Trump administration cuts to healthcare, food inspections, and Medicaid

 

On Saturday August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.

The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.

But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.

The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.

They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%.

For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.

Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.

But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.

They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care; they will mean lost jobs.

As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.

New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than 25% or who exercise “significant control” over the company, as Congress required in the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act. Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses.

In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was: nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard. Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Not only was it unfair to make “the industrious and the prudent” responsible for such shiftless men, but he also wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.

At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”

The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner’s belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest.

As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry.

This seems to explain why he has claimed—without evidence—that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished and that “[w]e don’t know what was killing” the 83 Samoans who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there. It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins.

And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots, requiring two doctor’s visits, the vaccine series would require six. Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk.

If overall health can fight off germs and illness, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary.

The U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness. It’s driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scaled back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly.

Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the U.S. has reported about 10,500 cases of foodborne illness. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual average was about 1,500 cases. At least 9,481 people in 17 states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated. It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.

It’s not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli; fresh jalapeños from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella; 1.5 million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. 

Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls “a steady stream of recalls” that includes “prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items and ready-to-eat products,” potentially contaminated with salmonella, Listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.

As former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, “You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you’re being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.” 

He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant. He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective.

In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety. Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day, and what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery.

In the early twentieth century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"Revealing healthcare histories could have serious consequences"

 

What Happened: Citing reporting by ProPublica, eight Democratic U.S. senators have criticized the Trump administration’s demands to access the health data of millions of people as a condition of giving lifesaving aid to other countries. In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the senators, including minority leader Chuck Schumer, said the U.S. demands were “unprecedented and at odds with U.S. policy concerning the data of American citizens.”

The inquiry into the administration’s approach to foreign health data referred to a ProPublica story published in June about agreements the U.S. struck with African countries — and the risks they posed to people there. Experts told ProPublica that the deals are vague and lack language used in most data-sharing agreements to adequately limit what information is collected and how it can be used. As a result, they said, there is an increased risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.

The senators — who include Tim Kaine of Virginia; Chris Van Hollen of Maryland; Brian Schatz of Hawaii; Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Christopher Coons of Delaware; Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who led the effort — requested a briefing on the healthcare agreements’ data requirements. They also asked Rubio to respond in writing to a list of questions by the end of August.

What They Said: In the letter, which was sent last week, the senators expressed concern that the requirement to access foreign health data might reverberate beyond the countries where the aid agreements were struck and “set international precedents that ultimately harm Americans.” They noted that the demands for data appear to be at odds with the Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy, which emphasizes the right to privacy for Americans and their data.

“These new demands set an alarming precedent that is seemingly contrary to the Administration’s longstanding support for the privacy of U.S. citizens’ data,” they wrote.

The senators also laid out the details of a data-sharing agreement between the U.S. and Uganda that were first reported by ProPublica. The deal demanded that Uganda provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the nation’s health data systems.

“While global health programs have historically included data sharing components,” the senators wrote, “they have never required direct access to privileged electronic systems for U.S. government representatives.”

The letter ends with more than a dozen questions for Rubio, including why the State Department has not made the health care agreements public, as federal law requires, and whether any of the data will be shared with “U.S.-based third parties for any commercial purpose, including to train any artificial intelligence models.”

The senators also asked what privacy rights foreign citizens will have over data that is transferred to the U.S. and how those rights will be enforced in the case of a data breach or another unethical use of their personal information.

Background: After the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing foreign aid. The State Department has since faced the challenge of finding new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics. The task has been especially challenging because the administration cut ties with most of the international partners and fired staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work.

In the past, PEPFAR, the U.S. program that provides aid for treating and preventing HIV around the world, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from foreign government health records. In contrast, the Ugandan agreement provides the U.S. with direct access to the government’s own health data systems.

Through separate agreements, the U.S. has also arranged for countries to provide it with specimens of pathogens that could cause pandemics, along with related information. The effort to establish these new aid arrangements was led by Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who founded three healthcare companies, one of which sold for a reported $2.7 billion. Before joining the State Department, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become the Department of Government Efficiency and oversaw some $67 billion in cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The U.S. agreement with Uganda provides up to $1.7 billion in aid for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, among other diseases. As a condition, the deal calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed and specifies that the information should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services. But experts told ProPublica that it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized.

The shift in the approach to health data is part of the America First Global Health Strategy, which is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations.” Rubio explained in September that under this new strategy, aid will be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest.”

Why It Matters: Privacy experts say that, if health data is mishandled under the agreements, it could have serious consequences. Revealing healthcare histories, including whether someone has had an abortion, a mental health condition, substance-use treatment or a sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence.

In the age of artificial intelligence, health data has become especially valuable. But the agreements reviewed by ProPublica provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in how their data is used or whether they would receive any potential financial benefits.

Response: The State Department declined to answer specific questions about the senators’ letter, saying that it does not respond to questions about congressional correspondence. 

