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      Victims of ‘kids-for-cash’ judge outraged by Biden pardon: ‘What about all of us?’

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      Victims of a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in the so-called kids-for-cash scandal are outraged by Joe Biden’s decision to grant him clemency.In 2011, Michael Conahan was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, were found guilty of accepting $2.8m in illegal payments in exchange for sending more than 2,300 children – including some as young as eight years old – to private juvenile detention centers.Conahan was released from prison in 2020 due to Covid-19 and placed on house arrest, which had been scheduled to end in 2026.Conahan’s sentence was one of about 1,500 the US president commuted – or shortened – on Thursday while also pardoning 39 Americans who had been convicted of non-violent crimes.In response to Conahan’s pardon, the mother of a boy sent to jail at age 17 before later dying by suicide told the Citizens’ Voice: “I am shocked and I am hurt.”“Conahan’s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son’s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power,” Sandy Fonzo said to the outlet. “This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”Similarly, Amanda Lorah, who at age 14 was wrongfully imprisoned as part of the scheme, told WBRE: “It’s a big slap in the face for us once again.“We had … time taken away from us. We had no one to talk to, but now we’re talking about the president of the United States to do this. What about all of us?”The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, also condemned Biden’s decision, telling reporters that his fellow Democrat “got it absolutely wrong”, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported.“I’ll offer these thoughts as an outsider, not privy to all the information he looked at, but I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in north-eastern Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said.Biden’s actions Thursday marked the largest instance of presidential clemency carried out in a single day.Describing the move, the White House said: “The president is commuting the sentences of close to 1,500 individuals who were placed on home confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities.”Attempts to contact Conahan were not immediately successful. More

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      Republicans take aim at subsidies that help tens of millions of women

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      As they prepare to take control of the White House and Congress next month, conservatives are eyeing cutbacks to federal programs that help tens of millions of women pay for healthcare, food, housing and transportation.Slashing or overhauling social support programs, long a goal of Republican lawmakers, could be catastrophic for women experiencing poverty. Supporters contend the social safety-net programs are already grossly underfunded.“With this new administration that is coming in … I really am concerned about the lives of women. We are seeing so many policies, so many budget cuts,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women.Republicans say they want to keep campaign promises to cut government spending, and three major programs make easy targets: Medicaid, the joint state/federal health insurance program for people with lower incomes; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a cash-allowance program that replaced welfare; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), widely known as food stamps.While conservatives frame cuts as making government more efficient and even restoring freedom, advocates for and experts on families with little or no income say reducing these programs will throw more people – especially women and children – further into poverty.“It is going to fall heavily on women,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a non-profit research organization.Predicting precisely what Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration will do is difficult. Congressional leaders are close-mouthed about negotiations, and the president-elect has not finished putting together his advisory team. None of the spokespeople contacted for this story returned calls or e-mails.But organizations known to advise top leaders in Congress and the previous Trump administration have laid out fairly detailed roadmaps.Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the incoming administration, denies its proposed changes will harm women, saying instead that marriage and “family values” will improve their economic situations. “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways,” reads the section on proposed changes to TANF and Snap.Numerous other groups that have studied the problem say forcing or even encouraging marriage will not make poverty disappear. And a recent study by a team at the University of South Carolina found that when state laws make it harder for pregnant women to get divorced, they’re more likely to be killed by their partners.Trump has promised not to attack the two most expensive and popular government programs: social security and Medicare. But he and Congress are up against a deadline to extend his 2017 tax reforms, which raised the federal deficit. They’ll have to cut something, and social spending programs, especially the $805bn Medicaid program, are low-hanging fruit for conservatives.Trump repeatedly tried to slash Snap during his last tenure in office: his 2021 budget proposal would have cut the program by more than $180bn – nearly 30% – over 10 years. Conservatives in Congress have continued these efforts and, with majorities in the House and Senate, they may be able to get them through next year.The Republican Study Committee, whose members include about three-quarters of the House Republican caucus, recommends more work requirements for Snap and TANF.“SNAP and our welfare system should embrace that work conveys dignity and self-sustainment and encourage individuals to find gainful employment, not reward them for staying at home,” their plan, released in March, reads.A large body of research questions whether widening work requirements does anything other than force people off benefits without helping them find employment. “I think there is a misperception that people in need of help are not working,” said Mei Powers, chief development and communications officer at Martha’s Table, a non-profit aid organization in Washington DC. “People are a paycheck, a crisis, a broken-down car away from needing services.”Snap currently helps 41 million people buy groceries and other necessities every month. Women accounted for more than 55% of people under 65 receiving Snap benefits in 2022, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a gender justice advocacy group. About one-third of them were women of color, the NWLC said.Among other things, cutting these programs will trap women in dangerous situations, the NWLC said: “SNAP helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault establish basic economic security.”TANF, which provides cash assistance, overwhelmingly benefits women. In 2022, 370,000 TANF adult recipients were female and 69,000 were male, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.Perhaps Medicaid is the most tempting target for conservatives because they can use it to undermine the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The GOP has been gunning for the ACA since it was signed into law without a single Republican vote in 2010.The federal government shares the cost of Medicaid with states. The ACA aimed to make Medicaid cover more people by offering to pay for virtually all the extra costs. Many Republican-led states resisted for years, but as of November, all but 10 states had expanded coverage to an extra 21 million people, or about a quarter of all Medicaid recipients.Medicaid pays for more than 40% of births in the US, plus it covers new mothers for post-pregnancy-related issues for 60 days. It also pays for medical care for 60% of all nursing home residents, more than 70% of whom are women.According to the health research organization KFF, expanding Medicaid helped improve care for women before and during pregnancy and after they gave birth.But most Republicans in Congress have never approved of this federal spending. Proposed cuts to Medicaid funding, which would save hundreds of billions of dollars, are laid out by the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative health thinktank headed by Brian Blase, a top health adviser to the first Trump administration.Experts predict states would be unable or unwilling to make up the difference. “Facing such drastic reductions in federal Medicaid funding, states will have no choice but to institute truly draconian cuts to eligibility, benefits and provider reimbursement rates,” Edwin Park, research professor at Georgetown University, wrote in an analysis.That would mean women, children, older adults and people with disabilities would lose coverage as facilities closed and providers stopped seeing patients.The effects, says the National Organization for Women, “will be widespread, devastating, and long-lasting”.This story is published in partnership with the Fuller Project, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the coverage of women’s issues around the world. Sign up for the Fuller Project’s newsletter. More

