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      University of Michigan shutters its flagship diversity program

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      The University of Michigan has shuttered its flagship diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program and closed its corresponding office, becoming the latest university to capitulate to Donald Trump’s anti-DEI demands.The school launched the program in 2016, at the beginning of Trump’s first administration, and it became a model for other DEI initiatives across the country. In announcing the DEI strategic plan’s end, university leaders pointed to the success the program had.“First-generation undergraduate students, for example, have increased 46% and undergraduate Pell recipients have increased by more than 32%, driven in part by impactful programs such as Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways,” the statement said. “The work to remove barriers to student success is inherently challenging, and our leadership has played a vital role in shaping inclusive excellence throughout higher education.”Since the supreme court ended affirmative action in 2023, programs geared towards diversity have been targeted by conservative groups. In an email on Thursday, the university of Michigan’s leadership referenced the enforcement of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders, along with the threat to eliminate federal funding to colleges and universities that did not eliminate their DEI programs. According to the statement, some at the university “have voiced frustration that they did not feel included in DEI initiatives and that the programming fell short in fostering connections among diverse groups”.In addition to closing the DEI office, the University of Michigan is also terminating the office for health equity and inclusion and discontinuing their “DEI 2.0 strategic plan” despite its success. The closures comes after the school decided last year to no longer require diversity statements for faculty hiring, tenure or promotion.The university said that it will now focus on student-facing programs, including expanding financial aid, maintaining certain multicultural student spaces and supporting cultural and ethnic events on campus.“These decisions have not been made lightly,” university leadership said in a statement announcing the changes.“We recognize the changes are significant and will be challenging for many of us, especially those whose lives and careers have been enriched by and dedicated to programs that are now pivoting.”The university’s decision was met with immediate concern.“The federal government is determined to dismantle and control higher education and to make our institutions more uniform, more inequitable, and more exclusive,” Rebekah Modrak, the chair of the faculty senate, wrote in an email to colleagues about the decision, according to the Detroit Free Press. “They are using the power of the government to engineer a sweeping culture change towards white supremacy. Unfortunately, University of Michigan leaders seem determined to comply and to collaborate in our own destruction.” More

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      US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future | Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman

