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    NHS could pay 25% more for medicines under plan to end row with drugmakers and Trump

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    Ministers are preparing to raise the amount the NHS pays pharmaceutical firms for medicines by up to 25% after weeks of intensive talks with the Donald Trump administration and drugmakers.Labour has drawn up fresh proposals to end a standoff with the industry over drug pricing, including changing the cost-effectiveness thresholds under which new medications are assessed for use on the NHS, according to industry sources.The row has been cited as one of the reasons why big companies in the sector, including MSD (known as Merck in the US) and AstraZeneca, have cancelled or paused investments in the UK in recent weeks, while ramping up investments in the US.The Department of Health and Social Care is in a standoff with the Treasury and No 10 on how to fund the deal, with Downing Street resisting pressure to commit new funds for medicines in next month’s budget.The Liberal Democrats immediately criticised the move, first reported by Politico, asking how much it would cost and whether it would lead to cuts elsewhere in the NHS.The science secretary, Patrick Vallance, has publicly acknowledged that the UK’s spending on new medicines needs to rise from 9% of overall NHS spend, which is below drug spending in the US and many other European countries.The main element of the plan is thought to include raising the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) cost-effectiveness threshold by 25%, which has been unchanged since 1999. Under current rules, Nice considers a medicine costing between £20,000 and £30,000 for every extra year of good-quality life it provides a patient to represent good value for money for the NHS.The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry on Tuesday reiterated its call for “urgent action” on drug pricing, saying the Nice threshold should be increased as soon as possible in line with inflation to between £40,000 and £50,000, and index-linked thereafter. Making this change would, over time, lead to a greater share of the NHS budget being allocated to medicines, and additional funding would be needed to support this.In talks over the summer, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, proposed a deal that would save the pharmaceutical industry £1bn over three years, with billions more promised over the coming decade.But the industry argued that it was forecast to make repayments totalling £13.5bn over the same period and has been demanding about £2.5bn a year extra.A government source said ministers were prepared to spend more on medicines as they increasingly became more ​innovative and preventive. They cited the example of weight loss injections – which are forecast to save the NHS billions of pounds in treating obesity and associated health problems – and trials for cancer-preventing vaccines.The patient-led campaign group Just Treatment called it “deeply troubling news for patients and the NHS”, adding: “We are at risk of importing America’s disastrous drug pricing crisis.” It called on the government to “take steps to establish a system for developing and manufacturing medicines that puts patients first”.The NHS spent £20.6bn on medicines and medical devices in 2023-24, up from £19.2bn the year before.Trump has put pressure on pharma companies to lower their drug prices in the US and increase them elsewhere, accusing other countries of “freeloading” on high US prices. Nearly two weeks ago, he threatened to impose 100% tariffs on pharmaceutical imports from 1 October to ramp up the pressure, although these did not materialise.In response to pressure from Trump, Pfizer and several other US and European companies, including the UK’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, have started to cut their prices in the US and to sell directly to patients to cut out costly middlemen.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn return for reducing its prices by up to 85%, Pfizer won a three-year reprieve from tariffs last week, which was seen as a bellwether for the rest of the sector.Last week, Varun Chandra, Starmer’s main business adviser, flew to Washington DC for talks with senior US officials and drug companies, the latest in a series of visits to try to hammer out a deal on pricing and tariffs.A UK government spokesperson said: “We’ve secured a landmark economic partnership with the US that includes working together on pharmaceutical exports from the UK whilst improving conditions for pharmaceutical companies here.“We’re now in advanced discussions with the US administration to secure the best outcome for the UK, reflecting our strong relationship and the opportunities from close partnership with our pharmaceutical industry.”However, the Lib Dem health and social care spokesperson, Helen Morgan, said: “It beggars belief that the government is bending to a bullying US president having told patients for years that life-saving new drugs are unaffordable.“Ministers must come clean about how much this move will cost and whether it will be funded by cuts elsewhere in the NHS. They should also lay their plans before parliament without delay so they can be properly scrutinised. It increasingly feels like this government puts the whims of Trump before everything else – even our precious NHS.”The pharma sector’s negotiations with the UK government over drug pricing under a voluntary scheme broke down without an agreement in late August. Since then, MSD has abandoned plans for a £1bn research centre in London and AstraZeneca and New York-based Eli Lilly have paused projects, taking total pharma investments that are on hold or cancelled to nearly £2bn since the start of this year.One industry source said: “We are relieved to see a recognisable change in sentiment and language from August.” More

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      Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News | Margaret Sullivan

