his business relationship with foreign governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” moving forward. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Yet, after Trump took office, Kushner resumed his central role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. In an October 2025 interview on 60 Minutes, Kushner argued that financial conflicts made him and Witkoff more effective. 

“What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner said.

CNN reported that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied Trump to strike Iran. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE has significant financial ties to Kushner and Trump.

The UAE is another major backer of Affinity Partners, directly investing about $200 million with Kushner’s firm. Additional money came via Lunate, a supposedly private Abu Dhabi investment firm that is financed by government money and tied to the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds.

Witkoff is the co-founder of the crypto firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) and retains an 8-figure stake in the company. Trump and his family also own significant pieces of the company. 

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and head of the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased 49% of WLF days before Trump’s inauguration. 

Of the $250 million paid up front by the UAE, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoff family. In May 2025, MGX, a company controlled by Tahnoon, purchased $2 billion of crypto tokens from WLF.

Following the conclusion of the mediation on Thursday, Kushner and Witkoff “ominously issued no statement,” and the pair was reportedly “disappointed“ by the Iranian negotiating position. After presumably being debriefed by Kushner, Trump said, “we’re not thrilled with the way they’re negotiating.” According to Trump, it would be “wonderful” if the Iranians “negotiated in … good faith and conscience but they are not getting there so far.”

The new Iran War comes weeks after PIF financed a $7 billion development deal in Saudi Arabia with the Trump Organization. Under the agreement, Dar Global, a developer with close ties to the Saudi government, will build a “Trump-branded hotel and golf course,” along with “500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” The project is part of Diriyah, a $63 billion development funded entirely by PIF.

When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2025, MBS took him on a tour of Diriyah and showed him a model of the development. According to Jerry Inzerillo, who heads the Diriyah Company, a PIF subsidiary, Trump was “amazed“ with the quality and scale of the project.

Trump maintains full ownership of the Trump Organization and will profit from the deal. Typically, these deals involve the developer paying millions in fees simply to license the Trump name. About 80% of the money will flow directly to Trump, according to Forbes’ reporting on similar deals. (The Trump Organization has been nominally transferred to a trust controlled by his son, Donald Trump Jr. — an arrangement ethics experts have dismissed as meaningless.)

While Trump discussed a potential war with Iran in multiple calls with MBS, he has spent little time justifying the war to the American people. In lieu of a traditional live address from the Oval Office, Trump announced the war in a short, edited video, delivered in a baseball cap and posted on his social network, Truth Social. The video was recorded at his Florida home and private club, Mar-a-Lago. On Saturday night, Trump attended a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser there for the primary pro-Trump Super PAC, MAGA Inc.

After the beginning of hostilities on Saturday, Iran launched attacks on the Saudi capital of Riyadh and numerous targets in the UAE. In response, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement saying it would “mobilize all its capabilities“ against Iranian aggression, and the UAE warned Iran of “grave consequences.”

By Sunday, the war claimed the lives of three U.S. service members and hundreds of Iranians.

Subscribe to Popular Information by Judd Legum 

Grifter's gotta grift

The Saudis make their latest payment in their purchase of Donald Trump

Judd Legum

A rendering of Trump International Golf Club, Wadi Safar (Dar Global)

On November 18, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) visited Donald Trump at the White House. During his meeting with MBS, Trump agreed to provide Saudi Arabia with unprecedented levels of cooperation and support.

Trump named Saudi Arabia a “major non-NATO ally,” a coveted designation that comes with “defense trade and security cooperation benefits, including access to joint research and development programs with the Pentagon and privileged access to US weaponry, training and loans.”

Further, Trump agreed to sell 300 Abrams tanks and an unspecified number of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Previously, Israel was the only country in the Middle East permitted to buy F-35s. Acquiring the advanced jets has long been a priority for MBS and the Saudi government.

Trump also agreed to cooperate with Saudi Arabia on civilian nuclear energy and to provide Saudi Arabia with access to advanced AI chips.

In addition to the practical benefits to Saudi Arabia, the visit helped burnish the international standing of MBS, who American intelligence concluded directed the murder of a U.S.-based journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Trump called MBS a “very good friend of mine.”

