United States | News & Politics

Senator Bernie Sanders says Kennedy’s policies threaten Americans’ health and future.

James Gallagher put forth resolution to split state after Democratic bid to redraw in response to Texas gerrymander

Some National Guard units patrolling Washington, D.C., have begun carrying firearms, marking an escalation in President Donald Trump's military deployment in response to crime concerns. This directive, authorized by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, allows armed units to operate under strict rules of engagement, stating that force should only be used as a last resort[^3][^9]. The move comes amidst Trump's threats to expand military presence to other Democratic-led cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, and New York, drawing criticism from local leaders[^2][^8].

According to reports, some National Guard members were seen carrying handguns while patrolling areas like Union Station, with the Pentagon indicating that troops on specific missions would be armed[^5][^10]. The deployment has sparked protests and raised concerns about the militarization of law enforcement in urban areas, particularly those governed by Democrats[^7][^9].

Trump's actions have been met with strong opposition from Democratic officials, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who criticized the federal intervention as unnecessary and politically motivated[^2][^8].

[^2]: NBC Washington - Trump expands cities targeted for possible military deployment to Baltimore in a spat with governor
[^3]: Los Angeles Times - Some National Guard units in D.C. are now carrying firearms in escalation of Trump deployment
[^5]: Yahoo News - Some National Guard units in Washington are now carrying firearms in escalation of Trump deployment
[^8]: WRAL - Pentagon says some Guard units in Washington are now carrying firearms. Trump targets more cities
[^9]: ABC News - Hegseth authorizes Guard troops in DC to carry weapons
[^10]: The Hindu - Pentagon says some National Guard units in Washington now carrying firearms as Trump targets more cities

A South Florida gymnastics coach accused of sexually assaulting at least three underage girls who were his students has been sentenced to 12 years in prison as part of a plea deal

The Republican-controlled Texas house on Wednesday approved a redrawn congressional map requested by Donald Trump and fiercely opposed by Democrats, who led a weeks-long protest to stall the effort that kicked off a coast-to-coast redistricting arms race between red and blue states.

With the house’s approval, the measure next goes to the state senate, where it is expected to pass, possibly as soon as Thursday. It would then be sent to the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, for his promised signature before taking effect.

Americans are moving at record-low rates, with only 7.8% relocating in 2023, the lowest since 1948. Families are stuck in homes that are too small or no longer suitable due to high mortgage rates, limited inventory, and skyrocketing prices. Those who have low-rate mortgages are reluctant to sell.

Workers are less likely to switch jobs or relocate for work than in previous decades. Recent grads face long, difficult job searches, often turning down offers due to low pay or lack of relocation support. Many are choosing to stay local, even if it means settling for less.

Employees with low mortgage rates, stock options, or bonus plans are staying put to avoid losing financial perks. Dual-income households and family obligations further reduce mobility.

The world economy is like a supercomputer that churns through trillions of calculations of prices and quantities, and spits out information on incomes, wealth, profits, and jobs. This is effectively how capitalism works—as a highly efficient information-processing system. To do that job, like any computer, capitalism runs on both hardware and software. The hardware is the markets, institutions, and regulatory regimes that make up the economy. The software is the governing economic ideas of the day—in essence, what society has decided the economy is for.

Most of the time, the computer works quite well. But now and then, it crashes. Usually when that happens, the world economy just needs a software update—new ideas to address new problems. But sometimes it needs a major hardware modification as well. We are in one of those Control-Alt-Delete moments. Against the background of tariff wars, market angst about U.S. debt, tumbling consumer confidence, and a weakening dollar watched over by a heedless administration, globalization’s American-led era of free trade and open societies is coming to a close.

The global economy is getting a hardware refit and trying out a new operating system—in effect, a full reboot, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century. To understand why this is happening and what it means, we need to abandon any illusion that the worldwide turn toward right-wing populism and economic nationalism is merely a temporary error, and that everything will eventually snap back to the relatively benign world of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The computer’s architecture is changing, but how this next version of capitalism will work depends a great deal on the software we choose to run on it. The governing ideas about the economy are in flux: We have to decide what the new economic order looks like and whose interests it will serve.

