Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:

“This is an appalling outcome for the rule of law. Todd Blanche is Donald Trump’s lawyer. He is committed to lawfare and Donald Trump’s political vendettas, not rule of law defense and the American people. He should not become our permanent attorney general. We are disgusted by those who are allowing his confirmation to continue.”

Instead of serving everyday people, this Farm Bill was designed to funnel more taxpayer dollars to corporate factory farm expansion, maintain devastating nutrition assistance cuts, and weaken fundamental conservation investments. The bill:

• Fails to address the devastating impacts of the H.R. 1 cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), leaving millions of people vulnerable to food insecurity and hunger.
• Expands support for dirty factory farm gas projects and factory farm infrastructure through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) despite documented project failures and loan defaults.
• Guts the budget authority for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program and cuts $500 million from the Conservation Stewardship program, two of the nation’s most oversubscribed conservation programs, stripping critical funding without ensuring sustainable farmers will have access to replacement conservation support.
• Ignores the devastating impact of the Monsanto Co. v. Durnell Supreme Court decision, which effectively handed pesticide corporations a liability shield and closed the courthouse doors for tens of thousands of sick and suffering Americans.

In a shocking moment of bipartisanship, seventeen members of the Senate Agriculture Committee voted to include an amendment authorizing Mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling for beef.

In response, Food & Water Watch’s Food Policy Director Rebecca Wolf issued the following statement:

“A Farm Bill that fails to protect farmers from corporate consolidation, invest in real climate solutions and ensure healthy, affordable food for all is not a solution – it’s just more of the same. Senate Democrats were smart to reject this deeply flawed Republican bill. They must continue to do so in September.

“After years of skyrocketing food prices, family farm decimation and worsening climate impacts, Congress should use this opportunity to create a new Farm Bill that builds a resilient food system – not double-down on the same corporate model that created these problems in the first place. We need a fair Farm Bill, not one that continues to prioritize agribusiness profits over farmers, workers, consumers and the planet.”

The stakes are high: more than 4.5 million people across the country have already lost food assistance since the reconciliation law’s cuts were enacted last July. That’s the steepest decline in SNAP participation in nearly three decades. The SNAP cuts are already causing children far more harm than most expected, despite Republican claims during last year’s debate that they would be protected. Across the U.S., these cuts are taking away food assistance from eligible families. And without SNAP, these families are skipping meals and choosing between buying groceries and paying for other essentials like rent.

A main culprit of this crisis is the provision — set to take effect in about a year in all but a handful of states — that requires most states to pay between 5 and 15 percent of SNAP costs for the first time in the program’s history, shifting billions of dollars of costs onto states. The too-hasty implementation and dramatic financial implications are leading states to create access barriers to basic food assistance in an effort to lower their error rate. Notably, wrongly turning away an eligible household does not count as an error, while providing somewhat more or less in benefits to a family eligible for SNAP does.

Without a delay to this cost shift, states will have to make hard budgeting decisions in their upcoming legislative sessions, which start in January. States that are unable or unwilling to pay their share of SNAP costs will have to drop out of the program entirely, ending SNAP for children, seniors, parents, workers, veterans, and people with disabilities alike.

States on a bipartisan basis have said they need more time to bring down their error rates — and some have acknowledged that ending SNAP in their state is a potential option.

The impact of this massive cost shift has already caused millions of people to lose the food assistance they need to feed their families. Even more people will lose SNAP once states must begin paying billions of dollars in benefit costs for the first time. Without federal action, SNAP may soon no longer exist as a nationwide program available to people in all 50 states.

The farm bill proposed by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Boozman includes a one-year delay in the cost shift, to October 1, 2028. While the original proposal failed to give states more time to lower their costs by reducing errors, the committee adopted an amendment to give states an additional year to see error rate reductions resulting from their intensive work to lower their error rates and reduce their costs, an additional step in the right direction.

The amendment also provides additional funding for emergency food providers, a positive development and a recognition that the Republican reconciliation law is driving up emergency food needs. But more funding for emergency food is not a substitute for ensuring that SNAP is available and accessible for the families who need it.

Here’s how the proposal falls short of what people across the U.S. need to afford groceries, despite its improvements.

First, it would cut SNAP deeper in future years to pay for the one-year cost shift delay, even as Republicans press for billions of dollars in additional farm relief without offsetting savings. It actually raises the amount some states will have to pay in SNAP benefits in the future, increasing the risk that some states will opt out of participating in SNAP. Addressing this unfolding crisis shouldn’t lead to even deeper food assistance cuts in the future.

Second, it provides only a one-year delay in a provision where too-hasty implementation is causing millions of children to lose food assistance. A longer pause that gives states more time to lower their error rates and prepare for the new costs would let states reassess their steps to lower error rates and undo unwarranted access barriers that are taking food assistance away from eligible people who need it. Congress already gave some states a two-year delay in paying the cost shift — those with the highest error rates — and the Boozman farm bill preserves that preferential treatment. All states need more than just one additional year to responsibly reduce their errors and budget for these new costs.

Third, the proposal fails to delay the imminent 50 percent cut to federal funding for SNAP administrative costs, which takes effect in less than two months on October 1. Some states have already failed to backfill for this federal funding cut, which will force them to try to improve their SNAP programs’ accuracy with fewer resources. That will raise the risk of more staffing shortages, backlogs, and people waiting months without benefits. Delaying this cut to administrative funding is critical to restoring food assistance for eligible families who are losing food assistance solely because they can’t get through on overloaded phone lines, and because understaffed states can’t keep up with additional red tape. It’s also important for accomplishing what policymakers say they want: improved program administration and fewer payment errors.

When Congress returns this fall, policymakers must work on a bipartisan basis to advance legislation that addresses the unfolding crisis without making deeper cuts to food assistance in later years. Recognizing the current hunger crisis and the need to delay the cost shift for all states is an important first step, but Congress can do better. Children and families deserve more.

At a moment where wealth and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, policies that tackle both the immediate and the structural, long-term causes of this are imperative to reshape Americans’ lives and sustain progress. Dēmos has worked at the intersection of economic justice and democracy reform for more than 25 years, and that knowledge – and ties to frontline organizations across the country – uniquely positioned the organization’s policy experts to create a package of long-term solutions.

"For too long, public debate has centered on short term wins, but the more important question is what happens after power shifts," said Taifa Smith Butler, President of Dēmos. “History shows that periods of political upheaval can also create opportunities for transformative change. Previous generations have used these moments to advance civil rights, expand democracy, and build economic security. This agenda is our contribution to building a bold vision for the future that endures.”

The nine policies outlined in the agenda look at change from two different lenses. First, a recommendation of three populist policies, aimed to swiftly and resolutely improve material conditions in the here and now. Then, the agenda lays out six structural solutions to change the systems that govern political and economic power so that everyday people, especially Black and brown people, have more power, and can keep it. The policies, when moved on collectively, offer a new blueprint for navigating this current landscape and delivers public institutions that are more accountable, a democracy that is more representative, and an economy that delivers mobility and security for all.

“We wanted to be bold in our thinking to address the struggles of everyday people, and craft solutions as large as the problems we aim to address. These policies have the potential to change the material conditions of the multiracial working class, putting money in their pockets and time at their disposal,” said Alix Gould-Werth, Chief of Programs and Strategy at Dēmos. “When circumstances shift in this manner, when we disrupt the avenues by which corporations and the ultra-wealthy have a stranglehold on our resources, the economic and political power of Black and brown communities will grow."

As debates over the country's future continue, Dēmos hopes this agenda will serve as a resource for leaders committed to advancing bold, people-centered policies that build a multiracial democracy that not only survives today's challenges but endures for generations to come.

The full report is available here.

Free Press Vice President of Policy and General Counsel Matt Wood said:

“After his legally dubious maneuvers to waive the national cap for Nexstar’s takeover of Tegna, Carr is doubling down, seeking to overturn a vital media-ownership limit he has no actual authority to eliminate. His goal is to spur more media consolidation involving companies Donald Trump views as ideological allies and corporate cronies.

“Changing this limit requires congressional action, but Carr doesn’t care. He’ll do whatever it takes to clear the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations wherever and whenever they please. The result would be just one or two dominant broadcasters in every market, deep job cuts for journalists, and an influx of bargain-basement content disguised as local news. This spells disaster for the local communities that broadcasters are supposed to serve.

“Free Press and allies sued the Carr FCC for the unlawful procedural tricks it used to waive this ownership limit in the Nexstar-Tegna merger, and we intend to take the agency to court over today’s unlawful power grab too.”

Joining Sanders as cosponsors are Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) introduced companion legislation along with 86 members of the House of Representatives.

“It is beyond unacceptable that in the year 2026, the United States remains the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid vacation time to workers. This legislation would put an end to that international embarrassment,” Sanders said. “We hear a lot of talk about family values in America, but let’s be clear: When a husband, wife, and kids, during the course of an entire year, are unable to spend any time together on vacation, that is not a family value. That is an attack on everything that a family is supposed to stand for. It’s not a radical idea to require companies in America to provide at least two weeks of paid vacation to their workers. What’s radical is that millions of Americans are not only working longer hours for lower wages, but that they do not receive a single paid vacation day. That should not be happening in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world.”

“Every worker in America deserves the chance to rest, recharge, and spend time with the people they love without worrying about missing a paycheck,” Magaziner said. “I’m grateful to Senator Sanders for leading this fight in the Senate. It is time that we deliver this basic fairness to hardworking Americans.”

While millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, the U.S. remains the only major economy in the world to not guarantee some type of paid vacation time to its people. Today in Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Australia and many countries in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 10 days of paid vacation. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and France, paid vacation benefits are even stronger.

Meanwhile, nearly one in four workers in America — or more than 33 million workers nationwide — receive no paid vacation time at all. At the same time, almost 40% of workers report being on the job at least 45 hours a week and the average full-time worker in the U.S. now reports working 43 hours a week. Moreover, more than nine million Americans work multiple jobs, with more than five million working a second part-time job on top of a full-time job.

If passed, the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act would ensure that:

• Every worker in America has the right to accrue at least one hour of paid annual leave for every 25 hours worked.
• Full-time workers will earn at least two weeks of paid annual leave per year, to be used for any reason, at their standard rate of pay.
• Workers are protected against discrimination for exercising their right to take annual paid leave.

