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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at a news conference. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Sanders Launches Petition Urging Lawmakers to Block Military Action Against Iran Without Congressional Approval
War with Iran, warned the senator and 2020 candidate, "will be an unmitigated disaster."
May 17, 2019
As heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to provoke warnings of potential war, Sen. Bernie Sanders released a petition Thursday calling on federal lawmakers to "pass legislation that would prohibit military action against Iran without congressional approval."
"A war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster," Sanders tweeted Thursday evening from his presidential campaign account.
\u201cA war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster.\n\nTell Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit Trump from taking military action against Iran without Congressional approval: https://t.co/zzwVU8sech\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1558044144
The petition followed the senator's impassioned online address Tuesday night, during which he declared, "The United States Congress must do everything it can to prevent the Trump administration's attempts to put us on the brink of a catastrophic and unconstitutional war with Iran that could lead to even more deaths than the Iraq War."
Sanders also referenced the devastating U.S. war with Iraq in an email encouraging supporters of his presidential campaign to sign the petition:
[It] is almost beyond impossible to imagine that after the horrors of the war in Iraq--a war that upended the regional order of the Middle East and resulted in an untold loss of life--that this administration would put us on such a dangerous path toward more war. But every day we see a new story about how this administration is trying provoke conflict, like sending huge bombers to the region, or raising the possibility of sending more than 100,000 troops.
Apparently for some, almost two decades of constant war is not enough.
Well, unfortunately for this president and people like John Bolton who love endless wars, the constitutional authority for declaring war rests with the United States Congress--not the president--no matter if that president is a Democrat or a Republican.
The senator's call to halt President Donald Trump's march to war with Iran comes as foreign policy experts and peace advocates challenge his administration's narrative of a supposedly increasing Iranian threat. Critics charge that the president, Bolton--Trump's national security adviser--and other hawkish aides are to blame for the recent escalations, rather than Iranian officials.
Although Trump reportedly told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan earlier this week that he does not want to go to war with Iran, his administration's moves over the past two weeks suggest otherwise. Such moves, as Common Dreams reported, include Bolton using "the scheduled deployment of an American aircraft carrier and bomber task force to the Middle East to threaten Iran with military action."
Sanders, in his Thursday email, countered the Trump administration's approach to Iran, writing that "real American power is not demonstrated by our ability to blow things up, but our ability to forge international consensus around shared challenges."
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As heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to provoke warnings of potential war, Sen. Bernie Sanders released a petition Thursday calling on federal lawmakers to "pass legislation that would prohibit military action against Iran without congressional approval."
"A war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster," Sanders tweeted Thursday evening from his presidential campaign account.
\u201cA war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster.\n\nTell Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit Trump from taking military action against Iran without Congressional approval: https://t.co/zzwVU8sech\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1558044144
The petition followed the senator's impassioned online address Tuesday night, during which he declared, "The United States Congress must do everything it can to prevent the Trump administration's attempts to put us on the brink of a catastrophic and unconstitutional war with Iran that could lead to even more deaths than the Iraq War."
Sanders also referenced the devastating U.S. war with Iraq in an email encouraging supporters of his presidential campaign to sign the petition:
[It] is almost beyond impossible to imagine that after the horrors of the war in Iraq--a war that upended the regional order of the Middle East and resulted in an untold loss of life--that this administration would put us on such a dangerous path toward more war. But every day we see a new story about how this administration is trying provoke conflict, like sending huge bombers to the region, or raising the possibility of sending more than 100,000 troops.
Apparently for some, almost two decades of constant war is not enough.
Well, unfortunately for this president and people like John Bolton who love endless wars, the constitutional authority for declaring war rests with the United States Congress--not the president--no matter if that president is a Democrat or a Republican.
The senator's call to halt President Donald Trump's march to war with Iran comes as foreign policy experts and peace advocates challenge his administration's narrative of a supposedly increasing Iranian threat. Critics charge that the president, Bolton--Trump's national security adviser--and other hawkish aides are to blame for the recent escalations, rather than Iranian officials.
Although Trump reportedly told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan earlier this week that he does not want to go to war with Iran, his administration's moves over the past two weeks suggest otherwise. Such moves, as Common Dreams reported, include Bolton using "the scheduled deployment of an American aircraft carrier and bomber task force to the Middle East to threaten Iran with military action."
Sanders, in his Thursday email, countered the Trump administration's approach to Iran, writing that "real American power is not demonstrated by our ability to blow things up, but our ability to forge international consensus around shared challenges."
As heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to provoke warnings of potential war, Sen. Bernie Sanders released a petition Thursday calling on federal lawmakers to "pass legislation that would prohibit military action against Iran without congressional approval."
