Democratic leaders and a “pro-voter” coalition on Tuesday announced separate actions to combat President Donald Trump’s attack on voting by mail after the US Supreme Court’s right-wing majority delivered a “painful setback” for critics who argue the Republican’s executive order is unconstitutional.

The president’s March order directed the US Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of citizens eligible to vote, states to provide voter information to the federal government, and the United States Postal Service to craft new regulations for absentee ballots—for which the USPS published a final rule last Friday, less than three months away from the midterm elections.

The nation’s top court said in a 6-3 decision on Monday that Democrat-led states had not demonstrated sufficient standing to challenge the president’s order and paused a lower court injunction blocking its implementation. The attorneys general in that case, Trump v. California, vowed to keep fighting back, and as of Tuesday evening, others already are.

The chairs of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Governors Association, US Senate and House minority leaders, and heads of the party’s campaign committee for each chamber of Congress on Tuesday announced the filing of a new motion for a preliminary injunction.

“Today, we are taking strong, joint legal action to stop Trump’s unlawful attempt to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service,” said DNC Chair Ken Martin, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), and Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.) in a joint statement.

“Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling did not say that Trump’s executive order attacking voting rights is constitutional,” they stressed. Rather than ruling on the merits of the challenge, the majority of justices simply said that the states had sued prematurely, as federal efforts to respond to Trump’s order were still underway.

“But the law is clear: States have the authority to run elections—not the president,” the Democrats said. “”We will not stand by while Trump and Republicans try to unnecessarily inject chaos and confusion into our elections, just weeks before voting begins. We are asking a district court to immediately stop the Trump administration from unlawfully disrupting mail-in voting in every state. Democrats will continue fighting every day until Trump’s illegal executive order, and all of his other attempts to undermine our free and fair elections, are completely thrown out.“

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF) also continued their battle against the order, filing a new complaint on behalf of the Arizona Students’ Association, League of United Latin American Citizens, Secure Families Initiative, Texas’ Travis County, and the city of Madison, Wisconsin.

BREAKING: we just filed to STOP the new USPS rule on mail ballots

The Court only held that the injunction came too early. Now we HAVE a final rule & we are litigating it@DDFund_ & @CampaignLegal are proud to represent LULAC, Madison WI & Travis County TX pic.twitter.com/e7MTj66U0W

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) August 25, 2026

“Key provisions of the president’s second executive order on elections have already been declared unlawful in multiple federal cases,” said Anna Baldwin, CLC’s director of voting rights litigation. “But the US Supreme Court’s recent lawless order on the shadow docket has given USPS the green light to attempt to implement their new mail voting rules—mere weeks before mail ballots start to be sent out in some parts of the country.”

“But nothing in the Supreme Court’s procedural order suggests that the rules are lawful,” Baldwin emphasized. “We will not let the president’s dangerous anti-voter agenda go unchecked, so we’re filing a new complaint challenging USPS’ unconstitutional new rulemaking to ensure all voters can cast their ballot in November.”

Ripping Trump’s order as a “reckless power grab that would likely result in mass confusion, chaos, and disenfranchisement of eligible absentee voters,” DDF legal director Tianna Mays said that “this rule not only places ordinary Postal Service employees in the untenable position of determining whether eligible voters may receive and cast mail ballots, it wreaks havoc on state and local election officials and civic engagement groups.”

“If not stopped,” Mays warned, “our clients, voter advocacy groups, and local election officials in two states would be tasked with deciphering, implementing, and educating their staff and members about the rule’s requirements, just weeks before Election Day.”

Separately on Tuesday, Massachusetts-based US District Judge Indira Talwani found that the Trump administration violated her injunction by finalizing the rule published last week by the Postal Service, though she declined to take any action over it.

The group behind that case, the League of Women Voters Massachusetts, also pledged to keep fighting Trump’s efforts to restrict voting by mail—despite repeatedly voting that way himself—after the Supreme Court’s interim ruling on Monday.

Politicians from Canada’s two biggest political parties vowed on Monday to hit back hard against US President Donald Trump’s trade war against their country.

Trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed last week after Trump reportedly sought to restrict Canada from striking trade deals with other nations, while also pressuring the country to scrap requirements aimed at preserving the use of the French language.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Trump’s aggression would come back to hurt US workers.

“It’s not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs,” said Carney, a member of the center-left Liberal Party. “But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on Canadian demand? We’re their largest customer for automobiles, more than the European Union, Japan, Korea.”

Mark Carney: "It's not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs, which was on top of other unjustified tariffs. But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on… pic.twitter.com/2o5rbEmQAo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2026

Carney also said there was an “attitude at the negotiating table” from US officials that “Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” which is “not something we’re going to accept.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a member of the rival center-right Progressive Conservative Party, delivered a more strident rebuke to Trump, vowing that Canada’s response would deliver a hit to the president’s voters.

“The red states, we’re going to hit hard,” said Ford.

The Ontario premier then outlined all the ways his country can make life more painful for US consumers so long as Trump keeps trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty.

“If it gets really, really bad, I say everything’s on the table,” Ford said. “We need everyone to be on Team Canada and throw everything and the kitchen sink at them, no matter if it’s electricity, if it’s fuel, again, if it’s potash, if it’s uranium. We need to have everything on the table… we can put massive pain on the US. President Trump underestimates us. And that’s the biggest mistake.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford: "We need to throw everything and the kitchen sink that them — electricity, fuel, potash, uranium … we can put massive pain on the US. President Trump underestimates us. And that's a mistake." pic.twitter.com/IRIidj0iYS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2026

Trump lashed out at both Carney and Ford in a Monday morning Truth Social post.

“The USA will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada,” Trump wrote. “Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive—it’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States—their key to survival.”

The US military has resumed its campaign of bombing alleged drug-trafficking vessels after a two-month pause in a campaign that many legal experts and human rights groups believe constitutes a murder spree.

In a Monday social media post, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said it carried out a “lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes” in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Two people were killed as a result of the attack, SOUTHCOM claimed.

In announcing the strike, SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis Donovan said the attack was part of a campaign of “imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists—disrupting their operations, dismantling their leadership, and eliminating cartel terror across the region.”

Donovan’s boasts about the effectiveness of the boat strikes in combating the drug trade come less than a month after a leaked a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) analysis revealed that the boat-bombing campaign has not “reduced the amount of cocaine entering” the country, as drug cartels have found alternate methods for shipping their product into the US.

With the latest two casualties, the boat bombing campaign launched nearly a year ago by President Donald Trump’s administration has now claimed the lives of at least 223 people.

Adam Isaacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), criticized the administration for resuming its boat bombings despite “overwhelming evidence that they are murder; that many, likely most, of the dead are either super-low-level or uninvolved with drugs; and that cocaine supply is unaffected.”

Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, delivered a similarly scathing assessment, commenting that “the Trump administration’s lawless killing spree at sea resumes.”

Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, described the boat strike campaign as “murderous” and “illegal,” adding that its victims are “not terrorists” and “may not even be drug traffickers.”

Investigative journalist Camila Lourdes Galarza observed that “there’s still no proof any of the victims” of the boat strikes were involved in the drug trade.

Lourdes Galarza sarcastically added that if the victims had been drug traffickers, “the US would probably give them a deal” like the one given to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was pardoned by Trump last year despite being previously convicted on narcotics trafficking charges.

On Tuesday morning, a coalition of leaders and members from labor, community, and faith organizations in Minnesota denounced Operation Puppet Master, an alleged campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to spy on Minnesotans during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. In a press conference held outside of Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, the coalition urged Minnesotans to continue standing in solidarity with one another, and demanded companies headquartered in the state sign the business for democracy pledge.

The call comes after the New York Times published a report on August 13 about the campaign by DHS. Details were made public in a motion for discovery filed by Kevin Riach, an attorney for healthcare worker Isaac Sant. According to the motion, federal agents “surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state. The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches, and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.” 

The documents describe surveillance and infiltration of union and community meetings during and before Operation Metro Surge. Eighteen organizations, including labor unions, were listed in a chart connecting them to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), a group of individuals who resisted what coalition members call a “terror campaign” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Operation Metro Surge. Sant is one of 15 individuals who were indicted and charged by the federal government for conspiracy in what organizers have called an act of political repression and retaliation. More than half of the 15 are rank-and-file union members, and now the federal government is claiming labor organizations to be part of the alleged conspiracy. The motion continues: “With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that this conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarca, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop, among others.”

In addition to the AFL-CIO, Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59, and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE), SEIU Local 26 is also named by DHS along with the Workers Solidarity Circle and Black Cat Workers Collective. The motion also states that Homeland Security Investigations subpoenaed financial records for several labor unions, including SEIU locals in Minnesota and the Communication Workers of America (CWA). 

Alec Stewart is a MAPE union member and one of the Minnesota 15. “The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering folks in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique, and that is our strong and unified labor movement,” he said at the press conference.

Treasure Thoreson is a teacher, executive board member at MFE Local 59, and one of the Minnesota 15. Thoreson spoke at the press conference about the food drives, fundraisers, grocery deliveries, and support that educators gave to their community all while continuing to show up to schools to educate students. “The government feels so threatened by our ability to come together and use our protected First Amendment rights, our legal rights as unionists that they feel they must surveil and disrupt. However, that to me is a signal that what we are doing is effective, impactful, and powerful,” she said. According to Thoreson, a GoFundMe that she donated to was flagged by DHS as evidence that she is part of a conspiracy.

Gabriel Van de Water is a community organizer and artist who is one of the Minnesota 15. Van de Water referred to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing the human rights abuses that happened under Operation Metro Surge. “Human Rights Watch referred to the occupation as a manufactured crisis. This administration has chosen to follow up that crisis with a manufactured conspiracy,” said Van de Water. “The Minnesota 15 case and others like it must be understood as an attempt to criminalize dissent, to make an example out of some of us so that all of us hesitate to exercise our rights to protect one another. We will not allow this to happen.”

Kieran Knutson is president of CWA Local 7250, which was also named in the document. “We are more determined than ever to stand up to our repressive government. We are more determined than ever to stand in solidarity with working class people,” he said. “The Minnesota 15 are some of the finest people I know. These are our people, we have their backs. We know that this prosecution against them is a bogus attack on the entire movement.”

Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, the executive director of Unidos MN, a grassroots social justice organization, spoke about the surveillance and infiltration enacted by the federal government on community members and noted the silence of corporations like Target. “They sat in our libraries, in training rooms, and wrote down what we thought about the Constitution. They took down license plates outside a church in Roseville, and built files of the families inside, their addresses, children, and where they work. Federal agents walked into a Target store in Richfield and detained two citizens who were at work,” said Gonzalez Avalos. “To this day, Target has said nothing about it. We came here today because that silence still has answers available.”

Target has been the center of national boycott campaigns for rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, and now this Minnesota coalition is demanding that the corporation meet with coalition members before early voting begins on September 15. Best Buy, 3M, and Cargill were also named by the coalition as corporations that are being urged to sign the pledge.

There is also a labor-endorsed call to boycott Target during the back-to-school season. President of MFE Local 59 Marcia Howard highlighted this call by the American Federation of Teachers that was supported by the national AFL-CIO, which passed a resolution supporting the boycott at its constitutional convention held in Minneapolis in June. 

“Educators spend eight billion dollars on back to school supplies,” said Howard. “Between AFT calling for a boycott and AFL-CIO extending that boycott, the only thing that this corporation needs to do is make good. Make good for Alex Pretti, for Renee Good. For all of us who have been in the streets, for our students, for each other.”

Target made $5.1 billion in profits in 2025, and its chair and former CEO Brian Cornell pulled in over $21 million. 

Bernie Burnham, the president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents 1000 local unions and hundreds of thousands of workers in the state, said at the press conference that “attacks on labor are not new. Those with power always push back when they face the kind of solidarity we saw in Minnesota last winter.” Burnham continued, “Instead of holding federal agents accountable for shooting and killing Renee Good and our [American Federation of Government Employees] union brother Alex Pretti, or addressing the dangerous and deadly conditions within immigration and detention facilities, the Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radically authoritarian agenda.”

Coalition members say they remain unintimidated. “Countless Minnesotans rose to the occasion and stood strong in the face of what the Trump administration tried to do to our communities and the whole nation owes those Minnesotans a debt of gratitude,” said Phillip Cryan, the executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa. “We keep us safe. If they come after any of us, 15 of us, or 1500 of us, the hundreds of thousands of us who did what we needed to do this winter to protect our communities, will be there to support them.”

President Donald Trump on Wednesday insisted that Americans should welcome artificial intelligence data centers in their communities, despite polls showing widespread opposition to their construction across the US, as well as mounting evidence of their negative impacts on the environment, public health, and Americans’ utility bills.