A recent poll found 79% of Americans support the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act. The American people’s support for the legal right to paid time off is nearly universal. According to a recent poll conducted by the RAND Corporation, 90% of Americans support legislation that would require employers to offer earned time off.

The Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act is endorsed by United Auto Workers (UAW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM Union), National Education Association (NEA), National Nurses United (NNU), Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR)-SEIU, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation (SMART) Union, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), United Steelworkers (USW), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), A Better Balance, National Partnership for Women & Families, United for Respect, Equal Rights Advocates, Family Values @ Work, MomsRising, National Employment Law Project (NELP), Paid Leave for All, Workplace Fairness, The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and Indivisible.

Read the text here.

Read a fact sheet here.

Wowza, rare glimmer of good news. We take a moment to honor the stunning Michigan victory of Abdul El-Sayed, who was outspent 12-1 by his opponent's millions from establishment Dems, Zionist PACS and corporations and still managed to win even though he is a progressive Muslim who calls genocide genocide and wants Medicare for all in a Trump state that isn't communist New York. Ha. What millions in dark money buys you these days: "Sweet fuck all, as it turns out."

El-Sayed's inspiring win came against a candidate, Haley Stevens, who was bankrolled by over $60 million from party leaders and outside money from a murky nesting doll of super-PACS and shell corporations but whose campaign still had the audacity to bill her as “the grassroots choice of Michigan working families.” Total spending on the race in a key swing state was about $80 million, most from fat cats, making it "the fattest cat in the history of primaries." El-Sayed reportedly got about $4.6 million in outside money; Stevens and Netanyahu got about $60 million, the plurality of it from AIPAC's United Democracy Project (sic) super PAC - the most they've dumped into a single race, making it what observers call AIPAC's biggest defeat. From I Fucking Love Australia: AIPAC shoved 30 million dollars up Michigan's arse, and Michigan shat it straight back out."

Born in Detroit in 1984, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed was raised by his father Mohamed, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmother Jackie, whose Michigan roots go back to the 1800s. After graduating from the University of Michigan Phi Beta Kappa, he earned an MD from Columbia and a doctorate in public health from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, worked as an epidemiologist and became the youngest health official in a major American city when he was appointed Director of Detroit's Health Department, gutted rwhen it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy, at age 30. Rebuilding it, he went after corporate polluters, stripped lead out of schools, starting offering free glasses to kids in need, expanded Narcan access, and spearheaded a program cancelling up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 state residents.

Faced with that resume, AIPAC spent their millions on an ad blitz that managed not to mention any of his policies, or even Israel, though he won the first-ever political endorsement from Jewish Voice For Peace. Instead, they focused on the issues that really matter: They attacked El-Sayed for criticizing the Obamas, allegedly helping Trump win, and sitting for an interview with a streamer they don’t like, Hasan Piker. If he wins the general election against the GOP's carpetbagging empty suit Mike Rogers, he'd become the first Muslim in the Senate. His longtime message to Dems: Stop compromising, ban ICE, end sending arms to Israel, Medicare for All, no more forever wars, get dark money out of politics. On election night, at a podium reading, "MIchigan Is Not For Sale," he celebrated "the movement we were able to inspire," and "the idea that we could take our government back."

El-Sayed's victory, while slimmer than predicted, was seen as pivotal; noted Bernie Sanders, "This is an election between Abdul and the billionaire class.” And the candidate the establishment called "unelectable" won with the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, "the beating heart of Michigan labor." His win was the biggest but not the only news out of Michigan: Sunrise Movement co-founder and data center opponent William Lawrence also took the primary for Michigan’s 7th Congressional district. They join progressive wins elsewhere: Zohran Mamdani in New York. Katie Wilson in Seattle. Three Mamdani-backed candidates in New York primaries, two against longtime incumbents. Melat Kiros in Colorado. Troy Jackson in Maine. It's still a long tough road ahead. But take heart from spineless ghoul Mike Johnson: “The insurgent left is on the rise."

In response, Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert issued the following statement:

“There is a single barrier left to the confirmation of Trump crony Todd Blanche: the Senate floor.

“Senators must urgently do the right thing and block Blanche. The consequences of inaction here are crystal clear. If we make Todd Blanche America’s lawyer at the head of the Justice Department, we are accepting a man who has been tasked with implementing Donald Trump’s revenge agenda.

“A man placed by Trump in this role only because the previous head of the DOJ wasn’t implementing his corrupt personal prosecutions fast enough.

“A man who rubberstamped the corrupt IRS deal that Trump made with himself to shield all the Trumps and their businesses, not only from enforcement of any taxes they may have dodged or any fines or payments they may owe to American taxpayers, but from ‘any and all’ related consequences for violating any federal criminal or civil law.

“A man who led the Epstein cover-up. Who was dismissive and negligent toward trafficking victims despite the nation’s intense outrage at Epstein’s crimes and in the face of these women’s ongoing advocacy to make clear how his horrific actions have impacted their lives.

“And it doesn’t stop there., A vote for Blanche is also literally a blank check to give money to January 6th insurrectionists or other cronies, whether through a revived slush fund or directly from the Judgement Fund. We have seen him act in this manner as recently as last week, when he facilitated a 7-figure settlement for a pardoned abortion clinic protester.

“We know exactly what type of Attorney General Mr. Blanche will be: Corrupt, toadying, and focused on one goal: defense of Donald J. Trump. It is a matter of morality, Senators of both parties must stand in his way and block his confirmation on the floor.”

Stand Up America’s Managing Director of Policy & Political Affairs, Brett Edkins, issued the following statement on Blanche’s confirmation:

“Every Senate Judiciary Republican just endorsed Todd Blanche’s extreme agenda for the Department of Justice: politically motivated prosecutions of the president’s perceived enemies, defending and giving taxpayer-funded settlements to January 6th insurrectionists, burying the Epstein files, and shielding Trump and his family from the IRS.

“Now it’s up to the full Senate. Are there still Republicans willing to stand up to the president—willing to say they’re against weaponizing the Justice Department, against shielding Trump and his family from accountability, and against protecting predators in the Epstein files? The Senate doesn’t need unanimous courage to block Blanche—it needs a few Republicans willing to put country over party.”

Led by Chair Paul Atkins, the SEC’s proposal ignores the reality of climate change as a growing source of financial risk for public companies and investors, as well as overwhelming investor demand for this more comparable, reliable climate disclosure. If finalized, the proposal would undermine transparency in capital markets to protect companies with high climate-related financial risks, the groups maintain.

“The proposal reflects the desire of Paul Atkins’s SEC to ignore growing financial risks from climate change and to deprive investors of essential information,” said Elyse Schupak, climate policy advocate for Public Citizen. “For polluting industries that seek to downplay their role driving the climate crisis and their exposure to related risks, finalizing the proposed rule would be a victory. The SEC should withdraw this proposal as it contradicts the Commission’s responsibility to facilitate transparency for investors and promote well functioning capital markets.”

“The 2024 climate disclosure rule set the SEC record for most comments ever collected on a regulation, and investors showed up nearly unanimously in support,” said Alex Martin, climate finance policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “This move is another in a long string of recent SEC actions to empower corporations over investors, and reflects this administration’s far-reaching attempts to deny the reality of climate change. If finalized, this proposal will hurt workers saving for retirement by depriving people of information needed to assess companies’ financial risks due to climate change — and by endangering other critical disclosures as well.”

This summer’s extreme weather has spared no continent. Wildfires are tearing through Spain and France, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. In the United States, a series of heat domes pushed temperatures past 100°F (38°C), and smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality across North America. India endured pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year, while torrential rain left hundreds dead in several countries in Africa since March.

Scientists estimate that emissions from just five fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves recorded globally between 2000 and 2023. Those same five companies are now announcing another blockbuster quarter of fossil fuel profits. TotalEnergies has reported adjusted net income of $5.4 billion for the second quarter of 2026, Shell profit hit $9.84bn in the three months to June, more than double compared with the same period last year. Exxon clocked $14.5 billion in profits this quarter; Chevron, $12.1 billion. BP is expected to announce comparable astronomical profits on the 4th of August.

That’s over USD $40 billion in profits by just 4 large oil companies, which is more than the entire GDP of over 100 countries, reaped in rewards while the rest of the world is left dealing with climate and energy chaos. The price spikes are driven in large part by volatility in oil prices during the war in Iran.

The results land as governments prepare to resume negotiations on a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York this month. A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of that process, alongside measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimates that aton the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. The Make Polluters Pay coalition says governments meeting in New York should seize the moment to get behind it.

To mark the moment, campaigners inflated a giant barrel of oil outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, calling on the UK government to back a permanent stronger taxex on fossil fuel profits and support a strong outcome at the UN tax talks.

David Hillman, Stamp out Poverty, said

“Big Oil has spent fifty years profiting from pollution while the rest of us pay the price in heatwaves, in wildfires, in energy bills we can barely afford. That’s why we’re bringing a giant oil barrel to the doorstep of Parliament: to make sure politicians can’t look away. Governments have a real chance this month, at the UN tax talks in New York, to finally make the polluters pay. They should take it.”

Anne Jellema, Executive Director of 350.org, said:

“From Bordeaux to Phoenix to Mumbai, families are living through the cost of climate delay, while the companies most responsible bank blockbuster bonanzas. That is not a coincidence; it is a business model. Governments meeting in New York this month have a genuine opportunity to change it. Calls are growing across the political spectrum for a proper global profits tax, so the industry that helped cause these disasters pays towards the recovery, the solutions and the protection people need. It’s simple fairness: those who caused the damage and profited from it should pay to fix it.”

Tyrone Scott, Head of Campaigns, War on Want
“While people struggle with soaring bills and communities across the world lose homes, livelihoods and lives to climate disasters, fossil fuel corporations are banking another quarter of enormous profits. This is wealth extracted from people and the planet. The UK Government must stop protecting polluters and start making them pay through permanent taxes on fossil fuel profits, a wealth tax on the super-rich and by backing a strong UN Tax Convention that ends corporate tax avoidance. Those who have profited most from the climate crisis must fund the transition and the repair.”

The Make Polluters Pay coalition is calling on governments worldwide to introduce permanent, higher taxes on oil and gas profits, to fund emergency response, recovery and long-term resilience for communities on the frontline of the crisis, and to back a strong, binding outcome at this month’s UN tax convention talks.