In a statement sent to ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson defended the data requirements in the health agreements. “Neither the U.S. government nor any private American companies receive or review any personally identifiable information (PII) under these data sharing agreements,” the statement said, going on to note that the new deals “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals.” The spokesperson also said no country has been coerced to sign the agreements with the U.S.

-Sharon Lerner and Anna Maria Barry-Jester for ProPublica

 

American Plutocracy

 

Donald Trump has assembled an administration with an unprecedented concentration of wealth, with 57 senior officials worth at least $100 million each, more than four times the combined number found in the administrations of his three immediate predecessors, according to a new analysis.

The report, released by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, identified eight billionaires among Trump's appointees and found ultra-wealthy officials throughout the Cabinet, diplomatic corps, and federal agencies responsible for everything from financial markets and Social Security to education and housing.

The 57-person count excludes Trump himself and Elon Musk, who previously served as a special government employee during Trump's second term. By comparison, Public Citizen identified only 13 officials worth at least $100 million across the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administrations combined. Bush and Biden each had five, while Obama had three.

Eight of the 23 members of Trump's Cabinet meet the $100 million threshold.

Among the most prominent are Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the former chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince McMahon. Both are billionaires.

The list also includes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager; Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, a former U.S. senator and business executive; and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-founder of private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.

Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor who has become one of Trump's most important international envoys, is also among the administration's wealthiest members.

But Trump's ultra-rich appointees extend far beyond Washington.

Seventeen of the 57 identified by Public Citizen are U.S. ambassadors, while another 40 serve in senior executive branch positions. The administration's wealthy officials hold positions across agencies including the Treasury, Commerce and Education departments, the Securities and Exchange Commission, NASA, Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration and Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Public Citizen argues that the extraordinary concentration of wealth raises questions about conflicts of interest and whose priorities influence government decision-making. "It is deeply concerning to see people with extraordinary wealth controlling the levers of power in our government," Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said in announcing the findings.

Being wealthy does not prevent someone from serving in government, and affluent donors have long been appointed to presidential administrations, particularly as ambassadors. Trump has also openly defended selecting wealthy people for government positions, portraying their financial success as evidence of their competence and ability to negotiate.

The scale of his second administration, however, sets it apart. Public Citizen also examined the officials' political giving. It found that 30 of the 57 people on its list contributed more than $65 million between 2022 and 2025 to political committees affiliated with Trump, with most of the money donated during the 2024 election cycle. The finding does not establish that contributions resulted in appointments, but the advocacy group argues the overlap warrants scrutiny.

One example highlighted in the report is Warren Stephens, Trump's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Public Citizen found Stephens made millions of dollars in contributions to Trump-related political and inaugural committees around the period in which he was nominated.

Another is Tilman Fertitta, the billionaire businessman appointed ambassador to Italy, whose family has been a longtime source of political contributions to Trump. Public Citizen reported Fertitta contributed $1.4 million to Trump committees during the 2024 presidential election cycle.

The findings arrive at a politically sensitive moment for the White House.

Trump won the 2024 election in part by expanding Republican support among working-class voters, but dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy has grown as Americans continue to struggle with prices. Only 32% of Americans currently approve of Trump's handling of the economy, according to polling cited by The Associated Press.

That creates a striking contrast heading toward the November midterms: a president who built his political comeback around economic frustration among ordinary voters now presides over an administration containing a historically large group of centimillionaires and billionaires.

 -NewsBreak

Confirming Blanche Might Finish Off Republicans’ Careers

 

Senate Republicans who vote to confirm Todd Blanche for attorney general should take heed: They will be haunted for the rest of their careers (some of which may very well end with the midterms) by the courageous survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s monstrous crimes.

CNN reported that last week 19 Epstein victims “responded to The New York Times’s reporting that Blanche and other senior officials participated in Situation Room meetings to discuss how to respond to growing pressure for more transparency as the issue became a public relations crisis for the administration.” The survivors’ statement read in part:

"We are deeply disturbed to learn that so many senior members of the administration gathered in the Situation Room to discuss the release of the Epstein files as a reputational problem, rather than an opportunity to pursue investigative leads and try to figure out what actually happened."

The reporting, they said, only confirmed their “worst fears about the administration prioritizing political expediency over justice for survivors and truth for the American people.” And they blasted Blanche, who “has consistently minimized legitimate concerns about how the files have been handled, including problematic redactions and the exposure of survivors’ personal information.” They concluded that he “failed to deliver transparency, and he has gravely failed survivors.” (Their jab that promoting him to AG would “failing upward, plain and simple” aptly describes the Trump DEI program for elevating unqualified, ethically deficient white males to top posts.)

Even before Blanche’s nomination, Republicans were under siege for their handling of the Epstein files. But Trump’s nomination of Blanche amounts to a gratuitous slam at Epstein victims, puts the issue back in the news, and forces Republicans (many past the primary season) to decide: Save their own careers or promote Blanche?

The perpetually concerned but never courageous Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is infamous for Trump-friendly votes when it matters (e.g., acquitting Donald Trump in the first impeachment trial; confirming obvious opponents of Roe v. Wade for the Supreme Court; sending the big, ugly bill to the floor when she could have stopped it in its tracks). She has been at her most spineless in rubber-stamping unfit, unqualified, and morally decrepit Cabinet members such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Pam Bondi for attorney general. Would Collins now double down and confirm yet another Trump stooge over the objections of Epstein survivors?

