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'Thug' Marco Rubio Tells Senate How US Plans to Keep Stealing Venezuelan Oil
"Rubio's dangerously expansive vision to transform the United States into a colonizing power in the Americas must be challenged," one watchdog leader said of the US secretary of state.
Jan 28, 2026
In addition to asserting that "there is no war against Venezuela," despite US forces killing scores of people there while abducting its president earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday laid out for a Senate panel how the Trump administration intends to continue controlling the South American nation's oil and related profits.
Legal experts have argued that US President Donald Trump's blockade of Venezuela's oil, abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—and bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean all violate international law.
"The ongoing military actions in the Caribbean and South America, including the abduction of Venezuela's president, are wrong, illegal under US and international law, and unconstitutional," Robert Weissman, co-president of the group Public Citizen, said before the Senate hearing. "Congressional Republicans have blocked war powers resolutions that would end the US aggression in Venezuela, an extremely dangerous abdication of congressional responsibility to check presidential unlawfulness."
"Marco Rubio's central role in the planning and execution of the scheme to violate the sovereignty of Venezuela and steal the country's oil merits a deep investigation by Congress, and potentially the removal of Rubio as secretary of state," Weissman continued. "Rubio's dangerously expansive vision to transform the United States into a colonizing power in the Americas must be challenged."
Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—Rubio said that "Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker, not a legal head of state," described his abduction as "an operation to aid law enforcement," and declared that "the United States is prepared to help oversee Venezuela's transition from a criminal state to a responsible partner."
Rubio, the acting national security adviser, insisted that Trump wasn't planning for any more military action in Venezuela—but also would not rule out such action, potentially without congressional authorization, in "self-defense" against an "imminent" threat.
Trump has repeatedly made clear through public statements that his Venezuela policy is focused on its petroleum reserves, seemingly to enrich the fossil fuel leaders who helped him return to power. American forces have seized several tankers in the Caribbean Sea linked to the country—which critics have condemned as "piracy"—and the first US sale of Venezuelan oil went to the company of a trader who donated millions to the president's 2024 campaign, which Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) last week called "yet another example of his unchecked corruption."
Describing US control of Venezuela's nationalized petroleum industry, Rubio told the committee:
Objective number one was stability... And one of the tools that's available to us is the fact that we have sanctions on oil. There is oil that is sanctioned that cannot move from Venezuela because of our quarantine. And so what we did is we entered into an arrangement with them, and the arrangement is this: On the oil that is sanctioned and quarantined, we will allow you to move it to market. We will allow you to move it to market at market prices—not at the discount China was getting. In return, the funds from that will be deposited into an account that we will have oversight over, and you will spend that money for the benefit of the Venezuelan people...
This is not going to be the permanent mechanism, but this is a short-term mechanism in which the needs of the Venezuelan people can be met through a process that we've created, where they will submit every month a budget of this is what we need funded. We will provide for them at the front end what that money cannot be used for. And they have been very cooperative in this regard. In fact, they have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States.
In an exchange with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Rubio said that an "audit process" has not yet been set up but will be, adding that "we've only made one payment" and it "retrospectively will be audited, but it was important we made that payment because they had to meet payroll. They had to keep sanitation workers, police officers, government workers on staff."
Shaheen noted that the oil reportedly sold for $500 million, but only $300 million went to Venezuela's government, now led by Maduro's former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, and asked Rubio about the remaining $200 million. The secretary said that the rest of the money was in a temporary account in Qatar that will ultimately become a US Treasury blocked account.
Summarizing the Trump administration's plans, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said: "I think the scope of the project that you are undertaking in Venezuela is without precedent. You are taking their oil at gunpoint; you are holding and selling that oil; putting, for now, the receipts in an offshore Middle Eastern account; you're deciding how and for what purposes that money is gonna be used in a country of 30 million people. I think a lot of us believe that that is destined for failure."
Highlighting that "a month later, we have no information on a timetable for a democratic transition, Maduro's people are still in charge, most of the political prisoners are in jail—and by the way, those that have been let out have a gag order on them from the government—the opposition leader is still in exile," Murphy added, "this looks, already, like it is a failure."
At one point during the nearly three-hour hearing, Leonardo Flores, a Venezuelan-American with the anti-war group CodePink, shouted, "Marco Rubio, you and Trump are thugs!"
US Capitol Police removed Flores from the hearing. As he was being led away, the protester said that "sanctions are a form of collective punishment of Venezuelan citizens. That's a war crime. Hands off Venezuela! Hands off Cuba!"