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      RFK Jr to research unsupported link between vaccines and autism, Trump says

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      Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Trump – who has previously said Kennedy would be allowed to “go wild” on health – said his health secretary pick would not “reinvent the wheel totally”.“He’s not going to upset any system,” he said.But on autism, he added: “Somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism. Now you have it … When you talk about autism, because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary.”Scientists have attributed the rise in autism diagnoses to improved screening methods while saying it is caused by a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environment and conditions during pregnancy and birth.The World Health Organization has definitely ruled out a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or other childhood inoculations.Research led by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield asserting a link between autism and the MMR jab was later discredited, with the Lancet, a medical journal, issuing a full retraction of a paper it had published based on it.Wakefield was later banned from practicing in Britain after being found by the country’s general medical council to have broken its rules on research and to have acted “dishonestly” and with a “callous disregard” for children’s health.The Guardian reported in 2018 that Wakefield had attended an inaugural ball marking the start of Trump’s first presidency the previous year at which he was quoted calling for a shakeup of the US medical establishment.“What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a huge shakeup,” he said. “We need that to change dramatically.” More

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      How did transgender children in the US become so politicized? | Moira Donegan

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      The politicization of transgender children in the US is one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history. Rarely has so much attention and rage been directed at such a minuscule number of people, and more rarely, still, have those people been the most vulnerable and blameless among us: kids and teens.The first state to pass a ban on transition-related care for minors was Arkansas, in April 2021; less than four years later, more than half of states have such a ban on the books. In 2016, North Carolina lost an estimated $3.76bn in revenue following boycotts after they passed a law banning trans people, including transgender students, from using appropriate restrooms in public facilities; now, 14 states have such bathroom bans on the books, and the boycotts have receded.These changes in public attitudes towards trans youth – from a broad if imperfect sentiment of tolerance to a widespread and politically weaponized attitude of hostility toward a small minority of kids – did not emerge by accident. It was the product of a deliberate, conscious effort to radicalize large swaths of the United States, and significant chunks of state policy, into a hostility towards a few children.That effort seems set to bear fruit now, at the US supreme court, in US v Skrmetti, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Biden Department of Justice challenging Tennessee’s HB1, a sweeping ban on transition-related care for minors that was passed in 2023. The law prohibits any puberty blockers or hormones from being prescribed for the purposes of gender transition, but it does not prohibit these medications from being prescribed for any non-transition-related purpose. A minor can be prescribed puberty blockers, for instance, if their doctor believes they are experiencing early onset, or “precocious”, puberty; they cannot be prescribed puberty blockers to delay the onset of a puberty that may change their bodies in ways they do not desire for gender identity-related reasons.That means, too, that a child assigned male at birth could access, say, testosterone treatment, but a child assigned female at birth could not. In oral arguments on Wednesday, solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar and Chase Strangio of the ACLU – the first trans attorney to argue before the supreme court – explained that this was a straightforward case of sex discrimination, and hence needed to be subjected to a heightened standard of judicial review under the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause.It will not be. A majority of the court’s conservatives seemed poised to uphold the ban on transgender healthcare, though for a variety of different reasons. Brett Kavanaugh made his usual mealy-mouthed paean to states’ rights, an argument he always makes in questions of federally guaranteed equality provisions, but not before extolling the hypothetical suffering of teenagers who may access gender-affirming care but then later come to regret it. (One wonders if there are any choices from his own adolescence that Brett Kavanaugh has come to regret.) Clarence Thomas and chief justice John Roberts, meanwhile, both advanced the idea that the physiological differences between male and female bodies could moot the equal protection clause’s reach, giving states broad leeway to regulate medicine in ways that would uphold gender hierarchy.For his part, Samuel Alito also seemed interested in the idea that states might have a right to effect gender discrimination via their regulation of medicine. He repeatedly cited the 1974 case Geduldig v Aiello, in which the supreme court ruled that states could discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, and that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination – because even though only female people become pregnant, not all of them are pregnant all of the time. (At the time, Congress found the outcome in Geduldig so egregious that it passed a law clarifying that pregnancy discrimination does count as sex discrimination for the purposes of federal civil rights law, and the precedent was largely mooted, but Alito’s controlling opinion in Dobbs has revived it.)But Alito, true to form, did not confine his opining to the notion that discrimination against trans people does not count as sex-based discrimination: he went on to suggest that trans people are not quite real, peppering Strangio, in a scene that seemed intended to humiliate the trans attorney, with questions about whether trans identity was truly an “immutable” characteristic. For his part, Strangio responded with a dignity and respect that Alito’s line of questioning did not merit.It was not the only low moment. James Matthew Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general who defended the ban in court, repeatedly compared gender affirming care with suicide, as well as to lobotomies and eugenics. During his time, justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, with occasional assists from Elena Kagan, tried to chase Rice down on the inconsistencies in his own argument.Tennessee claimed, after all, that the law did not discriminate on the basis of patients’ sex, but rather on the basis of the purpose of their treatment; when the liberal justices pointed out that this was a distinction without a difference, because the purpose of the treatment was dependent on the patients’ sex, Rice simply repeated his assertion that there was a difference, there, somewhere. Jackson, in particular, worked to get Rice to explain his position for some time. He declined to.To call the Tennessee ban sex-neutral is laughable, almost insulting. The statute itself makes gender conformity its explicit justification in its text, saying that it aims to prohibit “sex inconsistent treatment”, or anything that “might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex”. The law has long included sex role stereotyping within the purview of sex discrimination; Tennessee has sought to enforce sex roles, and sexed embodiment, with the force of the state. There is no good faith reading of the law that would allow it to withstand the scrutiny that the 14th amendment requires. But luckily for Tennessee, this is not a good faith court.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Raw milk CEO whose products have been recalled may lead US raw milk policy