Surely, even she understands that a vote to confirm Epstein victims’ nemesis could be a career-ender. If “character” is what Republicans want to talk about in Maine, Democrats may be more than willing to engage. (Indeed, Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner wasted no time last week making an issue of Republicans’ support for the “Epstein class.”)

Collins’ biggest problem may be finding enough colleagues willing to take the heat for voting to confirm Blanche so she can duck (i.e. vote no without imperiling Blanche and incurring Trump’s and MAGA’s wrath). Consider Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), the governor- appointed replacement for now-Vice President JD Vance. It would be wholly foolhardy for him to ignore the Epstein abuse victims’ pleas.

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) already has put out ads against Husted pointing to Husted’s receipt of six-figure donations from the infamous Ohio billionaire and Republican donor Les Wexner, who hired Epstein as a financial adviser and was named in an FBI email as “co-conspirator” in Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. (Husted has tried to muddy the waters by fishing around for names in the files who wound up giving to Brown, but, as fact checkers have noted, “[n]one of the donors the Husted campaign identified has been charged with a crime related to Epstein, nor has any been identified as a co-conspirator.”)

Blanche puts Husted on the hot seat: Should he support the Epstein cover-up architect for attorney general when no reasonable voter would believe Blanche is anything but a Trump stooge willing to perpetuate the heinous coverup? Husted could well conclude a “yes” vote for Blanche would doom his already-shaky campaign.

Likewise in Alaska, Blanche’s confirmation fight could very well aggravate Republican Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan’s own problems with the Epstein cover-up. Sullivan last September joined other Republicans (including Husted and Collins) in blocking a vote (on defense authorization) aimed at forcing release of the files.

As a local Alaska journalist at the time noted, Sullivan blithely declared in a constituent letter, “I trust [!?!] the Department of Justice to carefully consider the release of relevant materials, while simultaneously ensuring that Epstein’s victims remain protected and that legal protocols are upheld.” As absurd as his faith in the Department of Justice was back then, a vote now for the man who thwarted the law and obstructed the release of the files would cement Sullivan’s image that he is Trump rubber stamp who would throw victims under the bus to keep his job.

Finally, even though Texas Sen. John Cornyn will not be on the ballot, Blanche’s confirmation fight is already roiling the race of the man who defeated him, MAGA extremist and scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (Cornyn should consider if he wants one of his last important votes in the Senate to be a tip of the hat to Blanche and a kick in the teeth of Epstein’s victims.)

Houston’s Chron. reported on the ongoing fallout from Paxton’s sweetheart plea deal with Adam Hoffman, who was tried for first-degree sexual abuse of a child. (Seriously, what is it with Republicans cutting deals with accused pedophiles?) Democratic nominee James Talarico emailed the paper: “Adam Hoffman—an admitted child molester—just became a registered sex offender in Nebraska but still doesn’t have to register in Texas because Ken Paxton gave him an Epstein-style sweetheart deal.” Talarico continued: “Hoffmann was supposed to serve 25 years to life, but today he walks free after the most corrupt politician in America put the well-being of pedophiles over the safety of Texas children.”

Yikes. Talarico’s argument (“Does America really need someone who authored his own ‘Epstein-style sweetheart deals‘roaming the halls of Congress”) may hit home even in deep-red Texas. No wonder Republicans would rather talk about veganism and transgender kids; perhaps supporting pedophiles’ victims is a better way to measure masculine virtue.

In short, by insisting on nominating Blanche — already under fire for masterminding the coverup, botching the files’ redaction, and conducting a nefarious interview with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell — Trump has again handed Democrats a club to pommel Republicans who cannot resist Trump’s outrageous demands. If cowardly Senate Republicans vote to install Blanche to run DOJ, many voters may well conclude it is time to throw Republican senators out en masse. At some point, all Americans must decide whether to stand with the Epstein and his enablers or with his victims.

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"History will judge him harshly for his role in the MAGA assault on democracy and America’s disastrous loss of international stature"

 

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) passed away suddenly Saturday night from an apparent tear in his aorta. Unfortunately, Senate colleagues and most legacy media outlets are avoiding the hard reckoning he deserves. 

Few American politicians have been as disastrously wrong in their advocacy for regime change in the Middle East, not just once but twice, or in their indulgence in an Israeli right-wing government that took Israel (and in turn, U.S. policy) down a morally abhorrent road of domestic reprehension of Palestinians. He supported authoritarian rule in derogation of Israel’s professed democratic values and reckless violence aimed at the utterly unattainable goal of obliterating military threats to Israel’s survival at the expense of attainable diplomatic solutions.

Domestically, he played a small but critical role in trying to steal the 2020 election, assisting Donald Trump’s campaign to “find” nonexistent votes to swing Georgia’s election results. His role in demagoguing and running roughshod over now Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault victims marked a low point in Supreme Court confirmation hearings and helped steer the court toward its downward spiral into rank partisanship. 