Now, a few weeks later, MBS appears to be returning the favor.

The Trump Organization announced it would be partnering with Dar Global to build a $7 billion “Trump-branded hotel and golf course” in Saudi Arabia. The development in Diriyah “will include 500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.”

Report Shows How Recycling Is Largely a ‘Toxic Lie’ Pushed by Plastics Industry

The hard truth: we simply have to stop producing so much plastic

Brett Wilkins

A report published by Greenpeace exposes the plastics industry as “merchants of myth” still peddling the false promise of recycling as a solution to the global pollution crisis, even as the vast bulk of commonly produced plastics remain unrecyclable.

“After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.

“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of plastic waste and pollution.”

Among the report’s findings:

• Only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are actually recyclable;
• Major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly retracting sustainability commitments while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
• The US plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and reduce public backlash.

“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrative emanating from the White House,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”

“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.

Donald J. Trump Puts His Name on ‘US Institute of Peace’ while waging illegal wars and killing civilians

Latest chapter in Trump's quest for the Nobel Peace Prize

Jon Queally

The signs on the building of the United States Institute of Peace were changed overnight to include “Donald J. Trump,” adding the name of the sitting US president who, among other examples of warmongering and war-making, has openly supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza, bombed Iran, sent an aircraft carrier strike group to threaten Venezuela, and ordered the extrajudicial killings of over 80 people aboard boats in the Caribbean and Pacific in recent months.

The building’s name change preceded a meeting on Thursday between leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a proposed peace deal between the two warring nations is set to be signed. It also came amid an ongoing clamoring by the president to be recognized as a great maker of peace despite his record of violence, thuggery, racism, and human rights violations.

Critics of the move were swift in their condemnation of Trump, known more for being possibly the most famous narcissist in the history of humanity than for waging anything that remotely looks like a just and lasting peace.

“This is pathetic, like a little boy running around putting ‘Property of Donald’ stickers on everything in the house,” said Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. “It’s not the Trump institute of peace, it’s the US Institute of Peace.”

Trump dismissed a question about the CIA’s finding that Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of a journalist, saying the writer was someone “a lot of people didn’t like.”

Trump Calls Saudi Prince ‘Respected Man’ as Serial Human Rights Abuser Ups US Investment Promise to $1 Trillion

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

A US-based journalist and human rights defender was dismissed as someone “a lot of people didn’t like,” and the Saudi crown prince who US intelligence experts found had likely ordered the writer’s killing was applauded as “one of the most respected people in the world.”

That was Donald Trump’s assessment of Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated in 2018, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday at a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House.

Trump and bin Salman met to discuss a range of topics, from a US sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to agreements on minerals and artificial intelligence.

Bin Salman also told the president he would increase Saudi investment in the US from $600 billion to $1 trillion.

The BBC reported that Trump “bask[ed]” in the $1 trillion pledge, telling the prince it was an “honor” to be his friend and saying the US “very much appreciate[s]” the investment.

“We’re doing numbers no one has ever done,” Trump said.

ABC News reporter Mary Bruce asked Trump about his family’s business interests in Saudi Arabia and questioned whether the bilateral deals presented a conflict of interest, before pointedly asking bin Salman about the Central Intelligence Agency’s finding in 2021 that the prince had likely personally ordered the killing of Khashoggi.

“Your royal highness, the US intelligence concluded that you ordered the brutal murder of a journalist,” said Bruce. “Why should Americans trust you?”

Trump was visibly angered by the question and demanded to know what outlet Bruce was with before telling her ABC was “fake news” and calling her comment “horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”

“He knew nothing about it,” said the president, contradicting the government’s findings.

Khashoggi responded to Bruce, saying, “It’s really painful to hear anyone losing his life for no real purpose or not in a legal way.”

Trump, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, will “overlook the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to pad his pockets and boost the bottom line of the military industrial complex.”

A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science

Anti-science kills

By Dan Falk

BOOK REVIEW — “Science Under Siege: How to Fight
the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World,’’
by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez
(PublicAffairs, 368 pages).