During a White House event with cryptocurrency and technology leaders, Trump was asked what he would say to working-class voters who backed him in the 2024 election but are skeptical about the benefits of AI.

Trump said he saw no reason why there should be opposition to building data centers, which have drawn criticism for producing pollution and forcing major spikes in utility bills thanks to their massive energy needs.

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant, or a data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump explained. “The jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are enormous. And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

The president then suggested that the only reason data centers aren’t popular is due to lack of effective propaganda from the tech industry.

“Maybe it could use a little public relations help,” he said.

Trump: "If I were the mayor of a town or the governor or a state, and I had a chance to get a big data center, I would absolutely want it" pic.twitter.com/9caqZ8L76b

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2026

An internal memo written by the National Republican Senatorial Committee that leaked to Axios on Wednesday warned Silicon Valley that data centers were massively unpopular throughout the country and were putting GOP candidates at risk.

In particular, the memo singled out the US Senate race in Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has used incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s support for data centers as a cudgel.

“If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly,” the memo cautioned, “the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the backlash to data centers has gotten so strong that it has inspired recall campaigns against officials who approved their construction in states including Missouri, Oklahoma, and Michigan.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has proposed a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction, told the Times that opposition to Big Tech should be a basic litmus test for any ambitious politician.

“People are standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centers in our communities for a number of reasons,’” Sanders said. “If you can’t have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, first authorized through bipartisan legislation in 2009, has been credited with helping to dramatically reduce the number of American teenagers who have experienced unwanted pregnancies in the past decade and a half, dropping by more than 65% over 16 years, according to one congressional report.

Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s limits on the program’s federal grants paused.

Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were represented by Public Citizen and Democracy Forward.

The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and capricious.”

LAWSUIT WIN: The court blocked the Trump admin’s attempt to turn the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program into an abstinence-only program.

The court said the plan would seem to defy social reality, common sense, & scientific evidence alike.

A win for young Americans' wellbeing.

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 19, 2026

The new policy, announced in June, canceled 53 of 66 active grants that had gone to public universities, health departments, and nonprofits for programming related to sex education, including information that was given to teens on contraception and communication with sexual partners.

In Trump’s 2027 budget, the grants are described as promoting “radical leftist ideology,” and officials claim there is no evidence that teen pregnancy prevention programs that go beyond educating young people about abstinence have “contributed to the historic decline in teen pregnancy, which is now at an all-time low.”

Under new guidance issued in June, Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program grantees are required to focus lessons on abstinence, deemphasize contraception, and teach teens about fertility and “body literacy.”

“HHS is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy—or even whether it is worth preventing at all—and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint. But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained. The preliminary record suggests that HHS has done just that,” wrote Cooper in the ruling.

“Through the TPP, Congress sought to fund a range of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategies, not just abstinence. According to unrebutted record evidence, programs that teach abstinence to the exclusion of all other approaches are ineffective in delaying sexual initiation and reducing adolescent pregnancy, at least as a general matter,” Cooper continued.

The judge took aim at the administration’s promotion of “body literacy,” which he called “a nebulous concept that appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention.”

Cooper also suggested that HHS had not bothered to find genuine evidence of its claims about “body literacy,” instead “remarkably” referencing “public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”

The judge stopped short of reinstating the dozens of grants, amounting to about $67 million, that have been terminated, saying it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so.

The plaintiffs and other advocates of comprehensive sex education have called for a permanent injunction; Cooper called on both parties in the case to propose a schedule for next steps by September 1.

Callie Simon, executive director of SIECUS, said the group was “encouraged that the court has halted implementation of the new harmful policy” but emphasized that “the impacts of terminating existing grants remain.”

“Today’s decision sends a clear message that the Trump-Vance administration cannot replace the proven, bipartisan Teen Pregnancy Prevention program with an ideologically driven alternative that harms young people,” said Simon. “Communities across the country are still without the evidence-based programs they relied on, and we will continue fighting to ensure young people have access to the sex education they deserve.”

Sandra J. Valenciano, director and health officer for public health in Seattle and King counties, said local communities were facing a measurable loss due to HHS’ stripping of TPP grants

“This federal action threatened our ability to complete a study on a new science-based, community-informed sex education curriculum specifically for young men and boys,” said Valenciano. “This ruling gives us hope that we may still be able to get to the finish line with this study and ultimately empower more young people to build healthy families if, when, and how they choose.”

Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said the ruling “reaffirms the value of trusted, evidence-based education programs that help youth make informed choices and plan for their futures.”

“Attacks on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program not only put young people at risk, they also risk increasing costs for taxpayers,” said Richardson. “No one benefits from these politically motivated attacks. It’s time for them to end.”

If education is indeed the great vehicle of social and economic mobility, then higher education is no longer delivering the promise of the “American dream.” In fact, this “dream” has become a fiscal nightmare. Colleges and universities saw 9,000 job cuts and buyouts in 2025, and several college closures, mergers, and looming budget crises have already been announced in 2026. Portland State University is one of the most recent casualties, with a projected deficit of $35 million.

How did we get here?

Universities have been operating like corporations for quite some time now. Business terminologies — like return on investment (ROI), efficiency, strategic alignment, move the needle, transparency, buy-in, revenue generating, burnout, bottom line, deliverable, best practices, and others — have been normalized in strategic plans and administrative reports.

The boards of trustees and presidents running these academic corporations/factories have been boldly claiming that education is business. And just as businesses fail due to strategic missteps, poor financial decisions, and various forms of mismanagement, this “business” called higher ed is on the brink of a great collapse. This collapse has not happened overnight. It certainly did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly did not start with blocking international students from attending U.S. universities. It certainly did not start with Donald Trump and the resurgence of McCarthyism, although the various draconian attacks on higher ed under his presidency have exacerbated the collapse.

Decades of mismanagement, fiduciary irresponsibility, a lack of shared governance and accountability, and divestment are responsible for a plethora of failures. Irrespective of these failures, university presidents and boards have been transparent about their singular mindset (at least in their visible actions). To them, growth is essential, but such growth can only take place by cutting various services and programs that are no longer deemed “essential.” Faculty and staff at many institutions have raised warning flags, insisting that universities cannot cut their way to growth. Such illusory growth will weaken programs and prevent students from truly being educated. Such short-term growth will ultimately threaten the long-term foundation of higher ed and lead to the collapse of one of the biggest arenas of 21^st-century thought: the university.

There are also other reasons for this collapse. For decades, universities have overspent on real estate, building fancy residence halls, offering attractive dining services, and raising tuition for students. All of this “added value” has been accompanied by cuts to essential student services (particularly those serving the most marginalized students) and insufficient compensation for overworked faculty and staff. Recent reports by the American Association of University Professors have found that faculty salaries still have not recovered from the decreases they saw during the early COVID-19 pandemic.

While faculty salaries have declined, large investments in athletics, online courses with low completion rates, and other designer programs have drained operational costs and endowments. Decades of reduced investment in the well-being of faculty have led to widespread burnout, watered down the system of tenure and shared governance, and led to the rise of the most exploited class in higher ed: the gig hustlers called “adjuncts.” This system, which Adrianna Kezar calls The Gig Academy, has created serious inequity and contributed long-term damage to faculty morale.

The infrastructure of higher ed has been further damaged by administrative bloat, with institutions hiring consultants — like enrollment management companies — that demand hefty price tags, all while cutting essential staff and overworking the ones that remain. In 2023, Forbes reported on this “skyrocketing” bloat and warned that such exponential growth in non-instructional staff in higher ed will drive up the cost of tuition and push vulnerable institutions to the brink of financial crisis. Meanwhile, due to staff cuts, overworked and underpaid faculty and staff are being asked to meet the demands of students who are increasingly coming to them underprepared and with various issues of mental health, food insecurity, homelessness, and learning styles and disabilities requiring multiple accommodations.

But unlike corporations, there is no government backing to bail universities out of their millions of dollars in structural deficits. They are simply closing or merging, destroying the lives of faculty and staff at various ranks and causing serious educational derailments for their students. The age of “the great resignation” that we witnessed during the pandemic has been replaced by “the age of massive layoffs” in higher ed. In my own state of Oregon, sweeping academic restructuring is underway, with 36 faculty layoffs and the closure of the award-winning and nationally recognized University Studies, a general education interdisciplinary program.

Let’s face it: The greatest danger facing higher education is not the “demographic cliff” but the loss of its fundamental mission to educate students. This shift has been accompanied by the loss of public trust in higher ed to serve the public good. The greatest danger facing higher education is not in its ability or inability to provide students with “job-related skills and training,” but the increasing and crushing debt, akin to a mortgage, that students and their families will be struggling to pay for decades.

No university education should cost over $60,000 per year to deliver just an undergraduate degree, which only a handful can truly afford. And these days, some universities are charging over $90,000 per year. There is no justifiable ROI for this kind of exorbitant cost. Yet, most of us who have been in higher ed for a while now know well that the millions of dollars of structural deficits that almost every university is currently facing did not just accumulate overnight. They are a result of shifting priorities.

Universities are no longer mission-driven to create critical, thoughtful, responsible, and well-rounded citizenry to participate in democracy and serve the public good. Instead, higher ed has traded its long-term intellectual benefits for short-term market and profit-driven (sometimes predatory) programs, with the sole and narrow purpose of training a generation of students for the workforce. This focus on job training, under the umbrella of “professionalism,” may or may not even succeed given the volatility of job markets in the age of artificial intelligence. Yet the disciplines that will be necessary to combat AI, like the humanities, are routinely being devalued.

While university administrators are speculating like gamblers to gauge which revenue-generating “programs” will ultimately survive, they are reducing, cutting, or hamstringing the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences that have a long and storied tradition of cultivating “critical thinking.” Yet this strategy conflicts with studies that show the liberal arts, particularly the humanities, are valuable in terms of long-term employment prospects. According to the Mellon Foundation report “Humanities Graduates Can Find a Great Job. It’s Time to Make This Fact Known”:

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that, at latest count, 96.3 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed, a share that is on par with that for degree holders in the same age range across all fields. Further, the earnings of terminal bachelor’s degree holders in the humanities are comparable to those of their counterparts in the behavioral/social sciences and the life sciences, while the job satisfaction levels among humanities graduates are in line with those of degree holders in all fields.

This and other reports emphasize that students need to learn and practice deep critical thinking, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning as basic skills to enter and succeed in the job market.

In response to the closure of Hampshire College, Ken Burns, one of the school’s most celebrated alumni, hit the nail on its head: “The greatest danger that faces higher education,” Burns said, “is this transactional tendency that everything is about an exchange that ultimately is economic.” What is lost in this game is the mission that education should be “transformational.”

As bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” These days, in the age of fascism and corporatization, any radical space is a threat, and every effort is being made to destroy those threats. Federal policies target disciplines that challenge the status quo or question power structures, like sociology, pushing for them to be eliminated from the curriculum altogether.

This transformation was underway long before the current right-wing attacks on higher education, as universities slowly eroded critical programs through the use of the terminology of “academic prioritization.” Recently, “academic prioritization” has been replaced by new terminologies of “long-term sustainability,” “strategic growth potential,” “indoctrination,” and “demand programs.”

Irrespective of these terms, the end goal is to reduce and eliminate programs, mostly in the humanities, that have created transformational spaces for generations of students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, those who are economically disadvantaged, and first-generation students. Colleges and universities around the country have eliminated humanities majors in art, music, theater, philosophy, history, religious studies, global languages, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnic studies, citing decreased enrollments.

In April, the University of Montana eliminated its master’s degree program in English, focused on Literature and Ecocriticism, raising serious concerns about the university’s identity. “English is such a fundamental core subject within the humanities, and it’s almost like the heart of the humanities is being cut out,” said English Department Chair Louise Economides.

The University of Montana is not the only university where the “heart of the humanities” is being cut out with little to no conversation. The attack has been relentless nationally. Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold have described this crisis as “a crisis of civil society writ large.” They write:

There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled.

Yet none of this is a surprise. While the right-wing attacks on these disciplines and departments have been relentless in recent years, faculty have been witnessing this slow collapse of the arts, humanities, and sciences for quite some time now. The market-driven model that encourages packing students into classrooms like sardines to maximize profits is not conducive to the personal attention that students need in disciplines like the arts and humanities. Many of these departments, slated to be reduced or cut, have been deliberately hamstrung by their administrations (citing low enrollment numbers), resulting in their inability to offer a robust curriculum. The overemphasis on the number of majors these disciplines have is a deliberate strategy to discredit these disciplines. If these programs are retained, they are treated as second-class departments simply serving as the “general education requirements” for the more profitable “revenue-generating” programs.

Higher ed is on the verge of collapsing because it has lost its soul. Can this soul be restored? Perhaps. But this would require a nationwide movement to restore public trust and reclaim higher education, building an academy that is not solely transactional or profit-driven but is deeply invested in serving and collaborating with its broader communities and society writ large. If we cannot do this, then we are one step closer to witnessing the weakening of our civil society and the end of our democracy.