In response to the news, Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert issued the following statement:

“The late-night deal reached between the DOJ and the Republican Senators who had been objecting to the Blanche nomination is clearly a face-saving exercise to try to get the Senators to ‘yes’ on that nomination, not real limitations on pro-Trump cronyism. President Trump gets to keep tax immunity for himself, his sons and the Trump Organization, potentially saving the President millions in taxes owed to the American people.

“And on the slush fund itself, Trump has not waived his rights under the scheme that called on Blanche to establish the fund, and nothing prevents Blanche from simply reestablishing it if the Senate confirms him.

“In addition, nothing in what Blanche sent out prevents the DOJ from settling lawsuits brought by the January 6th rioters and other Trump cronies, and paying them out of the general fund. We saw a staggering seven-figure deal in that vein just last week.

“And if the inadequate deal on the slush fund and Trump tax immunity wasn’t enough to stop this unfit nominee, his horrifying lack of empathy and ineptitude when it comes to the Epstein files and the way he has engaged with the victims should disqualify him instantly.

“Whatever happens at the committee vote on Tuesday, there is still time to keep Trump’s fixer from becoming AG, to keep the DOJ from becoming solely a Trump revenge agency, and Senators must do the right thing and block Blanche before it is too late.”

More than 50 years after the murder of iconic Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, the last man convicted of killing him has been tracked down and brought to justice. In 1973, a day after Pinochet's coup, Jara was seized, tortured, his hands broken to silence what was deemed music "more powerful than a thousand machine guns." Today, in a world tilting right, he remains an enduring symbol of resistance. Manifiesto: “A song has meaning/ When it beats in the veins/ Of a man who will die singing.”

On Sept. 11, 1973, troops under brutal, U.S.- backed General Augusto Pinochet bombed and stormed the presidential palace in Santiago to depose Salvador Allende, a Chilean physician who'd become the first democratically elected Marxist head of state in Latin America. Barricaded inside the palace, Allende gave a final speech defending Chilean democracy. "My words do not have bitterness but disappointment.," he said. "May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath." He thanked the country's workers, farmers, miners, women, intellectuals, students for their heartfelt loyalty to "a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice." "I will always be next to you," he said. "My sacrifice will not be in vain. History is ours." Then he shot himself under the chin with an assault rifle.

A Marxist activist and singer hugely popular with Allende supporters, Jara had re-written the 1969 song Venceremos - composed by Sergio Ortega with original text by Claudio Iturra - as an anthem for Allende’s 1970 Popular Unity election campaign. Born to a poor farm family, Jara was mestizo, a mix of Indigenous Mapuche and Spanish heritage. He once said his first memory was hearing his mother sing folk songs as she worked in their garden or kitchen; after she died when he was 15, Jara went to seminary school but eventually decided against the priesthood. After military service, he studied theater and music at university, then turned to writing songs that merged tender folk music with political themes - rural working-class stories, brutal evictions of squatters: "We began to create a new kind of song. It was music that was born out of necessity."

In September 1973, widely recognizable, he was seized by soldiers the day after the coup and taken to Estadio Chile, a Santiago stadium now named for him, where about 5,000 people were being held. For four days, he was beaten, tortured, humiliated. An officer threw a cigarette on the ground and made him crawl for it; others played Russian Roulette with him; eventually, they broke both his hands before parading him through the stadium; later, through split lips, he sang a final Venceremos - "We Will Prevail." On his last day, said a fellow detainee, he found a pen and notebook and scribbled one more song, or harsh poem, Estadio Chile, later smuggled out. Two hours later, he was killed, his body dumped near a cemetery. His body had 44 bullet wounds 56 broken bones, including a shattered skull. He was 40 years old.

The Pinochet dictatorship went on to kill or disappear over 3,000 people, and detain and torture up to 40,000 during its brutal 17-year reign. It ended in 1990 through a constitutional process wherein voters rejected extending its rule and elected a civilian president. After years of legal efforts to hold Pinochet accountable, in 1998 a Spanish judge issued an international arrest warrant for his human rights abuses; he was detained in the U.K during a medical visit after the House of Lords ruled he did not have immunity, but Britain ultimately released him back to Chile in 2000 for health reasons. There, Chilean judges pushed their Supreme Court to strip him of immunity to face trial for murders and kidnappings tied to military death squads, but he died under house arrest of a heart attack in 2006, age 91, having never been formally tried or convicted for his crimes.

Victor Jara, one of the regime's most beloved and recognizable victims, swiftly became an enduring international symbol of resistance after the deadly, public silencing of his music. In 2003, Estadio Chile was renamed Estadio Víctor Jara; in 2009, Victor’s body was reburied in a public funeral attended by thousands of mourners; today, an annual 1,000 Guitars event held in his honor at that stadium also draws thousands. Still, the moral arc of the universe moved slowly. Over time, Chilean courts convicted hundreds of military officers and secret police for human rights abuses, but it was not until 2018 that eight retired officers were charged with Jara's murder, and that of Allende's director of prisons Littré Quiroga Carvajal. In August 2023, after five years of appeals and 50 years of evading justice, Chile's Supreme Court convicted them all in a unanimous decision.

The Court sentenced the eight, several in absentia, to 15 years and a day for the murders of both men, and 10 years and a day for their kidnappings, for a total of 25 years. A ninth was given eight years for concealing the crimes. The Court also dismissed all their appeals for annulment, and ordered the state to pay large reparations to the families of both men. Of those sentenced, 86-year-old Gen. Hernán Chacón killed himself moments after police arrived to arrest him at his home in a wealthy district of Santiago. Another, Pedro Barrientos, had fled Chile for the US in 1989; he was extradited back in 2023 after he was arrested in the US during a traffic stop. During his trial, one former soldier testified Barrientos liked to brandish his pistol in a crowd and declare, “I killed Víctor Jara with this!"

Five others have been in jail since then. Only one, Nelson Haase Mazzei, had remained missing since he failed to appear in court in 2018. A retired colonel, Haase Mazzei joined the Chilean army’s notorious Tejas Verde brigade in 1972 and was part of Pinochet’s brutal secret police; he worked closely with its head, Manuel Contreras, sentenced to over 500 years in jail for crimes against humanity before his 2015 death. Last weekend, in likely the final act of a too-long quest for justice, Chilean police announced they'd arrested Haase Mazzei, now 80, in rural Puyehue, south of Santiago. A judge ordered his immediate imprisonment to start his 25 year sentence; one article noted, "Impunity Takes Another Hit." Another said his defense lawyer has requested his transfer to Punta Peuco, a ritzy jail already housing many of the Pinochet era's murderers.

Through the Víctor Jara Foundation, started by Victor's widow Joan, a British dancer and activist who died in 2023 at 96, their daughter Amanda said she welcomes the news of Haase's arrest but, "Half a century after the murders, it is difficult to see this as justice." Still, Jara's songs live on from when Allende, after he won the presidency, spoke before a banner reading, "You can’t have a revolution without songs." "They were on the radio and television," said Joan in 1975. “The song movement was a tremendous weapon." Since then, music has continued fighting the fear authoritarianism depends on, transforming "political grievance into a shared language of survival" - Miriam Makeba, Mikis Theodorakis, Pussy Riot, America's Woody Guthrie to Dylan to Bad Bunny, who launched his 2026 tour in Chile with Jara's song, dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, The Right to Live in Peace.

In 2020, James Dean Bradfield, lead vocalist and guitarist for the Welsh alt-rock band Manic Street Preachers, released Even in Exile, a concept album dedicated to Jara's life and work, along with a three-part podcast. Bradfield discovered Jara as a teen, taken aback by a tenderness he didn't associate with "one of the only truly Marxist musicians. The truth...floats to you like a dream.” He learned more about Jara from poet Patrick Jones, whose brother is Bradfield’s bandmate; Jones had found two compilations of Jara songs in a thrift shop, became "obsessed" and wrote dozens of poems about Jara that, shared with Bradfield, became the album's songs. For Jones, the story of Jara's life and death is "a warning from history" that deeply . resonates with today's rise of the right: "Power is always afraid of those who stand up and say, 'There’s another way.'"

For the album, Bradfield wanted songs that span Jara's life, from his rural childhood to his final hours. He was moved by his singing of Venceremos near the end - "He died defiantly, but with grace" - yet felt, "If you just focus on his death, you ignore the journey." Above all, he wanted to highlight Jara's daunting courage and conviction throughout his life, a "naked truth" that rendered him what Phil Ochs called, when he met Jara in 1971, "the real thing." For Bradfield, it reminded him of the Preachers' 1998 song, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next. He also deliberately chose to include Jara's final Estadio Chile - "How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror/ Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying” - which he calls "an anthem that became a prophecy." Of Jara's life and work, he hears "the echo time and time again. I wanted to show here’s an echo that doesn’t die."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

- YouTube www.youtube.com

The Commission will hear directly from victims, their attorneys, and experts on excessive force used by the United States to suppress freedom of expression and peaceful assembly during immigration-related protests. The United States government is expected to participate and respond to testimonies by petitioners and questions from Commissioners. The hearing will take place on August 4, 2026, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. EDT at IACHR Headquarters, 1889 F Street NW, Washington, DC.

WHAT: Press Conference on IACHR Hearing on Excessive Use of Force by U.S. Agents

WHEN: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 2:00–3:30 p.m. EDT

WHERE: Regus, 1500 K Street NW, Room MR-239, Washington, DC 20005

Virtual Participation link here

RSVP here.

WHO: Speakers include:

• James Cavallaro, Executive Director, University Network for Human Rights; former Commissioner (2014–2017) and President (2016–2017) of the IACHR
• Antonio Romanucci, civil rights attorney representing the family of Renée Good and former counsel to the family of George Floyd
• Rev. David Black, witness struck in the head with a pepper-ball projectile by federal agents while protesting outside the Broadview Detention Facility in Chicago
• Locke Bowman, attorney for Rev. David Black
• Susan Akram, Director, International Human Rights Clinic, Boston University
• Naureen Shah, Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division at the ACLU

“Just over one year ago, Congressional Republicans passed the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history, and now the administration is making a bad budget bill worse with additional restrictive regulations. Our comments submitted today spotlight how these Administration rules are unworkable and unlawful, and how they undermine these key public coverage programs. The regulations are a tragic way to mark this week’s 61st anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid — pillars of our health care system that millions have relied on for generations.