Read: Americans want to be rich

The last such force-quit, hard-restart period was in the 1930s. In the United States, the huge liquidity crunch caused by the 1929 Wall Street crash combined with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to kill commercial activity and trigger the Great Depression. Bank failures swiftly turned into a mass failure of firms and industries; wages tumbled and unemployment shot up, in some areas to a quarter of the workforce. Despite the state interventions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, the economic situation stabilized and returned to sustained growth only in the ’40s, when wartime re-armament delivered a huge industrial stimulus.

The computer built for the postwar period was solving to avoid a repeat of the ’30s. The software update was a new governing idea of full employment. Achieving that aim as the central raison d’être of the economy also entailed several hardware modifications. One was a policy of forcing wealth owners to use their capital locally by limiting their ability to move it out of the country. To maintain their profits, they were obliged to invest in technology that would increase productivity. In this virtuous cycle, high productivity allowed for high wages, which the state could then tax to fund social transfers. Combined with the government-spending power of revenues raised by high marginal taxes, America’s welfare state was born. Labor unions were seen more as partners in business enterprises, and political parties needed to appeal to the median, middle-income voter. These changes produced a political system in which the two main parties competed over a centrist consensus so bipartisan that people struggled to see the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

The New Deal did indeed avoid a repeat of the ’30s, but its software had a bug. If full employment meant running the economy hot to keep unemployment down, then eventually employers’ ability to keep their profits up by augmenting productivity would fail as workers’ demand for higher wages outstripped firms’ ability to pay them. By the mid-’70s, profits were falling as wages and inflation rose, so the U.S. investor class reached for the reboot switch. Holders of capital founded political-action committees, funded think tanks and media outlets to promote free enterprise, and helped get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980. Reagan busted unions and deregulated markets, accelerating the movement of capital from union strongholds to “right to work” states, which was effectively an onshore tryout of offshoring. Simultaneously, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker raised interest rates to almost 20 percent to squeeze inflation, a measure that induced a harsh recession, which disciplined labor further by raising unemployment.

As all of that implies, full employment ceased to be the governing economic idea. The software rewrite of this era instead made price stability, capital mobility, and the restoration of profits via globalization the new priorities. The hardware modification was to make central banks more independent—the better to enforce price stability and enable the recovery of profits. These new priorities were justified by Margaret Thatcher’s famous nostrum that “there is no alternative.” This reboot has come to be known as neoliberalism.

Read: The debate that will determine how the Democrats govern next time

The computer was humming along again when I arrived from Scotland to attend graduate school in New York in the summer of 1992. The U.S. had entered a period that Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor (and later Fed chair), called the “Great Moderation.” Globalization was good; finance was the future. Central banks had delivered sustainable prosperity, and the investor class saw its profits restored on a transnational scale.

Once again, however, the system had a bug. The increase in profitability came not only as a result of improved domestic productivity but also at the expense of once-stable industrial regions of the U.S., as jobs, skills, and capital flowed out. Meanwhile, the authorities had presided over the deregulation of financial markets, which supplied the economy with copious credit. But one effect of this credit was to mask a chronic lack of wage growth and a rising level of inequality.

That turned out to be a major hardware issue: Neoliberalism’s financialized solutions to economic problems became liabilities when the next crash came, in 2008, as a tsunami of credit became an earthquake of debt. The hardware modification of the era—independent central banks—saved the system with colossal bailouts of the private sector, paid for by the public sector in the form of ever greater debt and more stringent fiscal policies. This liquidity dump enabled the economy to stagger on through the slowest-ever recovery from a recession—but only by pushing the bulk of the costs of those bailouts onto those least able to bear them. Signs of profound public disaffection in Western countries started to show in 2016: first with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, then with Donald Trump’s rise in the U.S.

Trump has acted as a catalyst for the next reboot. His hostile takeover of the Republican Party was leveraged by a new, more working-class electoral coalition based on a populist politics of resentment. His antipathy toward China may lack analysis, but by articulating a sense that American workers had lost out in the neoliberal era, it gave voice to authentic grievance. Trump’s chaotic first term made only limited progress in forcing another reboot, but his second term seems likely to foreclose on the Biden administration’s interim solution of keeping the neoliberal system running with a limited New Deal–like reindustrialization in new sectors such as renewable energy. The Inflation Reduction Act was a significant reinvention of industrial policy, something not seen for decades outside a national-security context, but Trump is abandoning this sort of intervention. Instead, he has chosen tariffs as his singular tool for reshoring industry.