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      If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation, and the corporation itself exuded a sense of public mission.But on Monday, when Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News, it was the latest turn in the network’s confounding departure from its roots.Given her lack of experience in news, “placing Weiss at or near the helm of a television news division makes no more sense than it would have, a generation ago, to have given such a role to William F Buckley of the National Review or Victor Navasky of The Nation,” wrote Richard Tofel, an astute media observer, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, mentioning conservative and liberal opinionators of their era.Weiss – a staunch Zionist and a fierce opponent of supposed wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives – famously left the New York Times opinion section, claiming she had been bullied by her colleagues for her beliefs. She started a Substack newsletter and eventually founded the wildly successful website Free Press.Her rise has been meteoric. She “has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot”, Jessica Testa of the New York Times put it this week.To her many critics, her appointment was just one more step on the shameful path that CBS has trod since Donald Trump was elected to a second term.The network caved to the US president when its parent company, Paramount, settled a lawsuit it could have won, sending millions of dollars for a future presidential library. Trump claimed that he was harmed during last year’s presidential campaign by the editing (actually, quite routine) of a 60 Minutes interview of his then rival Kamala Harris. Not only did the company settle the case, but now it has decided not to edit taped interviews with political figures on its Sunday morning Face the Nation – a dubious idea at best, and another piece of capitulation to Trump.The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes quit a few months ago, saying he feared the loss of his prized editorial independence; and the network’s evening newscast ratings continue to lag their competitors. Recently, the company named an ombudsman for CBS News – someone with no news experience – to monitor claims of bias, but with no arrangement to communicate regularly to the public, as normal news ombudsmen or public editors have.Others were much harsher than Tofel in their criticism, noting that Paramount paid an astonishing $150m for Weiss’s site, Free Press. Paramount is led these days by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people, and Weiss is very much his pick to led CBS News; the corporate press release said she will, among other things, “reshape editorial priorities”. She will report directly to Ellison, rather than to the CBS News president, a more traditional arrangement.“Like Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the deal can be understood as part of a broader elite project to smudge the lenses through which many people see the world,” wrote the Defector’s Patrick Redford. “By installing Weiss, the richest people in the world have taken another step toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they’ve always wanted.”Certainly, that is something that Trump and his allies have worked relentlessly for.Redford called it “yet another victory of marketing over its natural enemy, journalism”.As she took the helm, Weiss sent around a friendly-sounding note to the news staff that had one particularly notable line. Among her “core journalistic values”, she wrote, is “journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny”.Sounds good, but the two parties are far from equal these days.“CBS should brace for a heavy dose of bothsiderism,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, observing that the Free Press has, as its central thesis, “that Trump and his supporters are largely right about the cultural rot of the woke-elite” and liberal overreach (wokeness) is a bigger problem than Trump’s existential threats to American democracy.As independent media gains influence, it may not matter very much any more who leads a major TV network. Certainly, it matters far less now than in the years when CBS ruled the airwaves.But it is telling that Weiss – such a polarizing provocateur herself – has been chosen to reinvent the most mainstream of legacy networks at this fraught and dangerous time in the US.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Boom time for US billionaires: why the system perpetuates wealth inequality

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      To many Americans, the economy of the past five years has been rough. Prices have soared yet pay remains stagnant. High mortgage rates have made buying a home a dismal prospect. The unemployment rate has been creeping up.Most people have indicated they are delaying major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a very small group of people, the last five years couldn’t have been any better.The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even amid all the economic instability, the stock market has only continued to grow. This growth has largely benefited just a small number of Americans: 10% of the population owns 93% of stock market wealth.As uneven as this distribution seems, it’s the system working as it is currently designed.In his new book Burned by Billionaires, inequality researcher Chuck Collins argues that the system that perpetuates wealth inequality is purposely opaque to most Americans.“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”Collins, a director at the Institute for Policy Studies, is no stranger to wealth. A great-grandson to Oscar F Mayer, the founder of the meat processing brand, he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a non-partisan group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes for the rich and higher wages.To help others understand what exactly it means to be “wealthy” in the US, Collins borrows a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as “Richistan” villages: Affluent Town, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.To modernize the concept, Collins categorizes these “wealth villages” based on income levels. At the lowest tier, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m. The villages get more exclusive as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m; Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m; while Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.Altogether, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their experiences vary dramatically.“You could be in Lower Richistan, and you’re still sitting in the coach section of a commercial plane,” Collins said. “Whereas in Upper Richistan, you’re flying in a private jet. That’s a really different cultural experience. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don’t care if the whole system shuts down – you’re set.”The highest hill in “Richistan” is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world’s wealthiest. The power that this group has far surpasses those who are simply affluent, let alone the average American who doesn’t reside in “Richistan” at all.But Collins thinks the progressive slogan “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or “abolish billionaires” misses the point and has a “whiff of exterminism” to it.“It’s the distinction between individual behaviors and a system of rules and policies,” Collins said. “We should be concerned about an economic system that funnels so much wealth upward to the billionaires.”In other words, it’s not about the billionaires themselves, but about the system that allows them to have an enormous amount of influence and control over society today.To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: getting the wealth, defending the wealth, political capture and hyper-extraction.When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them residency in Affluent Town.But getting to Billionaireville requires serious investment and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the “wealth defense industry”: the tax layers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.“Wealth defense professionals use a wide variety of tools such as trusts, offshore bank accounts, anonymous shell companies, charitable foundations and other vehicles to hold assets,” he writes.To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m translates to political power, Collins says, and can be used to defend wealth and protect its accumulation. He notes that the 2010 landmark supreme court decision Citizens United v Federal Election Commission allowed the wealthy to pump a seemingly unlimited amount of money into elections, which has dramatically increased the power the ultra-wealthy have on politics.The last stage is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls “hyper extraction”, to describe how the wealthy have come to touch nearly every single part of an Americans’ everyday life largely through private equity, which allows wealthy individuals to invest in private companies.“Private equity is looking for those corners of the economy where they can squeeze things a little bit harder,” Collins said. “One thing I don’t think people understand is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can kind of turn around and say, ‘Where else can we squeeze money out of the economy?’ Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can’t go anywhere, [so] you can raise their rents.”Collins writes about the Mars family, best known for their dominance in the confectionary market, with M&Ms, Snickers and Skittles, but who have also cornered the pet industry. Along with being the biggest owner of pet care products in the US, the Mars family owns more than 2,500 pet care facilities across the US.The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It’s about people paying more for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to deep discontent.“The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being left behind [and] are economically suffering,” Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at tapping into a potent “phony populism”.“They can basically project this message that actually, Democrats are elitists. They just care about rich Hollywood executives and woke politics, and the people who care about you are over here. They’re the Donald Trumps of the world. They hear your pain, they feel your pain,” he said.The irony, Collins points out in his book, is that Trump has appointed a string of billionaires to his cabinet. Along with Elon Musk, who had a brief but powerful role as head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, which oversaw massive cuts to the federal workforce, Trump’s secretaries for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.His cabinet, along with help from Republicans in Congress, helped him pass his huge tax bill, which will make permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.While Republican continue to argue that immigration and bad trade agreements are the source of everyone’s economic problems, “the question becomes: Will the Democratic party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?” Collins said.Democrats, he argues, know what policies are needed to “reverse the updraft of wealth”, including deep changes to the tax system, increasing the minimum wage and strengthening unions.Collins recalled four years ago, when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The Democrats introduced the $4.3bn Build Back Better bill, which would have seen deep investments in the climate crisis, Medicaid, housing and childcare, among other things. The bill was going to be partially funded through changes in the tax system, including higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy and closing out tax loopholes.But while the bill passed the House in November 2021, it ultimately died in the Senate because two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, blocked it. Both Manchin and Sinema have since both left their Senate seats.“It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the majority of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these urgent problems,” Collins said. “Oligarchic power is not about creating so much as blocking. It’s easier to block than it is to make something meaningful happen, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like.”Collins is optimistic that there can be change, but said it would require sustained political momentum.“It may be before we know it that the pendulum swings back, and then it really is about maintaining a sustained really popular movement to make progress on this extreme inequality we’re living in,” he said. “We can fix this. It is fixable.” More