Asked by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) on Wednesday, "Will you make a public commitment today to rule out US regime change in Cuba," Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants—replied: "Regime change? Oh no, I think we would like to see the regime there change. That doesn't mean that we're gonna to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There's no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime."
Since the abduction operation, there have been "free Maduro" protests in both Venezuela and Cuba, which lost 32 citizens in the Trump administration's attack on Caracas. Speaking to thousands of people gathered outside the US Embassy in Havana earlier this month, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that "the current US administration has opened the door to an era of barbarism, plunder, and neo-fascism."
"No one here surrenders," he continued, taking aim at not only Trump but also Rubio. "The current emperor of the White House and his infamous secretary of state haven't stopped threatening me."
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#TakeBackTikTok From Ellison to Let Palestine Live
Billionaire Larry Ellison's takeover of US TikTok is a clear attempt to censor pro-Palestine content on the popular social media app. Here's how users can fight back.
Jan 13, 2026
CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans call on TikTokers across the world to flood the platform for Palestine to #TakeBackTikTok from billionaire Larry Ellison, the media mogul soon to control TikTok’s US app.
“We don’t have Ellison’s billions, his private Hawaiian island, or his cushy ties with Trump, but we do have people power on a platform with two billion users worldwide who warn against suppressing posts for Palestine,” said Benjamin, who has nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok.
“Time to school the billionaire yachtsman in uncharted waters,” said Evans, who organized a picket in front of Paramount, an Ellison family asset, to protest subsidiary CBS hiring Israel flack Bari Weiss to head the network’s news division.
The elder Ellison, 81, chair of the board at Oracle, may think he’s the smartest guy in the virtual room come January 22, when US-TikTok busts out of the social media gate to detach from TikTok globally. Ellison may be gloating about the fact that the new stand-alone consortium—prompted by China-phobic legislation—will center Oracle and UAE investors with AI at the ready to suppress pro-Palestinian content on a platform that LOVES Palestine. Ellison, who has donated over $26 billion to the Israeli military, may—when CODEPINK isn’t looking—even wink across the ocean to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.
These guys go back.
In 2021, Ellison offered pal Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle Board and a lounge chair on Ellison’s island of Lanai in Hawaii. That same year in Jerusalem, Oracle built a $319 million underground data bunker—hardened against a missile strike—to provide Netanyahu and the Israeli military with cloud services for intelligence on Palestinians and integration of information from drones and satellites for Israel’s killing fields.
At first glance, Ellison has much to celebrate as Israeli state propaganda prepares to saturate the new US TikTok with its official tourism tagline, “Israel, Exactly Like Nowhere Else." If the propaganda on TikTok mirrors advertising on other social media platforms, one can expect to hear denials in multiple languages that Israel is starving Gaza. Such claims, however, contradict United Nations findings (December 2025) that over a million people still face crisis levels of hunger, with over 100,000 children expected to suffer extreme malnutrition.
With Israel on trial at the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza, someone in the Zionist camp had to call 911 to overhaul the narrative on a platform with 170 million fans in the US.
For Israel flag wavers, this was an emergency.
TikTokers Rock for Palestine
TikTokers in the United States favor Palestine vs. Israel posts 17-to-1, according to Northeastern University research conducted from 2023-2025. TikTok posts of orphaned Gaza amputees wandering amid apartments turned to rubble make Israel a tough sell to Gen-Z and younger millennials scrolling the app to witness Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in between ads for panda drums and shimmering lipsticks.
Netanyahu, facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Gaza’s mass starvation, openly acknowledges the importance of counteracting the images of carnage on social media. “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are on social media, “ Netanyahu said during a September 2025, huddle with US social media influencers who might be willing to promote Israel’s image for $7,000 a post. During the meeting, Netanyahu identified TikTok as the No. 1 influencer of global public opinion of Israel.
In June, 2025, the Pew Research Center, noting a dramatic shift in public opinion, found that 60% of those surveyed in 24 countries did not favor Israel over Palestine; in the US, Israel’s biggest weapons supplier, 53% expressed a “somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel,” with 69% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans turning thumbs down on Israel. In what should be a wake-up call to Israel shills in the White House and Congress, Pew spotlights younger Republicans under 50, who are now about as “likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one.”