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      We don’t have a reliable count for how many people have been shot in the United States this year. We don’t know how many were shot last year either. Or the year before that. These most basic numbers should inform our gun violence prevention efforts. But they don’t exist.This is the void of information that is created and persists when critical research is suppressed.For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle, what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health – with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts – may feel inconsequential. But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country’s research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well.Our field has already experienced the devastating consequences of defunding and censorship. The story of how we got here begins in the 1990s.Buoyed by the success of a public health approach in curbing traffic fatalities, researchers were hopeful that the same approach – track the problem, identify and test solutions, share findings and implement what works – could be used to prevent gun violence. The researchers got to work, and that work advanced rapidly. But some of the findings that emerged – in particular, that owning a gun increased one’s risk of being murdered in one’s home – angered the powerful gun lobby.The late congressman Jay Dickey, who served as the National Rifle Association’s point person in Congress, took up the cause, introducing a provision into an omnibus bill that called for no federal funds to be used “to advocate or promote gun control”. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996, did not ban gun violence research outright, but research dollars within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reallocated, and the search for solutions was reduced to a trickle.Sixteen years later, days after the Aurora theatre mass shooting, Dickey co-authored an op-ed reversing his stance. In it, he urged more scientific research, not less, and stated the truly “senseless” part of gun violence “is to decry these deaths as senseless when the tools exist to understand causes and to prevent these deadly effects”.Six months later – and one month after Sandy Hook – then president Barack Obama directed the CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”.But even with the public outcry that followed these mass killings, even with Dickey’s reversal, even with the president’s directive, the pause in research continued.In 2018, on the heels of yet another high-profile mass shooting – this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida – then president Donald Trump signed a bill clarifying that the Dickey Amendment did not actually prohibit gun violence research.But it wasn’t until 2021 that these policy changes would lead to the first dedicated federal funding for gun violence research in 25 years. By this time, we lacked the most fundamental tools to support gun violence research: expertise, mentorship, basic data, surveillance and the infrastructure to implement that critical public health approach to address and prevent gun violence.The year the funding returned, 2021, was also the deadliest on record for gun violence in the US: 48,830 lives lost to guns over the span of just 12 months. As trauma surgeons in Philadelphia, we witnessed this heartbreaking moment in our country’s history firsthand. We were bombarded by the dying and the desperate and the so many who were harmed by this disease of gun violence – a disease our government had, for 25 years, not deemed consequential enough to cure.Because the CDC tracks gun deaths but not the total number of people with non-fatal firearm injuries each year, we don’t know exactly how many people were shot during that 25-year funding pause. But we do know that hundreds of thousands of lives were forever altered or lost. And the research community could not ask why, could not ask how, could not find the answers we so desperately needed then and so desperately need now.The suffering of our patients motivates us to do research to prevent gun violence – and the suffering we witnessed during the pandemic-related surge of gun violence very nearly brought us to our knees. We want research to stop our patients from being shot. We want research to stop them from dying.The moment we find ourselves in today is especially painful because with renewed research efforts over the last few years, we had finally begun to untangle the root causes of gun violence and identify and test solutions. We had also been making progress with gun violence prevention policy nationally.Three years ago, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the first major federal legislation addressing gun violence prevention in decades. Two years ago, we saw the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which implemented an all-of-government approach to tackling gun violence. And last year brought the landmark US surgeon general’s advisory, which deemed gun violence a public health crisis that demands attention.What’s more, we’ve seen the rate of gun violence decreasing. Here in Philadelphia, the total number of shooting victims over the last year is down about a third from the same point just before the pandemic.We had so much reason for hope, until January, when the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered. Then in February, there were broad attacks on scientific research. And this month, the surgeon general’s gun violence advisory disappeared from the government’s website.We loathe to think of what the next news cycle may bring.We were among the first to document the rise in violence in 2020, anticipating the catastrophic years that would follow. Now, as we watch a cascade of executive orders threaten public health and public safety, as we see fears of economic disempowerment sowed across this country, we trauma surgeons are bracing ourselves for another surge in gun violence.We should be filled with hope, not fear.But here we are, fearing for our patients, for our communities and for the countless many who will die from this preventable and treatable disease of gun violence because the research that could have saved them was defunded and censored yet again.No matter your political allegiances, no matter your life experiences, no matter your job, your income, your religion, your age or your race, we must stand firmly, together, in support of research that will help us understand this disease that causes suffering for so many – and one day, find its cure.