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      FCC chair claims he never threatened TV networks over Jimmy Kimmel

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      Brendan Carr, the tough-talking, pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), claimed on Tuesday that Democrats and the media had “misrepresented” critical comments he made about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow.Television conglomerates including Nexstar and Sinclair opted to pull the show for “business” reasons, Carr argued, not because of anything he said.“There was no threat made or suggested that if Jimmy Kimmel didn’t get fired, that someone was going to lose their license,” Carr said during a press conference that followed the FCC’s monthly meeting.On 17 September, ABC announced it would “indefinitely” pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, hours after Carr had appeared on a conservative podcast and appeared to pressure network affiliates to stop airing the show over comments by Kimmel on the death of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk.“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr had said, explaining that he wanted broadcasters to “take action” on Kimmel.Nexstar and Sinclair, two major carriers of ABC programming, quickly announced plans to pull Kimmel’s show, seemingly forcing ABC’s hand.Ultimately, ABC decided to bring Kimmel back the following week, and both Nexstar and Sinclair followed suit. The network’s decision reportedly followed a wave of cancellations of Disney’s streaming service Disney+.Carr’s comments drew criticism from across the aisle. Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, said some of Carr’s remarks were “dangerous as hell”.Asked at a press conference on Tuesday whether he regrets the phrasing he used when talking about Kimmel, Carr claimed “the full words that I said, the full context of the interview”, were very clear.“For a lot of Democrats, this has really been about distortion and projection,” he added. He then accused Senate Democrats of hypocrisy, referring to calls in 2018 for the FCC to review Sinclair’s “fitness to retain its existing broadcast licenses” over a controversial “must-run” video that its stations were forced to broadcast.“The very same Democrats that are saying that I said something that I didn’t are the same ones that engaged in that exact same type of conduct that they claim I did,” he said.With Kimmel now back on air, Carr suggested the entire episode was actually a win for local broadcasters – and a necessary check on the control of New York- and Hollywood-based broadcasters.“What we saw over the last two weeks was, probably for the first time in maybe 20 or 30 years, local TV stations – the actual licensed entities that are tied to specific communities – pushing back and saying that they did not want to run particular national programs,” he said. “They felt like they could stand up for themselves. I think it’s a good thing. And I hope that we can see potentially more of that going ahead.”Asked by the Guardian whether he was disappointed that Nexstar and Sinclair chose to bring back Kimmel’s show, Carr said he did not expect the pre-emption to last “for any sort of real sustained period of time” due to the economic pressures the companies were facing. “These were decisions ultimately were for them to make,” he said.During the meeting, Anna M Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, called out Carr’s comments – as he sat a few feet away. “This FCC threatened to go after [ABC], seizing on a late night comedian’s comments as a pretext to punish speech it disliked,” she said. “That led to a new low of corporate capitulation that put the foundation of the first amendment in danger.”While Gomez has been very critical of Carr’s leadership, she has largely refrained from attacking him personally, and has said that she maintains a good working relationship with him.While the FCC meets monthly, Tuesday’s gathering took on added significance and excitement. Outside the FCC building, a mobile billboard truck – organized by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders – carried the message: “Government can’t control media content.”Inside, the meeting room was unusually packed. Several protesters, organized by the progressive political action organization Our Revolution, wore T-shirts that said: “Federal Censorship Commission”. A few stood up during the meeting and yelled: “Fire Carr, the censorship czar,” and were quickly removed. One sign played on Carr’s tough talk to television networks, telling the FCC commissioner: “Brendan, We Can Do This the Easy Way (You Quit) or the Hard Way (You’re Fired).”When told by the Guardian that the “lengthy” (in Carr’s words) agenda for the monthly FCC meeting included seven wonky action items, one protester expressed frustration that they hadn’t eaten breakfast before arriving early. The man left before the meeting concluded. More