“In a health care system that is already overstretched, inordinately expensive, and wildly complex and confusing, these new paperwork requirements will push patients off coverage – not because they aren’t working or not eligible, but because of bureaucratic burdens. While many in Congress promised they would protect the vulnerable and medically frail from these paperwork burdens, the new requirements to get such an exemption are now exponentially more burdensome for both patients and providers.

“By tacking on “capacity to work” to the definition of medically frail and phasing out self-attestation, CMS has handed states an unwise and unworkable program without the resources or structure to implement it.

“The requirement that a patient doesn’t just need to have cancer or another condition but must produce the equivalent of a doctor’s note with a finding that the conditions leave them unable to work—is nowhere in the underlying statute, and unworkable.

“CMS has designed a program akin to determinations made by the Social Security Administration for determining eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI's disability-determination system took decades and billions of dollars to build, relying on a nationwide network of trained adjudicators, detailed federal medical criteria, and safeguards like compassionate allowances for the most serious conditions and multi-year redetermination periods. Such a rule would require setting up, in mere months, a regulatory structure bigger and more complicated than Social Security’s disability determination system, which after 50 years of maturity costs $4.6 billion a year to administer for 7.4 million recipients. For comparison, the budget bill provides less than 5% of that amount, $200 million, to implement.

“CMS is asking states to replicate that system from scratch, for a Medicaid population several times larger, in a matter of months, with almost no federal guidance, no clinical standards for providers, and none of SSI's basic protections. Families USA estimates the added administrative cost of these work-capacity assessments alone could exceed $4.8 billion a year — on top of the billions states are already spending to stand up work-reporting systems.

“It took the federal government fifty years and billions of dollars to build a disability determination system that still leaves people waiting seven months for an answer. CMS expects states to build something similar for Medicaid in under six months, with no playbook, no dedicated staff, and none of the safeguards that make SSI even marginally workable. The people who will pay for that gap aren't bureaucrats — they're cancer patients, people in mental health crises, and people with disabilities who will lose coverage while paperwork catches up to their diagnosis.

“The implementation deadline of January 1 is looming large, and we hope that over these next few months, CMS takes a long hard look at the thousands of comments it has received from patients and health care providers impacted by the agency’s rash and burdensome new requirements.”

Families USA has also joined the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), Community Catalyst, First Focus Campaign for Children, and National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), in another statement opposing this final rule. Read the full partner statement.

“Todd Blanche’s nomination is stalled because his record is corrupt and indefensible. He has spent his career proving that there is no legal principle he will not bend and no institution he will not compromise in service of Donald Trump. His blind loyalty, willingness to use the justice system to protect the president, and role in a sweetheart settlement benefiting Trump make him completely unfit to serve as attorney general.

“Senate Republicans may be trying to put some distance between themselves and this toxic nomination, but moving the vote does not change the facts. Blanche is still Trump’s fixer, still disqualified, and still a threat to the rule of law. The Senate should stop dragging this out and kill the nomination.”

MoveOn continues to mobilize its millions of members and run digital ads to put pressure on Congress to reject Blanche’s nomination.

The plaintiffs - Agroecology Commons, Oregon Farm Corps, Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA), Third Sector New England, and the Washington Farmland Trust - are represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, Earthjustice, and FarmSTAND.

The new terms and conditions require USDA grantees to agree that they will not promote “unlawful DEI” or “gender ideology,” or use grant funding to create “incentives for illegal immigration by demonstrating the availability of public benefits.” The terms even attempt to control the grantees’ work and speech unrelated to the grant, demanding they not “operate any programs that advance or promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

These terms put the plaintiffs in this case in a high-stakes bind: They either must agree to substantial restrictions on their speech and programing, or they must give up on the critical federal funding that has allowed them to effectively serve their communities. If the Trump Administration deems them to have violated the terms and conditions – despite the vagueness and otherwise unlawfulness of the terms – they will lose future payments of the grant. The new terms threaten civil and criminal liability for making supposed false claims.

These terms have already forced the plaintiff organizations to substantially reorient their work. Two of the plaintiffs have decided that they cannot accept any funds from USDA unless the court blocks these terms and conditions from being applied to them, as they fear serious consequences if the Trump Administration decides that they are not complying with grant terms. The effects of that decision are substantial: Plaintiff Washington Farmland Trust, for instance, will have to decline $676,000 in funding that could be going to critical support for farmers unless the court blocks these terms and conditions from being applied to them.

“Farmers need land in order to grow and raise our food. Washington Farmland Trust's Farm to Farmer program helps farmers access the land, resources, and capital they need to be successful,” said Melissa Campbell, Executive Director of Washington Farmland Trust. “This grant would have allowed us to grow the infrastructure of this critical program to serve more farmers. Instead, we’re faced with the impossible choice of pulling back from our mission-critical work or losing out on catalytic funding that would help us better serve our communities. If the court blocks the USDA's problematic terms, farmers will be able to receive the essential support they need to continue to grow food for us all.”

“Organizations like the plaintiffs do essential work to fight hunger, protect the environment, and ensure that communities across the country have access to healthy, local food,” said Stephanie Garlock, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “They should not have to choose between continuing that work and submitting to the Trump Administration's ideological speech code on issues of public policy."

“The First Amendment rights of these plaintiffs are at stake in this case, and so is the future of critical work to build a fair food system that works for everyone,” said David Muraskin, Managing Director of Litigation at FarmSTAND. “The court must block these unlawful, unprecedented terms and conditions. If it doesn’t, the Trump Administration’s enforcement of them will force USDA grantees to abandon important work in support of the next generation of farmers, for fear of serious consequences for violating the new terms.”

“USDA’s new terms and conditions for grants are yet another example of this administration’s unlawful politicization of programs designed by Congress to support farmers and rural communities,” said Carrie Apfel, Deputy Managing Attorney of the Sustainable Food and Farming Program at Earthjustice. “USDA should stop claiming to help farmers when instead it is undermining the very food and farming communities these programs were created to serve. This sort of illegal gamesmanship should not be tolerated.”

Killing The Messenger Dept: Somehow going still lower, Republicans - aka "you absolute fucking pieces of shit" - just hauled Dr. Anthony Fauci into a Senate hearing to charge the guy who saved three million lives with "sabotaging" a dog heartworm pill, wanting to be a megalomanic "sun god," destroying "Americans' trust in their government" and probs being "responsible for this entire pandemic." In response, Fauci, "the man they cannot forgive for being right," declined to answer any of their "questions."

Wednesday's Stalinist circus shitshow trial from a GOP so desperately bogged down they've resorted to, "Ok, but remember the pandemic?" - and forget the Epstein files - offered dismal proof they're still mindlessly bowdlerizing science and using Fauci - a Cornell-trained, 85-year-old immunologist and infectious disease specialist who spent over 50 years in public service - as its main punching bag. Fauci, who evil bridge troll Steve Bannon once said should be beheaded, served almost 40 years as head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) under 7 presidents. Reagan hired him, George H. W. Bush cited him when asked to name someone he admired, George W. gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom and asked him to design a wildly successful AIDS relief PEPFAR that saved 25 million lives, most poor people in Africa.

In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was one of multiple public health crises largely afflicting marginalized populations, along with Ebola and a first coronavirus, that Fauci confronted with grace and courage. "AIDS arrived attached to a despised population," notes one observer. "Fauci did not look away." He redirected research toward what was then deemed a plague "when it was neither safe nor popular," and when furious, screaming, ill AIDS activists stormed his office, he invited them in, listened to them, decided they were at least partly right and expedited clinical trials so patients could get quicker access to experimental drugs. Fierce AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who once called Fauci "an incompetent murderer," years later called him "the only true and great hero" among government officials of the time.

This week's hearing, called and convened under subpoena by rabid gadfly and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, was billed as an investigation into the origins of COVID, a legit scientific question that to some extent remains unresolved. For years, MAGA has chosen to blame an accidental "lab leak" from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Paul has devoted much of his otherwise less-than-memorable political career to arguing, according to that theory, that Dr. Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” - because NIH once provided the Institute with a sub-grant. Most virologists and other health experts say it was more likely caused by the occasional "spillover event" of a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human, arguing the “preponderance” of evidence points to that natural origin.

Public health officials have stepped up to protest the government's “vilification and harassment" of American scientists,” and a group of 155 scientists wrote an open letter dismissing bizarre MAGA charges against Fauci - he covered up the origins of his own research, bribed or others to join him, holds patents on vaccines, is working with bad actors to suppress the awful truth - as "baseless...No credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges." Still, Paul's office spent last weekend dumping over 1,100 pages of Fauci’s private “diary” online; after blowback, they took them down, made redactions and reposted them. Inadvertently or no, they left in Fauci's various descriptions of Trump as “rambling,” “crazy,” “bumbling,” “incompetent,” “an idiot” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

In a somber preamble, Fauci noted over the decades he has testified before Congress, willingly and under oath, hundreds of times. But because he "has spent years playing Twister with these sinuous assholes (and) he knows it doesn’t matter what the spinner says," he went on, "Though it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government," following counsel's advice he would invoke the Fifth and "refrain from answering your questions." He also blasted Paul's "unhinged obsession" with him. Then, dozens of times over the infuriating hours, he intoned, "I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.“ Later, an expert noted his carefully neutral body language during the ordeal: "He is refusing to participate in the confrontation beyond what is legally required.”

Paul - the only senator to vote against $8.3 billion in emergency spending during COVID, and the first senator to get it - grew agitated by Fauci's calm stream of refusals. He threatened him with "repercussions" and with a charge of contempt. Heatedly refusing to allow any of Fauci's attorneys to join him - "The attorneys were not recognized," he snarled - at one point he called on security to escort out of the hearing room one lawyer after he attempted to speak with Fauci. "This is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered - for a lawyer not recognizing the rules," he said. "Security, please remove him from the room.” The attorney gently patted Fauci on the shoulder and turned to leave on his own; a guard sheepishly trailed after him. In the audience, Laura Ingraham and other MAGA-ites applauded, because they have no shame and never will.

