Executive Order 14026 was issued by former President Joe Biden in 2021. In addition to increasing the minimum wage rate for federal contractors, it set adjustments to account for inflation. The Department of Labor (DOL) estimated that some 327,300 workers saw their wages go up, with an average wage increase of over $5,000 a year. The 2025 rate was set to be $17.75 per hour.

A full overturning of the rule means that some federal contractors will return Obama-era wage of $13.30 an hour, but Trump could undo the minimum wage for these workers altogether, meaning that some contractors could make just $7.25 an hour in some states.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-quietly-took-away-a-living-wage-from-thousands-of-federal-workers/

As Senior Editor Evan Ackerman notes in “Robots for Cows (and Their Humans)”, traditional dairy farming is very labor-intensive. Cows need to be milked at least twice per day to prevent discomfort. Conventional milking facilities are engineered for human efficiency, with systems like rotating carousels that bring the cows to the dairy workers.

The robotic systems that Netherlands-based Lely has been developing since the early 1990s are much more about doing things the bovine way. That includes letting the cows choose when to visit the milking robot, resulting in a happier herd and up to 10 percent more milk production.

Turns out that what’s good for the cows might be good for the humans, too. Another Lely bot deals with feeding, while yet another mops up the manure, the proximate cause of much of the slipping and sliding that can result in injuries. The robots tend to reset the cow–human relationship—it becomes less adversarial because the humans aren’t always there bossing the cows around.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/dairy-robots

Last month, an Oklahoma City news station reported that a federal team of law enforcement officers had battered down the door of a Latino woman and her three daughters. The family was subjected to a terrifying raid, in which agents held them at gunpoint, forced them to stand in the rain, then rifled through their home.

The agents were looking for undocumented immigrants. Everyone in the home was a U.S. citizen. The man they were looking for had moved out months earlier.

If it had all stopped there, that would have been bad enough. This was a violent, volatile raid over an alleged immigration violation — an extraordinarily disproportionate use of force. After learning of their mistake, however, the agents weren’t apologetic or contrite. Instead, they confiscated the family’s computers, cellphones, and an undisclosed amount of cash.

The agents didn’t identify themselves or which agency they were with, and they left no contact information so the women could file a complaint or, at the very least, retrieve their property.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/02/trump-police-executive-order/

Farage and his allies have drawn up plans to establish a think tank that will help them develop their policy agenda. They are hoping to attract funding from Trump donors in the United States: “MAGA, Tech, Religious conservatives.” The Reform treasurer Nick Candy also intends to launch a major fundraising drive in tax havens like Monaco, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates, enlisting the support of wealthy British people who would rather not contribute to the public finances but nonetheless have very firm opinions about how the country should be governed.

The aim is clearly to recruit a set of rich benefactors who will be less demanding and capricious than Musk, leaving Farage to steer the ship on a day-to-day basis. A party like that, with Farage at the helm, is obviously not going to do anything that will help the working class if it gains power. Yet Reform has been trying to win over working-class voters with a sham version of economic populism, making sympathetic noises about striking garbage collectors in Birmingham, calling for the nationalization of British Steel, and railing against the greed of private water companies.

It would be much harder for Farage to pull off this stunt if the Labour Party had not worked so hard to expunge the genuine left populism that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell promoted between 2015 and 2019. Keir Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have spent their first year in office antagonizing Labour voters with cuts to disability benefits and the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

When Labour members voted for Starmer in 2020, most of them probably thought they would be getting the British equivalent of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez — less radical in substance and more conventional in style than Corbyn, but ready to work with the Left and take some of its ideas on board. Instead, they unwittingly handed over the reins to a destructive clique whose members have no interest in using government office to change society for the better. Farage can unquestionably be beaten, but these are not the people to do it.

The ongoing push to exclude and delegitimize those who challenge Britain’s political consensus from the Left has created a welcoming environment for right-wing mavericks like Farage. They can pose as critics of a dysfunctional economic model while assuring rich donors that they will never do anything to interfere with their core interests. Farage is entering the political mainstream on a ramp that has been constructed for him by the establishment he affects to despise.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/england-election-starmer-farage-reform/

Los Angeles wouldn’t be the first city to turn to public housing after a tragic fire. When a catastrophic conflagration in Singapore razed an entire central neighborhood to the ground, the hyper-capitalist city-state placed a new dream of public housing for all at the heart of its rebuilding efforts.

In Chua Beng Huat’s 1997 book Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, the Singaporean sociologist — who lost his childhood home in the Bukit Ho Swee fire — describes how the aftermath of the tragedy revealed one of the keys to HDB’s success. As a response to the incident, the country’s Legislative Assembly quickly passed an amendment to the colonial Land Acquisition Ordinance of 1920 that allowed the government, ruled by Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP), to quickly purchase land from landowners in Bukit Ho Swee. The move would become the precursor to the 1966 Land Acquisition Act, the law that Chua and others argue is at the very core of Singapore’s public housing transformation.

[...] By 2005, the state owned 90 percent of Singapore’s entire land mass of 283.8 square miles.

Aside from laying the groundwork for further land acquisition, the Bukit Ho Swee rehousing project revealed another key to HDB’s success: the institution proved it could build swiftly and affordably to meet demand. In the nine months after the fire, HDB built five apartment blocks containing a total of 768 homes; in the following six years, it built around 12,000 apartments on the site of the former Bukit Ho Swee village. For the most part, the apartments were relatively basic, but they were built with modern plumbing and electricity — a novelty for many former traditional kampong village dwellers. From 1960 to 1963, HDB built more than thirty thousand apartments, proving it could develop and deliver housing at previously unseen speeds.