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      Americans and US food banks brace for Trump cuts: ‘Battling hunger is no longer a priority’

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      Americans are bracing for the impact of the largest cuts to the government’s food assistance program for low-income people in US history that have begun to take effect as a result of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.Effective 1 October, the beginning of fiscal year 2026, funding for Snap-Ed, part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) that provided funding for food banks across the US, is being eliminated. The cuts are part of the sweeping spending bill Trump signed in July.A report this month by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted “some low-income families will see their food assistance terminated or cut substantially (or will be denied benefits) this fall, though most current participants will face cuts when their SNAP eligibility is next recertified,” with estimates that 4 million Americans in a typical month will lose some or all of their Snap benefits when the cuts are fully implemented.A Snap recipient in Camden county, New Jersey, who works as a cake decorator at a small business and requested to remain anonymous, said their Snap benefits were cut off in September without receiving a notice.“Snap was my way to finally not pay half to three-quarters of my paycheck on groceries. Now, I have nothing in my house regularly and it just feels like no one wants to help people any more,” they said. “I only got a little over $110 a month, but it helped tremendously.”They said it’s made it more difficult to work at a job they love, but that doesn’t pay enough.Jessica Griffin of Fort Smith, Arkansas, a mother of three, said she lost her job about five months ago and has struggled to find another, with her family relying on her husband’s income.After rent and utility bills, there isn’t much left over to buy groceries and she doesn’t have reliable transportation to get to food banks, she said.“I used to be able to buy $100 worth of groceries a week to feed a family of five, now even with one child out of the house $100 will only go a couple days,” she said. “The rent rates are so high now as well as groceries that families can barely afford to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads at the same time. So it almost feels like we have two options, to either live in a house or live on the street and not starve.”View image in fullscreenFunding cuts to states, which will be expected to share costs of Snap for the first time as well as cover more administrative costs, are phased for fiscal years 2027 and 2028, but several provisions and changes to Snap are being implemented as states have to grapple with drastic costs shifted on to them from the federal government.“States don’t have enough administrative staff or capacity to handle this,” said Gina Plata-Nino, interim Snap director at the Food Research and Action Center. “I think we’re on a downward path. Polling and data is showing that one of the biggest obstacles that people are having in being able to eat is just how expensive food is at the moment. This is a direct result of tariffs and other policy choices that the administration has made. It’s something that everyone, regardless of income, can understand.”The looming Snap cuts come as food prices are still rising under the Trump administration and are expected to continue rising due to tariffs and labor shortages in the food industry due to Trump’s immigration policies.From January 2022 to August 2025, overall food cost in the US increased by about 17.8%, according the consumer price index, and has increased 2.0% since January 2025, when Trump took office. Trump’s tariffs are expected to drive further increases, with food prices set to rise 3.4% in the short term and stay 2.5% higher in the long run, according to the Yale Budget Lab.Food banks have been struggling across the US to keep up with demand and manage rising food prices, while bracing for further cuts, higher prices, and a surge in demand once Snap cuts begin taking effect.At a food bank in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jane Colony Mills, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, said the food bank has “experienced a 20% increase in the numbers of people coming for food assistance in 2025, likely driven not only by the cost of groceries in our community, but by the overall cost of living in Charlottesville and Albemarle area.”She noted their food supply has decreased as well, since they rely on food that stores cannot sell, and have also been affected by cuts at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to programs that support food banks. Colony Mills noted Snap cuts haven’t taken effect yet in Virginia, but local social service departments are bracing for those reductions or cancellations starting 1 October.“People who rely on these incremental supports will be struggling even more to provide food for their households each month,” she added.In Washington, the Thurston County Food Bank said they are bracing for significant cuts to Snap that will increase demand and make it more difficult to meet the current demand, let alone handle increases. They have already had to lay off staff positions funded by the Snap-Ed program that was cut by the Trump administration.“We have been told to brace for cuts that could be as much as 20% to 25% of the food we received in prior years. For us, 25% is $1m worth of food in 2024 prices, so with rising food costs, we can assume that is a gap of well over a million dollars,” said executive director of the Thurston County Food Bank.Ahead of the cuts to Snap and rising food prices, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of the annual hunger survey that measures food insecurity in the US and food researchers at the USDA were put on leave.USDA deferred comment to a press release, where they claimed “these redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger.”The decision is viewed by anti-hunger advocates as an effort by the Trump administration to obfuscate the impacts of their cuts to Snap and other policies affecting food insecurity for Americans.“By cancelling the survey, USDA is sending a signal that tracking and battling hunger is no longer a priority,” Eric Mitchell, president of the Alliance to End Hunger, said in a statement. “It is further troubling that the decision comes amid predictions that hunger may increase in the coming months and years. Hunger will not disappear simply because it is no longer tracked.” More