In the 1995 book "The Demon Haunted World," the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. 

Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez cite Sagan’s vision of science as a “candle in the dark,” and argue that what the astronomer feared is now coming to pass. In fact, readers may get the impression that the situation is already much worse than what Sagan envisioned.

While Sagan was primarily concerned with the rise of pseudoscience, Mann and Hotez fear that we’re now in the midst of an anti-science boom, led by people, corporations, and governments who intentionally spread false or misleading information. 

“Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term,” they write. “Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives, produce misguided national policies, and have long-lasting catastrophic consequences, including potentially, the destabilization of our civilization.”

Mann and Hotez are not merely observers, but scientists who have found themselves on the front lines of the ongoing attacks on science. Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Hotez is a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. In 2022, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine.

While attacks on science have taken many forms, the authors highlight the current pushback against vaccines and skepticism over climate science as two of the most urgent issues. Mann and Hotez describe the resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, but add that there is a third punch as well, in the form of mis- and disinformation. 

The authors point to the devastating consequences of resistance to public health measures, especially vaccines, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll from which currently stands at 1.2 million Americans, according to the World Health Organization.

Many of those deaths, they suggest, could have been prevented had people been vaccinated and followed social distancing and mask guidelines. And they’re not shy about saying who’s to blame: “The deaths occurred mostly along a political partisan divide,” they write, “with those living in Republican-majority (‘red’) states disproportionately suffering most of the deaths and disabilities as a consequence of being targeted by propaganda and misinformation from elected leaders, extremist media, and the modern political Right.”

Donald Trump and the power of the big FAKE number

Trump and Musk love to put out big numbers but the facts don’t back them up.

Paul Waldman

If there’s one thing Donald Trump loves more than a deal, it’s the announcement of a deal, the part where he comes before the cameras in triumph to tell the world that through his superhuman negotiating skills he has secured an agreement that will bring a future of unfathomable riches to all Americans.

These announcements invariably center on a dollar figure, usually one almost preposterously large. Five hundred billion, two trillion, 10 trillion — we are all supposed to marvel at the majesty of this number, to the point where our critical faculties fail us and we accept it without skepticism.

There may never have been a better case study of this than Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East. During the tour, Trump repeatedly touted the enormous deals he supposedly obtained from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but an examination of those and some other recent deals he has announced — all portrayed as new investments pouring into the American economy — shows them to be largely a mirage.

We’re the marks, and the suspiciously large dollar number is the centerpiece of the con.

So many deals you’ll be tired of all the deals

Trump ADMITS taking $$$ from foreign governments.

Trump library opens

Hey Golf fans, welcome to the Bonesaw Classic

For more cartoons by Jen Sorenson, CLICK HERE

 

Who supports Trump?

 

A Criminal President -- with Accomplices

Trump is not our first criminal president

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump has been indicted on seven federal felonies.

Most Americans view Donald Trump as an aberration, a one-off, the exception. He’s our first “criminal president” they think, the first to have committed crimes to get into office, while in office, or both.

Most Americans, in this regard, are wrong, and it’s a tragic statement about both the way we teach American history in our schools and the way our corporate media deals with past presidential crimes.

If previous Republican presidents had been held to account for their crimes the way it appears Trump is about to be, Trump may well have not been as brazen in everything from his violations of the Hatch Act to the Espionage Act to his explicitly asking Vladimir Putin to intervene in the 2016 election.

Everybody knows that Richard Nixon got caught orchestrating and then covering up a break-in at the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex, and that he avoided going to prison by resigning his office. Yet it’s no secret that Nixon committed a far more serious crime — naked treason — just to get into office in the first place.

When the LBJ White House tapes were released in 2013, the world learned that Johnson had negotiated a secret deal with the Vietnamese to end the war in the late fall of the election year of 1968.

Nixon got wind of it and, through a campaign aide during a meeting in his New York apartment, reached out to the South Vietnamese ambassador offering inducements to pull out of the peace talks and scuttle the deal, which they then abandoned just as it was about to be signed.

