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      US arts funding agency sued over Trump order targeting LGBTQ+ projects

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      Several arts organizations are suing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) over its new requirements following Donald Trump’s executive order barring the use of federal funds for the promotion of “gender ideology”.The groups, which are seeking funding for projects that support art about or are made by transgender and non-binary people, say they have in effect been unconstitutionally blocked from receiving grants from the agency that was built to promote artistic excellence, despite having received funds for similar projects in the past.“Because they seek to affirm transgender and non-binary identities and experiences in the projects for which they seek funding, plaintiffs are effectively barred by the ‘gender ideology’ certification and prohibition from receiving NEA grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” says the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.It goes on to say that the NEA’s gender ideology prohibition goes against the agency’s governing statute and “violates the first and fifth amendments by imposing a vague and viewpoint-based restriction on artists’ speech”.The lawsuit argues that Congress had already made clear when creating the NEA that the only criteria for judging applications were “artistic excellence and artistic merit”.The groups are being represented in the litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).“This gag on artists’ speech has had a ripple effect across the entire art world, from Broadway to community arts centers,” Vera Eidelman, senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in a statement. “Grants from the NEA are supposed to be about one thing: artistic excellence.During his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order directing that federal funds “shall not be used to promote gender ideology”. The order is titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.The Trump administration’s rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights have since greatly affected the arts world. Last month, Trump named himself the chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC after accusing it of hosting drag shows that are “specifically targeting our youth”. More

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      ‘Little agency that could’ cheered for act of resistance against Trump and Musk

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      Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit were barred from entering a small, independent federal agency promoting economic development in Africa on Wednesday after a tense standoff with federal staff they had been sent to fire.Workers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF), which Donald Trump has ordered to be closed, refused to allow Doge operatives to enter after they arrived at its Washington headquarters on Wednesday afternoon. But the Doge team returned on Thursday, accompanied by agents with the US Marshals Service, and Peter Marocco, the acting director of the now-shuttered US Agency for International Development, according to a government official familiar with the situation. This time, they were able to gain access to the building, the official said, and no staff were present.Scores of legal challenges have been lodged against the sweeping project to upend the government bureaucracy, producing a spate of court rulings declaring the halting of aid illegal and ordering the reinstatement of fired federal workers.In Wednesday’s episode, workers instructed a security guard at USADF’s headquarters to deny the Doge team access when they arrived with Marocco. Trump is trying to install him in a similar role at USADF.Staff cited a letter sent by the agency’s chair, Ward Brehm, who was not present at the time, to a Doge subordinate the previous day making clear that his team would not be allowed to access the agency’s offices in his absence.“In my absence, I have specifically instructed the staff of USADF to adhere to our rules and procedure of not allowing any meetings of this type without my presence,” he wrote, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by the Guardian.Brehm also declined to cooperate with Marocco unless he was officially appointed to the agency’s board.“I will look forward to working with Mr Marocco after such time that he is nominated for a seat on the board and his nomination is confirmed by the Senate,” Brehm wrote.“Until these legal requirements are met, Mr Marocco does not hold any position or office with USADF, and he may not speak or act on the foundation’s behalf.”About 30 workers were in the building when Marocco arrived with a Doge team – described as young men wearing backpacks – intent on carrying out firings based on an executive order issued by Trump on 19 February, the Washington Post reported.The standoff, led by one of the smallest government agencies, with only about 50 employees, has been cheered by government officials as a mighty act of resistance against Trump and Musk’s war on the federal bureaucracy.“This is the little agency that could,” the official said.Trump’s order declared USADF and three other agencies – the Presidio Trust, the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) and the United States Institute of Peace – as “unnecessary” and subject to elimination.Wednesday’s standoff followed a similar exchange at the IAF’s headquarters earlier this week.The workers’ defiant stand comes after Democrats publicly condemned the attempted dismantling of the agency as illegal.“Any attempt to unilaterally dismantle the USADF through executive action violates the law and exceeds the constitutional limits of executive authority,” Democratic members of the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee wrote in a 24 February letter to Trump.Democrats have argued that Doge lacks the authority to eliminate an independent entity created by Congress, and that attempts to install Marocco as the acting chair of USADF and IAF are unlawful.The official familiar with the situation said that unlike other federal agencies such as USAid, USADF is a “congressionally chartered corporation” operated by a board of directors whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.“It’s expressed in the statute that you can’t dissolve ADF except by an act of Congress,” the official said. “The president [of ADF] doesn’t take orders from anyone except for the board. The president [of ADF] isn’t even authorized to take orders from the president of the United States.”The agency, created by Congress in 1980 to support small businesses and grassroots organisations serving marginalised communities in Africa, has long enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Between 2019 and 2023, it handed out grants worth about $141m to 1,050 community enterprises serving 6.2 million people. More