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      Why Trump is backing Argentina’s Thatcherite economics | Heather Stewart

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      “We’re backing him 100%. We think he’s done a fantastic job. Like us, he inherited a mess.” Donald Trump gave his enthusiastic endorsement to Javier Milei’s radical economic experiment when the pair met in New York last week.The US has declared itself ready to offer more than rhetorical support to the chainsaw-wielding Argentinian president in the coming days, as Buenos Aires stands on the brink of a fresh financial crisis.The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the US was “ready to do what is needed”. He suggested the Federal Reserve could offer Buenos Aires a $20bn (£15bn) dollar swap line – a crucial crisis-fighting tool – or the US could even buy the country’s bonds directly.US administrations have rallied support for Argentinian governments in the past – Bill Clinton was a fan of Carlos Menem’s 1990s reforms, for example. But Trump’s readiness to wade in directly is the latest example of his determination to use economic tools for political ends: in this case, propping up an ideological ally.Milei swept into power two years ago, on a wave of frustration and discontent with the economic status quo.Like Trump and Boris Johnson, he eschewed the usual conventions of politics and promised to smash up the establishment and remake the state on behalf of the people.But while Milei’s political playbook may echo Trump’s, with its embrace of chaos and showbiz, his economic policies owe something to another radical with big hair – Margaret Thatcher, whom the Argentinian president has called “brilliant”.Like the Thatcher governments in the UK, Milei sees slaying the dragon of inflation as an overriding priority. The challenge in Argentina is on a completely different scale to 1980s Britain, however: the inflation rate peaked at more than 25% a month soon after Milei came to power.But aspects of his approach, including a systematic onslaught on trade union rights, public spending cuts and a wave of privatisations, have echoes of Thatcherism.Despite lacking a parliamentary power base, Milei has succeeded in cutting deep into pensions and public sector wages – and more than 48,000 public sector workers have lost their jobs.He travelled to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, in the US, to pose on stage next to a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was partly inspired by Milei’s aggressive style.Argentina’s tough policies have won plaudits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which granted a new $20bn lifeline to Argentina in April.On stage at the IMF’s meetings in Washington that month, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, proudly pinned on to her green jacket a tiny silver chainsaw badge, handed to her by Argentina’s minister for deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.But while Milei’s “shock therapy” may have met with approval in Washington – and indeed in financial markets – the Argentinian economist and campaigner Lucía Cirmi Obón highlights its human impact.“The macroeconomic changes implemented by Milei have not shown – nor do I believe they will show – any positive impact on people’s quality of life. In practice, what we are seeing is an economic recession,” she told the Guardian.“The main reasons are that real wages fell, and the opening of imports also dismantled a large part of national industry. On top of that, there were cuts to the number of people receiving a pension, support for childcare, for people with disabilities who used to receive pensions. All of the policies the population used to receive from the state have been reduced.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnemployment has risen by two percentage points, but she argues that there is also significant hidden unemployment – with former factory workers crowding into poorly paid gig-economy jobs such as Uber driving, for example. Household debt is rising, and because many of the occupations targeted by cuts are female-dominated, the gender pay gap has widened, undoing six years’ worth of progress.Obón adds that while Milei’s approach was meant to unleash the corporate sector, to open the way for surging economic growth, investment as a share of GDP has actually fallen.Meanwhile, determined to squash inflation, Milei has maintained the peso’s link to the dollar – a trigger for so many crises in Argentina over the years.For several decades, the peso has been pegged – within limits – to the greenback, which circulates within Argentina as an alternative currency, in which many citizens like to hold their savings, especially in times of trouble.Milei had advocated full dollarisation during the election campaign – a policy that would leave Argentina without the right to set its own interest rates. When he came to power and allies rejected that plan, he instead devalued the peso by more than half, willing to wear the resulting inflation in the hope of stimulating exports.But the currency has nevertheless come under continued selling pressure – exacerbated by the political uncertainty unleashed when Milei suffered a disastrous showing in local legislative elections in Buenos Aires province, which he had himself called a “life or death battle”.Since those local elections, and amid a mounting clamour of corruption claims against Milei’s powerful sister, Karina, the peso sell-off has accelerated. The central bank burned through more than $1bn of reserves in a week trying to prop up the currency, before Bessent announced Washington was ready to step in.As well as political fellow feeling, some experts suggest geopolitics may have been another motivation for Washington’s intervention, with China becoming increasingly influential in Latin America.The peso rallied and the markets calmed after Bessent’s comments, but as the costs of “shock therapy” bite and Milei looks to crucial midterm elections in October, the Argentinian public face a volatile period ahead. More

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      Outrage mounts as Republicans in Congress move to protect pesticide makers from lawsuits