Rand and other Republicans tried to claim Fauci had no right to take the Fifth because Biden issued him a preemptive pardon that eliminated that privilege, an ongoing debate in some legal circles. What is not debated though Repubs tried to argue otherwise: Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not a confession of guilt, but a foundational right against self-incrimination as long as there exists a valid threat of prosecution. Most pointedly, the Fifth does not represent guilt but "the ordinary caution" of any citizen who is dragged before a hostile panel by a vindictive chairman vowing for years to put him behind bars, and who "understands this hearing was "never a search for information but a search for a crime - of having stood in public and told a frightened country the truth, while a president lied to it."

Public health experts now say roughly 40% of America's million-plus COVID deaths, representing hundreds of thousands of lives, could have been prevented under more effective federal policies. But because they were caused by an idiotic malignant narcissist tragically unable to admit he's ever fucked up - or to allow anyone around him to admit it - the lies keep spewing. Last year the White House published a paper on the lab-leak theory as a rationale to defund the NIH, justify cutting over a billion dollars in state and local health funding, and gut cancer and Alzheimers research; now, citing that lame lie and dreaded diversity, they're trying to put the entire $1 trillion federal grant apparatus under the control of political appointees. This week, in honor of Paul's hearing, Trump wrote Dr. Fauci’s ideas were "CRAZY."

On Wednesday, MAGA dutifully jumped in. Cowardly slimebag Josh Hawley, who fist-pumped then ran away from the mob who smeared shit on the Capitol walls, said Fauci had no right to invoke the Fifth, "This is about contempt for this body and the American people," and, yuge pot/kettle, the good doctor was a lying megalomaniac who "wanted to be the sun god." Bernie Moreno demanded Fauci apologize for his crimes and sneered, "Who the fuck did you think you were?" Roger Marshall, an alleged doctor, said vaccine lies "made Americans not trust their government," though unvaxxed MAGA died at twice the rate of Dems. Ron Johnson called a vaccine that saved millions of lives "an experimental gene therapy, and accused Fauci of lying in his own diary, eliciting the day's only smile from him.

Later, a frustrated Paul told reporters he would hold Fauci in contempt, though it's not up to him. Besides, notes Tom Wellborn, the spectacle wasn't really about answers to questions; it was about a mob of willfully ignorant quacks and losers finding an imaginary villain. "Fauci was the man on the screen," he writes. "He absorbed the rage that had nowhere else to go." Above all, Fauci was hated, not for lying, but for "telling the truth to people who did not want to hear it." He "stood between the American public and a president who wanted the problem to vanish before an election," who suggested insane things - Ivermectin, disinfectant, lights - as Fauci carefully contradicted him, "trying to keep his job long enough to keep being useful."

Fauci wasn't a saint, Wellborn writes, and he wasn't right about everything. But he was "right about the things that mattered most" - it was airborne, masks and distance helped. He "told the truth as the science understood it at the time, and when the science changed, as science does, he changed the guidance, and his enemies have spent years calling those updates lies." Meanwhile, "he saved lives, and they were on the other side." Most vital: To remember "that in the summer of 2026, a man who had given his entire adult life to keeping other people alive was hauled before a hostile Senate by a colleague nursing a personal vendetta... and which of the two men in that room had spent his life saving strangers, and which spent his trying to jail the person who did."

"As some day it may happen/that a victim must be found" - Gilbert and Sullivan's I've Got A Little List

The action comes after Department of Homeland Security contractors cut down three neighboring Fremont cottonwoods estimated to be 200 to 250 years old.

“Destroying these ancient cottonwoods is a death sentence for an entire ecosystem,” said Russ McSpadden, Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These magnificent cottonwoods survived centuries, nourishing wildlife through floods and drought, only to be bulldozed for the Trump administration’s disastrous border wall. The San Rafael Valley is one of the most biologically rich landscapes in North America. It’s both a refuge and crucial corridor for jaguars, ocelots, black bears, pronghorn and hundreds of bird species.”

Today’s action is believed to be the first tree sit aimed at stopping U.S. border wall construction.

The three cottonwoods cut down earlier this week stood along a rare stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border where mature trees once formed a transboundary canopy. The trees provided nesting habitat, shade and shelter within an increasingly scarce riparian ecosystem that supports hundreds of animal species. One protester was arrested Monday while trying to protect those trees and nesting migratory birds.

Federal officials said preconstruction surveys would be conducted during Arizona’s active nesting season, but observers at the site reported that no surveys for nesting migratory birds were completed before the trees were destroyed.

The area also contains prehistoric archaeological sites that preserve evidence of thousands of years of Indigenous presence in the borderlands. Ongoing construction threatens cultural resources that would be permanently lost if disturbed.

The Department of Homeland Security is constructing the border wall under authorities that waive dozens of the nation’s cornerstone environmental and cultural resource protection laws, allowing construction to proceed without reviews normally required under laws including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

In a letter sent today to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Center called for an immediate halt to construction in the Lochiel area. The letter urged the agencies to conduct comprehensive biological and cultural resource surveys, consult with Tribes with ancestral and cultural connections to the San Rafael Valley, protect the remaining ancient cottonwoods, and assess the ecological and cultural resources at risk.

Videos and photos for media use are available here.

Cottonwood tree destruction for border wall construction in Lochiel, Arizona. Credit: John Kurc. Image is available for media use.

Since then, gas prices have again crossed $4 per gallon and Trump’s new tariffs have increased the risk that inflation will accelerate. Despite mounting signs of labor market weakness, the Fed’s decision today signals they believe that the inflation Trump reignited is not done yet.

Groundwork’s Chief Economist Breyon Williams shared his reaction:

“The president’s reckless economic policies have done irreparable harm to working families’ budgets. Inflation remains elevated, with no immediate relief in sight for Americans. Even Trump’s hand-picked Fed chair, Wall Street sweetheart Kevin Warsh, knows the president’s actions are driving up prices for consumers and creating an influx of uncertainty for the economy. Today’s decision to hold rates steady is a reflection of a stalled labor market and persistent inflation.”

To speak with Breyon or any of Groundwork’s experts about Warsh’s first meeting, reply to this email or reach out to press@groundworkcollaborative.org.

BACKGROUND

Inflation remains above the Federal Reserve's target, and the latest energy price shock has yet to show up in the data.

• Tomorrow's Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report is expected to show prices increased 3.7% in June from a year ago, and largely reflects inflation before Trump dismantled his own ceasefire. Since then, gas prices have climbed back above $4 per gallon, creating renewed inflationary pressure that will not show up in tomorrow’s report.
• The San Francisco Fed warned this month that inflation remains "elevated and uncertain," citing renewed volatility in energy markets and accelerating core inflation.
• Trump is determined to keep prices high using tariffs. After the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s Section 232 tariffs, the administration fell back on temporary Section 122 tariffs, which expired last week. Instead of giving working families some relief, the administration immediately imposed new Section 301 tariffs to keep taxing everyday goods that consumers buy. And more tariffs are already on the horizon: Trump has signed an additional 50% tariff on a wide range of Canadian goods, scheduled to take effect next month, and a 100% tariff on patented drugs are planned in 2028.
• Businesses’ costs are still climbing. The latest wholesale inflation data suggest businesses are still contending with persistent cost pressures that have yet to fully reach consumers. Wholesale inflation rose 5.5% in June from a year ago.
• The Federal Reserve's July Beige Book found that contacts in 9 of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts reported price increases, with businesses repeatedly citing higher energy costs from the conflict in the Middle East and tariffs as key drivers.

The Federal Reserve meets amid growing evidence that the labor market is losing momentum.

• The job market is frozen. Hiring has stalled and layoffs sit near historic lows, a labor market environment that leaves workers feeling stuck and job seekers feeling shut out.
  • Recent job gains were sluggish, with employers adding just 57,000 jobs in June. Payroll gains in April and May were revised down by a combined 74,000 jobs.
• More Americans are leaving the workforce. A total of 720,000 people exited the labor force in June, pushing participation to its lowest level since March 2021.
• Workers are spending longer searching for jobs, and millions of Americans still cannot find full-time work. More than one in four unemployed Americans (27.3%) have been out of work for at least six months, up from 23.3% one year ago. About 4.7 million Americans are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs, pushing the broad U-6 unemployment rate, which captures workers who are unemployed, marginally attached, and part-time but want full-time jobs, to 7.9%.

The economy is expected to grow at a slower pace, with AI investment propping up the headline numbers. The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model estimates the economy grew at a 1.6% annualized rate in the second quarter, well below the 2.1% pace recorded in 2025. Much of the expected growth reflects continued investment in AI infrastructure and data centers rather than broad-based strength across the economy.

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in Washington this week and he should not be allowed to leave D.C. without Congress seeking to understand, from him, publicly how one of the company’s most advanced AI systems escaped its intended testing environment and reportedly carried out offensive cyber operations affecting multiple companies,” said J.B. Branch, Director of Federal AI Governance at Public Citizen. “Voluntary disclosures after the fact are not a substitute for congressional oversight. The American people deserve a full accounting of what happened, why existing safeguards failed, and what concrete steps are being taken to prevent it from happening again. Most importantly, Congress must act, not rely on voluntary action by Big Tech companies. AI systems are creating real-world consequences. Congress should treat this with the urgency it deserves.”

“The federal government must develop emergency authorities and response capabilities for advanced AI systems. If a frontier model demonstrates dangerous autonomous behavior, the government cannot be left relying solely on private companies to decide when — or whether — to pause, contain, or disable it. A credible national emergency preparedness framework is now an essential component of AI governance.”

Public Citizen urges Congress to hold immediate oversight hearings, obtain all relevant incident reports and technical findings, and evaluate whether additional statutory safeguards — including mandatory incident reporting, independent safety evaluations, cybersecurity standards for frontier AI systems, and pre-deployment oversight for exceptionally capable models — are necessary to protect the public.

While Congress is considering legislation in the name of pipeline safety, the coalition points out the current legislation fails to establish minimum protections for communities and first responders that are necessary before the industry is allowed to build tens of thousands of miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines. The letter also points out that the administration is actively weakening existing pipeline safety oversight and enforcement, making all pipelines less safe.

The letter comes as Congressional leaders must reconcile differing pipeline safety bills that passed through House and Senate Committees, and the White House is cutting oversight and enforcement for pipeline safety across the board.