More generally, his support for a corrupt, racist, conspiracy-mongering president who threatens the fiber of our democracy leaves a legacy of moral cowardice. As someone who formally supported comprehensive immigration reform, his indulgence of the rank racism and domestic campaign of terror against migrants exemplifies the rot at the core of the Republican Party.

We leave it to others to scrounge for redeeming features or accomplishments that contributed to the well-being of Americans and the advancement of our democratic values. His career should stand as a reminder that, in the end, access to power and electoral success mean little. History will judge him harshly for his role in the MAGA assault on democracy and America’s disastrous loss of international stature... 

-The Contrarian

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"Freedom of Navigation"? from an "Ill-Advised War"!

 

Anyone outside White House vortex of spin and lies knew the die was cast as soon as Iran demonstrated its ability to seize the Strait of Hormuz and hold the world’s energy markets hostage. With that, the vaunted principle of “freedom of navigation” that the United States has stood behind not only in the Middle East but around the world was shattered. And, as we are now witnessing, a crack in a fundamental pillar of U.S. power has dire consequences for the U.S.’s stature in the world and the rules-based system that has largely preserved peace and ensured prosperity for the Free World.

There is no such thing as “partial” or “conditional” freedom of navigation of the world’s oceans and waterways. The diplomatic contortions the U.S. continues deploying are something to behold. “Any fees in the Strait of Hormuz would be voluntary,” suggested a diplomat from Oman, recently enlisted by Iran to obtain its pound of flesh from the Trump negotiators. Iran, however, was not playing along: Of course the payments would be mandatory. (Who would pay otherwise?) 

The New York Times explained: “Call it voluntary if you like — Hormuz was completely open before this war, and now it isn’t,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization in London. “That is not Oman’s doing, they never wanted this. All this hassle is part of Washington’s bill for starting an ill-advised war.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reliably disingenuous (unless he somehow believes the claptrap he parrots), insists that “the United States would oppose any scenario in which use of the strait was monetized, regardless of whether it was called ‘a fee or a toll or a donation.’” The U.S. can oppose it, but there is no reason to doubt that Donald Trump and his hapless negotiators will simply give way on this bedrock principle.

Donald Trump’s nonstop lies about our control of the Strait cannot alter the new power dynamic in the region, as Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson details: 

The United States expended a large portion of its munitions, both precision-guided bombs and missiles such as Tomahawks and advanced missile interceptors such as Patriots, in a multiweek burst of “epic fury” in order to create a situation where Iran believes it will remain in control of one of the world’s key shipping corridors (and may well do so), all while ensuring for itself sanctions relief and billions of dollars in economic oxygen.

While U.S. President Donald Trump still mulls the idea of restarting the war with Iran, few take that seriously because kinetic action achieved little except higher gasoline prices, and the U.S. midterm elections are now even closer. To get a short-term peace, Trump offered all carrots and no sticks. Even future carrots: The MOU actually commits the United States to refraining from future sanctions on Iran.

Sure enough, Trump’s flimsy memorandum of understanding has become Iran’s mechanism to exert its leverage over the Strait, angle for sanctions relief, pursue access to frozen funds, and haul in international reconstruction funds — all without making binding commitments to address the ostensible reason Trump launched his reckless war, its nuclear weapons program.

Brookings Institution’s Burt Jones observed recently that “Iran [showed] that it can flex the major muscle that it has, which is to constrict shipping through Hormuz, and it can withstand the price that the West would impose on it.” Having accomplished that, nothing that will occur in post-war talks is likely to alter the new regional reality: 

Iran comes out of the war “in a stronger position than we went in.”

In reporting on Iran’s newfound negotiating partner, the New York Times reported last week: Iran and U.S.-allied Oman are moving forward with plans to collect payment for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, despite public American objections, according to an Iranian official and four diplomats with knowledge of the matter.

If enacted, the plans would be a significant change from the prewar status in the strategic waterway, underscoring how the American Israeli decision to attack Iran on Feb. 28 has changed the Middle East in far-reaching and unanticipated ways.

Demonstrating Iran’s newfound confidence, “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles at two commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz early Tuesday,” the Wall Street Journal reported. It is just the latest sign that the shift in power in the region has become more profound as the war played out.

 Kari Heerman of the Brookings Institution explained: “Iran did not only assert control over the strait, it also experimented a little bit with politically conditioned access, offering discounts to its friends and higher rates to its enemies.” Heerman noted in analyzing how “freedom of navigation” has lost any meaning. “[T]hat’s a major departure from not only the status quo ante, it also presents major challenges for international maritime law.”

We hear each week that the talks are at risk of “collapsing” or that the “fragile truce” is at risk. Iran, with Oman’s aid, is systematically asserting long-term control of the Strait. Trump has zero interest in returning to full-scale hostilities; the economic sanctions that have constrained Iran are already being unwound; and the entire topic is a political loser for Trump. As oil prices gradually drift downward, Trump is less inclined to restart major military operations. The war is over, as both sides know. The memorandum talks are merely the means of tallying the cost to U.S.’s international standing.