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      It’s been seven years since Germany’s Bayer bought US agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not only the company’s vast portfolio of seeds and pesticide products, but also more than 100,000 lawsuits alleging Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide causes cancer. Bayer, which has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts to cancer victims, has been working – so far in vain – to put an end to the litigation and to block any future such cases.Now Bayer appears closer than ever to success, as many Republican congressional leaders push for measures that would effectively block lawsuits against pesticide makers around the country.A group founded by Bayer called the Modern Ag Alliance is the face of the legislative push, advocating for liability shields they say are necessary to allow companies to continue to sell chemicals that farmers use to kill weeds and bugs in their fields.“Without legislative action, a potential catastrophe is on the horizon that could result in many farmers going out of business and food prices rising even further,” the alliance, which represents more than 100 agricultural organizations, including farmers who grow wheat, corn, soybeans and other key food crops, warns on its website.The alliance has been lobbying for the passage of state laws blocking such lawsuits. They’ve succeeded thus far in two states – Georgia and North Dakota – and continue to lobby for such laws in all 50 states.But the immediate battleground is in the halls of Congress, where a provision tucked into a congressional appropriations bill is outraging consumer advocates, including those affiliated with the influential Make American Healthy Again (Maha) movement. Similar protective language for pesticide makers is expected to be included in the new farm bill as well.“The audacity of elected officials voting for legislation to fully strip our legal rights away when injured by chemicals is stunning,” said Kelly Ryerson, a leading Maha advocate who has been lobbying lawmakers and her 84,000 social media followers to oppose pesticide company protections. “Especially in this age of Maha when an unprecedented number of Americans are rallying against toxins in food and the environment.”‘Important investments’Bayer has made it clear that changing laws in its favor is a priority. The company states on its website that without “legislative certainty”, lawsuits over its glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and other weed killers can affect its research and product development and other “important investments”.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be the ultimate arbiter of product safety and what warnings should be required on product labels, Bayer says. The company also says if the EPA approves a product label, consumers should not be able to sue companies for failing to warn of perceived risks.In a statement to the Guardian, Bayer said federal legislation is “needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority”.Bayer has already removed glyphosate, classified as “probably” carcinogenic to humans by World Health Organization cancer experts, from consumer herbicide products. And the company has threatened to stop selling it to farmers if the litigation is not brought to an end.The company disputes, however, that the appropriations bill will provide that certainty, saying in its statement that the language doesn’t prevent lawsuits and asserting it does is a “distortion of reality”.The relevant section of the House version of the appropriations bill – section 453 – does not mention litigation or pesticide company liability. Section 453 simply says that no funds can be used to “issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling” inconsistent with the conclusion of an EPA human health assessment.But critics say the language effectively would impede states and local governments from warning about risks of pesticides even in the face of new scientific findings about health harms if such warnings are not consistent with outdated EPA assessments. The EPA itself would not be able to update warnings without finalizing a new assessment, the critics say.Due to the limits on warnings, consumers would find it nearly impossible to sue pesticide makers for failing to warn them of health risks if the EPA assessments do not support such warnings.The language is “by design sneaky and complicated and hard to explain”, said Daniel Hinkle, senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, who has been lobbying against the action.“Nobody thinks that a giant chemical company should be able to lie about the risks of using their product and get away with it. It’s just making sure that people understand that is what is at stake,” Hinkle said.‘Very worried’Representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine who tried but failed to overturn the language in a July appropriations committee hearing, said she is “very worried” about the “outrageous” efforts to protect pesticide companies from litigation.“We’re talking about chemicals here that are already prone to health risks,” Pingree said. “And the chemical industry is trying to keep that information from consumers … and then to have immunity from being responsible if you get cancer from being in the presence of these chemicals.”The language is not currently included in the short-term government spending package being debated ahead of a looming government shutdown that would occur at the end of the month in the absence of continued spending authorization.But it is expected to see support in both House and Senate appropriations bill versions once the short-term budget is resolved. The new farm bill is also expected to include language limiting or preventing pesticide injury lawsuits, with strong signals from Glenn Thompson, chair of the House committee on agriculture, favoring such protections.Previously, Thompson has weighed in on the side of Bayer amid its ongoing efforts to get the supreme court to weigh in on federal “preemption” over pesticide regulation.The involvement and influence of the Maha movement, made up of voters from both parties, is adding a bipartisan element to what otherwise might be a highly partisan fight.Max Lugavere, a health journalist, author and podcaster who posted a photo of a Maha-related visit to the White House to his 1.1 million Instagram followers, said pushing lawmakers is important, but “awareness among everyday people is the first domino”.Citing “growing evidence linking pesticides to health risks”, Lugavere said: “Stripping away legal recourse in these cases wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be [a] tragedy.”For California lawyer Brent Wisner, who helped lead the early Roundup litigation against Bayer, the efforts by lawmakers to protect the company against future litigation is un-American and potentially unconstitutional.“I don’t care what party you are in, if you get poisoned by a pesticide manufacturer you want to be able to sue. You need to be able to sue,” he said. “Bayer is paying millions of dollars to get these laws passed because it’s cheaper than it is to pay people they’ve given cancer to.”This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group More