To the extent that the Trumpian approach coheres, the economy’s new goal is to benefit native workers by restoring carbon-heavy industrial jobs while removing immigrants from the labor pool and encouraging women to have more children and become homemakers. This is not so much the building of a new computer system as the retrofitting of several old ones—a version of what a critic of Thatcherism once called “regressive modernisation.” The MAGA economic ideal derives from a blend of the 1950s, which saw a huge expansion of manufacturing jobs for men, and the ’40s, when women were pushed out of the wartime jobs and back into the home, and immigration was tightly restricted. This boost for the native labor force is in turn yoked to a 19th-century, mercantilist “spheres of influence” foreign policy.

This hodgepodge of historical impulses speaks to the unsettled nature of Trumponomics. No new economic order is discernible, because the governing idea is still contested. The national-conservative movement, which seeks to rebrand the GOP as a workers’ party, has one vision, but other forces are also trying to shape this moment. The “Dark Enlightenment” wing of the tech sector is a player, too. Overinvested in AI and keen to grab government funding that was earmarked for elite research universities, the Silicon Valley billionaires imagine an economy that runs not as a return to hard-hat industry’s glorious past but as a posthuman future of automation and space exploration.

The problem with such projects is that we cannot go back, any more than we can leap into the future; we can live only in the present. The populist-right reset will fail because tariffs may spur some reindustrialization, but robots will be the main producers, not working-class men on an assembly line. And little suggests that most women will relish the return to hearth and home that is planned for them. The techno-futurist update has nothing to offer the great mass of humanity and would benefit only the tech lords most invested in its realization.

Read: What Chris Murphy learned from the new right

So we seem to be stuck, which is why this moment is so perplexing. The system upgrade is pending: The right is offering its regressive modernization as the update. The left has yet to figure out which one of three paths it wants to take.

One possibility is to stay put with the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party and wait for Trumpism to implode. That might happen, and the Democrats’ current position as the party of the institutionalist status quo makes this the most likely path. But this will be a losing proposition if no reversion to the mean of the pre-MAGA American politics occurs.

The effort by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to rally an anti-oligarchy movement advocates for a second option, of left-wing populism. But whether this appeals to young men who have been drawn to Trump, as well as young women who poll as more progressive, and can create a broad-enough coalition remains to be seen.

A third approach is the “abundance” agenda, promoted recently by Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, which proposes a progressive political program based on lower-regulation, pro-growth policies as a spark for renewed economic growth—though critics on the left accuse this approach of failing to confront corporate power.

To develop an alternative to the regressive modernization underpinning Trump’s reelection, the left must come up with a governing economic idea that can compete. Technocratic fixes of the old system look very unlikely to inspire a broad-enough coalition to defeat the potent, if unstable, electoral alliance that reelected Trump. The most promising avenue—one that could address the needs of millions of Americans who feel shut out of growth and prosperity and alienated from America’s governing elite—might be a fusion of AOC/Bernie populism with a more political, less technocratic version of abundance.

Regardless of whether such a project can materialize, we have to accept that a transformation is under way. A new economic order is forming—which means that it is not yet fixed and can still be shaped. But time is running out. As jumbled as the regressive modernization is, it could win the day if we do not come up with a different governing idea of what the economy is and whom it is for. And we need enough people in our democracy to agree that this new purpose is the right one. The ideas are there to be found. They just need politicians with the courage to try them.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits. One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move.

The move means that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service.

An Air Force spokesperson told The Associated Press that “although service members with 15 to 18 years of honorable service were permitted to apply for an exception to policy, none of the exceptions to policy were approved.” About a dozen service members had been “prematurely notified” that they would be able to retire before that decision was reversed, according to the spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Air Force policy.

A memo issued Monday announcing the new policy, which was reviewed by the AP, said that the choice to deny retirement benefits was made “after careful consideration of the individual applications.”