Given all this, much of the Iran coverage has taken on an air of unreality. The Trump regime pretends to be engaged in grown-up statecraft; legacy media coverage regurgitates the Trump team’s assertions that Iran is desperate for a deal. The headlines take at face value the threat that the U.S. would resume a full-scale fight; but no one engaged in the talks believes that is remotely possible.

Rather than frame the news of the day around what the Trump regime is saying about events (Trump ready to destroy Iran again!), coverage of the talks should lay out the facts to educate the public about the new balance of power (Iran using muscle to extract economic benefits from Strait of Hormuz).

The U.S. has sacrificed a cardinal principle of a rules-based international order, freedom of navigation of the seas, which is a strategic defeat of immense importance.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress, having entirely abandoned its constitutional and oversight role in America’s disastrous war, is equally responsible for this debacle. Republicans have made the case better than the most esteemed constitutional scholars: allowing the president (especially one as ignorant and reckless as this) unchecked control of foreign policy is a recipe for constitutional chaos and national security ruin.

Democrats need to keep the pressure on, insisting on comprehensive hearings and definitive committee reports to document the serial blunders in launching and conducting the war, tally the human and financial costs, and assess the diplomatic, economic, and strategic consequences of Trump’s catastrophe. Republicans have disqualified themselves from holding power. It will be up to Democrats to reassert Congress’s role as a critical constitutional player in matters of war and peace — and deal with the consequences of the loss of freedom of navigation of critical waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

 

Postscript to July 4, 2026

We live in a country today where an authoritarian is destroying our democracy and the Rule of Law; where venture capitalists and hedge fund billionaires continue to destroy our democracy; where 401(k) s are still fraudulent games of theft and greed played within the wealthy financial sector; where numerous senators and representatives are pawns of a demented fool and the American Legislative Exchange Council; where “the privatization of health services has corresponded closely with skyrocketing costs, leaving millions of Americans without access to care or deeply in debt for seeking treatment for their illnesses.” 

We live in a country where Republicans are behind the scenes on the federal and local levels to eradicate Social Security and Medicare as overly costly entitlements given to working class people; where today’s Republicans aim to reduce the range of thought through doublespeak, denial and deceit; where language is stripped of reason and raped by propaganda. 

We live in a country where power is not a means for Trump; it is an end for him—power for its own sake; where plutocracy caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of millions of Americans, while promising “freedom and prosperity;” where Free market principles advocate that the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; where education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized to reap in more profits; where publicly-owned companies, services and their assets are auctioned off to private investors; where there is the allocation of vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, and where there is also a transfer of private debts to the public sector. 

We live in a country where systemic racism and bigotry are rampant; where xenophobia is pervasive; and where hypocrisy, prevarication, incompetence, immorality, inequality, poverty, and injustice prevail. We have witnessed this trumped-up transformation and its exacerbation these past years. Trump is an authoritarian inhibited by no laws or moral consideration, and there are others who are just as avaricious, incompetent and dangerous as he is: Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Scott Bessert, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon... The destruction of America's fragile democracy will be the result of our failure to respond to those among us who choose to repudiate empirical truth and falsify reality for power and greed. 

What our current weak democratic leadership needs to address, besides the antiquated filibuster and Freedom to Vote Act, is the lack of unity in the Democratic Party; the Republican propagation of lies; the ongoing Republican subversion of the next elections; the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor; the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections; Republican gerrymandering; Republican legislator purges; Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security; Republican obstruction of serious gun control legislation; Republican (or theocratic!) takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court; rising American religious fundamentalism; the pandemic's long-range effects on healthcare; the unvaccinated and their effects on hospitals and the economy; the global demand for thermal energy; the climate crisis; the education and teacher crisis; cyber security; immigration reform; corporate corruption; pharmaceutical greed; wage stagnation, inflation and reflation; Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran... 

What the Democratic Party also needs to consider (when it finally takes over the House) is the income inequality and unfair taxation of the wealthy elite; the availability of healthcare for those who cannot afford it; an expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits; more reduction of prescription drug prices; the continuing expansion of the Child Tax Credit; and the incarceration of a revengeful, demented, narcissistic, sociopathic criminal and insurrectionist, to name just a few. 

-Glen Brown 

 

The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism

 

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappears. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 Bread and Bullets - by Mr. Fish