"A war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster," Sanders tweeted Thursday evening from his presidential campaign account.
\u201cA war in Iran would make the Iraq war look like a walk in the park. It will be an unmitigated disaster.\n\nTell Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit Trump from taking military action against Iran without Congressional approval: https://t.co/zzwVU8sech\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1558044144
The petition followed the senator's impassioned online address Tuesday night, during which he declared, "The United States Congress must do everything it can to prevent the Trump administration's attempts to put us on the brink of a catastrophic and unconstitutional war with Iran that could lead to even more deaths than the Iraq War."
Sanders also referenced the devastating U.S. war with Iraq in an email encouraging supporters of his presidential campaign to sign the petition:
[It] is almost beyond impossible to imagine that after the horrors of the war in Iraq--a war that upended the regional order of the Middle East and resulted in an untold loss of life--that this administration would put us on such a dangerous path toward more war. But every day we see a new story about how this administration is trying provoke conflict, like sending huge bombers to the region, or raising the possibility of sending more than 100,000 troops.
Apparently for some, almost two decades of constant war is not enough.
Well, unfortunately for this president and people like John Bolton who love endless wars, the constitutional authority for declaring war rests with the United States Congress--not the president--no matter if that president is a Democrat or a Republican.
The senator's call to halt President Donald Trump's march to war with Iran comes as foreign policy experts and peace advocates challenge his administration's narrative of a supposedly increasing Iranian threat. Critics charge that the president, Bolton--Trump's national security adviser--and other hawkish aides are to blame for the recent escalations, rather than Iranian officials.
Although Trump reportedly told Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan earlier this week that he does not want to go to war with Iran, his administration's moves over the past two weeks suggest otherwise. Such moves, as Common Dreams reported, include Bolton using "the scheduled deployment of an American aircraft carrier and bomber task force to the Middle East to threaten Iran with military action."
Sanders, in his Thursday email, countered the Trump administration's approach to Iran, writing that "real American power is not demonstrated by our ability to blow things up, but our ability to forge international consensus around shared challenges."
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LATEST NEWS
Sanders Meets Freed Trump Political Prisoner Khalil as Columbia Punishes Gaza Protesters
"We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment," Sanders said as the Ivy League school expelled or suspended scores of students in what critics called a bid to win back blocked federal funding.
Jul 22, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday met with Mahmoud Khalil—the former Columbia University Palestine defender recently imprisoned by the Trump administration—on the same day that the school expelled or suspended more than 70 students who protested Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza.
Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a photo of himself with his arm around a beaming Khalil, with the caption: "I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's illegal and horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous. We must not allow [U.S. President Donald] Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent."
Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent married to a U.S. citizen, last year finished his graduate studies at Columbia. He was arrested at his New York home by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers on March 8 before being transferred to New Jersey and then Louisiana, where he missed the birth of his first child.
Accused of no criminal offense and widely considered a political prisoner, Khalil was arrested following Trump's issuance of an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who take part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which allows for the deportation of noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to foreign policy interests—to target peaceful Palestine protesters who have committed no crimes.
Khalil was released last month upon a federal judge's order. He is far from the only student jailed for opposing the Gaza genocide; others include Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung—both permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and others.
On Tuesday, Columbia announced disciplinary action against more than 70 students who took part in last year's protests for Gaza at the New York City school's Butler Library. Around 80 Columbia students were arrested amid the violent police crackdown on campus encampments and occupations.
"While the university does not release individual disciplinary results of any student, the sanctions from Butler Library include probation, suspensions (ranging from one year to three years), degree revocations, and expulsions," Columbia's Office of Public Affairs said in a statement.
The school's announcement came days after Columbia and Trump administration officials met in Washington, D.C. to negotiate an agreement to restore most of the nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the university that were canceled in March over an alleged failure to tackle antisemitism.
As part of the deal, Columbia agreed to adopt the dubious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a war that experts increasingly agree is genocidal.
The school also said it would partner with the Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. Last year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the ADL for what it called a "pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate."
Columbia University interim president Claire Shipman has already been working with white nationalist Stephen Miller—Trump's White House deputy chief of staff and a primary architect of the president's first-term migrant family separation and Muslim travel ban policies—to restore lost contracts.
Columbia's acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 215,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Most of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving amid an increasingly fatal famine fueled by Israel's siege of the enclave, which is partly the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
Israel has also been accused of committing scholasticide in Gaza, where every university has been destroyed or damaged.
"Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry," said one student quoted in a recent Columbia University Apartheid Divest blog post. "This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure."
Largest Trial Yet Finds Four-Day Workweek Boosts Worker Well-Being
The analysis "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
Jul 22, 2025
Echoing previous research from countries including Iceland and the United Kingdom, the biggest trial ever conducted of a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay found that the shift positively impacts workers' well-being.