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      in US Politics

      Trump has called the US postal service ‘a joke’. But don’t expect Amazon to replace it | Niamh Rowe

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      In towns where Washington DC is an abstraction, the post office is the front desk of American democracy – sometimes the only public space at all. Here, postmasters are “the human side of government”, as the senator Jennings Randolph put it in 1976. “When such offices are closed,” he warned, “the American flag really comes down.”Championed by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, the roots of the US postal service – whose mandate is to “bind the nation together” – are older than the republic itself. The constitution calls for “post offices and post roads”. The USPS is still legally obligated to provide a “basic and fundamental” service to all Americans. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a rural carrier drives more than 700 miles a year to serve just two households.But after years in the red – and amid open hostility from the Trump administration – its future looks uncertain.The USPS has lost about $114bn since 2007, according to financial reports, amid declining letter volume, competition from private carriers and rising employee costs. Meanwhile, the specter of privatization looms larger than ever.“The postal service is a joke,” Donald Trump told reporters in 2020. A reform plan during his previous administration called for restructuring it “to return it to a sustainable business model or prepare it for future conversion from a Government agency into a privately-held corporation”.Given this historical scorn, it was no surprise when reports broke in February that Trump was considering dissolving the agency’s leadership and absorbing it into the Department of Commerce.“The fate of the USPS is no longer financial or managerial, but political,” James O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, recently told me. “Putting the post office up for an IPO would not be much of a stretch in the current climate. The checks and balances are gone.”Indeed, a Wells Fargo memo to investors titled “USPS Privatization: A Framework” was leaked last month. It reads: “Parcel could be carved out and sold or IPOed.” The plan predicts parcel prices would increase 30%–140% across product lines and proposes a post office sell-off so that “value can be harvested” from the real estate.Yet if the parcel segment were “carved out”, not all of the carcass would bear meat. Investors will seize only the parts they can further monetize, O’Rourke says. That would mean closing small-town post offices and ending home delivery on unprofitable routes.Think of the mule train that descends into Havasupai territory in the Grand Canyon; the small aircraft and seasonal boats that serve Little Diomede, Alaska, where residents can see Russia from their windows; or Point Roberts, Washington, where mail crosses Canada to reach a US town. If universal service falters, those addresses are likely to be abandoned first.People in affected zip codes – already more likely to be lower income – will have to travel to pick up parcels or pay steep delivery costs. “Those people will do with less or do without,” O’Rourke says.But the cost of losing universal service would be more than financial. Vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are particularly critical in rural areas with distant polling stations, and the USPS ensures those ballots reach voters. It also handles 1.2bn prescription-drug shipments each year, as of 2020, according to the National Association of Letter Carriers union. In places with no nearby banks, the post office may be the only location where residents can pay bills.Rural postal workers also fulfill a civic role that transcends transporting mail. A study of village postmasters from the 1970s illustrates how closely woven they can become into civic life: “People going out of town commonly leave their house keys with the postmaster … residents leave notes with the postmaster for friends to retrieve later in the day.”While the advent of the internet renders that depiction somewhat antiquated, its essence remains true. “Rural carriers are still the fabric that knits some communities together,” Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, told me. In some towns, carriers may be the only contact residents have with the outside world – and thus a lifeline, he added. Carriers still carry out “wellness checks” if a resident fails to collect their mail.Mark Jamison spent 15 years as a postmaster in a remote office in the mountains of North Carolina, where he was the town’s only government worker. Many residents were not literate, so he assisted with written tasks. Older residents would stop by the post office on their way home so he could open their jars. He assembled bicycles at Christmas. Locals referred to him as the “bartender”, because people came in with stories to tell and advice to seek.“There are still postal employees who do that,” Jamison said.While the USPS has staved off a formal sell-off so far under the current administration, its universal service is already being eroded in de facto terms. This year, its 10-year “Delivering for America” modernization plan kicks off in a bid to save at least $36 billion. The plan will slow service for about three-quarters of the country’s zip codes, according to the advocacy group Save the Post Office, with rural areas bearing the brunt. The Postal Regulatory Commission voiced opposition to the plan in January, noting it was “very concerned” about how it would disadvantage rural communities.Louis DeJoy, the former US postmaster general, announced a plan in March to cut 10,000 USPS jobs. Amid reports Trump urged the USPS board of governors to appoint FedEx board member David P Steiner as postmaster general, Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, alleged a “hostile takeover” of the postal service. (Steiner, who took the job in July, has said he does not believe the USPS should be privatized and that he believes “in the current structure of the postal service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch”.)At the same time, Amazon Logistics is on track to surpass the USPS as the nation’s largest parcel carrier by volume. The company is also speeding up in rural America, as AI-driven efficiencies make more routes economically viable. In April, it announced a $4bn investment to expand its rural “last-mile” network – tripling its size by the end of next year and reaching 13,000 more rural zip codes.This will be welcome news to those households. But Amazon drivers can’t go the extra mile. They lack the civic responsibilities of government workers, and their routes fluctuate algorithmically, meaning it’s harder to build community ties.What’s more, Amazon’s last-mile network will expand only as long as it’s profitable to do so. “I don’t see it going into the mule train business, right?” said Christopher W Shaw, author of First Class: The US Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat. An Amazon driver will never sing the USPS’s unofficial motto: “Every piece, every address, every day.” Without a legal mandate, why would they?As one Minnesota town-hall clerk put it in the 1970s: “The post office is like drinking water. You don’t appreciate it till you don’t have it.”