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      Cheap goods ‘not essence of American dream’, Trump official says amid tariff price fears

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      Buying cheap products is “not the essence of the American dream”, Donald Trump’s top economic official has declared, amid warnings that the US president’s trade wars risk increasing prices.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, defended the new administration’s aggressive trade strategy on Thursday, two days after it imposed sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico and hiked duties on China.Top retail CEOs have cautioned the move would swiftly lead to higher prices for US consumers. Trump, too, has acknowledged there would be “a little disturbance” as a result.During an appearance at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Bessent conceded there could be what he referred to as “a one-time price adjustment” as a result of Trump’s tariffs.“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” he said. The American dream was “the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, economic security”, he added. “For too long, designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.”It comes a few days after Bessent said he was “laser-focused” on high prices in the US. At the weekend, he announced the treasury would recruit an “affordability czar” to help address the issue.“I think President Trump said that he’ll own the economy in six or 12 months, but I can tell you that we are working to get these prices down every day,” Bessent told Face the Nation on CBS.The US president has already watered down key parts of this week’s US trade onslaught, suspending tariffs on Mexico and Canada for carmakers on Wednesday, before temporarily halting tariffs on many other goods from the two countries on Thursday.Trump has repeatedly pledged to rapidly bring down prices for consumers, and declared during a joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening that he was “fighting every day” to “make America affordable again”. More

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      What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it

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      Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable. In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods. An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw. Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself. Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.That’s why Homer-Dixon thinks better communication is essential – not just to create consensus around what we call our current predicament but also how to address it. He runs the Cascade Institute, which is fostering “a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept [of polycrisis] in constructive ways”.“Constructive” is a key word here. “You’ve got to get the diagnosis right before you can go to the prescription,” he says. Finding that diagnosis means looking at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect and identifying what his team calls “high leverage intervention points”: “places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment”.The Cascade Institute’s proposals target what they have identified as key drivers of the polycrisis, such as polarization and climate change, by, for instance, improving school curricula to bolster students’ understanding of disinformation and expanding the use of deep geothermal power.In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).View image in fullscreenThere has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos.It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.On the other hand, “t​​he crisis can actually be a moment for really significant change,” he says, “because it kind of delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change”. For instance, while Homer-Dixon sees Donald Trump as an “abominable” figure, he also notes that, “like an acid”, the president dissolves norms around him. That creates the risk of disaster but also offers opportunities to change the world for the better.“This really is a critical moment in human history and things can be done,” Homer-Dixon says. “We don’t know enough about how these systems are operating to know that it’s game over.”And the term itself, as terrifying as it is, can also be a strange comfort. “I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic,” Tooze told Radio Davos. When the world feels like a nightmare, identifying the condition gives us something to hold on to – a kind of understanding amid the chaos. More

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      Europe can’t just hope for the best with Trump. Ukraine needs all the arms we can send | Frans Timmermans