All transgender members of the Air Force are being separated from the service under the Trump administration’s policies.

President Donald Trump flew to Scotland, where he spent the weekend at his Turnberry resort playing golf. While the White House press corps and those credentialed to wander the grounds were rummaging through the resort, a Reuters photographer discovered some of the items up for sale in the new resort gift shop would normally be subject to hefty tariffs if sold in the United States.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Angela, are longtime owners of a $1.5 million house in a gated community outside Dallas. In 2015, they snapped up a second home in Austin. Then another.

The problem: Mortgages signed by the Paxtons contained inaccurate statements declaring that each of those three houses was their primary residence, enabling the now-estranged couple to improperly lock in low interest rates, according to an Associated Press review of public records. The lower rates will save the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars in payments over the life of the loan, legal experts say.

The records also revealed that the Paxtons collected an impermissible homestead tax break on two of those homes, and they have routinely flouted lending agreements on some of their other properties.

The British socialite reportedly initiated the meetings she had with Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche this week

A Bronx office of the US House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was vandalized early on Monday, according to New York City police, who say they are investigating.

The vandalism occurred after Ocasio-Cortez on Friday voted against a defense spending bill amendment authored by the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia that would have eliminated funding for the system protecting Israel from missiles.

Her vote on Greene’s amendment prompted the Democratic Socialists of America to issue a statement accusing Ocasio-Cortez of backing Israel’s “eliminationist campaign against the Palestinian people”.

The GOP-led House Rules Committee has shut down activity in the House this week to avoid having to take a vote on the Epstein files. It may not resume activity until September.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33239981

First, approximately 1,000 personnel in the Information Management Division (IMD) and the FBI New York Field Office were assigned to this task, confirming the whistleblower account made to Senator Durbin’s office. I can also confirm that a log exists tracking the mentions of Donald Trump in the files, and that there were approximately 100,000 files containing roughly 300,000 pages. Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they’d hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their (sometimes 24 or even 48-hour) shift. But it’s important to note that the agents were not told to flag Trump until later in a process that began mid-March.

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But there is a log of instances Donald Trump is mentioned in the files, there are video and PDF trainings instructing analysts to flag Trump, there were multiple instances of Trump appearing in the files, Patel and Bondi wanted victim information and PII, and sloppiness means that more people than previously known had access to the Epstein and Maxwell files. And while there was no indication of a ready-made, A to Z client list beyond the little black book that’s already public, “to say there’s nothing or to say it’s a hoax? Bullshit.”

https://archive.ph/ekOj3

Is this the location where he allegedly beat his mistress? Allegedly you betcha!

Is there anything more Trump-era Republican than fake-rich living beyond one’s means? And cheating on your wife, allegedly beating your mistress and lying about your finances and qualifications? Meet Florida Rep. Cory Mills, who is one messy pile of curb furniture! He’s getting evicted from the soon-to-be-divorced-dad pad he was sharing with his sidepiece because he owes his landlord more than $85,000 in unpaid rent, on a penthouse that’s nearly $21,000 a month! 

(If you live outside DC or New York or another large city, please understand that $21K per month is very expensive anywhere.)

How befitting for an arms-maker with shady finances. (You know, in case you were curious how he got approved for $21K per month on his $174,000 congressional salary.) If you’re wondering what the soon-to-be-available place looks like, TPM’s Josh Marshall found a link to a similar, slightly smaller penthouse in the complex. Oligarch chic!

The eviction scoop and receipts were picked up by former Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger and dropped on X, and Mills quickly X’d back the sorriest of excuses for not playing his bills:

Sure, guy, the multibillion-dollar management company Bozzuto left its website unable to collect rent from tenants for months on end and refused to accept payment in any other way. You know landlords, how they’re always so lackadaisical about collecting their money! (Especially when the rent is $21K.)

Always projection! Sollenberger added for good measure: 

FWIW, this isn't a surprise — Cory Mills has had foreclosure and lien troubles for more than a decade. What is a surprise is how a guy with his financial history is affording a penthouse in one of the most expensive rental properties in Washington, DC. (And a rented beach house.)

Sounds like he is NOT, that IS very mysterious, and ZING.