Your $7,000 Limit, Their $551,300 Check. The Supreme Court Made Sure of It Today

Six justices struck down the limit on party spending and the door to buying a senator swung wide open.  Here's what happened and what to do about it. How does a $7,000 limit become a $551,300 weapon in the hands of one wealthy donor, with nobody breaking a single law and nobody facing a single charge? You are about to learn the answer, and the answer should make you furious. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case called National Republican Senatorial Committee versus Federal Election Commission. The name sounds sleepy. The result is a wrecking ball.¹ Six justices erased one of the last guardrails standing between your vote and the open purchase of your government. I read every page of the opinion and every page of the dissent. As a trial lawyer who has spent decades watching how power moves through a courtroom, I am telling you plainly. Your voice in American elections got smaller today, and the checkbook of the wealthy got a direct line to the people who write your laws. What the Court Did Today Federal law sets a hard ceiling on how much money one donor hands a single candidate. $7,000 per candidate for the whole election cycle. That ceiling comes from the Federal Election Commission. The cap runs $3,500 per election, and the primary and the general count as two separate elections, so $3,500 plus $3,500 gives you the $7,000 total. Congress built more walls behind that ceiling. One of those walls limited how much a political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidate. Picture the party and the candidate sitting at the same table, planning ads, moving as one operation. The law capped how much the party pours into the joint effort, because a party check spent hand in hand with a candidate works exactly like cash in the candidate’s pocket. The Supreme Court knocked that wall down. In a six to three ruling, the majority declared the cap on coordinated party spending a violation of the First Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett signed on. Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The majority overruled a precedent called Colorado II from 2001, a decision where this same Court looked at the same wall and upheld the cap as fully constitutional. The Math They Hope You Never Run. Run the numbers with me, because the numbers tell the whole story. You, an ordinary citizen, hand your candidate the legal max. $7,000. A wealthy donor wants to move far more to the same candidate. The old rules blocked the easy routes. Today the donor walks through a door the Court swung wide. Here is the play. The donor does not write the candidate one giant check, because a check that size breaks the $7,000 cap and breaks the law. The candidate builds a different tool, a single collection account that holds a stack of committees at once. The legal name is a joint fundraising committee. Give it a friendly label, like the John Smith Victory Fund. The fund links 52 separate committees under one roof. The candidate’s own campaign, the national party committee, and the party committees of all 50 states. Each committee carries its own legal limit, and the fund lets one donor max out all 52 with a single check. These three limits come straight off the FEC’s 2025 to 2026 chart: -Candidate, $7,000. The most one donor may give a candidate for the cycle. -National party committee, $44,300 per year. This figure rises with inflation, and $44,300 is the current number. -Each state party committee, $10,000 per year. This figure is fixed in the statute and has held at $10,000 for years. Now watch the total climb. Fifty state parties at $10,000 each comes to $500,000. Add $44,300 for the national committee. Add $7,000 for the candidate. One donor signs a single check for $551,300 and never hands any one committee a dollar more than the law allows. Then the money moves. Federal law lets a party shuffle unlimited sums between its state and national committees. So the 50 state parties wire their $10,000 shares up to the national party, often the very same day. Stack those transfers on the national committee’s own $44,300, and the national party sits on $544,300 from one donor. The candidate already pocketed his $7,000 directly. Here is what changed today.  The old rules let the party spend only a small, capped amount in coordination with the candidate, so most of that $544,300 had to flow into other party work. The Court removed the cap. The national party can now spend the full $544,300 backing the candidate. Ad buys. Polling. Office rent. The catering for a campaign event. Every dollar lands where the candidate needs the money. So, a $7,000 limit becomes a $551,300 pipeline to one candidate. Around 80 times the cap Congress wrote. Justice Kagan laid out this exact math in her dissent, step by step, and the majority brushed past it. Here is the door the Court left standing open.  The candidate makes the ask. A senator sits across from a billionaire and says, max out my victory fund. The donor needs no earmarking words, no written instruction, nothing the rules would flag. A naked deal, your money for my official act, stays a federal crime, one now nearly impossible to catch with the guardrail gone. The Court calls the gratitude protected speech. You and I call the result the wealthy buying a government. Here’s what you actually need to remember. Forget the legal maze for a second. One donor used to be capped at $7,000. That same donor can now move more than half a million dollars to one candidate. That’s it. That’s the whole story. How We Got Here, and Why I Despise Citizens United. None of this happened in a vacuum. Today’s ruling is the newest brick in a wall the Court has been building against you for sixteen years, and the foundation stone has a name. Citizens United. In 2010, in Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, five justices decided corporations and outside groups hold a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums influencing your elections. I have detested this decision since the day the Court released the ruling, and time has proven every fear right. Citizens United, paired with a lower court ruling months later, birthed the Super PAC.  