It’s a “Hot Socialist Summer,” proclaims the New York City Democratic Socialists of America Instagram. Indeed, it has been a summer of socialist victories, with more socialists winning electoral office in June than ever, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are headed to Congress; and the socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is visible everywhere, from announcements about an impending municipally owned grocery store with cheap food staples to the Knicks victory parade to announcing huge gains in back pay for the city’s deliveristas, those who deliver food for DoorDash and Uber Eats.

All this good news feels somehow related to the celebratory atmosphere of summer, a time of cookouts in the park and block parties and dips in bodies of water. But our ability to enjoy summer is deeply tied to the success of the socialist project. That’s because capitalism is ruining summer, and dear reader, only socialism can save it.

Let’s start with the worst part: the weather, brought to you by fossil fuel capitalism. When we think of summer, most of us nostalgically recall childhoods playing on the block, going to the beach, running around barefoot, families grilling at the park — all made possible by the warm, sunny weather. People are still doing all those fun things, but there have been fewer days on which to do them as of late, because the climate crisis has brought some truly horrible weather.

This summer has been marred by deadly heat waves all over the world, including in places like Spain, which used to be a summer vacation destination but at times reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit this summer. Not to mention the awful air quality, which produced many days we couldn’t go outside, caused by wildfires from Canada — a regular feature of the ongoing climate crisis. And on days that were not too hot or polluted to enjoy the outdoors, we were often pelted with flooding rainstorms. All of these forms of extreme weather, and many others, are products of or wildly exacerbated by the climate crisis.

While Democrats, amply funded by fossil fuel capitalists, run away from climate as an issue, claiming it doesn’t poll well, a rising ecosocialist movement fighting for publicly funded renewable energy and against the vampiric, energy-sucking data centers, and electing politicians who will stand up to the fossil fuel and tech polluters, is our only hope.

Of course, summer 2026 has not been an uninterrupted apocalypse. On some days, the weather has been perfect. But for many, capitalist wealth hoarding means that the places they can go to enjoy these days are limited. Since most people don’t have their own private island, the mass enjoyment of summer requires public space. In New York City — mostly because we had social democratic government and powerful unions in the middle of the twentieth century — we do have great pools, beaches, baseball fields, and shady parks. Ninety years ago this summer, as Ted Hamm recently chronicled for the Indypendent, 50,000 New Yorkers attended the grand opening of a new pool in Sunset Park.

“This is the finest swimming pool in the country,” said then Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cited as a role model, “and it’s all yours.”

That same summer, LaGuardia, who was never anti-capitalist but was closely allied with socialists and revered for his pro-worker policies, opened eleven new pools across the five boroughs, all of which are still open today.

New York has continued in this tradition, and the current socialist administration has done so with enthusiasm and intention. This summer, after seventeen years of disuse, Mayor Mamdani reopened the beautiful art-deco-style Orchard Beach Pavilion, built in 1936 with funding from the Works Progress Administration, now renovated with the historic architecture preserved, with upgraded concessions and communal spaces. Mamdani also expanded the lifeguard program to improve access to its wonderful pools and beaches; the lifeguard union pushed for better pay and bonuses, and the mayor widely publicized those improvements to the job, increasing the number by 150, expanding our access to safe swimming at the city’s fourteen miles of public beaches and seventy-nine outdoor pools. This administration has prioritized summer fun for all, allowing huge free street watch parties during the Knicks playoffs and the World Cup, as well as free outdoor film screenings.

American-style capitalism and its insane work culture also robs us of the time to enjoy summer’s pleasures.

But in much of the United States, people are not so lucky. Good public swimming pools have become harder to find, thanks to austerity and privatization (as well as, in some places, the legacy of segregation). Less than half of Americans live within three miles of a forest. And tragically, 70 percent of our shoreline in the United States is privately owned, with only 10 percent protected by robust public access laws. The rich don’t want to pay taxes to make beautiful public spaces, and they’ve been allowed to not only hoard that wealth but also our most stunning natural resources.

Wrecking the weather and robbing us of beautiful spaces aren’t the only ways that capitalists deprive us of the full fruits of summer. American-style capitalism and its insane work culture also robs us of the time to enjoy summer’s pleasures. As Claire Valdez, a trade unionist and socialist assemblywoman from Queens who was elected to Congress in June, pointed out on the popular Instagram show Subway Takes, New York City has the best beaches, but most people are so busy working that they don’t have enough leisure time to go. The United States is the only rich country that does not obligate bosses to give workers paid vacations; without a union to negotiate such benefits, or fair wages, and with so little else provided — health care, housing, college — many can’t afford to stop working even for a couple weeks.

Socialism is the antidote to the wage slavery and work addiction that the boss class prefers. In fact, socialists invented summer vacation. Ninety years ago, in response to trade union demands and a “holiday movement,” Léon Blum, socialist prime minister of France, mandated paid vacation for all the country’s workers. Blum’s Popular Front government was so committed to summer vacation that it not only required the bosses to allow it but also invested in making summer getaways possible for workers, negotiating with railways to offer vacation packages that workers could afford. Communist governments were also ahead of other countries on summer vacation, requiring employers to offer time off and investing in resorts, campgrounds, and spas where workers could not only relax and return ready to work but also have adventures and experiences outside of work, whether exploring unknown places, engaging in activities like biking, or indulging in the apparently socially sanctioned “resort affair.”

New York City summer benefits enormously from our own socialist history and a current administration eager to govern in that tradition. But as Hamm pointed out in his Indypendent piece on the swimming pools, 1930s working-class New York had a freely flowing spigot of federal money to rely on through the New Deal. Mamdani is trying to do a lot with a very different federal government, one seeking to not to improve summer vacation for working-class people but actually worsen its conditions, even cutting staff and access to cherished public vacation spots like National Parks.

The vibes this summer are strong and the commitment to socialist summer fun meaningful. But it will take a much more fundamental rearrangement of our economy to address climate change, redistribute property and wealth for broadly shared public space, and rewrite labor relations to allow us the real time off that we deserve.

While humanitarian associations’ coverage of Gaza focuses on how to provide food, medicine, and shelter, another devastating consequence of wars is the loss of childhood itself.

According to various reports and estimates, tens of thousands of children have been killed or injured in Israel’s war on Gaza, and many more have been affected by the loss of one or both parents. Large numbers of people have been displaced amid widespread destruction and ongoing genocide since 2023.

It is an unbelievable set of statistics that illustrate the systematic killing of childhood in Gaza and the erasure of new generations from Palestinian society. However, according to Save the Children, an estimated 105,000 to 110,000 children have been born in the Gaza Strip during the war — a new generation born alongside the immense number of children killed.

A New Generation Born Amid War

These children are born with nothing but suffering. Many mothers give birth in makeshift tents, in winter or the heat of summer, under bombardment, and with severely limited medical care. Many children experience starvation, displacement, and the loss of family members and lives around them.

Israel is not only preventing normal life but also restricting the entry of toys into Gaza. A wide range of goods, including toys, have been subject to restrictions entering the Strip. Some in the newest generation of Palestinians in Gaza may not even know what toys or games are.

Regarding the war’s impact, Truthout interviewed Italian psychologist and psychotherapist Damiano Rizzi, president of Fondazione Soleterre, an Italian humanitarian organization founded in 2002 that works to protect the physical and psychological well-being of people across the world.

Rizzi works in the West Bank and supports psychosocial programs for children affected by war in both the West Bank and Gaza.

“Children have trauma that affects emotional regulation, communication, language, and trust in the world,” Rizzi says, describing how war impacts the mental state of children. He explained that when trauma is repeated without a root solution, it becomes more complex and appears more as post-traumatic stress disorder, aggressive behaviors, lack of self-awareness, and difficulties in dealing with relationships.

“Trauma becomes permanent because there is almost no experience of an ‘after’ in which children finally feel safe.”

The normal daily life of a 2- or 3-year-old child has lost much of its meaning and is instead filled with fear. The ability to play with toys is not a secondary aspect of childhood; it is a crucial part of a child’s ability to develop, learn, engage with life, and build essential skills. Instead of doing so, many children in Gaza now are growing up searching for water, standing in food lines, and falling asleep to the sound of explosions.

I have seen this play out in the experience of my 5-year-old brother Yamen, who has lived in Gaza throughout the war and continues to suffer there, since he was not able to come with me on my student visa to Italy. “I really want to have a toy,” Yamen said during a video call I had with my family, who remain in Gaza.

Yamen is one of those children who have lost the experience of childhood. He was only three years old when the war began, so he no longer remembers the toys he once had.

He used to have many toys, but he lost many of them amid the chaos of displacement and the destruction of our neighborhood. Later, during the intense starvation conditions that we faced in Gaza in 2025, when we ran out of fuel and firewood with which to cook, we were forced in desperation to burn Yamen’s remaining plastic toys to make a fire. Too young to understand what was happening, Yamen innocently helped us by bringing more of his little plastic cups and toy dishes to feed the flames so we could prepare a meal. Wanting to help us, he was unaware that we were destroying the last pieces of what had once been his childhood.

Yamen’s young mind cannot fully grasp that he once owned so many toys and that they were all lost. He longs to play, go to kindergarten, and make new friends. However, Israel’s restrictions have shaped even his simplest dreams, where something as small as a toy becomes a reminder of the childhood he might have had before the war.

Children in the Strip are also deprived of the right to education; over 90 percent of Gaza’s school buildings have either been destroyed or repurposed as shelters for families displaced by the war. Instead of attending classes, many children now live in school buildings, having lost both their homes and access to education.

Parents Cannot Provide Safety

When a child like my brother asks for a toy, he is not asking for a simple material possession. He is asking for something ordinary: the right to play, imagine, and experience a moment of normal childhood.

Children usually look to their parents for reassurance that the world around them is safe. In Gaza, however, many parents are themselves terrified, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the daily struggle to survive. They spend hours searching for food, clean water, or a safe place to shelter, leaving little emotional energy to comfort their children or help them feel secure. Instead of protecting their children from fear, many parents are forced to endure that fear alongside them. The psychological burden of war affects entire families, making it far more difficult for children to find the stability and reassurance they need during their earliest years of development.

For many children, there are no gardens to play in, no toys, no regular activities, and no functioning schools. Countless children have also lost relatives, neighbors, and friends. The ordinary experiences that define childhood have been stripped away, leaving many parents unable to give their children a sense of normalcy. Children used to calm themselves through the reassurance of trusted adults, but what if the adults are themselves traumatized?

Recovery Seems Far Off in Gaza

Healing is nearly impossible when children remain trapped in the same environment that caused the trauma. “Trauma becomes permanent because there is almost no experience of an ‘after’ in which children finally feel safe,” Rizzi said, explaining why many children in Gaza are unable to recover psychologically. As long as displacement, destruction, deprivation of basic rights, disease, and daily suffering continue, they are denied the safety and stability necessary for healing. Instead of leaving trauma behind, these children are forced to relive it day after day during the most formative years of their lives.

When a child like my brother asks for a toy, he is not asking for a simple material possession. He is asking for something ordinary: the right to play, imagine, and experience a moment of normal childhood. When even toys become difficult to access, it reveals the extent to which war has disrupted the most basic elements of children’s lives.

The loss of access to toys is not only about the absence of objects. It reflects the broader destruction of childhood itself — the memories, skills, imagination, and emotional development that shape a generation. The consequences of war extend beyond physical injuries; they also affect the minds and futures of children who are growing up surrounded by fear and loss.

Children in Gaza are growing up shaped by memories that no child should ever have to experience. They are learning the language of loss and fear before they have the chance to discover the possibilities of life. The damage in Gaza affects more than homes and buildings; it reaches a generation that is being shattered by this war even amid the so-called ceasefire.

The U.S. government is attempting to use conspiracy charges to imprison organizers, just as it did in its war against the Black Panther Party, New Left, and other 1960s and ‘70s radicals through its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. Through this method, the Trump regime shares the goal of the Nixon administration of disrupting and attempting to destroy domestic opposition to its authoritarian agenda.

Two weeks after the September 2025 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memorandum created a category of “domestic terrorist” that, while lacking legal authority, broadly includes anyone who believes in things deemed as constituting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 openly calls for “investigative” tactics designed to “disrupt” and “dismantle” political movements and organizations.

Following the recent use of conspiracy charges to successfully convict people in both the Prairieland case in Texas and the Spokane 3 case in Washington, 15 community members in the Twin Cities were indicted on June 16 for resisting the Trump administration’s December 2025 immigration crackdown dubbed “Operation Metro Surge.” According to the indictment, all defendants are identified as “members and associates of … Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’),” which helped organize Minnesota’s resistance. That organization is now defunct in light of the arrests and revelations about government infiltration.

