FedEx and UPS — two private carriers positioned to capitalize on a weakened U.S. Postal Service — poured nearly $20 million into federal lobbying in 2025, an OpenSecrets analysis found. A series of events left USPS bracing for an uncertain future. First, its leader warned the agency could run out of cash by 2027, leaving it unable to pay employees or vendors. Amazon then announced it would…
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As backlash against Big Tech’s complicity with President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda grows, 200 to 250 people gathered on a rainy Seattle afternoon outside Amazon’s headquarters on Friday to demand that the company “dump” its support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which they illustrated by dumping ice onto the grass. The protest came one day…
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In an ad during the Super Bowl on Sunday night, Amazon’s Ring touted the establishment of an AI-powered surveillance network through their camera systems, which the company whitewashed under a feel-good narrative about finding lost dogs. The ad for Ring’s free “Search Party” program urges users to “be a hero” by using their surveillance cameras to help identify lost dogs in their neighborhood.
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The Washington Post, one of the largest newspapers in the U.S., announced on Wednesday that it is laying off a third of all staff — a move that owner Jeff Bezos could prevent personally without his net worth changing in any meaningful way. As of Wednesday, Bezos’s net worth was listed as just under $249 billion by Forbes. Just last year, he spent an estimated $50 million on his wedding.
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The latest flashpoint of resistance to global logistics juggernaut Amazon has proven, once again, that collective worker power can force the company into improving its miserable working conditions. Amazon workers in Murcia, in southeastern Spain, struck twice at the RMU1 fulfillment center during the 2025 holiday “peak” season and forced the company into a negotiated settlement in late…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 09, 2025. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A US advocacy group, American human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, and the group in Ecuador behind a historic legal battle against Chevron over its dumping of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest are condemning the Ecuadorian government’s plans to pay the oil giant hundreds of millions of dollars due to an arbitration ruling.
In response to the legal fight in Ecuador that led to a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron—which bought Texaco—the fossil fuel company turned to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, suing the South American country in the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration. As part of the latter case, Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez’s office announced Monday that the government would pay the US company only around $220 million, rather than the over $3 billion Chevron sought.
While Chevron said in a statement that it was “pleased with the resolution of this matter” and claimed the decision “strengthened the rule of law globally,” and Salazar Méndez’s office celebrated the dramatically lower figure, and the Union of Peoples Affected by Chevron-Texaco (UDAPT)—the group that began the case against oil company in 1993—pushed back against the government’s framing of the reduction “as if it was a success and an economic achievement.”
“The reality is it is a defeat for justice,” UDAPT argued in a Tuesday statement. “For 32 years, UDAPT has documented pollution, environmental crime, and lives broken by Chevron, proving what should be obvious: Communities have not recovered, health has not been restored, clean water has not returned, and the territories that sustain life remain contaminated. A debt is not owed to Chevron. A debt is owed to the Amazonian families still waiting for