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      Mark McAfee, a California raw milk producer whose products have been recalled several times recently due to bird flu contamination, said he has been approached by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team to guide the upcoming administration on raw milk policy.McAfee, whose dairy products were recalled after state officials detected bird flu virus in milk samples, said that the transition team for Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked him to apply for a position advising on raw milk policy and standards development. The idea, he told the Guardian, would be to create a “raw milk ordinance”, mirroring the existing federal “standard milk ordinance”.Kennedy is a notable fan of raw, or unpasteurized, milk, including McAfee’s products. If confirmed, he has said, he would work to remove restrictions on raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have so far advised against consuming.Kennedy’s team did not respond immediately to the Guardian’s request for comment.If McAfee, whose farm is the largest producer of raw milk in the US, were to gain a role in the upcoming administration, it would be in line with the upcoming administration’s broader edict to put industry heads in roles regulating the very products they sell.Trump has also appointed oil executive Chris Wright for secretary of energy, and Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.McAfee’s Raw Farm in Fresno supplies raw milk and milk products to grocery stories across California, and has the unique distinction of supplying the kefir used in the smoothies at Los Angeles’s celebrity-approved Erewhon market.Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate when he ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, interviewed McAfee for a documentary about raw milk released earlier this year. She told McAfee that Kennedy was a fan, and drinks his milk when he is home in Malibu. In a post on X in October, Kennedy said that with Trump in office, the FDA’s “war on public health” would end, as would its “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.Raw milk, which is not heated to kill harmful pathogens, has been linked to the outbreak of bacterial infections including a strain of E coli that can cause kidney failure. McAfee’s farm has also been involved in several lawsuits stemming from a salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 171 people in California last year.The federal government does not regulate the sale of raw milk – states do – but the FDA prohibits the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk for human consumption. In 2008, McAfee’s company pleaded guilty to putting “pet food” stickers on its raw milk in order to illegally sell it across state lines for human consumption.McAfee and other proponents of raw milk have claimed that it has more beneficial enzymes and diverse probiotics than pasteurized milk. The current FDA and researchers have countered that milk is not, in fact, a significant source of probiotics in the first place, and that the bacteria found in raw milk – which come through infected udder tissues, or the dairy environment including soil and cow manure), and milking equipment – are not the kinds that benefit our digestive systems.But the consumption of raw milk has come under particular scrutiny this year amid a bird flu, or H5N1, outbreak, which included the first documented human cases of the virus. No known cases of bird flu virus have been confirmed in people who drank raw milk, although there are three cases in North America where the source has not been identified. Contact with raw milk and the handling of raw milk, however, has been associated with infections – especially among dairy workers.Research suggests that milk carries huge amounts of viral particles. “The most infectious thing from the cows is the milk,” said Meghan Davis, a molecular epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University studying environmental health. In some cases, cows that tested negative for H5N1 in their respiratory tracts were found to be carrying the virus in their milk.Consuming raw milk amid the bird flu outbreak, Davis said, is inherently risky. While most people who have been infected with bird flu have reported mild illnesses, people with compromised or suppressed immune systems could experience more severe symptoms. And as more people are infected, the virus is more likely to mutate and develop more infectious or severe strains that could affect the broader population.“The impact of another pandemic would be awful,” said Davis. “Especially of a pandemic that really affects our food-producing animals as well as people.”Cats who have drunk infected raw milk have exhibited severe neurological symptoms and died.Still, McAfee vehemently denies that raw milk could be implicated in any such risks.“This is the newest platform for the FDA to attack us,” McAfee said. “There are no reported illnesses in the United States regarding [bird flu] and raw milk. Zero. But yet they say the sky is falling.”Like other proponents of raw milk, he has suggested that milk from infected cows boosts immunity to bird flu by passing on antibodies. Antibodies to H5N1, however, have not been found in raw milk products, and cow antibodies would not confer immunity to humans.This week, Raw Farm voluntarily recalled all milk and cream products made between 9 and 27 November after tests found bird flu virus in retail samples and dairy storage and bottling sites. The California department of food and agriculture also quarantined the farm and suspended the distribution of Raw Farm product produced on or after 27 November. More

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      AI expert Marietje Schaake: ‘The way we think about technology is shaped by the tech companies themselves’