62 Things Trump Did That You Forgot About To Preserve Your Sanity

Donald Trump's running for president again, so you can look forward to more of his "fun" ideas — like the time he tried to buy Greenland.

By Ryan Grenoble, HuffPost

Donald Trump has returned to the news cycle amid a deluge of stories about a dinner meeting he hosted with a white supremacist and Ye, the rapper previously known as Kanye West.

It’s a reminder of the chaotic years of his presidency, as well as a foreboding ― though hopefully instructive ― warning about how he would wield power if elected again.

If past is prologue, let’s take a moment to remember just how unsettling things got during the Trump administration, with this not-even-remotely-exhaustive list of weird and bad stuff he attempted while in office:

Trump is already getting foreign governments to sponsor his 2024 bid

Just days after announcing another run, Trump signs $4 billion real estate deal with Saudis and Oman

Rebekah Sager, Daily Kos Staff

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Donald Trump take part in a
traditional sword dance, Riyadh, May 2017. 
Photograph: Bandar Al-Jaloud/AFP/Getty Images

The word hubris comes from Ancient Greece, meaning “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” And no word seems more fitting to describe former guy Donald Trump walking into Trump Tower in New York City with his son Eric Trump last week to sign a reported $4 billion deal with a Saudi Arabian real estate company to build a mammoth project in Oman.

The word hypocrite also comes from the Ancient Greek word hypokrites, which means “an actor,” another word most fitting to describe the Republican Party, which, after winning the House by a razor-thin margin, is promising to spend every minute of its time impeaching President Joe Biden and investigating his son, Hunter Biden, amid unabashedly bogus allegations of conflict of interest.

Trump is no stranger to selling his brand, but the Saudi deal is a bold move considering that he’s just thrown his name in the hat for a third run at the presidency.

This particular deal puts him directly into murky waters. According to The New York Times, the project isn’t just some random real estate deal—it’s a deal with the government of Oman itself. Conflict of interest much?

Could the US Regain Economic Self-Reliance?

Bring our jobs and businesses back home 

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

We can’t build enough cars because the chips, invented here in America, are all manufactured overseas. 30% of America’s oil is now being exported by giant oil corporations that are jacking up our gasoline prices because of a “shortage.” This is insane!

How did the Reagan administration and neoliberals ever since get away with making our nation almost totally reliant on China and a handful of other low-wage countries for everything from the chips in our cars to our cellphones to the tech necessary to build a battleship or missile?

And who turned our energy fate over to the Saudis? 

Of all the concepts that ground most Americans’ idea of our country, self-reliance ranks among the top. 

While much of it is based in fantasy ideas and children’s tales about “pioneers” carving their own lives out of the wilderness (in reality, community was the main value that guaranteed success for frontier towns), it’s nonetheless a foundational value intrinsic to Americans’ notion of themselves.

Self-reliance is also the number-one meme promoted by rightwing media and billionaires, celebrated by the Republican Party, and used to market everything from guns to trucks to survival food for Trump-humpers. 

“Stand on your own two feet!” is a favorite GOP mantra, particularly when discussing poor people looking for bootstraps to pull themselves up with.

I'd add Saudi Arabia too

By John Cole

 

Evidence Suggests Trump Tried to Sell Out America for Profit

Well, Trump always wants to be the "greatest." Why not the greatest traitor of all time?

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

(Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images and Romolo Tavani/Shutterstock)

Despite Donald Trump’s many campaign rally boasts that he knows “everything” about nuclear energy, he can’t tell you the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb. He’s a con artist, a know-nothing, without even rudimentary knowledge of nuclear weaponry (the subject of Barack Obama’s senior college thesis) or national security.

By Matt Davies

What Trump does know is this: foreign governments whose dictatorial leaders he admires–North Korea, Russia, and Saudi Arabia among them–would pay a fortune to acquire America’s most sensitive nuclear secrets. 

And what Donald knows is how to find buyers who will pay premium prices for whatever he has to unload.

What had been the unthinkable idea that any American president would sell our national security secrets is suddenly front and center following the execution of a search warrant. 