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      After US vice-president JD Vance’s speech in Munich last month, most European leaders came to the conclusion that our world has fundamentally changed. The Pax Americana that long ensured peace, security and freedom in Europe is over. Anyone who still doubted this will hopefully now realise, after the disgraceful treatment Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy endured last Friday at the White House, that we can no longer rely on the Americans for our collective security.We must hope for the best, but hope is not a policy. We – the Netherlands, the EU, and all western countries standing with Ukraine – must prepare for the worst. The question is this: how do we keep Ukraine free and independent, and how do we protect our economy, our freedom and democracy, and our borders?This begins with the awareness that our security is already directly threatened by Russia. Trump wants to do business over our heads with this country. It appears that he and Vladimir Putin have divided Europe into spheres of influence like two mob bosses in a low-budget movie. As the saying goes: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.The Netherlands is not an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; we are fully exposed when geopolitical and economic storms brew on our continent. It is the Russian aggression in Ukraine that has made our energy prices rocket. We cannot batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass. We are a medium-sized country with significant European and international interests. It is high time we acted accordingly.But political divisions at the heart of our government are leaving us exposed. The biggest party in the coalition governing the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders, has a history of pro-Kremlin rhetoric. While other parties, such as the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), formerly led by Mark Rutte, are staunch advocates of unwavering support of Ukraine. Combined with an unelected prime minister, Dick Schoof, who serves no specific political party, the coalition government is rudderless and unstable.It is abundantly clear that our national scale is far too small to make a real difference. Today, we need the EU more than ever before. We must also work on closer ties with countries that share our sense of urgency and are not EU members, primarily the UK and Norway, but also Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The EU will also need to take a much firmer stance against member states such as Hungary that spare no effort in promoting Putin’s (and Trump’s) agenda.View image in fullscreenThe most urgent priority now is to support Ukraine. We must fill the gaps that Trump is leaving behind. Financially, this should not be too complicated, but in military terms, this is a different challenge. Russia will now intensify its attacks, so all available military equipment must be sent to Ukraine as quickly as possible. With additional financial support, we can also get the Ukrainian defence industry up and running at full capacity.The Russians are struggling more than it appears at first glance; sanctions are damaging the country, the losses are significant, and the war economy is creating large gaps elsewhere. Sanctions need to be scaled up much further, and all frozen Russian assets in the EU must be transferred to Ukraine immediately.EU member states must wake up and stop squabbling over trivial matters. The same goes for the Schoof cabinet. It is all hands on deck now. This means thinking creatively about European war bonds and finding the fastest possible way to bolster our defence in preparation for a confrontation in which the Americans may leave us to fend for ourselves. This requires investing in areas that the Americans currently cover within Nato. Moreover, it is vital for the overall resilience of Dutch society that defence investments do not come at the expense of our social safety net.In the longer term, we must first establish a partnership that provides the collective security guarantee of Nato without having to rely on the US. Crucial to this is the involvement of Britain and possibly Canada, and European countries that are not members of the EU. Therefore, it should go beyond the EU and perhaps also exclude countries, if these, such as Hungary or the nominally neutral Austria and Ireland, for example, do not want to participate.Second, it is of national security interest to make progress on a genuine energy union. High energy prices constitute the primary economic threat to this continent. This requires much more collective investment in energy networks, renewable energy, and also joint procurement of gas for as long as we need it.The Netherlands can play a leading role in all these areas, but it is not doing so. Because the coalition is deeply divided, the prime minister speaks too hesitantly, too late, and too ambiguously. Because the coalition is not allocating additional funds for Ukraine and is implementing utterly nonsensical cuts to the contributions to the EU, the words of support are literally and figuratively cheap. Because the largest coalition party is at best ambiguous and usually sides with Trump – who is now also siding with Putin – our government is adrift.Fortunately, there is still hope. The rudderless government may be on the brink of despair, but the people are not without hope, and our country is certainly not without prospects. The Dutch people see that the world order is changing. In such extraordinary, dangerous times, they deserve a decisive, united government.

      Frans Timmermans is the leader of the leftwing alliance of the Dutch Green party and the Labour party (GroenLinks/PvdA)

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Charles Barkley calls athletes who won’t visit Trump’s White House ‘stupid’. I disagree | Etan Thomas