The primary charge against these 15 community members is that each of them “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown … to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security from discharging the duties of their officers.” Those accused of “conspiracy” are alleged to have done such routine organizing activities as moderating meetings, engaging in fundraising, posting on social media, and communicating on the secure texting app Signal. Some are also accused of participating in an anarchist speaking tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” which followed the collapse of the government’s campaign against the people of Minnesota.

Though the mainstream media headlines touted an “Antifa conspiracy,” anarchists are mentioned more in the 94-page indictment, with references to anarchism on 17 pages. While there are many local anti-fascist groups, and exponentially more people who identify as anti-fascist, the way the government is using “Antifa” to signify a single organization is simply false. People with a wide variety of beliefs and political commitments consider themselves anti-fascist. Anarchists historically have fought fascists as far back as the 1936 Spanish Revolution, prior to World War II, as they believe in the possibility of a cooperative world that is diametrically opposite the one that fascists envision. In painting the defendants as members of antifa and as anarchists, the government is attempting to both scare the public and to marginalize and isolate the accused. The U.S. has a long history of targeting anarchists, going back to repression against immigrant anarchist labor organizers in 1880s Chicago, when four outspoken anarchists were hanged for organizing for the eight-hour workday.

Anarchists traditionally oppose all forms of hierarchy, exploitation, and domination, while both advocating and practicing democratic decision-making. Anarchists pose an intersectionally informed opposition to the contemporary cultural, political, and economic organization of society, while offering an alternative vision of a just, cooperative, and free society.

In the interview that follows, organizer Cameron Kennedy, one of the so-called “Minnesota 15” defendants, discusses his thoughts on anarchism, the role it played in organizing opposition to Operation Metro Surge, and how other communities can organize resistance.

The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin: What does anarchism mean to you?

Cameron Kennedy: I think anarchism is deeply misunderstood by most. To me, it’s an egalitarian blueprint for resisting oppression and building a better world that democratizes every aspect of society. That democratizes our communities and workplaces and gives each of us agency and responsibility; where resources are distributed evenly and fairly and not hoarded by the billionaire class.

This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader.

Maybe more importantly to me personally, it’s a code of conduct that guides my actions and my thinking: to always treat others with respect and grace, to always question and adapt to my surroundings, to educate and work to better myself, to engage with my neighborhood and community, to recognize oppression in all its forms and have the courage to confront it in any capacity I can, as we struggle for a just society.

What aspects of the Twin Cities’ response to Operation Metro Surge, starting late in 2025 until earlier this year, resonate most with anarchist practices and principles?

I think the resistance we saw here in the Twin Cities is deeply and directly influenced by anarchism. There is a strong anarchist and labor history in the Twin Cities that goes back more than 100 years. Anarchists have been deeply involved in movements here, especially since the 2008 Republican National Convention, and in the many uprisings against police brutality, like those around the police murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many others. I think this involvement played a role in introducing the wider population to anarchists’ organizing.

The resistance to Metro Surge was entirely decentralized, meaning there were no leaders and everything was organized on a hyperlocal scale by average working people, connected through apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving everyone the ability to coordinate in unison at a macro scale. Mutual aid, long associated with anarchism, became a practice that every neighborhood committed to — for instance, to get food and rent money to our immigrant neighbors who were too under threat to leave their houses.

The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again.

The rapid-response loops and Whipple Watch were designed to observe and report all ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] activity through this decentralized network, in which nearly 100,000 people participated at the height. [Whipple Watch is a counter-surveillance project comprised of locals using their constitutional right to observe law enforcement, specifically at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where most ICE operations are based.] This gave us the ability to respond to ICE raids in as little as three to five minutes almost anywhere in the Twin Cities. This wasn’t just a movement without leaders — this was a movement where everyone became a leader, and that’s exactly what anarchism is. That self-agency, the air-tight community communication, confrontational nature, and adaptability are why our resistance was so successful against Operation Metro Surge.

How have the indictments of the 15 of you been received by the wider community, namely the 100,000+ people that turned out in subzero temperatures to resist ICE?

My co-defendant Cal said it best: “Homeland Security really kicked the hornets’ nest with this one.” The movement against ICE had burned out post-Metro Surge, after the state of Minnesota moved toward a strategy of local law enforcement cooperating with ICE to arrest immigrants on low-level offenses, turning folks over to ICE at county jails. This allowed ICE to quietly and more effectively carry out its work without the constant flashy confrontations of Metro Surge. The raids and indictments woke the Twin Cities up again. Hundreds have rallied at our court dates and the community is mobilizing for another wave of repression. Bluntly, the raids enraged the Twin Cities back into action.

For myself, I’ve received nothing but support here. My neighbors have offered to help my partner and I any way they can, donating money and food. People recognize me on the street and thank me for the work I’m alleged to have done. It’s very clear that the government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.

Do you have any advice for how organizers can best use the Signal app for secure communication? What are the best protocols for using that app to organize securely and effectively?

The number one rule is: “Always assume there is a fed in the chat and don’t say anything you don’t want read back to you in court.” I firmly believe mass-oriented organizing is crucial, but in that type of approach, it is impossible to avoid infiltration from the state. I don’t think there is any point in vetting large rapid-response groups, but I don’t think we should then throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon mass organizing just because of that. Smaller groups doing mutual aid in the Twin Cities, who were being directly targeted by ICE for supporting their neighbors with grocery runs and rent money, restricted their chats to small groups on a need-to-know basis with trusted individuals. There is no bulletproof way to do this work though. Right now, the State Department is using rapid-response chats that nearly 100,000 people were in as evidence of “conspiracy.” Under an authoritarian state, resisting means taking necessary risks to protect our community and even very legal methods will be targeted if they are effective.

Also in rapid-response chats, it’s really important to use the SALUTE method of reporting ICE activity. SALUTE stands for size, activity, location, uniform, time, equipment. So, for example, that might look like utilizing your constitutionally protected right to observe ICE in your neighborhood and reporting to your local rapid-response group something like: “It’s 8:17 am. There are six ICE officers armed with assault rifles, less-lethal weapons, and riot gear. At 38th and Chicago, that are currently detaining one person. No one else on scene.” By giving accurate and precise information, we avoid the rumor mill and unneeded panic that further confuses and spreads fear in the community.

What lessons have you learned from the successful resistance to the ICE surge that you can pass on to other communities that may be targeted in the future?

I think this decentralized hyperlocal organizing is key, as is being confrontational and taking risks (if you can). Protests still serve a purpose, but it’s clear our politicians aren’t listening and they aren’t protecting us; in fact, they are using local police to attack our community and protect ICE despite what they may say in speeches. This is why it’s up to us to take personal responsibility to protect our communities and not show fear when we confront the state that is murdering our neighbors in the streets.

The government’s claim that we are “a danger to our own community” is a load of horseshit and just about anyone in the Twin Cities will tell you as much.

Activating every element of society — from neighborhoods, workplaces, places of worship and even hobby groups — and then combining them in an informal alliance working together to resist ICE is also essential. Combining unions, activist groups, and rapid-response networks is what lead to the first successful general strike in the U.S. in generations. Those connections built a foundation for society to resist effectively together.

Final note: I want people to study what we did in Minneapolis with a critical lens, then apply and adapt it to where you are. The Twin Cites won the battle of Metro Surge while losing more than 1,700 people to deportations and two people to state-sanctioned street executions. The larger war ICE is waging against communities across the country is still raging and intensifying, and in the last few weeks, we have seen record amounts of families being ripped apart.

I firmly believe that solidarity with each other, including groups you might normally never work with, is key: organizing at a micro level with agency, like anarchists, instead of under the control of a large organization, taking orders from leadership like our dysfunctional political system has indoctrinated us to do. And having the courage to confront the brutality of ICE in a way that effectively protects our immigrant neighbors and isn’t merely performative.

Take responsibility, take risks, take care of each other, and never rely on the very state that is ripping our communities apart and murdering our people to solve the problem that both political parties created. Together, we will march arm-in-arm through the ruins that capitalism has brought on itself into a far better world of our own making.

As Mainers continue to target Sen. Susan Collins’ office with protests following a recent killing by an immigration agent, new reporting shows how some of the $70 billion she and her GOP colleagues gave to President Donald Trump’s immigration agencies is being spent.

According to the Associated Press on Tuesday:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.

ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.

The devices are known as the GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.

As the company’s website explains, “the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks, or scars.” It describes them as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform.”

As if ICE wasn’t sadistic enough, the agency plans to spend up to $20 million to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shockshttps://t.co/y5yMRYecLr

— Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) August 12, 2026

John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told the AP that the sensation is “immediate and sharp,” comparing it to a “bee sting.”

While he said it could be an effective tool to prevent “resistance,” he warned that it should not be used as a form of punishment against those merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people.

But given the recent record of rampant civil rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, excessive use of force, and efforts to lie about misconduct, civil rights advocates are warning that these gloves are being placed into, or onto, the exact wrong hands.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country that they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences for citizens and noncitizens alike,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Common Dreams. “Now they might be equipped with a device that allows them to deliver an electric shock with their hands by pushing a small button, in a move that might be imperceptible to those watching.”

Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, concurred, telling Common Dreams that ICE is a “rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities.”

“Arming poorly trained agents with electric shock gloves to inflict pain on our neighbors is disgusting and barbaric,” Matos added. “Congress must end the blank check to ICE, and ICE must get out of our communities.”

The shock gloves are just one way that immigration agencies are spending the $70 billion in additional funding they were given back in June, when Republicans in the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize the funding despite rampant lawlessness. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), voted against supercharging the funding.

In a July 16 letter to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, Collins defended her vote for the increased ICE funding by pointing to “reforms” passed in April as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s broader appropriations bill, which included $20 million for body cameras and $2 million for “de-escalation” training.

Collins’ office did not immediately respond when asked by Common Dreams whether she believes electric shock gloves were a good form of “de-escalation.”

A five-term senator in the midst of a fierce reelection bid against Democrat Troy Jackson has taken fierce criticism for her vote to support ICE on the campaign trail, which has only grown in intensity since July’s fatal shooting of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.

It was one of two fatal shootings of men without criminal records over the course of a week. ICE later acknowledged that the victims were not the target of their operations.

When asked after the shooting, Collins declined to say that she regretted her vote for increased ICE funding.

Protesters who gathered outside Collins’ Biddeford office on Tuesday said she should.

“$70 billion to fund the terror that left my family and community in fear,” Fernanda McLaughlin, a Maine resident and community organizer, said over the loudspeaker, according to NBC News Center Maine. “You know what that money can be really used for? To feed Mainers. To fund our schools. To fund our health system.”

“There were no guardrails included, and she still voted yes on it,” McLaughlin said. “Simple guardrails that exist in nearly every other law enforcement agency across our nation.”

A right-wing talk show host on Tuesday pushed President Donald Trump to declare a “national security emergency” that would let him meddle in the 2026 midterm elections—and the president did not rule it out.

In an appearance on Real America’s Voice, Trump listened as host Wayne Allyn Root rattled off actions he would like to see the president take ahead of the midterms.

“Let me put an idea in your head,” Root told Trump. “Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections.”

🚨🚨🚨

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail ballots

TRUMP: Let me just say stranger things have happened. I'll leave it at… pic.twitter.com/SvXYoYI0lQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 11, 2026

Root then told the president that “if you do this in the next month” it would allow for the implementation of photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, as well as restrictions on mail-in ballots.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Trump said in response. “I’ll leave it at that.”

The US Constitution does not give the president power to declare a “national emergency” that would allow him to unilaterally rewrite states’ election laws.

Regardless, ABC News reported in February that a group of pro-Trump attorneys were circulating a 17-page draft order that would use the purported threat of election interference from the Chinese government to declare a “national emergency” that would outright ban mail-in ballots and mandate that all ballots be hand-counted.

Trump has not yet signed such an order, but he has issued other election-related directives, including one that instructs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.

The USPS executive order and an order that required Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote have been blocked by courts.

Regardless, some observers expressed concern that the president wasn’t yet finished in his efforts to meddle in the coming elections.

“There is zero reason,” wrote CNN host Jake Tapper, “to not take Trump at his word that he and his team are planning something alarming to disrupt the midterms and beyond.”

Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield observed in response to the president’s appearance on Real America’s Voice that “Trump has no legal authority to do this,” but warned “that doesn’t mean he won’t try.”

Journalist Mike Rothschild questioned what the conversation between Trump and Root said about both men’s mental stability.

“Once again, Donald Trump is not a wizard,” wrote Rothschild. “He can’t just manifest things into existence by saying them or with a tweet. There is no ‘right’ to do this in US law, nor is there any mechanism that would enable any of this to happen. Both people in this conversation are deranged.”