      Dr Jessica Beard is the director of research for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow, and director of trauma research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University; Dr Elinore Kaufman is the research director for the division of trauma at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Pennsylvania Trauma System Foundation Research Committee. Both are trauma surgeons in Philadelphia. More

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      Schools in Puerto Rico are bracing for Trump cuts after gains made during the Biden years

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      Maraida Caraballo Martínez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.But during the Biden administration, Caraballo noticed a big change. Due to an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, whiteboards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.Yabucoa, a small town in south-east Puerto Rico, was hard-hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near-constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the pandemic, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries – seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system – the seventh-largest school district in the United States – has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a compromised power grid.Under Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House and Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the US Department of Education. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the US territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor”. During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.View image in fullscreenA recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only one in five people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools.Trump has already made massive cuts to the US Department of Education and its staff, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds – which last year made up more than two-thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican department of education (PRDE) – were transferred directly to the local government, it would probably lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula”, a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds was opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency, and there’s no clarity.”In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6bn in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to historic teacher pay increases, funding for after-school tutoring programs, the hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.Cardona also designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, Soto made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a non-profit that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month than their base salary, a nearly 30% increase for the average teacher. “It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than their mainland counterparts.One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico department of education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency – the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget – was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in the region based on individual schools’ needs. The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center.But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign – not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He said that the program would not continue in its current form.“The pilot isn’t really effective,” Ramos said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said, he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per-pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, Puerto Rico still spends far less than any of the 50 states on each student: $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.The US Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, plays an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55% of children live below the poverty line and 35% of students are in special education. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68% of the education budget on the island came from federal funding, compared with 11% in US states. The department also administers Pell grants for low-income students; about 72% of Puerto Rican students apply.Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The US Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And, he said, there was little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away, or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland’s. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that US students take, just 2% of fourth-graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, and 0% of eighth-graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1% of third-graders were reading at grade level.There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the non-profit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an islandwide coalition of 70 partners to improve literacy from kindergarten through the third grade (K-3), including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3m in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective”.A new reading test for first- through third-graders the non-profit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it was too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that,” she said.Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested against when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73bn to $31bn. And last year board members increased education spending by 3%. Mujica said the board was focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom,” he said.Ramos said he met McMahon, the new US secretary of education, in Washington DC, and that they had a “pleasant conversation”. “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policy-wise”, but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said: ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.Principal Caraballo’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared, partly thanks to community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6.30am to 6.30pm. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said.She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After pension plans were frozen, Caraballo will receive only 50% of her salary at retirement, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to social security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay,” she said.This story was produced by Guardian partner the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education More