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      Since Donald Trump took office for his second term, he has taken a blowtorch to America. He has pardoned January 6 rioters, started the gutting of the federal government, eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs, insulted who we thought were the country’s allies, and vilified immigrants.While there have been voices of dissent in the sports world – such as former NFL punter Chris Kluwe and soccer coach Jesse Marsch – athletes have largely stayed silent on Trump’s policies, a stark contrast to his first term in power. In recent months, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce spoke of their pride in playing in front of Trump at the Super Bowl, while the Philadelphia Eagles are reportedly keen to visit the White House to celebrate their NFL title, a decision supported by Charles Barkley, who believes boycotts make the nation more divided.I couldn’t disagree more with Barkley. So I wanted to sit down with the epitome of the athlete activist, someone who didn’t hesitate to express his beliefs, even in the face of enormous backlash. And that is the great Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, whose protest during the national anthem in 1996 cost him his NBA career. Below is our conversation, which was has been lightly edited for length and clarity, about the importance of protest under the Trump administration.Etan Thomas: Do you think athletes have gone a little quiet since Trump has taken office? How important is it for athletes to not stay silent?Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf: It’s definitely not just athletes, but for the context of this discussion, we can focus on athletes. And, yes, it’s super important [for athletes to speak up]. I can’t help but think of years ago, J Edgar Hoover was discussing the power of the athlete. And how [the] goal was to shift [focus] from the Muhammad Ali types to the more quiet type of athlete because those in power recognize the power that athletes had to influence people. Especially an athlete that’s articulate and knows how to communicate and is current with all of the issues. So, there is an enormous amount of power that a lot of athletes … don’t realize that they have.ET: A lot of the reasoning given as to why athletes may be more reluctant to speak out now is because they are making so much more money and have much more to lose.MAR: Well, to whom much is given much is expected. Sometimes, people are quiet when they’re trying to get ahead in fear of messing up their chances to succeed, and I understand that. But when you get to a point where you are making millions and your finances are all taken care of, you would think that it would embolden you even more. But for so many of us, it makes it even worse … Sometimes, people listen to athletes more than they will academics who have studied the issues continuously.ET: Has the time of athlete activism passed? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once told me “if you have someone with that type of power and influence, pushing for something you don’t agree with, of course they are going to try to do whatever they can to silence them, because they are a threat to them.”MAR: Mr Abdul Jabbar was absolutely correct. So athletes having that power, have to prepare themselves for that responsibility. And if you want to improve on anything, you have to practice. We have to prepare ourselves just like we do on the basketball court. Just as we train, plan and strategize to overcome the opponent, exploit their weaknesses, capitalize on your strengths to win the game, that same strategic analysis has to be applied in real life. You can’t lose those lessons. It has to carry over. And let me add to that, the more athletes surround themselves with people who can influence them in a positive way, the better.ET: Like Muhammad Ali being mentored by Malcolm X.MAR: Exactly. Without the influence of Malcolm X, we may have only known Muhammad Ali as the greatest boxer of all time. And that would’ve been tragic. An athlete can be utilized as a mouthpiece to wake up the masses … because if an athlete says it, they pay more attention. It shouldn’t be that way of course, but a lot of times, that’s the reality. But honestly, the masses shouldn’t need anyone to point out what is clear and evident. It is amazing that a small cabal of people have convinced the masses to accept their oppression while they know they are being oppressed.ET: Like Trump getting so many people to vote against their own interests for a second time.MAR: Exactly, yes. So to answer your original question, it’s mandatory [for athletes to speak out against Trump]. Too much is at stake. I have conversations with different athletes all the time, just as I’m sure you do. Different races, ages, colors, coaches, administrators, everyone. But I also have conversations with different people of everyday life all the time; not just athletes, people from all races, backgrounds, owners of companies, people in the workforce. But so many people are afraid to make it public. They got us so fearful right now.ET: Almost like everyone is afraid to stand up to the school bully. The whole reason I wrote my book We Matter: Athletes And Activism is because I wanted to praise athletes like LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant who were using their voices in Trump’s first term, despite the criticism and backlash, and showing younger athletes that they can follow suit.MAR: And they should look at those criticisms as a compliment. If the powers that be are speaking highly of you, in a system that doesn’t mean you or your people well, you should ask: “Why are they praising me?” Because they always have an angle. They are always trying to manipulate and conform to fit their agenda. But on the flip side, if they are going out of their way to tear you down, that means you are doing something right. The civil rights leader John Lewis talked about “good trouble”. Well, this is “good backlash”.ET: I like that. In your day, there was no social media. Nowadays, athletes don’t have to wait for a reporter or media outlet to interpret what their message is. They have the power to construct their own message, however they want to. But power unrecognized is just a waste.MAR: I wish we had social media back in the day. Being able to control your own narrative and get your own message out the way you want to is invaluable. And to add to that, now athletes have the ability to feel the support of the community through social media. So just as you can feel the backlash, you can also feel support. We didn’t have that when we were coming up. We kind of felt like we were on an island by ourselves because we only heard the media backlash. So, yes, social media plays a big difference in many ways.ET: Any final thoughts?MAR: OK, let me end it with this. If you’re really about human freedom and justice you have no choice but to speak up. With everything going on right now, it’s crucial for everyone to use whatever platform they have – not just athletes but everyone. I want to make that point clear. We can’t put this all on athletes even though we know and understand the level of influence athletes have. Silence is acceptance, compliance and ultimately agreement with the status quo. It was Huey P Newton who said: “I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment”. With the magnitude of where we are right now, remaining silent isn’t an option. Either you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem. And that goes for everyone, not just athletes. More