After losing the 2020 presidential election to former President Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede the race, lied about the election being “stolen” by nefarious actors, pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overtake Biden in the Peach State, and pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject certifying the election despite lacking constitutional authority to do so.

When these efforts to overturn the election failed, Trump encouraged his followers to march to the US Capitol, where they broke into the building, assaulted law enforcement officers, and sent members of Congress running for their lives.

Police in cities across the U.S. are rolling out a pro-drone PR blitz as hundreds of local police departments prepare to deploy autonomous, AI-driven surveillance drones. The drones are capable of following a single vehicle across an entire city, capturing footage through apartment windows, and generally recording daily life from the sky without being noticed.

As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called “drone-as-first-responder” (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.

The automated drone push comes as resistance to mass surveillance by license plate-reading cameras goes viral. Residents are packing city council meetings across the country to demand restrictions on the data gathered by high-tech drones and cameras — or an end to mass surveillance altogether.

Scandals over digital stalking by police and other abuses are erupting as new surveillance tech empowers the state to violate privacy in entirely fresh ways. In response, people are taking direct action, sabotaging automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that are capable of building complex profiles of individual vehicles.

Flock Safety, a top surveillance tech firm, is the company most associated with ALPRs and is itself often at the center of controversy. But Flock also has a number of competitors, including Axon and Motorola Solutions. And business across the surveillance tech economy is booming.

In many cities, local cops have extra funding for surveillance from wealthy private donors, police foundations, and federal grants; surveillance companies also often offer police free trials and help with applying for grants and waivers. Those surveillance firms have expanded from offering singular technologies such as ALPRs or body-worn cameras to become one-stop shops for police seeking the latest surveillance setup — including advanced drones.

Unlike most consumer drones, which are controlled by an operator looking up from the ground, autonomous surveillance drones used for DFR programs are operated remotely, allowing police to send drones much longer distances and stream live video footage back to headquarters. Cops in many cities have launched camera-carrying drones for years, but autonomous drones guided by AI are capable of flying “beyond the visual line of sight” of the operator (also known as BVLOS drones) and can be managed from a central launch pad, freeing up police time and capacity.

“The human increasingly is not flying the drone; the drone is driven by artificial intelligence and just deployed from one spot to another spot.”

“The human increasingly is not flying the drone; the drone is driven by artificial intelligence and just deployed from one spot to another spot,” said Beryl Lipton, the senior investigative researcher at EFF, in an interview. “They don’t have a pilot, but there is often a human person who is there to manage the feed.”

Instead of attending a street parade and launching a drone overhead, for example, police can fly multiple drones with AI-driven navigation from a desk, as EFF writes:

FAA rules for police drones also required a human operator to manually fly the device to a scene, but DFR technology has become a more common and more automated police technology. DFR programs increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to automate drone flights from launchpads placed around the city, often atop municipal buildings, and make it possible for one drone operator to “fly” multiple devices at once.

Flying a BVLOS drone requires an FAA waiver. The agency streamlined the waiver process in April 2025 and approved more waivers for BVLOS drones between then and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined, EFF reports.

Lipton said most law enforcement applicants are already deploying automated drones or are strongly considering a “drone-as-first-responder” program. Once police begin a relationship with a company such as Flock Safety or Axon, Lipton said, taxpayers can expect a push for purchases of additional gadgets, upgrades, and storage for video.

It’s also not surprising that these programs now seem ubiquitous. “There is a lot of this kind of peer pressure in law enforcement, you can really see it with Flock,” Lipton said. “One police department gets a new tool or signs off on Flock cameras, and then you see neighboring cities are now signing up for Flock to keep up with the latest new thing.”

Flock Safety boasts that its automated “first responder” drones carry ALPR cameras that can read license plates from above up to 2,000 feet away, allowing police to connect surveillance footage of individual vehicles to data captured on the street. Lipton said companies such as Flock and Axon bundle services like gadgets and processing software to help police compile data from multiple streams into easily searchable databases, including footage from body-warn cameras, ALPRs, automated gunshot detectors, and drones flying overhead.

While a corporate partnership between Flock Safety and Axon fell apart in early 2025, some of the most prominent companies selling drones to police departments, including Skydio, integrate their products directly with the software and data analysis tools sold by leading manufacturers of ALPRs. “People don’t realize that video analytics has really developed as much as it has in the past few years, no matter whether coming from a police body-worn camera, drones or ALPR,” Lipton said. “All of these can easily be analyzed and made searchable, and that is a really integral part of what Axon and Flock are doing.”

Amid widespread backlash to ALPRs, police across the nation are going into PR mode, releasing footage of drones in action along with statements casting the technology as a “first responder” that can arrive on the scene before police to establish “situational awareness,” help with search-and-rescue, and track down suspects and stolen property.

“It seemed much more palatable for a drone to be framed as a ‘first responder’ … But in practice it is plain old surveillance.”

“It seemed much more palatable for a drone to be framed as a ‘first responder’ going to a specific crime rather than a tool for surveillance that has a very abstract crime-fighting purpose,” Lipton said. “But in practice it is plain old surveillance.”

Audits of drone flight logs — from piloted or autonomous drones — tell a more complicated story. In places police are required to log flights, officers often record only vague justifications for launching drones without a warrant, often for what appear to be routine dispatches and training flights, the ACLU has noted. Even on mundane missions, such drones equipped with powerful zoom lenses or infrared sensors can capture significant data that can later be analyzed with AI-powered data processing and facial recognition technology.

On July 13, Wired published an investigation into hours of drone footage from the San Franciso Police Department, providing an unfiltered look at automated drones in action. The footage was accidentally released on the open internet via the website for Skydio, the company providing the drones and software behind them. Discovered by security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert, the leaked footage itself raised serious privacy concerns.

“In the case of San Franscisco, they are doing a lot of locking onto license plates and, particularly, people, and the drone is able to navigate itself,” Lipton said.

The innocuous scenes captured by drones — police talking to a unhoused person, an arrest at a gas station by undercover officers, two men parking a car before joining a basketball game — also raised questions about the nature and breadth of the surveillance.

In one video, a response to an alleged “prowler” incident, the drone hovers over a young person wearing headphones and apparently having a private moment on the roof of a building. The drones have powerful zoom lenses, and footage captured of living rooms in the interior of apartments and people on private rooftops raise serious constitutional questions about the level of intrusion involved, according to Jay Stanley, a privacy analyst at the ACLU.

“It’s pretty clear that a police drone hovering, say, outside a 2nd story window in a suburban backyard would violate ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ and thus the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, but it’s less clear what the courts would find to be a reasonable expectation of privacy in a city, where people are already susceptible to Rear Window-type observation,” Stanley wrote in a blog post on July 17.

In some cities, police launched drone-as-first-responder programs with automated BVLOS drones with little or no oversight. The city council in Nashville, Tennessee, is considering placing restrictions on automated drones after learning that police had quietly launched a trial program without a vote or hearing by the city council. After public outcry, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced on August 6 that it would end its trial drone program.

New Orleans was among the cities that received the FAA waiver for an automated drone-as-first-responder program. Police plan to expand their existing drone program to launch drones in response to 911 calls from the historic French Quarter later this year. But residents were outraged after activists discovered that the city’s police department had changed internal rules to allow police drones to carry “weapons” with prior approval from the police superintendent, according to Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance. Police claimed the change was only a proposal added to a draft policy, but as Verite News pointed out, the file name for the “draft” document suggests the policy was meant to go into effect on June 21.

“Nobody knew; city council didn’t know, we had to announce it, and we mobilized people to start calling and start demanding that this be rescinded,” Romero told Truthout in an interview.

Police ditched the policy on drones carrying weapons after public outcry. On August 6, the New Orleans City Council voted to require police to publicly publish regular drone flight logs and reports on usage and reasons for deployment. While the new ordinance addresses transparency, it does not place enforceable restrictions on drone use. Romero echoed residents who submitted public comments arguing the ordinance does not go far enough.

“We need to do an investigation of the policy violations that happened last year, and the change in policy that weaponized the drones before we can move toward an expansion,” Romero said, adding that there must be penalties for police who deploy drones for unapproved uses.

The city has become a testing ground for surveillance tech, including ALPRs and cameras equipped with facial recognition. Wealthy private interests have funded an expansion of policing in the French Quarter, and the nonprofit Project NOLA secretly supplied police with data from a network of facial recognition cameras in violation of local law.

Officials said the use of facial recognition was paused after a Washington Post investigation exposed the program in May 2025, but the ACLU reported in April 2026 that abuses continue. The ongoing controversy has left residents anxious about surveillance in a city where drones are already a common sight during parades and street festivals.

“We already have people coming to us saying, ‘I saw drone outside my window, we don’t know what to do, how can we even confirm that it was a police drone?’” Romero said. “But we don’t know who was manning the drone, and for what purpose.”

According to Skydio flight logs for 2025 obtained by Eye on Surveillance and reviewed by Truthout, piloted drones were overwhelmingly dispatched to respond to calls about minor incidents, including a subject who was “involved in a disturbance with the hot dog guy then fled the scene.”

Drones were twice dispatched in response to a “Black female” causing a “disturbance” on or near Bourbon Street, famously one of the rowdiest bar crawls in the world. While many entries for “Type of Incident” in the flight logs are left blank, in multiple cases, drones responded to calls about unhoused people and people with mental illness.

“This is really why they want the [drones-as-first-responder] drones in the French Quarter,” Romero said. “These business owners don’t want to see people that are houseless, and they want to harass people they think are suspicious.”

Romero said building a surveillance state is clearly not the solution to homelessness or the budget crisis facing city leaders, who may be tempted by lucrative federal grants that require cities to build out surveillance infrastructure. Romero pointed to the Trump administration’s Model Cities Initiative, which offers $300 million to cities that invest in “proactive policing” and surveillance tech.

“If cities are building the surveillance infrastructure, the risks that our data will end up in the hands of the federal government or state government in our case are really high.”

“We have to take into consideration that the federal and the state governments are trying to use all the surveillance technologies out there. And so if cities are building the surveillance infrastructure, the risks that our data will end up in the hands of the federal government or state government in our case are really high,” Romero said.

Lipton said many questions remain about how police are actually using drones as “first responders,” and advocacy around restrictions and transparency is critical. Drones are not as immediately visible to the public as traffic cameras. But as anger continues rise over the automated license plate readers sold to police by Flock and Axon, Lipton expects a similar backlash to automated drones once more people learn about the technology.

“The adoption of these tools has outpaced the public’s awareness that they exist,” Lipton said. “License plate readers have been around for a very long time at this point, but we are seeing a moment where everybody — even people who are not tech-savvy — understand what it means that these systems are accessible in real time and interconnected.”

Can a lawsuit hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate-change and its impact? That’s the question a Washington State-based woman is hoping to answer. Misti Leon is suing several big oil companies — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and others — over the 2021 heat-related death of her mother Juliana, who died during a record-breaking heat dome over the Pacific Northwest.

For years, individuals and institutions have attempted to protect human lives from climate change using litigation. In 2015, a public interest law firm called Our Children’s Trust, representing nearly two dozen young people sued the federal government for failing to protect them against the impending impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Courts dragged their feet for more than a decade only for the case to reach a dead end at the United States Supreme Court in 2025.

Leon’s civil suit is significant, not just because a Washington judge unexpectedly cleared the case for discovery and trial, but because Leon can directly link her mother’s death to climate change. Scientists concluded that the 2021 heat dome was, in the words of one research paper, “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” It’s about a crime that already occurred instead of hypothetical harm.

“Ms. Leon’s case is unique in that it is the first of its kind to seek to hold big oil companies accountable for their role in an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster,” Mike Meno, communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports community efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for climate change, explained in an interview.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome. “She was found unresponsive in her car,” said Meno. “The medical examiner determined that her death was caused by hyperthermia,” a condition that is the opposite of the more well-known cold-related condition of hypothermia.

Hyperthermia-related deaths have sharply risen over the past decade, a predictable outcome of fossil fuel emissions. Oil companies such as Exxon have long been aware of the devastating impacts their product would have on the climate. “Major oil and gas companies decades ago knew, their own scientists told them internally, that if we kept burning fossil fuels, it would lead to, in the words of one internal Exxon document, potentially catastrophic events, just like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome,” said Meno.

Juliana Leon was one of an estimated 1,200 people across the Pacific Northwest whose deaths were linked to the heat dome.

Big Oil’s failure to act on this information has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco. Companies like Philip Morris knew about the impacts of cigarette smoking on human health and kept it secret for years. Since that information was made public, individuals suffering from their addictive products have sued repeatedly and won.

A major lawsuit brought by state attorneys general culminated in 1998 in what became known as the Master Settlement Agreement, where dozens of tobacco companies settled to the tune of billions of dollars for public health. Notably, the federal government also sued tobacco companies for violations of racketeering laws over their deception.

