Judge Slaps Down Trump Administration Scheme to ‘Starve’ Nation’s Top Consumer Protection Watchdog

“If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.


Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks at the White House on Monday, September 29, 2025.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


President Donald Trump and his administration have been openly plotting to scrap the nation’s top consumer protection watchdog, but a federal judge has at least temporarily put those plans on hold.

US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve must continue providing funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), rejecting the Trump administration’s claims that the nation’s central bank that the nation’s central bank currently lacks to “combined earnings” to fund the bureau’s operations.




‘Grave Danger’: Warnings as Supreme Court Looks Ready to Hand Trump Even More Unchecked Power

The administration had argued that the Federal Reserve should not be making payments to the CFPB because it has been operating at a loss since 2022, when it began a series of aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation.

However, Jackson rejected this reasoning and accused the administration of using it as a cover to defund an agency that the president and top officials such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, had long expressed a desire to abolish.

“It appears that defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding,” the judge wrote.

The CFPB must now be funded at least until the DC Circuit of Appeals weighs in on an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) against Vought over layoffs at the agency that is scheduled for hearings in February.

The NTEU took a victory lap in the wake of the ruling and taunted Vought for his defeat.

“Yet another loss for Rusty Vought,” the union posted on Bluesky. “Wonder how much longer Donald is going to put up with this?”

While it will continue to receive funding for the time being, the CFPB has still seen its ability to fulfill its mission severely diminished during Trump’s second term.

A Tuesday report from Reuters claimed that the CFPB is “on the brink of collapse” given that the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and industry lawsuits have “undone a decade’s worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending.”

The report also noted that, during Trump’s second term, the CFPB has “dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations” at the agency.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who first drew up plans to create the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, explained the agency’s importance in an interview with Reuters.

“I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one or more of their creditors,” she said. “For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between fifth and 10th, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated.”

THIRD WORLD U$A

In Blow to ‘Fetal Personhood’ Push, Alabamian Serving 18 Years After Stillbirth Gets New Trial

“I’m hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection,” said Brooke Shoemaker, who has already spent five years in prison.

Brooke Shoemaker has served five years of an 18-year sentence after a stillbirth. On December 22, 2025, an Alabama judge threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial.
(Photo: Shoemaker family via AL.com)

Jessica Corbett
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

While Brooke Shoemaker and a rights group representing her in court are celebrating this week after an Alabama judge threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial, her case is also drawing attention to the dangers of “fetal personhood” policies.

“Laws and judicial decisions that grant fetuses—and in some cases embryos and fertilized eggs—the same legal rights and status given to born people, such as the right to life, is ‘fetal personhood,’” explains the website of the group, Pregnancy Justice. “When fetuses have rights, this fundamentally changes the legal rights and status of all pregnant people, opening the door to criminalization, surveillance, and obstetric violence.”

Since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling ended the federal right to abortion in 2022, far-right activists and politicians have ramped up their fight for fetal personhood policies. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years after the decision, the number of people who faced criminal charges related to their pregnancies hit its highest level in US history.

Shoemaker’s case began even earlier, in 2017, when she experienced a stillbirth at home about 24-26 weeks into her pregnancy. Paramedics brought her to a hospital, where she disclosed using methamphetamine while pregnant. Although a medical examiner could not determine whether the drug use caused the stillbirth—and, according to Pregnancy Justice, “her placenta showed clear signs of infection”—a jury found her guilty of chemical endangerment of a minor. She’s served five years of her 18-year sentence.

“After becoming Ms. Shoemaker’s counsel in 2024, Pregnancy Justice filed a petition alongside Andrew Stanley of the Samford Law Office requesting a hearing based on new evidence about the infection that led to the demise of Ms. Shoemaker’s pregnancy, leading the judge to agree with Pregnancy Justice’s medical witness and to vacate the conviction,” the rights group said in a Monday statement.

Lee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Tickal wrote in his December 22 order that “should the facts had been known, and brought before the jury, the results probably would have been different.”

Shoemaker said Monday that “after years of fighting, I’m thankful that I’m finally being heard, and I pray that my next Christmas will be spent at home with my children and parents... I’m hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection. I loved and wanted my baby, and I never deserved this.”



Although Tickal’s decision came three days before Christmas, the 45-year-old mother of four remained behind bars for the holiday last week, as the state appeals.

“While we are thrilled with the judge’s decision, we are outraged that Ms. Shoemaker is still behind bars when she should have been home for Christmas,” said former Pregnancy Justice senior staff attorney Emma Roth. “She was convicted based on feelings, not facts. Pregnancy Justice will continue to fight on appeal and prove that pregnancies end tragically for reasons far beyond a mother’s control. Women like Ms. Shoemaker should be allowed to grieve their loss without fearing arrest.”

AL.com reported Tuesday that “Alabama is unique in that it is one of only three states, along with Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the state Supreme Court allows the application of criminal laws meant to punish child abuse or child endangerment to be applied in the context of pregnancy.”

However, similar cases aren’t restricted to those states. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years following Dobbs, “prosecutors initiated cases in 16 states: Alabama, California, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. While prosecutions were brought in all of these states, to date, the majority of the reported cases occurred in Alabama (192) and Oklahoma (112).”

“Prosecutors used a variety of criminal statutes to charge the defendants in these cases, often bringing more than one charge against an individual defendant,” the group’s report continues. “In total, the 412 defendants faced 441 charges for conduct related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. The majority of charges (398/441) asserted some form of child abuse, neglect, or endangerment.”

“As has been the case for decades, nearly all the cases alleged that the pregnant person used a substance during pregnancy,” the report adds. “In 268 cases, substance use was the only allegation made against the pregnant person. In the midst of a wide-ranging crisis in maternal healthcare and despite maternal healthcare deserts across the country, prosecutors or police argued that pregnant people’s failure to obtain prenatal care was evidence of a crime. This was the case in 29 of 412 cases.”