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      Republicans want corporate oligarchy. We need economic democracy | Rashida Tlaib and Michael A McCarthy

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      Families in the US are exhausted. They deserve a government that chooses them over billionaire donors. The Republican budget plan that passed the House last week calls for $4.5tn in tax giveaways for the ultra-rich and corporations. It will be paid for with enormous cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other federal programs that serve our families and the working class. These are the folks Elon Musk refers to as the “parasite class”.The agenda of the billionaire president and the richest man in the world is crystal clear: making the rich richer while working families struggle.Our democracy is dominated by the ultra-rich because our economic system concentrates ownership and investment power into their hands. Extreme inequality is often addressed by doing one of two things: redistributing wealth, via taxes and social programs, or changing laws and policies to increase worker incomes, such as raising the minimum wage. While these strategies are certainly necessary, in both cases our economy’s core institutions – the multinational corporations, banks, pension funds and hedge funds – are left to run as usual. But this is where so much power in the US lies.There is a third option: creating a democratic economy that widely distributes the power that comes through ownership and decision-making.In a democratic economy, ownership is extended beyond the wealthy few, to public and private institutions, such as cooperatives and non-profits, driven by the interests of ordinary people. In many worker cooperatives, for example, the workers own the firm and elect the board on a one-member, one-vote basis. This makes power on the shop floor and pay scales much more equal.The groundwork of a more democratic economy can already be seen across our country, in community land trusts, community development corporations, multi-stakeholder cooperatives, community development credit unions, housing cooperatives, community solar arrays, municipal broadband and the public Bank of North Dakota, which has operated successfully for more than 100 years. Glimpses of a new economy are there within the cracks of our failing system.We have also seen political crises provide opportunities for larger scale public ownership. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, the US government became the largest shareholder of General Motors, Citigroup and American International Group. While these stakes were eventually sold back, the next time, instead of bailing out failed businesses, we should transition them into democratic public ownership at the municipal, state or national levels. Other firms might be converted into worker cooperatives or multi-stakeholder cooperatives, governed by workers, consumers and community representatives, ensuring those same groups benefit from the company’s operations. And monopolized banks and large asset managers can be converted into democratic regional and local public banks that serve communities rather than shareholders.Beyond crisis moments, which this government is sure to produce, new public options can be established or expanded in industries such as education, childcare, housing, pharmaceutical development, healthcare, asset management and more. These public options can provide needed goods and services at prices accessible to all, while injecting competition into monopolized industries.From Los Angeles to New York, for example, there are dozens of grassroots movements across our country building public options for finance. Democratic public banks and public asset managers are not run by a corporate board at the command of profit-driven shareholders lounging on yachts somewhere on the other side of the world. Instead, democratic finance draws people from across a community, through processes of random selection, election or appointment, to deliberate over and make binding decisions about how pools of assets should be allocated and invested. Without shareholders or marketing expenses, and often tax exempt, these forms of democratic finance can offer much lower-cost loans and services to working people.Powered by democratic mandates, they can make investments in renewable energy, affordable housing, community wealth-building and other institutions that meet people’s real needs. The Detroit Justice Center, for instance, is working to develop community land trusts, which are non-profits that establish community control of land and permanent affordability of housing. Democratic public banks, such as those promoted by the Public Banking Act of 2023, could provide a ready source of capital.In a democracy, power should be in the hands of workers, community members, and democratically accountable representatives – not billionaires who govern to enrich themselves. The Republican budget is the natural outcome of an economy that funnels power and wealth to elites, while leaving working people to fend for themselves. Let’s show the billionaires we can build a democratic alternative to their corporate oligarchy.