Yet while individuals and states are taking action in the case of oil companies, the federal government clearly has no interest in holding Big Oil accountable for climate change. Instead, President Donald Trump says he wants the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies for raising oil prices in the wake of the Iran war. This appears to be a classic case of deflection, given that a majority of voters blame Trump for price increases at the pump. He isn’t interested in holding companies accountable for climate change; he’s upset they made it harder for people to consume oil. Moreover, his administration is suing states for trying to enforce environmental regulations aimed at oil companies.

In addition to keeping their own research secret, fossil fuel companies spent years sowing doubt over the cause-and-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and a warming climate. “What that decades-long deception campaign did is it stole a generation’s worth of time when action could’ve been taken, and we could’ve averted the worst of some of these climate disasters,” said Meno.

This year, more extreme weather records are expected to be broken as climate change intensifies. The first half of 2026 was the third-warmest half-year on record. An El Niño phenomenon developing this year is expected to be one of the strongest in modern history.

Whether or not the Trump administration admits that the climate is changing, Americans know it is. “Anyone of a certain age who can look back over enough time just knows, as a matter of common sense, that the climate we are all living in today is not what we had a few years ago,” said Meno.

The industry knows it too — and, according to Meno, oil companies “are in absolute panic mode, fighting tooth and nail to escape accountability.” Leon’s lawsuit is hardly the only one they fear. Numerous states, counties, cities, and tribal governments are suing Big Oil, and making headway.

Meno explained that companies have “been pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to take up one of these cases for years.” The Supreme Court finally agreed to review a case in Colorado where that state’s supreme court in May 2025 ruled the City of Boulder and Boulder County could move forward with discovery and trial in their suit against ExxonMobil and Suncor.

Not content with leaving it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress to grant the industry immunity over its role in climate change — and conservative lawmakers have complied. In April, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026.”

If Congress were to pass the bill, according to Meno, it “would be a truly unprecedented legal shield that would strip the public of their right to hold these corporations accountable for the harm they’ve caused.” Meno’s Center for Climate Integrity is urging members of the public to demand their elected representatives vote against Hageman and Cruz’s bill.

Big Oil says it deserves immunity because it shouldn’t be penalized for giving the public what it wants. In a joint statement, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said: “These efforts to retroactively penalize companies for lawfully meeting consumer demand are misguided and counterproductive.”

What they didn’t say is that they have worked for years to prevent fair competition from renewables. It’s why the state of Michigan launched an antitrust lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and others because they acted “as a cartel … to forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy in order to maintain their dominance.”

Fossil fuel companies have long known their products are deadly, kept it secret, unfairly ensured their dominance, then argued that they ought not to be sued for delivering a product the public wants. Now, as climate-related deaths stack up, the industry claims it isn’t responsible. Misti Leon, whose mother might be alive today if governments and courts had reined in Big Oil, told The New York Times: “I never would have in a million years guessed that a heat dome and climate change would be what killed my mother and what took her from me. There’s no way to comprehend that and to kind of even rationalize it.”

Following the largest nurses strike in New York City history, Marilyn Shuler and 11 of her co-workers returned to their jobs at Montefiore Hospitals in the Bronx in February, only to find that their work environment had changed in a major way. 

At the time, Shuler worked in utilization review, a department that ascertains the need for medical care and whether care is covered by insurance. The veteran nurse, who worked at Montefiore for almost 40 years, had to begin using Datavant, a tool used to abridge the process by which the hospital sends patient and care information to insurance companies. Datavant’s website refers to itself as an AI platform.

Shuler said she and other nurses thought the tool would just help process the backlog of cases created by the nurses strike. But when case volume returned to normal, the 12 nurses working in utilization review were told to continue using Datavant. 

In early July, after a few months of using the tool, Shuler was laid off from the position she held for six years. Her colleagues were all laid off too. They felt they had been replaced by artificial intelligence.

Shuler’s case and that of her colleagues, she said, is far from an outlier. Hospitals will continue to automate and eliminate the jobs of nurses and other workers through AI, Shuler added. 

Job automation keeps nurses up at night. It was a concern raised by nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) earlier in the year, when 15,000 walked off the job demanding a new contract. 

“Artificial intelligence should never replace real human caring from a nurse,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said in a press release issued when the 12 nurses at Montefiore lost their job.  

Montefiore representatives deny having replaced workers with Datavant. 

“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior vice president for government relations and strategic communications, said in an email. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said that Datavant’s tools are a nonclinical program that helps facilitate the paperwork process, but did not address whether the program uses AI.

Shuler said the laid-off nurses did not receive proper notice from the hospital. A union representative told the nurses on May 6, National Nurses Day, that the hospital planned to eliminate the 12 utilization review positions. 

“We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism. 

Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals deskill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.

“We have already begun to see that in places where AI has been introduced around triaging,” Fergus said. “The younger, newer clinicians, the more exposure they have to AI, and the earlier exposure they have to AI, the higher the risk of them deskilling.”

Fergus said healthcare workers should have a background education, but that they should also supplement that with real experience in the field and trial and error. Reading X-ray scans, Fergus said, is an example of a practice that is enhanced by AI tools. But workers should still be able to know what they are looking at.

“We will lose the skill of doctors being able to read those tools as well, and when the inevitable happens that the system goes down, then nobody’s going to know how to read the images,” Fergus said. 

Using an AI system that does not account for the historical inequities of the healthcare industry, Fergus said, is also a deep concern. Fergus worries that hospitals might look to save money on the AI products they contract with and end up with a service that is not attuned to serving a diverse population.

“If there’s any issues of racism, or the system is not properly programmed for the population that it’s in, then that additional programming of the AI can amplify the disparities that already exist and can actually result in injuries,” Fergus said. 

Despite hospitals onboarding AI systems as an addition to workers’ current workflows, Fergus said it is only a matter of time before hospitals look to automate jobs. She said most hospitals will likely see this as short-term savings. 

But if they don’t create more staffing to maintain and continuously train the products, “then the systems become obsolete, and they become harmful to the patients,” Fergus said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

Deeply divided by nationalism and deprived of its vast colonies by the last century’s catastrophic two world wars, Western Europe has been in decline ever since. Recently, that decline has become drastic and desperate as Western Europe falls ever further behind — economically, militarily, and politically — today’s two superpowers: the US and China. Mediocre and unpopular leaders reflect Western European decline. They bet and built their careers on accepting junior partner positions vis-à-vis the United States. But Europe’s decline now threatens to split Europe apart. Inside each nation, rich and powerful minorities use their social positions to sustain their wealth and power while the masses bear most of the burdens of decline offloaded onto them by the rich and powerful. The problems flowing from these cumulative developments are approaching points of social explosion. Despite the lessons taught by the two world wars, many Western European leaders once again provoke and prepare for a war, this time against Russia, notwithstanding the awful risks of nuclear weapons. One key question to ask: why is this happening?

From 1945 to 1990, Cold War set Western European nations against the USSR and its Eastern European allies in many ways and on many levels. Yet that war remained cold. In 2026, after more than three decades of post-Cold War peace, a military war between a largely unified Europe (East and West) and post-Soviet Russia seems imminent. Such a war has been prepared by NATO’s growth, its moving eastward toward Russian borders since 1990; by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; and by the escalations of their hostilities by both Russia and Ukraine since that invasion. War between much of Europe and Russia now looms.

US President Donald Trump used both his presidential terms to distance the United States from its European allies in NATO. Among his provocative, unilateral statements and actions were heavy tariffs on imports from European countries. In exchange for some reduction of those tariffs, Trump demanded and obtained tribute from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (over $1 trillion in committed purchases of liquified natural gas plus investments by Europe in the United States). He also reduced US support for the war against Russia in Ukraine. That war thus became a mostly European project.

As the US withdrew from its former close alliances with Europe, the latter’s leaders developed an increasing hostility toward Russia. They demonized the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Where Trump notably lessened hostility to Russia, his European counterparts intensified theirs. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe and the US rushed to bolster Ukraine’s defense beyond the huge assistance they had already provided to Ukraine since at least 2014. After February 2022, Europeans provided Ukraine with still more support in finance and weapons. By 2026, many observers in Europe and Russia and beyond predicted a Russo-European war as imminent. Our goal here is to explain why this dangerous situation arose.

World Wars I and II fatally weakened capitalist colonialism. The British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Russian and Japanese colonialisms had especially escalated competitive clashes into two catastrophically self-destructive wars. This allowed movements of the colonized people finally to defeat the weakened colonizers and win political independence. The different anticapitalist movements that had blossomed earlier in 19th century Europe allied themselves with anticolonialism especially in the Soviet revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949. A complex, shifting relationship between anticolonialism and anticapitalism continues to evolve in both the Global South and the former colonial powers.

As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc.

The private capitalist classes atop each colonialist nation had understood the colonies’ importance for their profits and thus for their imperial economies. They went to war in large part to retain their colonies. After the two world wars, they faced, separately and together, momentous challenges to their existence. As their empires dissolved in wars of independence, capitalists’ profits and their national economies were threatened. Worse still was a potential alliance linking ex-colonies, the Comintern nations, and those capitalists’ own domestic socialist and communist parties and unions. Fearing such developments, nothing less than the survival of 20th century European capitalism seemed at stake for European capitalists and their supporters.

To undo this threat, Western Europe appealed to the post-World War II global hegemon: the United States. Within a few years of 1945, the US had scooped up much of what European and Japanese colonialisms had lost. US capitalists moved into newly independent ex-colonies to widen and deepen their economic dependence via the dollar as world currency, through both US trade and investment. European capitalists had to settle for positions as junior partners of their US counterparts, or else lost everything. Europe as a whole followed suit and became the junior partner of the US in most other dimensions (NATO, geopolitics, financial and cultural institutions, etc.).

Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.

As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc. The US could do this because it had suffered far less than any of the other capitalist colonial nations from the two world wars. Indeed, World War II had extracted the US from capitalism’s worst ever crash. Its economy was stronger in 1945 than it had been for many years, whereas in all the former colonizing nations the reverse was the case. That economic strength contributed to its dominant military power.

US hegemony defined itself as a moral crusade against a great evil, the USSR (equated with communism). The US was “the leader of the free world” pitted against an unfree world — the USSR, Eastern Europe, and, after 1949, China. The latter were all demonized as anticapitalist dictatorships, which made them enemies of “democracy” as championed in and by the free world. On that basis, US hegemony followed as the necessary condition to “contain” the unfree world, to prevent its spread. The US-led “free world” could and would guarantee containment by means of global military bases, the world’s greatest military arsenal, ideological campaigns, political isolation, and economic discriminations. The world thus entered into a Cold War between 1945-1990 punctuated by military — hot — wars when the US deemed them necessary (for example, in Korea and Vietnam).

US hegemony also included domestic campaigns inside both Europe and the US aimed at containment. Those campaigns all featured two parts. One was a set of “welfare state” or social democratic benefits for working classes. Leading politicians in North America, Western Europe, and Japan installed those benefits. Many feared that not doing so would influence working classes toward socialism and communism. In the US, this meant perpetuating the 1930s New Deal into the 1970s. Successive leaders, Republican as well as Democratic, added Medicare to Social Security, regularly raised minimum wages, gave special attention to the non-white and non-male victims of systemic discrimination, subsidized higher education via massive public institutions, and subsidized home ownership loans. Such state interventions delivered a much less harsh life for working classes than any prior private capitalism had ever done. Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.

capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”

The other part of these containment campaigns involved widespread purges of Communists, socialists, and their “fellow travelers.” In the US, a ferocious “anti-communism” project “cleansed” labor unions, schools, mass media, and government of leftist employees. Capitalist employers’ organizations and many individual capitalists collaborated with the state’s repressive campaigns. They mobilized behind Sen. Joseph McCarthy for a few years. His was a particularly extreme version of the old American political style of demonizing political opponents, foreign and domestic, as “of the devil.” The US House of Representatives established an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Such campaigns’ ostensible objective was to destroy the Communist Party. Mass media circuses, newspaper headlines, arrests, prison sentences, deportations, and getting witnesses to betray others — resulting in losing their jobs — were their means. Guilt by association targeted both socialists and independent left-leaning citizens. Purges identified many victims by citing their activities before 1945. It made little difference that at the time those activities (in unions, political parties, schools, churches, and civic associations) were both legal and often patriotically anti-fascist. The systematic repression of the US left after 1945 left deep political scars.

Western Europe dutifully undertook a similarly two-sided project. However, social conditions there imposed different qualities on it anti-Soviet and domestic anti-left campaigns. Europe’s pre-1945 history gave communist and socialist parties and their millions of members much greater social approval than existed in the US. Leftists’ roles in resisting fascism before and during World War II — often heroic — gave them genuine, widespread popularity. They could defend their political views, and themselves, in ways their US counterparts could not. European welfare states were more generous and lasted longer than their US counterparts.