Suddenly a handful of billionaires and corporate interests poured oceans of money into races and drowned out the voice of the ordinary voter. The 2024 cycle tells the tale in cold figures. PACs raised more than fifteen billion dollars. The parties raised under three billion. Big money owns the field, and your single vote started to feel like a whisper in a hurricane. Four years after Citizens United, the Court struck again in a case called McCutcheon. The justices erased the overall ceiling on how much one donor gives across an entire election cycle. Remove the ceiling, and the joint fundraising committee I described becomes a loaded weapon. In 2022, the Court kept chipping in a case called Cruz. Today the demolition reached the party coordination wall. Each of these rulings sounds technical. Every one of them moves money in the same direction, toward the people who already hold the most of it. The majority dressed today’s ruling up as fairness. Parties deserve a chance to catch the Super PACs, the Court said. Read the logic twice. The same Court built the Super PAC era, and now points to the imbalance the Court itself created as the reason to knock down one more guardrail. Justice Kagan caught the circular game in her dissent and called it out cold. The Fingerprints on This One. Here is the detail you deserve to sit with. When a federal law gets challenged in court, the government usually defends the law. Stands up for the rule Congress wrote. The people’s lawyers argue for the people’s statute. The Trump administration refused. Donald Trump’s Justice Department had already stopped enforcing the cap on party coordination, the cap protecting you from half million-dollar end runs around the contribution limit. Then the administration walked into the Supreme Court and argued the cap should die. The government’s own Solicitor General stood with the people tearing the law down. The Court had to reach outside and appoint a private lawyer to defend the people’s statute, because the President’s lawyers would not. Sit with the meaning of this move. The administration that swore an oath to uphold the laws stood aside and let one more wall protecting your democracy collapse, and the wall happened to protect a system the President and his donor's profit from. One of the original challengers carries a familiar name too. JD Vance filed as a Senate candidate back when the suit began. He sits in the Vice President’s chair today, and his old candidacy paperwork kept the case alive long enough for the Court to rule. The people who brought this fight now run the executive branch. The people who refused to defend the law now run the Justice Department. Connect the dots, and the picture comes into sharp, ugly focus. What This Means for You. Strip away the legal vocabulary, and the ruling lands in your living room. Your government grows more responsive to the people writing the biggest checks and less responsive to you. A megadonor now buys a level of access and gratitude you will never afford. When a billionaire funnels half a million dollars to a senator through the party side door, the senator remembers. The next time a vote touches the billionaire’s business, the billionaire’s taxes, the billionaire’s industry, the senator returns the donor’s call first. Yours waits. You feel the result everywhere. In the prescription drug prices nobody reins in. In the tax loopholes nobody closes. In the industries nobody holds accountable. Money talks in Washington, and the Court keeps handing the wealthy a louder microphone, and your kids and grandkids inherit a government tuned to the frequency of the rich. I worry about them constantly. I worry about the country we leave behind. A democracy where a half million-dollar check outweighs ten thousand ordinary voices stops being a democracy and starts becoming an auction. What Happens Next. Brace yourself, because the wealthy and the operatives around them read these rulings the day they drop, and the planning starts immediately. Expect the joint fundraising committees to balloon. Both parties will build them bigger, link more state committees, and chase the largest checks in the land. The Federal Election Commission, already toothless and now stripped of one more enforcement tool, steps further back. The flood of money through the party channel grows. The arms race accelerates. Watch the next targets too. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, flagged a warning every voter should hear. The same logic the majority used today points like an arrow at the remaining guardrails. The rule treating a donor’s coordinated spending as a capped contribution sits in the crosshairs. Even the base contribution limits, the seven thousand dollar line itself, look more fragile tonight than they did this morning. This Court has shown a steady appetite for dismantling campaign finance protection one case at a time, and the appetite has not been satisfied. Justice Kagan summed up the wreckage with a line I will carry for a long time. Years ago, Justice Breyer warned that an earlier ruling left the nation’s campaign finance laws a hollow remnant. Kagan looked at what survived after today and called the result a remnant of a remnant. She is right. Brick by brick, the wall built to protect your vote from open corruption keeps coming down. This Is Where You Come In. I refuse to treat today as the end of the story. The Court wrote the latest chapter. You write the next one. Money found new lanes into our politics. Your power lives in the one place no billionaire outspends you. The ballot box, and the organized voice of an awake public. A megadonor buys access. A movement of informed voters buys outcomes. They are counting on you to feel small, to shrug, to look away as the auction runs. Prove them wrong. Learn the names of the candidates who take these mega checks and the names of the ones who refuse. Back the leaders fighting for real reform and a constitutional amendment to undo this entire rotten line of cases. Vote in every race, the small ones included, because the operatives bankrolling this machine pray you skip them. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your kids. Make this your dinner table conversation. Then do one more thing today. Share this piece with one person stuck in the fog and pull them into the fight. The wealthy already know how this system works, and they have stayed quiet about the mechanics on purpose. Your job, starting right now, is to make sure everyone you know understands the game and refuses to sit out. They built this for the few. We take it back for the many. Let’s go. -Mitch Jackson, Esq.