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      Cryptocurrency will not save the Democratic party | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      Twice rejected by American voters in favor of Donald Trump, the Democratic party now faces its most severe crisis of identity in four decades. Nowhere is the party’s search for relevance in Trump’s America more desperate than in its embrace of cryptocurrency, a sector whose existence depends upon its ability to circumvent the financial regulatory state the Democrats spent a century constructing. How else to explain the Democratic representative Ritchie Torres – whose South Bronx district is the poorest in the United States – joining forces with the Republican Tom Emmer to champion cryptocurrency through their newly formed congressional Crypto caucus.Congressional Republicans have always been uniform in their support for cryptocurrency: in May 2024, just three Republican House members voted against a bill to significantly relax regulations on digital tokens. But since 2016, the cryptocurrency industry has made steady inroads into the Democratic party. That convergence, if it continues, will represent a return to the pre-New Deal financial politics that the party spent a century rejecting.Throughout American history, the politics of money and financial risk have been central to party coalitions. Not since the election of 1896, however, have the Democrats been the party of deflationary, restrictive “hard money”. As the historians Anton Jäger and Noam Maggor explain, the de-facto fusion of the Populist party with the Democratic party transformed it into a vehicle for those who saw money not as a neutral store of value, but as a political instrument that could serve developmental ends – in this case, directing investment to credit-starved regions of the country.William Jennings Bryan’s defeat drove the party to moderate its more radical monetary positions. But notwithstanding the occasional inconsistencies, Democrats generally maintained the anti-deflationary stance established in 1896. Thirty years later, the Great Depression provided Franklin D Roosevelt with the mandate and the crisis necessary to complete this transformation: the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1933.“Consumer protection” in its contemporary form only truly entered the American political lexicon in the 1960s, but this period established the contours of America’s politics of financial risk. The Banking Act of 1933 (often referred to as Glass-Steagall) separated commercial and investment banking to protect ordinary depositors from speculative excesses. The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 imposed disclosure requirements on financial markets and established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Most critically, the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ended the era of devastating bank runs by insuring deposits.Collectively, these measures represented a fundamentally new relationship between citizens, banks and financial risk: the state would actively shape financial markets rather than simply enforcing contracts within them.The post-war era saw the Democratic party further articulate that approach to “market-making”. The Employment Act of 1946 declared it the government’s responsibility to maintain “maximum employment”, while the Federal Reserve, treasury, SEC and FDIC enforced financial stability through interest rate caps, capital controls and heavy regulation of financial institutions. While occasionally inefficient, these policies contributed to remarkable stability. As the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have documented, the period from 1945 to 1971 saw virtually no banking crises in advanced economies.The Clinton administration’s financial deregulation – culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 – represented a significant retreat from these principles, and ended in the catastrophe of 2008. But, if only to offset the mounting risk they allowed the private sector to assume, the Clinton administration frequently sought to expand the FDIC’s responsibilities.Pro-crypto Democrats, from Torres to the disgraced New York City mayor Eric Adams, argue that cryptocurrency aligns with progressive principles. “Blockchain technology can liberate the lowest income communities from the high fees of the traditional financial system,” Torres said at an industry-organized summit last year. Kamala Harris herself appealed to cryptocurrency as an opportunity for Black men. But cryptocurrency, at its core, subverts the tools for economic management Democrats have championed for decades.The FDIC was created precisely because uninsured deposits catalyzed routine bank runs; cryptocurrency exchanges offer no comparable protection. The Federal Reserve’s sovereignty over the American monetary base enables it to expand the money supply during downturns to maintain employment; Bitcoin’s fixed supply explicitly rejects this responsibility. The SEC was established because unregulated securities markets harmed ordinary investors; cryptocurrency’s decentralization enables exchanges like Uniswap to operate outside its protective frameworks.The industry’s “political investments” – to borrow the political scientist Thomas Ferguson’s terminology – are an undeniably defining force in American politics. By some counts, nearly half of all corporate campaign contributions in 2024 came from the crypto sector. But despite Kamala Harris’s substantial concessions to the industry, the top three crypto PACs leaned red by a margin of nearly 2:1. Harris’s promises to the industry were never enough to outweigh the Trump campaign’s proposal, running since late July, to enshrine crypto as a “permanent national asset” through a national bitcoin “stockpile”.Modest deregulation is simply not what crypto is in the political game for. It requires nothing less than the seizure of the American state. And until Democrats can outmatch Trump’s handouts to the sector, crypto will stay with the Republican party.Volatility is the basic roadblock to crypto’s further adoption. It is simply too risky for most people. No amount of regulatory tweaks will change that fundamental affliction: as long as cryptocurrencies are predominantly held as investments rather than used for transactions, their prices will remain highly sensitive to investor demand fluctuations. And the absence of traditional stabilization mechanisms, like central banks or reserve assets, contributes to the high volatility of crypto tokens. Put simply: if crypto is to grow, it’ll need both state backstopping and displacement of the traditional banking system altogether.Trump has set about doing exactly this. His administration’s recently established “strategic bitcoin reserve” is, in effect, a state backstop for cryptocurrency. But the Trump administration’s designs extend far beyond “de-risking” crypto: their goal, as the political economist Martijn Konings observes, appears to be the destabilization of the traditional banking system itself.At the behest of Elon Musk’s s0-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – itself named after Dogecoin, Musk’s cryptocurrency of choice – the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” packages and layoffs have already reduced the FDIC’s workforce by 10%. And Trump issued an executive order in mid-February requiring that the formerly independent agency submit to White House oversight.The Trump team has floated replacing the already enervated FDIC with a gutted insurance scheme housed in the treasury, merging it with the office of the comptroller of the currency, or simply defanging it through mass layoffs and employee transfers. In either case, tighter executive control over banks’ balance sheets will render the financial system’s solvency contingent upon whether a particular bank is favored or disfavored by the president. It’s easy to imagine a resulting loss of confidence in the traditional banking system – an outcome that crypto advocates believe would work to their advantage.If the Democrats wish to outcompete the Republican party for crypto dollars, then, they’ll need to offer the “industry” much more than deregulation. They’ll have to become active participants in engineering a return to the pre-New Deal politics of money and financial risk – the very positions against which the modern Democratic party defined itself. That would be a capitulation unprecedented even in the Democratic party’s long history of betraying the American working class.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      JD Vance’s home town is bouncing back – and it’s largely thanks to immigrants