      Niamh Rowe is a New York-based writer and podcast producer More

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      in US Politics

      Kimmel controversy highlights ‘wildly dangerous’ consolidation of TV broadcasting

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      If the controversy behind Jimmy Kimmel’s show is a series of dominoes that fell one after the other, from the late-night host making his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing to ABC halting production of his show, the first domino arguably fell this summer.Months before Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) quietly announced it was seeking to make a major change to broadcasting rules.The change would primarily affect three companies that own more local TV stations than any other company: Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television Inc. All three companies own the maximum number of local TV stations that is legally permitted for a single company to own.That national cap is set by FCC rules and says a single company can’t reach more than 39% of the total national television audience.In June, the FCC announced that it was seeking public comment to raise the cap, which would allow the companies to acquire more local TV stations. In a filing to the FCC, media watchdog Free Press said that changing the national cap would be “wildly dangerous”.“Handing even more media control to a handful of conglomerates and billionaires already so dominant in the space is a wildly dangerous idea, no matter who holds the presidency,” the group said.But by August, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its broadcast rival Tegna for $6.2bn.“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the big tech and legacy big media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar’s chief executive officer, Perry Sook, said at the time.Nexstar – already the largest operator of local television stations – oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets across the US. Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets. The deal would be illegal under current FCC rules, as it would put Nexstar over the national cap.Immediately after Kimmel was taken off the air, multiple reports have noted that Donald Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, blatantly threatened the companies that air Kimmel’s show.“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Media experts called the move unprecedented.“The FCC is explicitly threatening companies that, if they don’t change their content in some way, they would suffer regulatory consequences,” said Gregory J Martin, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has researched the effect that media conglomeration has had on local TV news. “That just didn’t really happen before.”Soon after, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. As a local TV station conglomerate, Nexstar partners with the “big four” networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – to run their content on its stations. This is where the term “affiliate” comes from. If a station is, for example, an ABC affiliate, that means that the TV station owner has partnered with ABC to run shows like Kimmel’s.That’s why Nexstar’s announcement was such a big deal. When it comes to Kimmel being broadcast on TV, ABC relies on these local TV station owners to get him on the air.After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC announced that it was indefinitely halting the production of Kimmel’s show.The backlash that ensued led to ABC announcing it would continue producing Kimmel’s show. But Nexstar and its competitor, Sinclair Broadcasting, both said they will continue to preempt the show, meaning 25% of TV viewers won’t be getting Kimmel’s show on TV.“Nexstar is continuing to evaluate the status of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so,” Nexstar said in a statement. “We are engaged in productive discussion with executives at the Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.”To media watchdogs, the conflict highlights the size of the media conglomerates such as Nexstar, which critics argue have become too large and too powerful.“This has been a problem at the FCC for quite some time. We’ve been concerned for decades about what happens when you allow media companies to become too consolidated and too influential,” said Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They become beholden to political power because they have so many entanglements with government agencies regarding merger approvals [and] policy changes that they … soft-pedal their reporting when it comes to criticism of those in power,” he added.Historians often point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically relaxed regulations limiting the number of TV and radio stations a single company could own. The law set the stage for media companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair to exist and own a massive number of local TV stations.Over the past few years, political experts have expressed concern that this consolidation has been negatively affecting the quality of local television news. Though the number of local TV news viewers has been declining, millions of Americans still rely on their local TV news. And the funding for these local TV broadcasts comes from the station owners such as Sinclair and Nexstar.The Kimmel affair is not the first time that the station owners have shown their political colors. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Sinclair directed its local news anchors to read identical scripts criticizing “fake” news stories and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”.Trump defended the decision: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he wrote on what was then Twitter.When criticizing Kimmel, Carr said that the FCC has to ensure that broadcasters who are using public airwaves are operating in the “public interest”. Martin said that, typically, the “public interest” requirement refers to producing local TV news shows.“That’s how they satisfy their public obligation, by providing informative news shows. It’s never been on the table that they could be interpreted to mean they have to not criticize the president,” he said. “That’s a big, important change in how the FCC operates.”Karr, of Free Press, said that the media watchdog has made it clear, in a filing to the FCC, that the regulator would need congressional approval to change the national reach cap.“We need to be watching the FCC very carefully over the next couple of weeks to see how far Carr will go in removing this huge hurdle to the merger,” he said.The New York Post reported this week that there is also growing criticism of the Nexstar/Tegna deal from conservatives concerned that the Kimmel suspension is “nothing more than a ruse to convince the White House its programming is watchful of leftwing bias” in order to convince the FCC to pass a deal that will hand the media group too much power.When he went back on air on Tuesday, Kimmel took a direct jab at Carr in his monologue, which has now received over 20m views on YouTube. Kimmel quoted the threats Carr made to broadcast networks over his show and said it is “a direct violation of the first amendment [and] not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public”.“You almost have to feel sorry for him,” Kimmel said. “He did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show.” More