“Congress is telling communities to shoulder all the health and safety risks while pipeline companies are making off with billions in taxpayer dollars. Communities deserve more than empty promises about stronger rules at some point in the future. If lawmakers are serious about pipeline safety, they should stop drafting bills to benefit the pipeline companies and start drafting them for people who have to live with the consequences of these dangerous projects,” said Jim Walsh, Policy Director, Food & Water Watch.

"There’s no pipeline safety when the regulations are drafted by the oil and gas industry. For decades, fossil-fuel infrastructure including pipelines have dictated lifespans across Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income neighborhoods, exposing these communities to higher rates of disease and early mortality. As the Trump Administration dismantles more and more safeguards, we will see even more chronic illnesses and dangerous pipeline disasters that harm our neighbors and families. Congress must pass comprehensive pipeline safety standards that actually safeguard people’s lives and livelihoods — not cut corners for industry profit," said Mar Zepeda, Legislative Director at Climate Justice Alliance.

“Landowners should not be criminalized for protecting their private property rights,” said Emma Schmit, Bold's Pipeline Fighters Organizing Director. “Farmers who have been waiting on federal regulations for years now should not be forced to accept potentially deadly CO2 pipelines on their farms through eminent domain. Without any adequate federal rules, the industry is plowing forward seeking state authorizations for dangerously unregulated projects while keeping the public in the dark with regard to the full scope of potential risks.”

The wholesale price of U.S. fossil gas is likely to double by the late 2030s, relative to the 2020 to 2025 average, if Trump’s AI and LNG policies succeed in pushing gas demand to levels that can only be met by more expensive gas production. New production in the Appalachian and Permian Basins can meet a portion of rising demand for fossil gas, but these relatively low-cost basins cannot produce enough gas to meet the surge in demand created by Trump’s policies.

One region in particular, called the Haynesville shale play, is expected to fill the gap. Production in the Haynesville shale play in western Louisiana and eastern Texas is expected to soar by over 130%. However, because it’s more expensive to drill in the Haynesville, where gas is harder to access, this aggressive production growth would require prices to rise.

Over the past decade, the annual average wholesale gas price (Henry Hub) was $3.18 per Million British Thermal Units (MMBTU). But analysts estimate that for gas supply from the Haynesville to grow to meet surging demand, prices will have to rise above $5. Several analysts, as well as the U.S. Energy Information Administration, project that Henry Hub prices will reach annual averages of $7 by the late 2030s.

Decisionmakers in the U.S. and across the world can protect families from out-of-control energy costs by stopping the buildout of expensive gas projects, and investing in clean, affordable renewable energy instead. Transitioning to a just renewable energy system is also critical to creating good green jobs, reducing toxic fossil fuel pollution, and safeguarding communities from deadly climate disasters.

Lorne Stockman, Research Director at Oil Change International, said:

“Trump's policies are making everyone's lives more expensive while Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry cash in. Our research shows that the cost-of-living crisis will only escalate in the coming years if Congress and government agencies don’t intervene. Our leaders must stand up to Trump, phase out LNG exports, stop the reckless data center buildout, and transition the U.S. economy off of fossil fuels to make energy affordable again.”

More madness from the surreal saga of a nuclear-armed Iran oscillating between "obliterated" and "threatening our families" so we have to obliterate it though we just agreed to help nuclear-arm the brutes behind 9/11 so go figure. Meanwhile, the Pentagon pursues a gazillion bucks and testosterone-ripped troops even as a flailing president insists the last dead troops all said "very strongly" to keep fighting right before he odiously covered up their deaths so others would. Head-spinning, soul-killing.

To date, "Emperor Commodus of Covfefe's" illegal, disatrous, dim-witted Iran "excursion," a mangling of "incursion" and global clusterfuck with no clear mission, strategy, end goal or clue, has killed over 3,500 Iranians, many of them women and children, wounded over 26,500, and razed much of that country's infrastructure, including fresh water sources. At least 18 U.S. troops have been killed, with up to 500 wounded. A quarter of the world’s oil is held hostage across two vital straits, at least 70% of Americans oppose the war, recession-level prices here loom, and rage, especially among Muslim nations, is palpable, perhaps nudged along by a brilliant Iranian social-media campaign - "ONE VENGEANCE FOR ALL" - that tied America's latest atrocity to those of the past, from Native Americans, "stolen blacks" and Vietnamese villagers to Abu Ghraib, Gaza and Epstein Island.

In the bleak wake of eight missed deadlines, 28 empty claims of a "deal," several failed ceasefires and ongoing blather of a mythical "victory" on the horizon, the war is now widely seen as militarily, politically and morally "unwinnable," and even U.S. money, always there for calamitous wars, is running low. Thus did greasy dunk-tank clown and strung-tight "warfighter" zealot Pete Hegseth appear before Congress last week to plead for a profane $67 billion more in emergency funds - part of a $1.15 trillion defense bill, a 44%, $454 billion increase - added to the $37.5 billion he's already squandered in the name of a vague "generational investment," maybe to get the Strait of Hormuz closed again? Par for the inept course, only Pete, fired from two non-profits for mishandling their finances and adroit at blaming others for bad decisions, seems surprised the money's run out.

Maybe that's 'cause at the start of the Iran misadventure he was so busy posting braggadocious war porn, "some of the most loser shit ever," of tacky bellicose video games cut in with real carnage from Iran - war=Call of Duty - and delivering bombastic briefings to crow about annihilating the enemy "without mercy" in the name of "real warriors." Those briefings have now been quietly "replaced by a vacuum." Frantic to control a grim political narrative, he's held no briefings since May, emptied the Pentagon's press corps of everyone but right-wing hacks, restricted access in ways large and small, banned "unflattering" images of himself - oh vanity thy name is lame snowflake - and otherwise treated America's vital free press as an enemy to be subdued, defeated or at least hoodwinked in order to obscure his own lies, failures, abuses and all-round buffoonery.

By all accounts, Hogsbreath has been serving more as showboating fitness influencer than sober head of a functional military. He now presides over a largely broken Pentagon where morale is dismal, finances are strained, readiness is collapsing and care for troops, veterans and their families is at historic lows. Within the ranks, he's derided as an out-of-his-depth, D-list pretender and "fake-ass manly man" who looks like a Ken doll "stored too close to the furnace," relishes lecturing generals, and "dresses like he's on The Love Boat" - hair gel, makeup, showy pocket hanky resembling military honors - while somehow disastrously managing to kill 170 Iranian schoolgirls on the first day of a misbegotten war he still insists is "a historic, overwhelming victory." From Jeff Tiedrich: "He's what would happen if arrogance and an elevated blood-alcohol level became a real boy."

In a "beyond Strangelovian" move, that blustering boy recently responded to the multiple crises of his Dept. of Deep Masculine Insecurity with a bonkers video from def not his makeup studio, titled "The High-T Department of War," announcing a new program to ensure troops have enough testosterone to stay "on the leading edge of lethality." He's evidently unaware any guy who declares he's "high-T" is probs not - "Real gangsta *ss people don't flex nuts"; also, that behind most war crimes is too much testosterone and a failed moral compass, today's military doesn't do much hand-to-hand combat, studies show testosterone doesn't help focus, fatigue, memory or well-being, and "High-T For Better Killing" is maybe not a great slogan. Still, the guy fixated on "the highest male standard" is calling for mandatory annual screening of those over 30; under 30, it's voluntary.

The general response to this very cool plan has been...mixed. Many noted the discrepancy between his strident insistence on freedom from governments making our medical decisions - hence ending a decades-old flu vaccine mandate (until an outbreak led to its quiet reversal) and gender-affirming health care, which is why a judge may overturn it - and his railing against beards, fat troops, high-ranking women and people of color. Women decried flaky policy decisions inspired by "the far corners of the manosphere" or the ravings of RFK Jr.; some suggested he replace salutes with chest bumps and "Sir" with "Bro"; others wondered who'll be screening Pete "for being a dick." Above all, especially after last week's hearing, a broad consensus has emerged that no amount of testosterone pumped into his body will render him even remotely qualified for his job.

Confronted with lawmakers questioning yet more money for a debacle, Pete blustered, stuttered, sneered, fear-mongered about radical Islamists "coming for our families" with nuclear weapons "to hold us at issue (sic)." He thundered Jack Reed - West Point, Harvard, veteran, professor - should respect "the historic nature of what (Trump's) undertaking"; Reed snapped, "He should be praised for starting a war without authority?" He shrieked at Jon Ossoff for calmly listing the multiple times he's lied "Iran’s military had been, quote, destroyed." When Gary Peters cited those lies and the 30 times he's declared what's clearly "a complete failure" an "overwhelming victory," Pete screeched the word failure "smears the sacrifice of the troops" (sic) and "shame on you." He didn't use it about the troops, Peters retorted, but their leaders: "You, sir, are the failure. You don't have a strategy."

Finally Hegseth, the model avatar for a regime that never accepts responsibility for anything, laid the blame for a Pentagon famed for funding atrocities abroad with little to no accountability seeking $1.5 trillion more in blood money on...Biden and his “gross negligence.” Gross, indeed: “You cannot inherit a war you started.” Dems balked at an obscene price tag that dwarfs even the Iran debacle, noting it includes $800 million for the National Guard to keep pointlessly patrolling D.C, over $1bn to patrol the southern border which is DHS’ job, $900 million to illegally bomb more boats in the Caribbean etc. Also quietly stuck in there was the vile Save America Act (more sic) to further restrict voting, and the random horror of a move to establish a joint US-Israel tech initiative so we can further integrate our military with Israel's universally admired genocidal regime. Still, it passed, barely.

Defense bills tend to win broad bipartisan support, but the House barely squeezed through a $1.15 trillion version of this insane one with the help of six craven Dems, including Maine's fucking Jared Golden. In better news, they also passed a second, largely symbolic but heartening resolution to end the war, with four Repubs joining them. In the Senate, the measure was blocked, 47-49, by fucking John Fetterman. Also last week, the US made a deal to help the Saudis - of hacksaws and 9/11 - set up a civilian nuclear program, despite MAGA terror of Nukes For Muslims! (see war in Iran, whose painstaking deal Trump tore up). Despite longtime fears of a nuclear race in the Middle East, Trump said they have to join the "very respected" Abraham Accords with Israel and sign a hollow "safeguards agreement" with a pinky promise of "no enrichment of material!" So no worries.