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      When Daniel Cárdenas from Coahuila, Mexico, first arrived in Middletown, a post-industrial city of 50,000 people in south-west Ohio, he was immediately enamored.“It’s a small town with friendly people. You have shops, big stores; there’s no traffic,” he says.“I really fell in love with Middletown. It’s awesome.”A pastor at the First United Methodist church since 2022, Cárdenas is one of a growing number of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Honduras who have moved to the home town of Vice-President JD Vance in recent years. And while Vance has been at the forefront of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US, the story of immigration’s impact on Middletown is one of rebirth and success.Dominated for decades by a huge steel plant on the south side of town, Middletown has felt the effects of the decline of American manufacturing more than most. A 2006 lockout at the steel plant that lasted for more than a year saw AK Steel lay off nearly a thousand workers. The ramifications of the Great Recession that followed in 2008 can still be felt, fueling a population decline of more than 10% between 2010 and 2020.But today, the city is bouncing back, with immigrants such as Cárdenas playing a central role. Nearly all of its population growth since 2010 can be attributed to its foreign-born population, which stands at more than 2,000 people.Its Hispanic communities have helped turn Middletown into one of the few regional cities in the state with a growing population. Homes and commercial spaces on the city’s south side have been revitalized, creating new sources of property and income tax revenue for city authorities. Mexican food trucks dot the city’s street corners and Spanish chatter fills its local chain restaurants.In November, Middletown’s mayor, Elizabeth Slamka, was elected without having any political experience, and is the daughter of an immigrant mother from Colombia.“After the pandemic, everything was closed,” says Cárdenas. “And now we are having a kind of boost in our community, and the Hispanic communities are helping with that.” Many, he says, work in construction and landscaping jobs – industries that have suffered chronic staffing shortages since the pandemic and which represent a wider midwestern trend.The midwest is set to be one of the regions most affected by population decline in the decades ahead. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan currently make up four of the 10 most populous states in the country, but all four are expected to experience population decline by 2050.Shrinking populations for communities in the industrial midwest mean fewer resources for infrastructure, maintenance and other basic needs.Vance, however, has made criticizing immigrants a central theme of his political career.Since before his election win last November, he has claimed immigrants undercut American workers, and in recent weeks has claimed that uncontrolled immigration is the “greatest threat” to the US.And he’s not alone.For decades Middletown’s Butler county sheriff, Richard Jones, who sports a Stetson hat, has been known for taking an anti-immigrant stance. The same week Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Jones installed a sign outside the county jail that reads: “illegal aliens here.” Recently Jones, who has had a grip on the sheriff’s office for more than 20 years, began renting out jail cells to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency at a rate of $68 per person a day and $36 an hour for transportation, or in his own words for “as much as I can get”.This month, the sheriff’s office and a city neighboring Middletown were ordered to pay a $1.2m settlement for the wrongful detention of about 500 people over a two-year period beginning in 2017.The anti-immigrant rhetoric from Vance, Jones and Trump has hit home.After mass, some people have approached Cárdenas expressing fear of Ice raids, following one such incident that saw two people detained 20 miles north of Middletown just days after Trump took office in January.“People are saying they are seeing undercover police cars; people are afraid, they don’t know what to believe; there are a lot of rumors,” he says. “In my sermons, I try to give some hope.”Two years ago, Alexandra Gomez established the Latinos Unidos de Middletown Ohio organization to serve as a venue for Latino immigrants to find education, housing and employment resources. “At our first festival in 2023 we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” she says.But statements from the new administration in recent weeks have fueled concern.“It was real here; people were scared, they did not want to go out. They were afraid to go to work,” she says.“And it isn’t that people were afraid that Ice would show up [at their gatherings] but that someone who felt the right to be rude shows up. The biggest concerns people have are: ‘How do I go to work?’”One of the biggest effects of the recent rise in immigration has been seen in the city’s schools.Over the last 15 years, the number of students taking English language classes has more than doubled. Today, nearly one-in-five students are Hispanic or Latino, their presence helping to keep the wider school system funded and operating. The winner of last year’s Middletown Community Foundation’s volunteer of the year award was a high school teacher originally from Colombia.Gomez and Cárdenas say a source of comfort for immigrants has come from a surprising source: the local police force.Cárdenas says his and other churches recently had a meeting with the city police force and was told that it wouldn’t be working with Ice to request visa documents or detain suspected illegal immigrants. “They said: ‘We are not going to profile anybody; we are just going to do our job.’”That was echoed by Gomez.“They reached out to us and basically said: ‘We’ve got other things to do. It’s not our job to be chasing paperwork.’”Such has been the growth in Middletown – about three-fourths of the city’s foreign-born population are from Latin American countries, according to the US Census Bureau – that Roberto Vargas from Guadalajara, Mexico, saw on opportunity to open the Cancun Mexican restaurant on the city’s eastern edge in December 2023.“I have good people working for me; I haven’t heard anyone have issues with [deportations or Ice activity],” he says.For him, it’s the state of the economy that is the major concern.“Restaurants all over the place are closing down. It’s scary,” he says. Since Trump took office, the US economy has been on unsteady ground, with the stock market losing 7% of its value.“I don’t know what’s going on.” More