Sollenberger threw on the pile: 

New Cory Mills campaign filing shows $35,000 in legal payments from April through June, with another $41,000 in unpaid legal service fees, including $10,000 in "disputed" charges.

GET IT TOGETHER, CORY.

Mills also has even more swirling drama of the homewrecking and financial kind. 

His 17-years-younger girlfriend, Sarah Raviani, called 911 in February, claiming Mills had assaulted her, and that he was her partner of more than a year. Police saw fresh bruises on her, and heard Mills telling her on the phone to lie to them about the cause of her injuries. But then-acting US Attorney for DC Ed Martin wouldn’t sign his arrest warrant, Raviani retracted her statement, and the problem went away for him. Now Mills is getting evicted for nonpayment on that same place where it happened. Karmic!

Raviani is also co-founder of the group Iranians for Trump, where she “spearheaded efforts to mobilize Iranian-American voters.” Wonder if any in that group have some regrets now? Maybe one or two?

Oh, and Mills has a wife. She is an Iraqi refugee, and they have two sons. Holy near-east conflict!

Mills and wife were married by an Islamic cleric in Virginia in 2014, one Mohammad Al-Hanooti, who the Daily Mail insists is a Hamas supporter who had connections to some of the guys who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and who said in 1998 that “Allah will rain his curse on the Americans and the British.” (Maybe Mills is that curse?) Mills excused using such a controversial imam to marry them because, he said, they were in a big hurry for his soon-to-be wife to get a new green card so she could travel, and he was the only one they could find. Mkay!

And of course one of Mills’s favorite things to holler has been that Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden are like Al-Qaeda. Weird coming from this particular guy, but OK!

After the police report came out, Mills claimed he and the wife were in the process of divorce. I’ll bet! 

Don’t you just love how these are the people lecturing everybody else on FAMILY VALUES? Hope this eviction maybe helps Raviani move on with her life.

AND there’s more shadiness around Mills, because of course. Two ethics investigations: When he got elected in 2022 he owned a grenade and tear-gas-manufacturing concern, and the board of the Office of Congressional Conduct had some questions about what countries his clients were in, which Mills refused to answer. Also somehow a $1.8 million loan from Mills appeared in his campaign coffers, and nobody knows where he got that money. The Board concluded that “there is substantial reason to believe that Rep. Mills may have omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements,” and investigations allegedly continue.

A real peach, this one. He also likes to brag that his company’s tear gas was used on Black Lives Matter protesters, and their riot bullets on protesters in Hong Kong. He announced his arrival in the House in 2022 by gifting everyone an artisanal grenade.

[T]he guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear—like masks, flashlights, and cameras—as potential precursors to violence, telling officers to prepare “from the point of view of an adversary.”

Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.”

One list of “violent tactics” shared by the Los Angeles–based Joint Regional Intelligence Center—part of a post-9/11 fusion network—includes both protesters’ attempts to avoid identification and efforts to identify police. The memo also alleges that face recognition, normally a tool of law enforcement, was used against officers.

Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, says the government has no business treating constitutionally protected activities—like observing or documenting police—as threats.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

“Exercising those rights shouldn't be justification for adverse action or suspicion by the government,” Eidelman says. Labeling something as harmless as skateboarding at a protest as a violent threat is “disturbing and dangerous,” she adds, and could “easily lead to excessive force against people who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.”

“The DHS report repeatedly conflates basic protest, organizing, and journalism with terroristic violence, thereby justifying ever more authoritarian measures by law enforcement,” says Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People. “It should be sobering, if unsurprising, that the Trump regime’s response to mass criticism of its police state tactics is to escalate those tactics.”

In a reversal of decades of legal precedent, the Internal Revenue Service said in court filings on July 7 that churches and other religious 501 c(3) organizations can endorse political candidates in certain circumstances.

The new position, which was made in a joint filing intended to end a lawsuit brought by a group of high-profile Christian organizations last year, carves out a narrow exception to the Johnson Amendment, which has banned political activity by churches since 1954.

The rule was introduced by former President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954 when he was serving as the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. It banned all tax-exempt organizations like churches and charities from “directly or indirectly” participating in politics, specifically in endorsement or opposition of candidates.