From private citizen Trump’s Florida home, the FBI recovered extensive national security materials belonging to our government. No previous American president has been the subject of a criminal investigation, much less one that raises the question of disloyalty for profit.

Freedom of the press is under threat from strongmen and social media

Nobel Peace Prize for journalists reminds us how important finding the truth is to a free society 

Kathy Kiely, University of Missouri-Columbia

When the reporter becomes the story. AP Photo/Bullit Marquez

Thirty-two years ago next month, I was in Germany reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event then heralded as a triumph of Western democratic liberalism and even “the end of history.”

But democracy isn’t doing so well across the globe now. Nothing underscores how far we have come from that moment of irrational exuberance than the powerful warning the Nobel Prize Committee felt compelled to issue on Oct. 8, 2021 in awarding its coveted Peace Prize to two reporters.

“They are representative for all journalists,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in announcing the award to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, “in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions.”

The honor for Muratov, the co-founder of Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, and Ressa, the CEO of the Philippine news site Rappler, is enormously important. 

In part that’s because of the protection that global attention may afford two journalists under imminent and relentless threat from the strongmen who run their respective countries. “The world is watching,” Reiss-Andersen pointedly noted in an interview after making the announcement.

Equally important is the larger message the committee wanted to deliver. “Without media, you cannot have a strong democracy,” Reiss-Andersen said.

Anti-War Group Blocks Entrance to Portsmouth RI Raytheon Facility to Protest US Killing of Civilians Worldwide

Activists block entrance to Raytheon’s Portsmouth facility

By Steve Ahlquist

Two people attached themselves to automobiles to block the main entrance. Other activists stood nearby holding banners and signs, and chanting. The two people were detached from the vehicles after about four hours. One person was arrested still attached to a large concrete block.

Activists from the FANG Collective and RAM INC (Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex) blocked the entrance to Raytheon‘s Portsmouth, Rhode Island Facility around 6am Thursday morning to protest the company’s weapon sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel, and their involvement in enforcing the United States / Mexico border.

UpriseRI arrived shortly after the protest began. 

Two people attached themselves to automobiles to block the main entrance. Other activists stood nearby holding banners and signs, and chanting. The two people were detached from the vehicles after about four hours. One person was arrested still attached to a large concrete block.

A second person was attached to a separate vehicle from underneath. It took the use of a forklift to extract him from the vehicle.

“Raytheon profits from the killing of civilians, families and children in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere,” said one of the people who blockaded the entrance to the Raytheon facility. “We can’t sit idly by while Raytheon engineers new and more destructive ways of killing innocent people, Raytheon must be stopped and held accountable.”

The groups also used the protest to raise concerns about the influence that weapons contractors like Raytheon have over elected officials.

“Raytheon spends millions of dollars a year lobbying politicians to escalate global conflicts and inflate the Pentagon’s budget just so that their profits can grow,” said RAM INC in a statement. 

“Right here in Rhode Island Raytheon is the second highest donor to both Senator Jack Reed and Representative Jim Langevin. We can no longer allow rouge corporations like Raytheon to determine our foreign policy.”

Video from UpriseRI was used by DemocracyNow! in their daily newscast.

In a press release, the groups write:

“Raytheon, which is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, is second largest weapons contractor in the world and is the largest global producer of guided missiles. In recent years they have faced growing scrutiny for their involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“A 2018 report by CNN directly linked Raytheon produced missiles with several attacks that killed civilians in Yemen. This includes an air strike that targeted a wedding in which 21 civilians were killed and another 97 injured, many of whom were children. Raytheon also has close ties to the Israeli military and supplies them with missiles, bombs and other equipment, including the “Iron Dome” system. These weapons have been linked to dozens of attacks that have killed and injured civilians. This past spring, during an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, protests erupted around the world condemning the ongoing violence.

“In addition to its weapons divisions, Raytheon has received contracts from United States Customs and Border Protection and has supported border security programs around the globe.”

Sources:

https://investigate.afsc.org/company/raytheon-technologies

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-raytheon-yemen.html

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/09/world/yemen-airstrikes-intl/

https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/more-than-a-wall-report.pdf

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2021&id=D000072615

https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jack-reed/summary?