For the new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, 4 Day Week Global invited independent researchers to collect and analyze data. Four experts from Boston College in the United States and Ireland's University College Dublin collected data from 2,896 employees across 141 organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.
The organizations underwent a "pre-trial work reorganization to improve efficiency and collaboration, followed by a six-month trial," the paper details. Analysis of the data collected "shows improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies."
"Both company-level and individual-level reductions in hours are correlated with well-being gains, with larger individual-level (but not company-level) reductions associated with greater improvements in well-being," the paper says. "Three key factors mediate the relationship: improved self-reported work ability, reduced sleep problems, and decreased fatigue. The results indicate that income-preserving four-day workweeks are an effective organizational intervention for enhancing workers' well-being."
There are limitations to the study, which the authors acknowledged: The organizations were generally smaller companies in English-speaking countries and participated voluntarily, and the outcomes were self-reported by workers. Given all that, the experts encouraged future randomized, government-backed research.
Still, the apparent impact of the study seems to bolster researchers' conclusions. According to co-author Wen Fan, an associate professor of sociology at Boston College, over 90% of companies opted to keep the four-day workweek after the trial.
In coverage of the study published by Boston College, both Fan and her co-author and colleague in Boston, Juliet Schor, noted how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted conversations about working conditions, including the length of the workweek.
"This would've been a difficult sell pre-Covid—it would've struck a lot of people as pie-in-the-sky, and not feasible for companies," said Schor. "But the pandemic created such levels of stress and burnout, and led many employees to say, 'I want to live my life differently,' and this created more of a space for reimagining work—and, as part of that, the four-day week."
Noting that the "traditional" 40-hour, in-office model is still dominant in many places, Fan said: "Social change is always difficult, especially when it comes to challenging the deep-seated institutional logics dictating how, when, and where we work. Let's hope we don't waste the crisis of Covid in terms of the profound workplace innovations it has precipitated."
The new study comes amid the Trump administration's "barrage of attacks on workers," with the U.S. Department of Labor planning to overhaul dozens of rules intended to protect employees from exploitation and wage theft.
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"They're showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration," Andrew Stettner of the Century Foundation told Common Dreams.
Jul 22, 2025
In what has been described as a "barrage of attacks on workers," the U.S. Department of Labor under President Donald Trump is planning to overhaul dozens of rules that protect workers from exploitation and wage theft.
The administration announced this month that it planned to change over 60 regulations it deems "unecessary" burdens to businesses and economic growth.
According to an analysis released Tuesday by labor policy experts at the Century Foundation—senior fellows Julie Su and Rachel West and director of economy and jobs Andrew Stettner—most of the changes "reverse critical standards that ensure workers get a just day's pay and come home healthy and safe."
In one of the most sweeping changes, the department plans to reverse a 2013 rule that extended minimum wage and overtime protections to home healthcare workers.
These workers, who care for elderly and other medically frail individuals, already make less than $17 an hour on average.
Stettner told Common Dreams that the changes will "suppress wages" and allow agencies to "put the screws on workers to work 50- or 60-hour weeks."
The Trump administration is also rolling back a Biden-era rule that banned bosses from paying subminimum wages to disabled employees.
This discriminatory practice has been on the wane due to state-level bans in 15 states. But in the absence of a federal ban, nearly 40,000 employees—most of whom have intellectual disabilities—still received less than the federal minimum wage as of 2024.
The Century Foundation report says that by ending the rule, the Trump administration would be once again "relegating workers with disabilities to jobs that pay as little as pennies per hour."
The department is also taking a hatchet to workers' rights and safety. Another major change it proposed would do away with protections for seasonal migrant farmworkers under the H-2A visa program who raise complaints about wage and hour violations.
It was commonplace for farm owners to take advantage of these seasonal employees, whose legal status was tied to their work, and who therefore risked deportation if they lost their jobs.
Cases of exploitation, however, declined to an all-time low after the Biden administration introduced the rule, which banned employers from firing, disciplining, or otherwise retaliating against workers who attempted to participate in collective bargaining.
"These reforms protected the rights of farmworkers in the H-2A program to speak out individually and collectively against mistreatment and prevented employers from arbitrarily firing them from their jobs," the report says.
The department also proposed weakening the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) general duty clause, which allows businesses to be punished for putting their employees in dangerous situations. The proposed change would exempt many jobs that are deemed "inherently risky" from protection.
The administration described it as a way to prevent OSHA from cracking down on workplace injuries among athletes and stuntmen.
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"The employer community, they're jumping onto this," Stettner said. "They're telling their members to write in to the Department of Labor about other inherently dangerous occupations they should accept from the general duty clause."
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