While nothing quite like McCarthyism swept Europe, most Western European nations joined NATO and aligned their foreign policies to the US-led containment agenda. Their defense budgets and capabilities declined, and they relied instead on US military protection. What each European state saved by means of small defense budgets it could then use to provide public services for their working classes. The latter might otherwise have required higher taxes on corporations and the rich (and not only or chiefly on working people). European capitalists supported their welfare states partly because they endorsed containment. Equally important, capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”

For the last 75 years, European politicians who hesitated to embrace the positions and tones consistent with the US-European “consensus” on foreign and domestic policies saw their career opportunities threatened or destroyed. The British sought and found a special role as the closest friend and imitator of the US in this consensus. The rest of Western Europe sometimes mocked Britain’s fawning subordination, but many jealously and secretly approximated it. European capitalists looked longingly at the US’s steadily shrinking welfare state programs that facilitated tax cuts on corporations and the rich. However, those non-Anglo Europeans accepted the political limits that rendered matching the US and UK impossible. They could only hold back the domestic power of their working classes by providing generous social welfare policies. The same was required to make Western Europe a consumerist bulwark against Russia, thereby to contain it and its Eastern European allies.

Breaking from those limits only became thinkable when it was made necessary. This happened when Trump ended the post-1945 US-Europe deal. His “friendliness” with Russia underscored his evident contempt for Western Europe as a junior partner/dependent that was too costly to carry anymore. His trade and tariff wars, pointedly, did not exempt Europe. The tariffs particularly shocked Western European capitalists who had concentrated during reconstruction (1945-1975) on producing goods and services that could compete in the rich US market. The tariffs also occurred just when Trump reduced support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and sharply criticized NATO. For shocked Western European leaders, Trump broke the US-European deals of the post-1945 world.

Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires.

Ever since 1945, Western European capitalists had set themselves to rebuild their economies by producing goods and services of better quality and/or cheaper than the US output that dominated both the US and other markets. This included some investments in their former colonies, rendering them economically dependent notwithstanding their political independence. The latter became more performative than substantive. It remains that way in many areas. The crucially important exception was the spectacular economic growth of the People’s Republic of China. China’s growth changed everything, and continues to do so. It is transforming the world economy as it takes an ever more powerful place therein.

China’s still-export-driven manufacturing economy competes globally and ever more successfully with what remains of manufacturing in the US and in Europe. China competes, as well as an importer of energy and other inputs. Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires. Europe already had had a century of decline, whereas the US was new to decline, with many of its citizens steadfastly committed to denial as their coping mechanism of choice.

Western European capitalism had partly offset its decline first by post-war reconstruction, then by explosions of consumer credit. Then, and especially after 1989, Europe welcomed waves of cheap immigrant labor while expanding eastward to re-absorb Eastern Europe into its economic operations, much as it was doing with its former colonies. Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism. Fantasies swirled about extending those mechanisms eastward to include Russia, perhaps dividing it up into smaller states as manageable as the Eastern European states were. If somehow achieved, that could give Western Europe an immense new geographic expanse to economically colonize. Trump, too, engaged parallel fantasies in his neocolonial gestures toward Panama, Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico.

Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism.

The great break in post-World War II US-European relations came with Trump’s combination trade and tariff war designed to “make the US economy great again.” Trump had effectively dedicated his second presidential term, begun in January 2025, to waging this economic war. Another part of that war was a broad turn away from neoliberal globalization and toward a systematic economic nationalism (“America first”). Trump’s blunt message was disengagement. Europe could no longer count on the US to provide it with military protection. Trump depicted Europe as an ally who had betrayed and cheated the US economically. He demanded payments as compensation. Those took the form of buying US liquified natural gas (LNG) for its energy needs plus committing to invest $700 billion or more in the US over a few coming years. Von der Leyen formally acceded to Trump’s demands. Such payments amounted to either tribute or reparations, depending on one’s viewpoint.

Europe’s required purchase of US LNG emerged from the Russia-Ukraine war. The economic sanctions of that war (since February 2022) plus the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (in September 2022) sharply reduced and then ended the flow of cheap energy from Russia into Germany and other parts of Western Europe. Desperate for access to energy, Europe turned increasingly to imports from elsewhere — and especially from the US — at a much higher cost. Meanwhile, steadily growing trade competition from China and more rapid technical innovations achieved in China and the US further squeezed the European economy.

The shock of Trump’s abandonment of Europe as the US economy’s junior partner accelerated Europe’s decline. Once it had been the dominating center of a planet it had colonized. Now it had fallen to a poor third place in a world economy increasingly dominated by what had once been the poor corners of that planet. On one side stood the declining but still strong US; on the other the rising People’s Republic of China. No wonder the Ukraine war drove Russia to declare its identity shifting from European to Asian.

Europe’s political leaders reflected and exemplified its decline. Burnham, Macron, Merz and Meloni especially — like most of their predecessors after 1945 — had built political lives around loyalty and subservience to the post-World War II deal with the US. They relied on the military, financial, and ideological support from the US, on NATO, on the IMF, the World Bank, and myriad NGO missionaries for US “democracy.” They championed their “close alliance” with the US as a key cause of Europe’s prosperity and peace after 1945. Betrayed by Trump, they were forced by Europe’s decline to pay tribute with monies therefore not available to offset that decline. Trump pointedly forced them to begin financing the huge costs of developing their own military defense (already far behind the military capabilities of the US, on one side, and the China-Russia alliance on the other).

European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both.

Given the deep personal opportunism cultivated in Western European leaders by their subordinate (to the US) situation, they grasped that Trump’s betrayal threatened their careers. Trump’s repeated insults of and disdain for Western Europe risked provoking European voters to turn against leaders seen as slavish toward Trump’s US. Those leaders’ alarm only deepened as much of the US employer class seemed quite supportive of Trump’s anti-Europeanism. Perhaps their greatest fear lay in the possible reactions of European voters once they understood that Trump’s betrayal posed serious economic dangers for them. Voters might ask where the money would come from to finance European rearmament when the US defense umbrella closed. If enhanced, would budget allocations for the military diminish outlays for mass public social services, raise their taxes, or both? Europeans began to wonder out loud whether the Ukraine-Russia war being fought to the last Ukrainian might prefigure a US war with Russia/China fought to the last European. European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both. How that plays out in European politics provides new opportunities for the left and the right and existential threats to the traditional centrist pro-US political leadership trying desperately to retain power.

Nationalist politicians on the European right see their opportunity. Office-holding conservative leaders (like Burnham, Macron, and Merz, for example) can be voted out via guilt by subordination. They perpetuated the post-World War II programs that made Europe vulnerable to its current economic decline because of their subservience to the US. Western European opportunism now incites the suspicion that maybe it bet on the wrong horse. A similar suspicion now arises in some of the Gulf States in the wake of the US-Israel war on Iran. Having “invited” US military bases to be constructed on their land for security, they now see that those bases actually achieved the opposite. The bases and their host nations have become endangered targets vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles.

Anticapitalist politicians on the left also see an opportunity. The US was a partner who mostly pushed Europe to the right. The US undid its New Deal sooner and took that undoing further than the Europeans dared to even try to do to their welfare state. 

Among the results of Europe’s left: it abolished the death penalty when the US pointedly did not. Military adventures, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine and Iran, were always started, led, and driven by the US with the Europeans marginally along as “coalitions of the [barely] willing.” Left politicians in Western Europe kept seeking to secure, if not advance, social democratic goals and policies. One way to do that was to limit the US connection as a context for more socialistic development in Europe. The European left positions itself as the way for the mass beneficiaries of the social democratic state to protect it from a US-connected old leadership that always seems to threaten social democracy. Europe’s left likewise rejects the nationalist right politicians because of their pro-capitalist, anti-worker and anti-immigrant tendencies.

Europe’s old US-linked political leaders have now found a way to arrest, or maybe even reverse, Europe’s frightening decline. It is the only way to do that they can see or imagine. That way can, they believe, both keep them in power in the short run and give them a new economic growth opportunity in the longer term. That way provides a convenient public justification for shifting state budget expenditures from public social services to big-business defense firms, from social democracy to pro-employer (pro-capitalist) austerity. By minimizing any extra taxes upon their employer classes, Western European leaders serve them very well. They will cover the costs of rearmament and tribute obligated to the US by diverting funds from the welfare state plus state-guaranteed borrowing plus heightened mass-based taxes, if needed, on working classes. Domestic austerity will be intensified across Western Europe while wages are brought downward toward southern and eastern European levels.

The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.

Europe’s leaders believe they can accomplish this by pumping up mass anxiety and fear around urgent preparations for a war against Russia. To that end, they demonize Russia beyond even the levels achieved against Stalin and Stalinism during the Cold War. Those leaders hope that an adequately terrified Europe will keep voting for them for a while. Longer-run hopes entail imagining Russia’s military defeat and consequent de jure or de facto dismemberment. The resulting subunits of old Russia would then offer Western Europe a new colonial opportunity, a vast expanse for profitable investment to obtain food, raw materials, and possibly workers to rejuvenate Western European capitalism. The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.

All wars are overdetermined by both domestic and international causes intertwined. Europe’s current drone and missile warfare against Russia escalated from the Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine that began in 2022. Its local overdeterminants began earlier. Local concerns woven into global shifts — NATO toward the east and China toward the west — shaped Russia’s changing international position, concerns, and “red lines.” The whole world watches as China, Russia, and their allies square off against the US and whatever allies it retains. The world sees the wars in Ukraine and Iran today as conflicts among proxies of the two great powers of our time.

The danger inherent in both wars is that Europe or the US or Russia or Israel might resort to nuclear weapons if “existentially” threatened. The question is whether global masses and leaders can recognize the danger. This essay is one effort toward that recognition. The solution is a serious commitment to international collaboration. What began as the League of Nations and was rebuilt as the United Nations needs still another incarnation with real powers and real global respect. Otherwise we risk World War III and its mad, mutual assured destruction.

As wildfires ravaged large swaths of the Western US, a group of Democratic senators on Monday called on federal regulators to rein in prediction markets offering contracts tied to such disasters, warning that turning climate-fueled extreme weather into financial wagers creates “perverse incentives” that could motivate arson and other crimes.

In a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig, Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Adam Schiff (Calif.), Jacky Rosen (Nevada), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), Martin Heinrich (NM), Ron Wyden (Ore.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote that “prediction markets have been enabled to expand rapidly, increasingly inviting speculation on war, political violence, disasters, and public emergencies that raise ethical and public policy concerns.”

These markets risk creating perverse incentives, undermining public trust, and commodifying human suffering in ways that warrant careful scrutiny,” the lawmakers continued. “Recent public reports have highlighted how Polymarket—the largest prediction market platform in the world—accepted more than $1.2 million in bets surrounding the Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025. These fires devastated the Los Angeles area, claiming the lives of 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.”

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter argues. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”

Allowing prediction markets on wildfires is outrageously dangerous and will incentivize bad actors to spread or even start fires themselves. Frankly, this is betting on the suffering of our neighbors and families.

I’m demanding the CFTC crack down on this practice before… pic.twitter.com/EMZ0Al5vq0

— Senator Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto) August 4, 2026

“By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading,” the senators added.

The CFTC controversially considers Polymarket and Kalshi designated contract markets (DCMs)—over which the federal agency has control versus state gambling regimes—and is currently developing nationwide rules.

The letter’s signers asked Selig:

• Is the CFTC considering prohibiting DCMs from offering event contracts on wildfires as part of the rulemaking process currently underway, given they are against the public’s interest?
• Does the CFTC have any plans to curb bets on wildfires on prediction markets in the United States?
• Does the agency have plans to address these contracts being offered on offshore markets?
• Does the CFTC believe event contracts offered on the following wildfire-related events are in the public interest?
• Does the commission have guidance or planned enforcement related to these wildfire event contracts?

“As the United States faces yet another record-breaking fire season this year, the [CFTC] cannot allow these prediction markets to offer unrestricted betting on wildfires,” the senators stressed. “While these bets appear to be offered only on the offshore Polymarket site, it is only a matter of time before other US-based designated contract markets try to offer these. The CFTC must lead the charge to rein in these contracts in the US and offshore and put in place commonsense guardrails to prevent people from profiting as wildfires threaten communities.”

In addition to wildfires, Polymarket users can place wagers related to earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.

Polymarket responded to the senators’ letter in a statement to Claims Journal saying, “When tragedy unfolds, people turn to the news for commentary and to Polymarket for information.”

“While we recognize the risks associated with these markets, removing them does not prevent a tragedy,” the company added. “It only makes timely, market-based information less accessible to those seeking to understand what may happen next.”

The senators’ letter came days after Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit targeting Polymarket competitor Kalshi for operating as “an illegal gambling operation” in “flagrant disregard” for the Empire State’s “Constitution, penal laws, and other statutes.”