Still, some were worried, also enraged. The folks at I Fucking Love Australia were already some pissed at Admiral USS Bigly and his 271 Republicans, "you spineless, belly-crawling, yellow-bellied fucking grubs" and "geography-proof fucking muppets who can't count past their own indictments," not one of whom will stand up to a doddering "windbag at the arse end of his miserable sex-offending, pedo-loving, decomposing life" as a fifth of the world's oil remains bottled up behind Hormuz, just like "HIS OWN JOINT CHIEFS WARNED HIM," using small words and a hand puppet. With Australia down to 29 days of vital diesel in reserve, they fume, "You lot couldn't poll your collective vertebrae and build a fucking prawn...Do your job." And that was before last week's Houthi attack by "a militia in sandals" on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea for breaching their naval blockade.

The bold move by a ragtag militia from the Middle East's poorest country, armed with "cheap hardware from a rusty shed - drones, hand-me-down missiles and a Telegram account" - prompted the sages at IFLA to offer a cogent, useful backstory on just what's going down in a volatile, "centuries-deep cauldron of grievance" into which "waddles Napoleon Blownapart, fresh from a Bibi slideshow in the Situation Room, convinced he can win a regional war with vibes and a Sharpie." They began by citing the Saudis' "one genuinely clever move of the war": When Hormuz shut down, they were ramming up to 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, far more than usual, through the critical Asia/Europe escape hatch of Bab Al Mandeb's east-west pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Then, "The Houthis just bricked it the fuck up - they welded the back door of the global oil market shut."

Pundits call Yemen's Houthis Iran "proxies,” but "they've got their own grievances, which tell you where this war is headed." IFLA "follows the thread all the way back, since apparently nobody in the White House owns a ball of string." To Houthis and hundreds of millions more, "This is now a defensive war against an attack on Muslim nations," and "you cannot drone-strike a conviction." See Vietnam, Afghanistan, ISIS etc. Not inside that tent: Saudi Arabia, who "picked the wrong side of (their) religion," watched Gaza flattened and only checked their wealth fund balance; now the Houthis "declared them fair game, and no one is holding (a) vigil for them." Righteous bottom line: "Why is the region on fire? Israel. Occupation, annexation, settlements, the slow-motion theft (that) manufactures resistance. Hamas and Hezbollah didn’t fall out of the sky. Dispossession built them, brick by bloody brick."

Brilliant strategist Trump "surveyed that flawless 0-4 record of American wars of choice, a historical record so grim you could read it by Braille, and thought, you know what this list needs? Iran, plus a bonus round against mountain fighters in Yemen who've never once lost." He thought the Houthis no longer wanted to fight; now, he's "disappointed" and "cranked up the rhetoric with his 76th ultimatum." Meanwhile, on "planet fucken consequences," oil prices spiked to over $100 a barrel amidst market chaos, and "the dumbest cunt that ever fumbled the world’s most dangerous military operation opened the gates of Hell with his own two tiny clay-colored hands." Or more accurately the Gate of Tears, Bab el-Mandeb in English. "The old sailors named it for the ships it drowned," notes IFLA. "Turns out it was just waiting all these centuries for a presidency worthy of the title."

Still, he blunders on. The same day he again boasted his war has *only* killed 18 U.S. troops - there's a chart! - vs. "hundreds of thousands" - actually 58,220, none him - in Vietnam, he went to Dover for the dignified transfer of four Americans just killed in an Iran attack at a Jordan airbase. He told reporters he was en route to "honor great heroes, actually." Then, in a "next-level ghastly" move, he put his own vile words in their young dead mouths to claim, "All of them said, very strongly, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon." Appalled responses: "Did they have tears in their eyes? Did they ask why we need to destroy their nuclear program when we've already done it five times? Vastly more plausible: They said 'What the fuck are we doing here?' or 'What the fuck is wrong with you?' and, Can any journalist ask him to name two of the fallen soldiers? Or hell, name two of his kids?"

We can name them: Sgt. Michael Swinton 30, of North Carolina, father to two kids 4 and 6, First Lt. Tyler Feehan, 25, of Hawaii, weeks away from earning his MBA, Sgt Angel Rampersad, 28, of New York, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas. Hours after the ceremony - where the guy who never bothered to know their names gazed blankly, blue suit gaudy among black suits and bowed heads - he went to a MAGA rally at a Georgia high school where he sweated and babbled: "We had transgender for everybody, ravaging through our cities," "We don't need the Hormuz Street in our skirmish...They're not ready to make a deal. They'll be ready soon," "We'll pass the great healthcare plan. It's called Our Great Healthcare Plan," "The communists want to blow up Mt. Rushmore" (boos), "I fought Ossoff before (boos) and we won...He reminds me of Pinky Herman."

The newly dead, wholly unreal suckers and losers to a narcissist incarnate, were clearly far from what passes for the remains of his mind. That obliviousness reflects what former Sec. of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta charged is a "deliberate effort to withhold information from the American people, a shameful approach to sharing the responsibility we all have (in) a war." Speaking of a New York Times report the Pentagon suppressed news of dozens of military injuries - which the regime called “baseless and malicious” but anyway they're not "strictly required" to publicize them - Panetta said officials are in essence "challenging the press to find what’s really happening, and they will." "They can dodge, bob and weave," he said of a long, base tradition in American politics, "but my experience is that no matter how much you try to hide it, in the end, the truth comes out.”

The truth, says James Talarico: "We are closing schools and hospitals in this country so we can bomb schools and hospitals in other countries" - and working hard to hide it. The latest proof, again from the Times in a rare, welcome burst of journalism: The Pentagon's Casualty Analysis website just lowered the number of troop deaths from 18 to 14, with the four names just brought home scrubbed from the list. Garbled rationales ranged from deaths after Trump's April ceasefire mean no war/no deaths to "site errors due to a temporary data disruption (with) anomalies being resolved." Days later, they're still missing. Michael Swinton's widow Jamiah, asked if she had any details on the disappeared names, said nobody has reached out: "I kind of don’t have words for that.” We don't either. "They died serving our country," wrote Bill Kristol. "They should be honored, not erased." In sorrowful fact, we say they died for little besides a sick con man's lies. For that we are truly sorry. Remember who to blame.

Update: Jesus these inept hacks and clowns can't even keep track of how many gullible young people's lives they've fucked up in the name of their imperialist misadventures. Now, after their data was "quietly updated," it's 18 killed and 624 wounded. Do better, or for the love of God and gullible young people's lives just fucking stop.

The "anomalies": Feehan, Gonzales, Swinton, RampersadPhotos from U.S. Army

The national movement follows two recent, horrific killings by ICE agents. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved father and worker, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving a work van. On July 13, ICE agents killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his partner and toddler.

There have now been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated, 33 deaths in fiscal year 2026 alone. As the death toll grows, communities across the country are taking to the streets to protest and mourn together, demanding that the ICE agents involved in these killings, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and all related agencies under the Trump administration be held accountable. Given the pending confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General, this need for transparency, accountability and public pressure is particularly important now.

Find all events here.

Organizers and participants are calling for:

• Immediate Transparency: DHS must immediately release the key witnesses to Lorenzo’s death and halt their deportation proceedings so they can safely participate in any investigation and legal process.
• Full, Independent Investigations: Investigations must include full transparency and cooperation from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and all other law enforcement agencies. Accountability for any officer found to have committed misconduct or violated the law.
• ICE Out: All state and local leaders should stop using their resources to support federal immigration enforcement and stop all coordination with ICE. DHS must remove all ICE agents from the streets.
• Corporate Responsibility: Businesses and corporations must exercise their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to protect their employees, customers, and communities, and decline to cooperate with ICE, including by refusing access to private property, customer information, or other resources.

“We refuse to grieve quietly. We refuse to accept this terror and violence as inevitable”, said Crystal Cron, Executive Director, Presente! Maine. “Johan Sebastián should still be here with his wife and daughter — and instead, his name joins a growing list of people killed by an institution that treats our communities as disposable. This is bigger than one shooting, bigger than Biddeford, bigger than Maine. We will not stop fighting until there is justice for the Durán Guerrero family and a total dismantling of this lawless, criminal agency that took him from them.”

“Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a husband, a father of three, and a small business owner who built his American dream with his own hands. Johan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in front of his partner and his toddler,” said Juan Proaño, Chief Executive Officer of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “ICE has now taken the lives of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, and if they can kill Lorenzo and Johan, they can kill anyone. On July 25, LULAC’s members and councils will stand vigil with neighbors in communities across this country to demand transparency, independent investigations, and accountability for every life taken.”

“We are all in danger from the brutality of ICE, and the killings of Lorenzo, Johan, Juan Hairo —and all those who have been killed by this rogue agency—prove that no one is safe,” said Erika Andiola, NDLON Political Director. “We must unite to defend ourselves and honor immigrant workers and day laborers, who endure the worst anti-immigrant hatred while building our communities and defending human rights. Today, we gather to mourn them and demand an end to ICE’s reign of terror.”

“A government-authorized paramilitary force is roaming our streets, terrorizing, abducting and murdering human beings,” said Robert Weissman, Co-President of Public Citizen. “This weekend, thousands of Americans at hundreds of events across the country will gather to mourn the shameful loss of life, demand accountability for perpetrators and insist on an end to the cruel and deliberate Trump administration policy choices that make these kinds of killings all but inevitable.”

“ICE kills people, separates families, and threatens community safety across the country – full stop. No one is safe when ICE is present – whether on the streets or in one of the agency’s more than 200 abuse-ridden detention facilities,” said Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director of Detention Watch Network. “People are dying in ICE detention at a record-breaking rate, ICE agents are tearing families apart and shooting people on the streets, making people less safe, and causing chaos wherever they go — whether in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Biddeford, or beyond. No more abuse and death at the hands of ICE and no more ICE funding while people lose health care, struggle to pay rent and kids go hungry. We demand an end to the ICE age.”

“The deaths of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastián Guerrero, and now Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran are not isolated tragedies; they are the direct result of the administration’s drastic and dangerous expansion of immigration enforcement, fueled by the $270 billion in funding to ICE and CBP. These hundreds of billions to terrorize communities are financed by historic cuts to health care, and the American public is rightly outraged by these killings and cruelty,” said Todd Schulte, President of FWD.us. “We will continue to fight against this ICE violence that is tearing families apart, against the expansion of enforcement and for a more just and human approach to immigration.”

“Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving to a job site with his crew. Johan Sebastian Guerrero was starting his day as a delivery driver, with his wife and toddler beside him. They were doing what millions of immigrants do every day. And ICE agents gunned them down; for working. This is not immigration enforcement. This is lethal state violence against people who are our neighbors, family members, and friends, and it has to stop. For over a year, Workers Circle activists have taken action week after week through our Freedom Vigils, bearing witness outside detention facilities like Alligator Alcatraz until we shut it down in June and refusing to let this cruelty happen in the dark across the nation. Lorenzo and Johan’s deaths are part of the same fight for human dignity and Constitutional rights, now out in the open for the whole country to see” said Noelle Damico, Director of Social Justice at The Workers Circle. “On July 25, we’re bringing that same determination and love to communities from Houston to Maine and everywhere in between, because we owe Lorenzo and Johan and their families more than grief — we owe them justice. We will not look away, and we will keep speaking out until we end ICE’s reign of terror in our communities once and for all.”

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The July 25 Day of Action is being organized by volunteers, neighbors, families, and organizations nationwide, with support from the Disappeared in America project hosted by Public Citizen, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), The Workers Circle, Detention Watch Network, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). A core principle behind all Disappeared in America events is a commitment to nonviolent action.

• Read the Report

The report details how these efforts involve not only money spent on lobbying and campaign contributions, but aggressive and deceitful advertising and paid advocacy designed to convey the impression of grassroots support for the current system, which is enormously profitable for Visa, Mastercard and major banks that issue credit cards.

“For a combination of misleading claims and sheer financial firepower, Wall Street’s defense of credit cards really is something,” said Carter Dougherty, senior fellow for antimonopoly and finance at Demand Progress. “Visa, Mastercard and the big banks have money on their side but only vacant arguments, so this sort of campaign is the result.”

A glaring example of the industry’s astro-turfing is the Small Business Payments Alliance. The group, run by a New York public relations firm, spreads around videos of testimonials against reform from small businesses that have taken money from Visa and Mastercard. The industry has also engaged The Points Guy, a popular credit card website, in fighting change.

The report, entitled, “How Wall Street Money Misleads,” includes detailed evidence of how the credit card industry:

• Pumps money into political campaigns
• Spends heavily on lobbying in Washington and in states that have sought to pass incremental payment system reforms
• Uses advertising in select markets
• Bankrolls different groups and websites to convey widespread support for its position

The Credit Card Competition Act aims to introduce competition into the payment system by allowing merchants to route credit card transactions over networks other than Visa or Mastercard. In the Senate, Sens. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) are sponsors. In the House, the sponsors are Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Lance Gooden (R-TX). The bill would apply provided the card was issued by a bank with more than $100 billion in assets, a threshold that covers the oligopoly of megabanks whose cards are used for most transactions. It enjoys the support from a wide array of consumer advocates, antimonopoly advocates and small businesses. A fact sheet on the CCCA can be found here.

It follows the attack on Iran by a US B-1 bomber stationed at RAF Fairford this week and a statement from Iran’s foreign ministry which branded Britain as an ‘accomplice’ to the US’s illegal war. Iran now views British bases like RAF Fairford as legitimate targets.

This is the latest escalation in almost two weeks of the US’s bombardment of Iran, which has targeted bridges, energy supplies and other civilian infrastructure. In retaliation, Iran has targeted US bases in the Middle East, including Bahrain, Jordan and Qatar.

Rather than condemning the Trump administration for renewing the conflict - which has resulted in even greater casualties and is pushing the global economy even further into crisis - Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is continuing the policy of his predecessor Keir Starmer.

This support could now also be putting British lives in danger. It risks an even greater escalation in the Middle East and the involvement of the nuclear-armed alliance of NATO—something that Trump has been pushing for.

Instead, the British government needs to use its diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation. Central to this is withdrawing the use of British bases.

CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt said:

“New Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, needs to end Trump's use of Fairford and Diego Garcia now. This is dragging Britain directly into Trump's illegal war on Iran. Public opposition to the use of British bases to commit war crimes overseas is growing*. Diplomatic pathways to achieve a peaceful resolution to Iran's nuclear programme have been shown to work. Trump's bombardment is only sabotaging this progress.

The government’s ongoing attempt to hide behind spurious arguments that Fairford is being used for ‘defensive’ operations cannot be justified. Actively assisting a country breaching international law is indefensible. Burnham needs to do the right thing. That means using diplomacy to end this devastating war and end its complicity in US war crimes.”

In June, the news site NOTUS reported on Charlton Allen’s record of racist and bigoted conduct and rhetoric, both as an individual and through his role founding and serving as publisher of the Carolina Review while he was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Under Allen’s leadership, the Carolina Review ran covers depicting Black people as monkeys and a Jewish student leader as the devil, among dozens of other instances of hate-filled articles and opinion pieces. During his confirmation hearing, Allen failed either to apologize or to denounce his record at the Carolina Review.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley called his record “disqualifying” when these outrageous examples of Allen’s bigotry were first reported. On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 7-5 to move the nomination to the full Senate for a vote.

In a letter sent today to all U.S. senators, Kelley urged lawmakers to oppose the nomination.

“The FLRA is a small but highly important agency for America's two million federal workers. According to its mission statement, the FLRA exists ‘to promote stable, constructive labor relations that contribute to a more effective and efficient government.’ To do that, it must fairly and impartially investigate unfair labor practices, adjudicate disputes about the duty to bargain, conduct elections, and handle the certification and decertification of federal unions,” Kelley wrote.

“The position of FLRA general counsel carries a five-year term and requires Senate confirmation. It should be filled by someone who commands trust from all sides, labor and management alike. Charlton Allen does not meet that threshold.”

“[In] our view,” the court wrote, “denying judicial review of detention claims like Suri’s misreads Congress’ statutes and undermines the protections guaranteed all persons on American soil by the writ of habeas corpus.”

The court later expanded: “[An] unbroken line of caselaw also accords with common sense: if a noncitizen is challenging their detention pending removal, then waiting for their removal proceedings does them no good. They have already been detained, allegedly in violation of the Constitution. This ‘absurd’ reading of the INA would make such detention claims ‘effectively unreviewable,’ and the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to embrace it.”

In March 2025, ICE arrested and detained Dr. Suri, a lawful visa holder from India whose wife is a U.S. citizen, outside his Virginia home in retaliation for his associations and speech in support of Palestinian rights. Dr. Suri was detained for nearly six weeks over a thousand miles away from his wife and children at an infamous private detention center in Texas known for its human rights abuses. A federal judge ordered his release from detention in May 2025 while his case continued in federal court.

“Today reaffirms my faith that an independent judiciary remains the truest guardian of liberty, due process, and the rule of law. I am profoundly grateful to the judges who upheld these constitutional principles and gave my case the careful, deliberate consideration it deserved,” said Dr. Badar Khan Suri. “I remain, as ever, committed to the pursuit of justice through lawful and peaceful means. We should remember that a democracy without an accessible writ of habeas corpus is a democracy in name only; as the honorable court so aptly observed, the scope of habeas corpus ‘must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.’ I am proud of those who fought for me, and I am proud of every moment of life. Be courageous and stand for justice. Free Palestine.”

On appeal, the Trump administration argued that federal district courts don’t have the authority to review the constitutionality of Dr. Suri’s detention until the Department of Justice-controlled immigration process, which can take months or even years, is completed. The administration also argued that because it quickly swept Dr. Suri out of Virginia without notice to his family or lawyers, the Virginia court does not have jurisdiction to hear his petition, and that it should be handled by a court in Texas, where it chose to take him.

Today, a panel of judges from the Fourth Circuit rejected both arguments 2-1, finding that federal courts must be able to review constitutional claims stemming from immigration detention, and that his case should stay in Virginia.

“We are elated that Dr. Suri will remain free with his family and we are grateful that the court has seen through the government's brazen attempts to silence pro-Palestine speech,” said Noor Zafar, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The federal government cannot do an end run around the First Amendment by locking people up for their speech and denying them their day in court. Immigration laws cannot be abused to silence dissent, and we are grateful that today, justice prevailed.”

This ruling is the third opinion from a federal court of appeals addressing the question of whether the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) bars immediate federal court review of a noncitizen’s claim of unlawful detention in retaliation for their speech. In January, the Third Circuit ruled against Mahmoud Khalil, holding that the INA does bar such claims. And just two days ago, the Second Circuit ruled against Mohsen Mahdawi, agreeing with the Third Circuit’s analysis. Addressing the Khalil v. Trump decision, the Fourth Circuit was clear: “We disagree.”

“We are gratified that the court recognized the basic principle that the government cannot escape judicial review of their patently unconstitutional actions — here, arresting Dr. Khan Suri, transferring him far away from his family and community, and detaining and attempting to deport him for nothing more than his associations and constitutionally protected advocacy for Palestinian rights,” said Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Similar to the cases of Mr. Khalil, Mr. Mahdawi, and other students, Dr. Suri was arrested in retaliation for his speech in support of Palestinian rights. He was additionally targeted because of his U.S. citizen wife’s speech, her Palestinian origins, and her familial ties. On social media, Dr. Suri criticized U.S. support of Israel’s assault on Gaza, motivated by the time he spent volunteering in Gaza and fear for his wife’s family members who still lived there with no way to flee during the war. The administration has falsely argued that Dr. Suri’s presence in the United States “compromised a compelling foreign policy interest” and therefore, under a rarely used section of the INA, it had the right to deport him. Dr. Suri’s immigration court proceedings remain ongoing.

“ICE abducted Dr. Khan Suri from his home in Virginia before moving him among five different ICE facilities across three states in a shameless attempt to find a court that would be friendlier to his unlawful detention,” said ACLU-VA Legal Director Eden Heilman. “We are elated that the Fourth Circuit saw through the Trump administration’s blatant attempt to bend the law to their will and rejected their bid to re-detain our client thousands of miles away from his family in Virginia. The First Amendment protects all of us — regardless of citizenship — and we will continue to fight for his constitutional rights.”

Dr. Suri is represented in his federal lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Van Der Hout LLP.

For more information, see the case page. The opinion can be read here.

This press release is available here and here.