Background
In 2024, Congress passed legislation to force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, launched by Chinese entrepreneurs, to sell off its US app or face a ban in the land of the not-so-free US. President Donald Trump, Ellison’s chum, then issued an executive order to delay the sale of TikTok’s US platform until Oracle and ByteDance could work out the kinks to enable Oracle to host US data on its cloud server and retrain the algorithm leased from ByteDance for US auditors to police. Lots of moving parts here.
Under the US joint venture, majority ownership will rest in the hands of Oracle, MGX, (UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund), and Silver Lake, a US private equity firm with ties to UAE investors. Existing ByteDance investors (General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Soft Bank, and more) will be among the minority owners, along with ByteDance founders and employees. The Congress that kicked and screamed about foreign influence, imagining Chinese spies behind every TikTok post, barely shrugged when the UAE surveillance state teamed up with Ellison to siphon off US TikTok.
Follow the Billions and the Acquisitions… If You Can
The Ellison family holds an estimated 40-41% of Oracle’s outstanding 1.16 billion stock shares in a family trust controlled by patriarch Larry Ellison. Through the trust, the elder Ellison provided a $40.4 billion guarantee to finance the merger of Skydance Media, owned by son David, with the Paramount entertainment conglomerate. With the Ellisons’ shares in Oracle, Skydance Media, and Paramount, the family’s media dynasty can—left unchallenged—propagandize for Israel and Trump at CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Pluto TV, and Paramount+—and soon TikTok.
TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language.
CODEPINK, hardly new to media activism, ramps up for the challenge.The LA chapter recently joined Entertainment Labor 4 Palestine to demonstrate outside Paramount-CBS studios in Hollywood. Activists waved signs that read, “CANCEL PARAMOUNT” and “PARAMOUNT/CBS BLACKLISTS PRO-PALESTINE WORKERS” and “BARI WEISS CENSORS TRUTH” as Evans and the crowd tried to deliver a petition in objection to the CBS News editor’s cancellation of an expose on CECOT, the Salvadoran torture prison where Trump sent migrants—beaten by batons—to languish in windowless cells.
“You cannot stay on the property… Back on the sidewalk,” ordered the guards to CODEPINK.
Flood the platform
TikTok content creators and users could outsmart the Ellisons by flooding the platform with pro-Palestinian posts and comments in “algospeak” or coded language, some of which is already popular on TikTok. A Palestine demonstration becomes a “music festival.” Israel’s genocide becomes “Isrel G-side.” Gaza becomes “G@za.” Dead becomes “unalived.” Palestine become P*l3stine, with symbols and numbers replacing letters.
“Flood the platform for Palestine” was the message that the #TakeBacKTikTok campaign projected one December night onto the building of Oracle’s UK headquarters. The “Keep Posting, Keep Talking, Keep Sharing” call to action wrapped up a bold three-minute projection of life-sized images of tortured half-naked Palestinians, cratered apartment buildings, and terrified children in Gaza.
Also projected were images of Ellison, Netanyahu, Trump, and pro-Palestinian social media influencer Guy Christensen, 19, “yourfavoriteguy” who has amassed 3.5 million TikTok followers and endorsed the US #TakeBackTikTok campaign to flood the platform for Palestine in the run-up and emergence of US TikTok as a stand-alone app. While months ago ByteDance hired a former Israel Defense Forces instructor to monitor content at TikTok, Christensen views the new US joint venture as an attempt to double-down on censorship.
”What will it take for Americans to rise up against Israel’s blatant takeover of the last remaining major social media platform?” Christensen asks on his Substack.
Benjamin shares his outrage after receiving TikTok messages that read, “Not eligible for recommendation” when her posts are presumably deemed too controversial or sensitive for wider distribution. “TikTok has already been blocking our content when we simply call for an end to genocide. Enough! The new owners must stop, not escalate, the censorship,” said Benjamin.
Options for organizing
- Building a strategic partnership: MGX, the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Silver Lake investors are, like Oracle, intent on deployment of AI across social media, much to the chagrin of US-based TikTok workers in California, New York, Washington, and Texas who fear losing their jobs to AI. Unlike TikTok proletarians in the UK, workers based in the US are not unionized—yet. Seeking union representation from United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA), TikTok content monitors and e-commerce sales reps, some of whom may be offered stock in the emerging US spin-off, are likely allies to buck the bosses and outsmart the algorithm to keep Palestine alive on TikTok.