Around this time, in 1964, the PAP-led government decided to start offering HDB apartments for sale and began to view public housing no longer as rented social housing for Singapore’s poorest citizens, but rather as a means to ensure that all Singaporeans could live in well-built homes. HDB speculated that homeownership, as opposed to renting, would “stake” citizens into their homes — and by extension into a nascent Singaporean nation. Legislation introduced in the late 1960s eventually allowed citizens to tap into mandatory pension savings accounts to purchase HDB units on public land leased to apartment owners, unleashing the financial potential of its own residents to pay for a mass mixed-income public housing building drive that continues to this day.

Once a collection of shophouses, kampongs, and informal settlements with no running water or electricity, Singapore has transformed into a metropolis with over a million HDB units housing a population that’s more than tripled since the Bukit Ho Swee fire. Today 80 percent of the approximately 4.1 million Singaporean citizens and permanent residents live in high-quality HDB high-rises. Families from all income brackets and a variety of cultural backgrounds thrive in vibrant neighborhoods offering numerous public and commercial services designed with communities’ needs in mind. With less than 0.2 percent of the population unhoused, homelessness has essentially been eradicated, and housing has become an unwritten right. What’s more, HDB housing is actually extremely popular in Singapore, where the unfortunate stigma attached to public housing has been entirely lifted.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/la-fires-singapore-public-housing/

Già il rapporto Draghi (settembre 2024) suggeriva la creazione di un’Autorità e di un commissario per l’industria della difesa, incaricati di coordinare acquisti centralizzati a livello europeo. Vanno in questa direzione la nomina del commissario alla Difesa (oggi il lituano Andrius Kubilius), l’istituzione del Safe (Security Action for Europe) e il Libro bianco per la difesa europea (White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030).

Un ulteriore passo potrebbe essere il Me (Meccanismo europeo della difesa) proposto da Guntram Wolff, Armin Steinbach and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, modellato sull’Esm (Meccanismo europeo di stabilità). Sarebbe del tutto autonomo dai singoli governi e avrebbe la capacità di finanziare progetti comuni ricorrendo al mercato dei capitali. Ha però due i limiti: il Med sarebbe concentrato sul mercato interno, senza competenze sul commercio estero di armamenti, fondamentale per l’Europa, secondo esportatore mondiale dopo Usa e Russia, mentre la governance basata sulle quote sottoscritte rischierebbe di accentuare le disuguaglianze tra paesi ricchi e poveri.

https://lavoce.info/archives/107725/se-la-difesa-europea-non-e-uguale-per-tutti/

""For blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality.""

"To use Thomas Piketty’s terminology, the “merchant right” has long understood that they needed to forge a coalition with middle-status people against the “Brahmin left.” They had to give them something, so they offered cultural issues that matter less to them than perpetuating their wealth.

Trump innovates on this tradition. He’s brilliant at it. He genuinely feels condescended to and rejected by elites — the high New York elites, not the Brahmin left — and people sense his authentic anger against elites. He performs a certain strain of masculine toughness that conveys dignity among blue-collar men, saying, “I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m not mealymouthed like those white-collar professionals who suck up to each other. I’m a straight shooter.”

Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?,” the first line of which is “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity.” This type of condescension appeals to elites but not to middle-status people, who often feel they’re on the receiving end of this attitude from elites."

"Look at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour — people in red states flocked to hear them rail against the rich. Republican donors learned long ago they needed to tolerate anti-elitist rhetoric. Democrats need to learn the same lesson."

"If we want to really help poor people, we need to break the elite feeling rules that mandate empathy for certain groups and scorn for others — empathy for poor people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, but scorn for people who go to church, respect the military, and embody the basic culture of middle-status America. That’s a losing strategy that ironically puts a target on the backs of the aforementioned marginalized communities, as we are seeing.

It’s a matter of framing. We don’t need to become “Republicans lite.” Life’s too short. None of us would do that, because if we did, we wouldn’t be ourselves, and we wouldn’t be on the Left. But we need to understand the people we’re trying to persuade: middle-status people who value traditional institutions and obsess over economic stability. Unless we rebuild relationships with them, our progressive values won’t materialize.

We won’t abandon climate initiatives, because the world is about to fry. But we can discuss climate action in ways that connect with rural and blue-collar values, and stop talking down to people as “climate deniers” who don’t understand science. The class condescension is driving them to the far right."

"Gay marriage is the only social justice battle we’ve definitively won in forty years. There’s a key message for the Left in here. Your values are your own — don’t compromise them — but politics is about building coalitions that win. The gay marriage movement built a winning coalition and changed what it meant to be gay in this country. We think of it as inevitable, but it wasn’t."

on immigration: "More effective arguments include protecting American workers — you’ll never protect American workers while immigrants remain infinitely exploitable, so it’s important to make sure they have a path to being documented. Another approach: many immigrants are working-class people with working-class values themselves. Rather than focusing on the poverty and violence they’re fleeing, emphasize that they’re religious people with traditional family values — just like you. [...] I saw this with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the sheet metal apprentice deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador. Instead of saying, “A marginalized person of color was targeted and further marginalized,” the leadership of his union said, “A Maryland father and fellow union worker was kidnapped and sent illegally to El Salvador. He was one of us.” That seemed like a different message."

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/trump-middle-class-values-left/