Last month, a coalition of consumer advocacy groups condemned the CFTC’s attempt to allow platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket “a green light to bypass state gambling regimes.”

“Calling a sports wager an ‘event contract’ does not transform it into a legitimate tool for managing economic risk,” said Eric Naing, communications director for Demand Progress Education Fund, one of the groups decrying the regulator’s approach to such companies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated our workplaces, where many employers have sought to boost productivity, cut labor costs, and eliminate jobs via the technology. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that 1 in 5 workers now use AI in their jobs.

Organized labor’s response to the AI has been fraught. Where some see an inevitable shift that simply needs to be regulated and could potentially even create jobs, others see a dangerous trend that will result in further job losses along with a variety of other problems.

The tension is succinctly summarized by a recent Politico headline: “Voters fear AI. Unions want the jobs.”

The ongoing debate over data centers encapsulates this tension. Across the country, community members have spearheaded efforts to block their construction over concerns about water depletion, higher utility bills, noise, and air pollution.

In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) introduced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act, which would institute a pause on data center construction until federal safeguards can be established. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue,” said Sanders in a statement on the bill. “The time for action is now.”

The legislative effort is backed by multiple unions including National Nurses United (NNU), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the Association of Flight Attendants. “The unchecked explosion of AI data centers is a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis,” declared NNU co-president Jamie Brown at a press conference announcing the bill.

However, there are also many unions that oppose any moratorium on data centers, particularly building trade unions that believe such construction can stimulate economic growth for struggling communities and provide members with work.

“We need the guardrails on AI, we just don’t think that a moratorium is the way to get there,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told Punchbowl News in June.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is even calling on members to contact their congressional representatives and make social media posts connected to the issue. “I’m a proud IBEW member and I oppose any bans on data center construction since these bans would eliminate good-paying union jobs,” reads suggested text for a social media post.

In June, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the groundbreaking ceremony for Oracle and OpenAI’s planned 1.4-gigawatt data center in the state’s Saline Township. Alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Whitmer told the assembled crowd that the state was setting an example for “the rest of the world” by ensuring the “responsible adoption” of AI.

The project was opposed by many residents and local lawmakers. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) called it “disgusting” and said she was “disappointed” with Whitmer, while Democratic State Rep. Dylan Wegela of Garden City said it was a “complete betrayal of the working class” and that the governor had sold out “Michigan to big tech billionaires.”

However, the data center was backed by North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), and its president, Sean McGarvey, was present at the groundbreaking. “America’s ability to lead in the next era of innovation depends, in part, on America’s ability to build, and our members are proud to be helping make that future possible,” he told the crowd.

Speaking to Politico in June, Senator Sanders’s chief political adviser, Faiz Shakir, said that the data center jobs heralded by certain unions won’t necessarily establish lasting occupations.

“It’s fine to say that [data centers will] be built with good-paying union jobs now — and I hope that that’s the case — but what we’re also looking for on behalf of the working class of America is long-term sustainability of jobs,” he said. “It doesn’t help a lot in our view if you have a short-term infusion of good, union paying jobs at the cost of the decimation of many, many long-term jobs.”

Support for AI within organized labor is receiving a boost from AI companies themselves. Last year, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced that it would create an AI training hub in New York City via $23 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

“The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots,” noted The New York Times. “These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was inspired by the work of other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, and that the idea for the National Academy for AI Instruction sprang from a partnership established between Microsoft and the AFL-CIO in 2023.

“AI holds tremendous promise but huge challenges — and it’s our job as educators to make sure AI serves our students and society, not the other way around,” declared Weingarten. “The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies, but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.”

The way Weingarten is selling the hub is seemingly at odds with that of Roy Bahat, who first proposed the idea. In a LinkedIn post made shortly after the announcement, Bahat, who heads the venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta, essentially admits that the center can serve as a test case for applying AI more broadly — or, as Nolan Higdon put it in Truthdig: “Teachers are guinea pigs in Big Tech’s broader project to reengineer labor, one profession at a time.”

“If we can figure out how teachers should teach with and about AI, we can affect the lives of millions of educators, and millions and millions of young people,” explains Bahat in the post. “And if we can figure out how to train teachers on using AI, maybe we can figure it out for other occupations.”

The training hub, and union leadership’s wider connections to AI, have sparked criticism from labor activists and rank-and-file members.

“Using AI compliments, intensifies, and accelerates privatization of the public sector, and that’s in addition to any harm that it’s doing to work.”

“Using AI compliments, intensifies, and accelerates privatization of the public sector, and that’s in addition to any harm that it’s doing to work,” author and teacher union activist Lois Weiner told Truthout. “The labor movement should be contesting the idea that the imposition of AI is inevitable. That’s the labor movement’s responsibility.”

“What makes this so disturbing is that it raises fully the problem of union democracy,” she added. “These decisions were made without informed debate with union members. They have a moral responsibility to community and the kids we serve to have a voice.”

Trevor Griffey, a labor historian, lecturer at UCLA and UC Irvine, and vice president of legislation for AFT Local 1474, told Truthout that, since the collaboration was established, the AFT national has focused too much on trying to help teachers adapt to AI, and too little on organizing worker power in school districts. He believes unions should go on the offensive and push for deeper reforms, as AI is already having a dramatic impact. He points out that groups like the California Federation of Labor Unions are trying to bring together statewide unions in California to lobby on a range of bills targeting the dangers of Big Tech.

“The question is less where unions stand on AI or other forms of technology, and more how they organize to resist the unsafe and unethical use of automation at work,” he told Truthout. “Unions need to invest in strategic research and organizing to support workers most likely to be negatively impacted by employers’ adoption of AI-powered technology — both at work, and in building political power sufficient to prevent the unethical and unsafe use of new technology. Beyond just regulating AI, unions should push for full employment and/or universal income policies to mitigate the disruptions to people’s lives that AI-related layoffs are already having.”

These sentiments were echoed by Vishal Reddy, a union negotiator for nursing home workers and the executive director of WorkFour.

“Unions at the local, international, and federation levels need to put real money and organizing capacity into figuring out which affirmative AI-related demands — four-day workweek, UBI [universal basic income], AI dividends, and so on — actually resonate with a wide swath of workers,” he told Truthout. “Just like in bargaining, we want to know which affirmative policy would be most deeply and widely felt, so we can prioritize it in the fights ahead, including May Day 2028.”

“That means cross-union convenings, issue campaigns, commissioned polling and research, and real resourcing behind the bargaining fights where these policies are already surfacing,” Reddy added. “For example, if a fight over a 32-hour workweek is on the table somewhere, that’s exactly where the labor movement should be throwing its weight.”

Hundreds of noncitizens detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gone on hunger strikes across the country to protest the widespread denial of due process and deteriorating conditions in detention centers during the Trump administration, according to advocates and detainees.

Conditions in ICE detention facilities have never been good, typically prompting around a dozen hunger strikes a year, said Josefina Mora-Cheung, director of organizing at La Resistencia, a grassroots organization that supports detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWPIC) in Tacoma, Washington. Last year, La Resistencia documented 16 such protests, mostly carried out by single detainees. But this year, the group has already documented 18 hunger strikes involving about 25 individuals at NWPIC, the most recent of which ended July 20. 

“This year we’ve seen such a skyrocketing of numbers that indicates how much people are willing to put their lives at risk in order to call attention to these conditions that are ultimately life-threatening for people,” Mora-Cheung said. “People are not willing to give up so easily or to have their spirits broken.”

Hunger strikes in ICE jails have also been reported at Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California; North Lake Processing Center in Michigan; Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania; Prairieland Detention Center and Camp East Montana in Texas; Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico; the ICE unit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary or “Angola”; and Delaney Hall in New Jersey. About 500 noncitizens have reportedly joined the strikes.

Advocates say there have likely been more hunger strikes across the 425 jails administered by ICE and its network of private contractors, but the agency denies they are taking place and, according to the advocates, quickly tries to break them up through threats or coercion. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. 

Detainees complain about inhumane conditions—including unsanitary food and water, lack of medical care, widespread physical abuse, and retaliation for filing complaints—along with racist abuse and a complete absence of justice and due process.

Take the case of Rogelio Bolufé Izquierdo, a Cuban national who has gone on multiple hunger strikes, including one that lasted nine days in Torrance. Initially sent to the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, Bolufé was transferred nine times in retaliation for his organizing, according to La Resistencia.

Bolufé spoke with Prism over the phone from Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he was deported in June despite having an open asylum case and a pending appeal before an immigration court.

He claimed that detainees are denied access to legal counsel at the Torrance ICE jail and very likely at the other jails where he’d been detained. He also claimed that his legal court documents were taken from him and that facilities do not provide mail service, which is the only way detainees can follow their deportation proceedings or request asylum. 

“That was one of the main reasons we went on hunger strike,” Bolufé said.

“The legal proceedings do not follow due process. They are a farce,” he added. “The Fifth Amendment does not exist in U.S. immigration proceedings.”

Torturous conditions in ICE jails have been well-documented by advocacy groups over the past two decades. These conditions have not only persisted during the current Trump administration but have worsened, according to advocates.

At least 52 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year. According to Human Rights Watch, this mortality rate is nearly four times that of the Biden administration and more than two and a half times that of the first Trump administration.

In the largest documented hunger strike of the year, at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, more than 300 men and women participated in a weekslong labor and hunger strike that ended in June. They denounced degrading conditions and a lack of due process, including arbitrary denials of bond and coercion to sign legal documents that would result in deportation.

“We see with profound helplessness and frustration that the right to due process & legal counsel were violated, and benefits granted in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution were unacknowledged,” wrote 25 of the Delaney Hall hunger strikers in a public letter. The author, identified as Leonardo Villalba, was summarily transferred to another ICE jail, according to the letter’s postscript.

ICE could not simply deny that the massive hunger strike at Delaney Hall was happening, so agents resorted to violence, said Jenny García, a campaign coordinator at the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee’s New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program. ICE officers cut off the detainees’ external communication, repeatedly threatened to sabotage their cases, and brutally assaulted and pepper-sprayed them, García said.

Hunger strikers at Torrance were stripped naked and sent to cold cells, where they were exposed to 24-hour lighting, according to Bolufé, who spent seven months in that prison. Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant and refugee justice organization, has documented these cold chambers at Torrance, calling them torture.

At some point during his strike, Bolufé said he asked himself, “Why should I go on if it makes no sense? No one will find out. It’s a lawless situation; the law isn’t respected here, no one will know.”

Despite the odds, strikes have brought individual victories: answers about cases from ICE officials, release from solitary confinement, and release from detention altogether at NWPIC and Delaney Hall, which also secured $12 million in pro bono legal services, said Mora-Cheung.

“This is strong,” García said about the ability of detainees to organize and encourage one another amid the horrific and inhumane conditions in which they are confined. “What’s happening inside is the best of humanity.”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a new request they filed today that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal’s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.

Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, “each attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,” argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. 

Grote told Truthout the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the “failures of the criminal legal system” in Abu-Jamal’s case, including an “unfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.” 

The UN determination of whether someone faces “arbitrary detention” is interpreted “more broadly” than simply being “against the law.” It also considers “elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.” 

Abu-Jamal’s lawyers say he was in “continuous solitary confinement” from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania’s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal’s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team’s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later “developed a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated” by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock “due to untreated hyperglycemia” caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

“I have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,” Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called “Mumia’s Vision: A Message for the Movement.” He explained he had “been reluctant to talk about my eye problems” because “any sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs” in prison, since it “brings predation.”

His legal team’s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal “began experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery” that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to “suffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.” 

“He is old and he is sick,” Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout. “This is someone who should not be incarcerated.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal’s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the United Nations. In 2023, they also asked the UN Human Rights Committee to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for “a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,” which opponents often call “death by incarceration” because of the lack of opportunity for review and release. 

Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, “We are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.” 

In 2020, the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was asked by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he — like Abu-Jamal — faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded in 2022 by calling on the U.S. government to “immediately” release Peltier after concluding the “cumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies” he “suffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.” In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. 

Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team’s submission to the UN. She notes how “international pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.” For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says “a lot of the work” that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole “happened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.” 

Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but “thankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,” Grote told Truthout. 

In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented “an undue risk of escape or danger to the community.”

The UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms.”

Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout, “Mumia’s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.” She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India’s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill. 

Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted “second look” policies to allow judges to review a person’s sentence, so Abu-Jamal’s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal “if new evidence justifies it,” Grote told Truthout, noting Abu Jamal’s case is 44 years old and “even more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.” Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms” and “offer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.” 

Correction note: This article was edited to clarify that the petition for Leonard Peltier was filed by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and that the 2023 moratorium on LWOP recommendation came from the UN Human Rights Committee.