      Rashida Tlaib represents Michigan’s 12th district. Michael A McCarthy is the director of community studies at the University of California Santa Cruz and author of The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). More

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      The US embrace of Russia is an existential threat to the EU. Germany must step up to save it | Catherine De Vries

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      In February 1945, three world leaders – Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin – met in Crimea for the Yalta conference, to discuss the new world order they would implement after the soon-to-end second world war.Smaller nations were given no say in deciding their fate. The Soviet sphere of influence would infest eastern Europe for decades and US foreign policy dominated the second half of the 20th century. Churchill resisted the end of the UK’s global empire and independence for Britain’s colonies came piecemeal; they were let go with bitterness.Eighty years on, the logic present at Yalta – that large states can impose their will on smaller states – is back. Might is once again right. But history is repeating itself with a striking difference – for this time, there is no European leader at the table. Russian and US delegations have sat down to discuss Ukraine’s future without Ukraine or the EU’s input. Eighty years down the line, Europe is no longer seen as relevant by the great powers.The urgency of Europe’s shifting geopolitical landscape was laid bare last Sunday in London, where European leaders gathered with their counterparts from the UK, Canada, Turkey, the EU and Nato for a high-level defence summit. That meeting came as a result of the very public collapse of White House talks between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump, and Trump’s suspension of military aid to Ukraine.Even if a reported reconciliation between Washington and Kyiv materialises, European officials are still reeling from the rapidity of the transatlantic rupture so early in Trump’s second term. Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, last month warned Europe it could no longer rely on US security guarantees. JD Vance, the US vice-president, went further at the Munich Security Conference, calling Europe – not Russia or China – the primary US threat.Pax Americana – the postwar period of relative peace in the western hemisphere, with the US as the dominant economic, cultural and military world power – is over. Europe will quickly have to adapt to the new reality, with the loss of its primary strategic and military partner. What part now will the EU’s largest member state, Germany, play?Despite large gains by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which doubled its support in the federal election on 23 February, Germany will be led by Friedrich Merz, head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The chancellor-in-waiting lost no time in declaring that Europe, faced with an increasingly adversarial US, must take its fate into its own hands.“It is my absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can actually become independent from the US step by step,” Merz said, hours after his election victory. Stark words from a politician who as recently as a few months ago was a bona fide Atlanticist.Merz wants to forge greater unity in Europe and establish an independent European defence capability. It remains to be seen how he will go about achieving this, but he clearly aims to put Germany back into the European driving seat.German leadership has been lacking in recent years. While Paris and Warsaw took increasingly assertive positions on European security, Berlin has remained cautious. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, spoke of a Zeitenwende – a turning point in German policy to reflect the new realities of the world. But, in the end, little but hot air was produced.Since the end of the second world war, Germany has invested relatively little in military capacity. Under the Nato umbrella, and with the close partnership with the US, this was not seen as a problem. But the world has fundamentally shifted, and Merz sees that Germany, finally, must change, too.However, an emboldened new Germany, at the head of the EU, faces a harsh world and an even harsher set of realities. The country will not only have to increase its military capacity, bring about bloc-wide military cooperation and perhaps even station troops in Ukraine, but it will also have to pay for all of this.This will require overhauling Germany’s strict ceiling on public borrowing, the so-called Schuldenbremse (debt brake) enshrined in the constitution. Merz has now begun that process; on Tuesday, his party struck agreement with its prospective coalition partners, the SPD, on the creation of a special €500bn (£390bn) fund to boost defence and infrastructure spending that would be exempt from the debt constraint. If approved by the German parliament, this would amount to a dramatic and some critics warn risky loosening of the budgetary straitjacket.Merz will also have to rally the EU (though Trump’s harrying of Europe and Zelenskyy is already pushing European leaders toward his vision), as well as face down Trump-friendly far-right parties, many of them in ascendence across the bloc.At a recent meeting in Madrid of the rightwing radical bloc of the European parliament, the Patriots for Europe, Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right PVV in the Netherlands, praised Trump as a “brother in arms”. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, expressed his support for Trump’s pro-Russian policy at the rightwing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last month. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has said that “Trump is implementing the policies that the AfD has been demanding for years”.These rightist politicians seem willing to risk Europe’s security and prosperity for political gain. The US turn toward Russia and away from democracy will be an existential test for the European project and Europe’s commitment to law and democracy. The art of European cooperation has long been to achieve the possible in unforeseen circumstances. Germany, under chancellor-elect Merz, has a steep learning curve ahead. But the task of stepping up to save Ukraine – and Europe – falls to Berlin.

      Catherine De Vries is professor of political science at Bocconi University in Milan More