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      So many souvenirs for JD Vance to take home from Greenland: oil, gas, minerals – and that’s just the start | Marina Hyde

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      There’s a Gerard Butler movie called Greenland, which – via a series of cataclysmic events handled incredibly Butlerishly – ends with Gerard cocooned in a remote secure bunker in Greenland. As the week has worn on, this has increasingly become the mood of today’s supposedly super-fun tourist trip to Greenland by the second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, and her husband, the vice-president, JD Vance. Who, come to think of it, does actually look like the Cabbage Patch Gerard Butler.Anyway: Greenland. Like I say, the trip has evolved this week both in style and substance. Originally, it was announced that the second lady was going to take one of her sons, immerse herself in various local events – she’s apparently simply fascinated by Greenland’s culture – and attend the famous Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race. No more. Now, it’s her husband instead of her son, and the Vances are only going to a military facility. This is a little bit like announcing you’re travelling to Kyoto to see the blossoms, then “recalibrating” your trip so that all you’ll actually be taking in is a tour of the storage facility where they keep the most boring documents from the signing of the 1997 climate protocol. Extremely important, no doubt – and extremely, extremely boring. Or as the White House has chosen to characterise this shift in emphasis: “The Second Lady is proud to visit the Pituffik Space Base with her husband to learn more about Arctic security and the great work of the Space Base.” It is unclear at time of writing if Pituffik has spa facilities. Presumably it’s got something of a year-round après-ski vibe.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the Vance kid now has to stay at home and go to school, instead of skipping it to enjoy a taxpayer-funded trip to a country his dad and friends are openly trying to annex. Still, the good news is that Mike Waltz should still be going. Yes! The second lady was in fact always slated to go on her little tourist jaunt accompanied by the national security adviser to the US president – and there’s nothing weird about that. Personally, I never minibreak without one. And it goes without saying that the travelling party will be joined in spirit by whichever journalists/Russian assets/assorted randos that Mike has added to the groupchat “Greenland Annexation Brunch With The Girls”.Alas, it seems that the sheer obnoxiousness of the Vances’ trailed visit was the thing that fatally repulsed the locals, leaving US organisers with no choice but to commute the trip down to just one secure base visit. It’s reported that advance-party administration officials went door to door in Greenland trying to find a local family who would be pleased to welcome Usha and her large adult son Mike Waltz into their humble dwelling – presumably in order that they could say something like: “Wow, what a beautiful humble home you have. Be a real shame if anything happened to it …”Strangely, no such family was forthcoming. It’s almost as if people in Greenland have the internet, and are able to read or watch the constant and intensifying statements on their country’s potential annexation by the covetous US president, Donald Trump. “It’s an island … that we need,” observed Trump with chilling mildness earlier this week. “And we’re going to have to have it.” Further matter-of-fact justifications have been repeatedly forthcoming. “We need greater national security purposes [sic],” ran another. “I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran [for president]. People really don’t even know that Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.” Spoken with all the kindly rationale of the school bully explaining you should give up your lunch money because he needs it.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, a series of proxies are emerging to push America’s case – or, in the case of Vladimir Putin, to not argue with it in a way that is tantamount to cheerleading. “In short, America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious,” the Russian president observed this week. “These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic.” On Friday morning, Stephen Moore – a former Trump economic adviser-turned-Heritage Foundation wingnut – explained cheerfully to the BBC that the Greenlanders were “the people who would benefit the most from this … let’s call it a sale, or acquisition.” Let’s not, but go on. “They could, overnight, turn into millionaires.” This somehow reminds me of that old statistic suggesting that instead of going to an expensive war to protect them, the British government could instead have just made every Falkland Islander a millionaire to soften the unwanted blow of having been taken over by Argentina. After all, what else do people want in life, except for money?“There could be trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals and oil and gas and other types of … precious minerals that could be of value to the United States,” speculated Moore, adding, almost by way of an afterthought about the Greenlanders, that there’s “essentially a treasure chest right below their feet”. Mm. The trouble with the nakedly rapacious hawks of Trumpworld putting it that way, of course, is that it’s only a very short hop to seeing the Greenland people as the obstacle. If only they, and their feet, could just be dug through, then the treasure chest could be rightfully – or wrongfully – claimed.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More

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      Donald Trump moves to end union rights for many government agency employees – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines through this morning.We start with news that president Donald Trump has signed an executive order limiting numerous federal workers from unionising and ordering the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.A memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) references an order from Trump but also provides a fact sheet, setting out the rationale for such a move, The Hill reports.It reads: “President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.”The Hill reports today:
      The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
      In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.
      In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies. The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.
      “Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.
      Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.
      The memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA [collective bargaining agreements].”It has been condemned by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in an email to members, which said the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers”.The AFGE added:
      Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members – and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else.
      AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.
      In other news:

      Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.

      Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

      Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

      Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

      Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.

      Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

      A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine. More