- Skirting US TikTok to go global: Should the new US TikTok hide or ban most pro-Palstine posts, even those with coded language and watermelon emojis, savvy TikTokers may skirt around the ban, opening up accounts on Private Virtual Networks to access the TikTok seen by much of the world—particularly Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—where TikTok is most popular. Such VPN’s can place content creators in another region of the globe—not in Los Angeles or Dallas where they may live, but in Cairo or Tokyo, beyond the reach of a customized and sanitized US TikTok with Pinocchio-type ads that scream, “Israel is not starving Gaza” while Palestinians boil weeds for dinner.
- Abandoning TikTok to encourage a hostile take-over: TikTokers could abandon the platform for Upscrolled, a pro-Palestinian site; Bluesky, a decentralized open source platform; RedNote, a Chinese version of Instagram; Reddit, a discussion platform for niche communities; or Facebook and Instagram, provided owner Meta drops its habit of rigging the algorithm to suppress Palestine posts. There could also be a migration of TikTokers to YouTube reels, although that, too, would present challenges in the wake of Google, YouTube’s owner, signing a $45 million deal with Israel to run ads that show thriving food markets with the message, “There is food in Gaza.”
Content creators abandoning US TikTok could trigger an exodus of advertisers in search of the migrating Gen Z demographic. Advertiser flight could, in turn, undermine or bankrupt a platform that generated $39 billion in revenue for ByteDance in 2024.
With users and advertisers abandoning a highly censored platform, TikTok could go to the graveyard with MySpace, an early social networking platform that alienated users with wall-to-wall advertising. Even UAE sheiks would hate to lose money in the long run on a hollowed-out US spin-off that cost the consortium $14 billion to buy from ByteDance.
Would the UAE or others with beaucoop bucks ever encourage US counterparts to launch a hostile takeover to purge Oracle from US TikTok? It could happen. Look at the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) battle, in which Paramount launched an unsuccessful hostile bid to block Netflix’s acquisition. Although TikTok is not publicly traded, Oracle trades on the NYSE and could be vulnerable to internal pressure and shareholder activism.
Bidding wars, platform censorship, and billionaire media ownership could also amplify demands on Congress to outlaw media consolidation under a future US administration sympathetic to regulation.
Larry Ellison may not be the smartest guy in the room, after all.
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Trump Again Threatens to Bomb Iran as Protest Deaths Near 600
"Under the guise of caring about Iranian people, the US is suffocating Iran to justify bombings and regime change," said one peace group.
Jan 12, 2026
The White House on Monday ramped up threats to attack Iran while President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on countries doing business with the Islamic Republic, where the death toll from two weeks of protests against economic hardship exacerbated by US sanctions and government repression rose to at least 599 people.
While Trump acknowledged that Iranian leaders want to negotiate with the United States to avoid renewed US attacks on the country like last summer's airstrikes targeting nuclear facilities and scientists, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that the president reserves all options, including military force, amid Tehran's deadly crackdown on protesters.
"Airstrikes would be one of the many, many options that are on the table for the commander-in-chief," Leavitt said. "Diplomacy is always the first option for the president."
In an ominous development, the virtual US Embassy for Iran on Monday advised all Americans to "leave Iran now" and “have a plan for departing Iran that does not rely on US government help.”
In a Monday post on his Truth Social network, Trump said: "Effective immediately, any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America. This Order is final and conclusive."
Trump’s escalation of sanctions will make life even harder for millions of Iranians.Under the guise of caring about Iranian people, the US is suffocatating Iran to justify bombings & regime change.
[image or embed]
— CODEPINK (@codepink.bsky.social) January 12, 2026 at 2:38 PM
This followed Friday's threat by Trump that the US is "locked and loaded" for attacks on Iran if the country's security forces keep killing protesters. At least 599 people have been killed during the demonstrations, even as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed Monday that “the situation has come under total control."
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said in a statement Monday that "as Iranian Americans, we are horrified by the images and reports emerging from Iran showing brutal state violence inflicted on civilians to suppress their protests and demands."
"We condemn the Iranian government’s crackdown on peaceful protestors in the strongest possible terms and urge for accountability for what, according to the information we are receiving, appears to have been a massacre," NIAC continued.
“We continue to reject the prospect of the US answering the Iranian government’s brutality with bombing," the group stressed. "Military interventions have not brought democracy, human rights, or prosperity to the targets of prior interventions, including Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and Afghanistan."
"Iran’s long history is riddled with examples of external interventions and military actions that have only robbed Iranians of their agency to decide their future," NIAC added. "The future of Iran must be shaped by Iranians, not by repression, foreign militarism, or those seeking to exploit suffering to justify war. There is no credible case that US military intervention would protect Iranian lives."
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