 Jon Mitchell “Mitch” Jackson is a senior partner and founding attorney of Jackson & Wilson He has represented clients in the Orange County area for over 30 years, and he is committed to providing the trustworthy and skilled legal representation people need during the most difficult times of their lives – after a serious accident or the loss of a loved one. He has met with considerable success in this endeavor, recovering millions on behalf of the injured, including numerous multimillion-dollar settlements and verdicts.

 

Republicans Starved Social Security: Now They Want to Wreck It!

These days, the MAGA Republican Party displays the survival instinct of dodo birds. Republican House and Senate leaders face staggering losses in both houses of Congress and in state races as a result of their cowardly capitulation to Donald Trump and the ensuing policy blunders they committed at his behest.

Aside from the narcissist in chief, no one will be shocked if Republicans get clobbered in November — certainly not after they passed the big, ugly bill (slashing healthcare and SNAP benefits to give billionaires more tax cuts); refused to compel complete disclosure of the Epstein pedophile files, or exercise a modicum of oversight of the most corrupt administration in history; sided with Trump’s ICE shock troops; and enabled the illegal, disastrous war in Iran. But wait: Republicans are still digging their political hole.

Now, Republicans are menacing Social Security. After their own policies worsened the Social Security funding crisis (more about that in a minute), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) last week grabbed hold of the proverbial third rail in politics, delivering Democrats a soundbite perfect for any “throw grandma over the cliff” midterm ad.

In a radio interview, Johnson responded to a government report that the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will run dry by 2032: The reason we’re in trouble is because over seventy-four percent of federal spending is on autopilot — mandatory spending, that is your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security — they have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year, and it’s critical, because we’re at $40 trillion-plus in debt. At some point, you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Considering the timing — right after Elon Musk attained trillionaire status and Trump got slammed for professing love for inflation and indifference to Americans’ financial pain — you almost wonder if Johnson is picking Democrats to win in the midterm prediction markets.)

Reacting to Johnson’s blunder, even right-wing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told The Bulwark that the speaker made Republicans sound like they want “all of their tax breaks and loopholes and carried interest deductions … [and want] working people who’ve paid into all of these programs to take less.” (Although Hawley says he really does not “like the sound” of cutting Social Security, he really did not like the sound last year of Trump’s proposal to slash Medicaid either — but then voted for it.)

Three senior House Democrats swiftly pounced, recounting Republicans’ long- standing animosity toward Social Security. DOGE stooges sabotaged Social Security customer service, mishandled private data, and got caught trying “to mark millions of living people as dead to force them out of the country.” Putting benefit cuts on the table (even with the midterm disaster looming) confirms Republicans have not given up their yearning “to destroy Social Security and Medicare,” House Democrats argued.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) on Monday followed up with a detailed letter. “Republicans have a history of attempting to increase the retirement age, privatize Social Security, or otherwise cut Social Security benefits, and some Congressional Republicans have called to raise the retirement age or means-test benefits as the ‘solution’ to this problem,” they wrote. 

Recently, both SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz have raised these ideas “to pay for the federal deficit, which the [big, ugly bill] worsened,” the senators observed.

Republicans’ favored “solutions” to the Social Security solvency problem exemplify their Simon Legree approach to governance. As the Democratic senators explained, raising the retirement age by two years would reduce a median retiree’s benefits between 17 and 35 percent, thereby “cutting tens of millions of Americans’ Social Security benefits and disproportionately [harming] seniors at the lower end of the income distribution who rely on Social Security as one of their main sources of income.”

The senators also demanded Trump answer pesky questions such as: Would you support removing the cap on income? Does the administration currently have a proposal to address the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund, and if so, does raising the retirement age factor into that proposal?

We anxiously await the answers — and for Democrats to raise the Social Security issue over and over again on the campaign trail and in every available oversight and budget hearing. In addition to their generic vow to strengthen entitlements by “making the wealthy finally pay their fair share, so every American can retire with dignity,” Democrats could offer additional proposals to boost funding for Social Security, such as slapping a 100 percent tax on illegal presidential emoluments or prohibiting corporate tax deductions for donations to projects defacing federal property (e.g., the arch, the ballroom).

In this same vein, Democrats, who should restore Social Security reserves when they regain the majority, should highlight how two key Trump initiatives have undermined Social Security.

First, the big, ugly bill worsened the Social Security funding gap. By lowering tax rates and temporarily expanding seniors’ standard deductions, it reduced the number of people paying into the system and the total amount paid in. Applying the Hippocratic Oath — first do no harm — would mean at least repealing the big ugly bill that robbed Social Security of critical revenue. (Certainly, repeal would also improve the general revenue picture, restore Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and end the unparalleled funding bonanza for abusive ICE and Border Patrol operations.)

Second, Trump’s draconian deportation operations and the concurrent crackdown on legal immigration make the Social Security problem worse. “Immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—offset the demographic factors that are straining the Social Security Trust Fund, namely fewer young workers paying into the fund and many more older Americans drawing from it,” the American Immigration Council has explained.

Halting the morally disgusting and economically disastrous assault on migrants would bring a bevy of positive results, but perhaps none as critical as helping to put Social Security on sturdier financial footing. Trump and his fellow white supremacists won’t admit that their economically suicidal anti-immigrant agenda, among other things, shrinks the tax base, stifles access to the best and brightness minds who promote technological innovation, and increase housing and food costs. But facts are facts. The resulting decrease in the workforce and payroll tax receipts has only aggravated the Social Security funding shortfall.

In sum, it took a decade, but Trump bootlicker extraordinaire Sen. Lindsey Graham’s infamous 2016 prophesy (“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it”) certainly proved accurate. Republicans’ midterm blunders, specifically their latest assault on Social Security, perfectly illustrate that their Faustian bargain with Trump drained them of whatever political survival skills they still had. A crushing defeat in November would be precisely what they deserve.

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-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

Photo: (Douglas Rissing/iStock)