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      Marietje Schaake is a former Dutch member of the European parliament. She is now the international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Her new book is entitled The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.In terms of power and political influence, what are the main differences between big tech and previous incarnations of big business?The difference is the role that these tech companies play in so many aspects of people’s lives: in the state, the economy, geopolitics. So while previous monopolists amassed a lot of capital and significant positions, they were usually in one sector, like oil or car production. These tech companies are like octopuses with tentacles in so many different directions. They have so much data, location data, search, communications, critical infrastructure, and now AI can be built on top of all that assembled power, which makes these companies very different animals to what we’ve seen in the past.Peter Kyle, the UK’s technology secretary, recently suggested that governments need to show a “sense of humility” with big tech companies and treat them more like nation states. What are your thoughts on that? I think it’s a baffling misunderstanding of the role of a democratically elected and accountable leader. Yes, these companies have become incredibly powerful, and as such I understand the comparison to the role of states, because increasingly these companies take decisions that used to be the exclusive domain of the state. But the answer, particularly from a government that is progressively leaning, should be to strengthen the primacy of democratic governance and oversight, and not to show humility. What is needed is self-confidence on the part of democratic government to make sure that these companies, these services, are taking their proper role within a rule of law-based system, and are not overtaking it.What do you think the impact will be of Donald Trump’s presidency? The election of Donald Trump changes everything because he has brought specific tech interests closer than any political leader ever has, especially in the United States, which is this powerful geopolitical and technological hub. There’s a lot of crypto money supporting Trump. There’s a lot of VCs [venture capitalists] supporting him, and of course he has elevated Elon Musk and has announced a deregulatory agenda. Every step taken by his administration will be informed by these factors, whether it’s the personal interests of Elon Musk and his companies, or the personal preferences of the president and his supporters. On the other hand, Musk is actually critical of some dynamics around AI, namely existential risk. We’ll have to see how long the honeymoon between him and Trump lasts, and also how other big tech companies are going to respond. Because they’re not going to be happy that Musk decides on tech policy over his competitors. I’m thinking rocky times ahead.Why have politicians been so light touch in the face of the digital technological revolution? The most powerful companies we see now were all rooted in this sort of progressive, libertarian streak of counterculture in California, that romantic narrative of a couple of guys in their shorts in a basement or garage, coding away and challenging the big powers that be: the publishers of the media companies, the hotel branches, the taxi companies, the financial services, all of which had pretty bad reputations to begin with. And surely there was room for disruption, but this kind of underdog mentality was incredibly powerful. The companies have done a really smart job of framing what they are doing as decentralising, like the internet itself. Companies like Google and Facebook have consistently argued that any regulatory step would hurt the internet. So it’s a combination of wanting to believe the promise and not appreciating how very narrow corporate interests won out at the expense of the public interest.Do you see any major politicians who are prepared to stand up to big tech interests? Well someone like [US senator] Elizabeth Warren has the most clear vision about the excessive power and abuse of power by corporations, including the tech sector. She’s been consistent in trying to address this. But broadly I’m afraid that political leaders are not really taking this on the way they should. In the European Commission, I’m not really seeing a vision. I’ve seen elections, including in my own country, where tech didn’t feature as a topic at all. And we see those comments by the UK government, although one would assume that democratic guardrails around excessively powerful corporates are a no-brainer.Have politicians been held back by their technological ignorance? Yes, I think they are intimidated. But I also think that the framing against the agency of governments is a deliberate one by tech companies. It’s important to understand the way in which we are taught to think about technology is shaped by the tech companies themselves. And so we get the whole narrative that governments are basically disqualified to deal with tech because they’re too stupid, too outdated, too poor in service delivery. The message is that if they can’t even process the taxes on time, what do you think they’re going to do with AI? It’s a caricature of government, and government should not embrace that caricature.Do you think the UK has been weakened in its position with big tech as a result of leaving the EU? Yes and no. Australia and Canada have developed tech policies, and they’re smaller in numbers than the UK population. I don’t know if it’s that. I think it’s actually much more of a deliberate choice to want to attract investment. So maybe it’s just self-interest that transcends Conservative and Labour governments, because I don’t see much change in the tech policy, whereas I had anticipated change. I was obviously overly optimistic there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou talk about regaining sovereignty. Do you think most people even recognise that any sovereignty has been lost? One of the reasons why I wrote this book is to reach average news readers, not tech experts. Explaining that this is a problem that concerns people is a huge undertaking. I’m curious to see how the impact of the Trump government will invite responses from European leaders, but also from others around the world who are simply going to think we cannot afford this dependence on US tech companies. It’s undesirable. Because, essentially, we’re shipping our euros or pounds over to Silicon Valley, and what do we get in return? More dependency. It’s going to be incredibly challenging, but not doing anything is certainly not going to make it better.

      The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake is published by Princeton University Press (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win

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      In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a “Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.View image in fullscreenThat social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.Welcome as the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain proportion of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains.By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of those turn into “counter-elites”: those willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English civil war, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within. View image in fullscreenOne result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.How does this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.The recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives went against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to favour open immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.It seemed to some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.Trump was clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).The main point here is that in 2024, the Democrats, having morphed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things play out from here.One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites backing a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far failed to learn the historical lessons.What comes next? The electoral defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from assured. Their opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war. More

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      Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him

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      Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More