When the publication was released last year, Pregnancy Justice president Lourdes A. Rivera said in a statement that “the Dobbs decision emboldened prosecutors to develop ever more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy, leading to the most pregnancy-related criminal cases on record.”

“This is directly tied to the radical legal doctrine of ‘fetal personhood,’ which grants full legal rights to an embryo or fetus, turning them into victims of crimes perpetrated by pregnant women,” Rivera argued. “To turn the tide on criminalization, we need to separate healthcare from the criminal legal system and to change policy and practices to ensure that pregnant people can safely access the healthcare they need, without fear of criminalization. This report demonstrates that, in post-Dobbs America, being pregnant places people at increased risk, not only of dire health outcomes, but of arrest.”

‘A Wake-Up Call’: Scientists Find 2025 Among Hottest Years on Record

“2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now.”


A woman cools herself off using a fan at a bus stop showing a temperature of 37°C—or 99°F—during a heatwave in Madrid, on July 1, 2025.
(Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.

Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that “although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record,” with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.

For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.

“Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real,” the report continues. “It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality.”

“Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops,” the researchers wrote. “Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world.”

The WWA researchers’ findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.




According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.

The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”

The WWA study’s publication comes a month after this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.

Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that “2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now.”

“Today’s report is a wake-up call,” Alt continued. “Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters.”

“Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather,” Alt added. “It’s time those in power started listening.”

Trillionaires at the Gates

The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable.


SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk participates in a town hall-style meeting to promote early and absentee voting at Ridley High School on October 17, 2024 in Folsom, Pennsylvania.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Bob Lord
Dec 30, 202

5Inequality.org


I wrote my first post for Inequality.org, “Our First Trillionaire: Only a Matter of Time,” over 12 years ago. I hoped, at the time, that the post would age poorly. After all, the presence of a trillionaire on American soil would certify that we had unquestionably reached an oligarchic concentration of our nation’s wealth.

Unfortunately, that post has aged remarkably well. If anything, I now see my forecasting as too timid.

Elon Musk’s personal wealth now sits at about $750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23% over the $60 billion Bill Gates fortune of 2013. At that rate of increase, America will boast its first trillionaire at least a decade before 2039, the year I gave CNBC writer Eric Rosenbaum in 2014 as the date our nation would most likely see its first trillionaire.

Back in 2013, I worried mightily that the absence of a reliable mechanism in America’s tax system to limit the growth rate of extreme fortunes would cause the wealth share of the richest Americans to rise to ever-higher levels. Wealth at America’s economic summit, I noted, was growing at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth, and that rapid growth was bringing a disturbing arithmetic into play.

America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration.

“If the wealth of one group within a nation grows at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth,” I pointed out, “that group’s share of the aggregate wealth must increase over time. That’s a mathematical certainty. And the level of subsequent wealth concentration has no limit.”

Our country’s wealth concentration story has played out exactly that way over the past dozen years, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed. The nation’s top .00001%—a mere 19 households—has increased its share of America’s wealth from 0.1% in 1982 to 1.81% in 2024. Of the country’s $148 trillion total wealth in December 2024, those 19 households held $2.6 trillion. In the past year, their wealth total has increased to well over $3 trillion.

That increase has produced a stunning annual increase in the wealth share of that ultra-elite group, nearly 7% per year on average. To achieve that rate of wealth share growth, the wealth of our top .00001%—one ten-millionth of America’s households—has had to grow at an average rate nearly seven percentage points above the average annual growth rate of the country’s wealth.


Over a decade ago, I told CNBC that America’s march to oligarchy would revolve around a considerable increase in the concentration of wealth within the billionaire class. Those 19 households in our top .00001% comprise 5% of America’s top .0002% (380 households, or roughly, the Forbes 400). Their share of the wealth of that larger group of billionaires now stands at about 50% today, a quadrupling since 1982.

What has generated America’s increasingly oligarchic wealth concentration? The worst culprit, I’d argue, continues to be a federal income tax system that not only lacks a reliable mechanism to rein in the growth of massive fortunes but does the exact opposite, exacerbating wealth inequality when we most need it contained.

Specifically, our tax system applies an extremely regressive tax rate to capital gains, the principal form of economic income flowing to our billionaire class. The effective annual income tax rate on the capital gains of our richest often runs less than 5%. That reality has baked into America’s cake a continuing concentration of our country’s wealth.

In 2013, with Mexico’s Carlos Slim then the world’s wealthiest person, I contemplated the concentration of power that would accompany the arrival of American trillionaires.

“Unless basic US tax policy changes,” I noted, “the United States will be mathematically certain to reach Mexican-like levels of wealth concentration. The only questions: Who will be our Carlos Slim and how kindly will our trillionaires treat us.”

Indeed, the gap between America’s level of wealth concentration and Mexico’s has closed considerably over the past 12 years. Slim, still the wealthiest Mexican, has seen his share of Mexico’s total wealth fall since 2013. But the share of American wealth held by the wealthiest American—Gates in 2013 and Musk in 2025—has tripled.

And we saw the accompanying concentration of power become vividly visible at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. On the inaugural stand, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat center stage.

We see that same concentration in the funding of our politics. In the 2024 election, reports Americans for Tax Fairness, our billionaires collectively accounted for $2.6 billion of the $15.9 billion in total political spending, a total lopsidedly on the Republican side.

Musk alone spent about $277 million in 2024, a tiny one-thousandth of his net worth at the time, but nearly 2% of total political spending in a nation of 340 million people. At his current level of wealth, Musk could drop $1 billion by himself into the 2026 election without breaking much of a financial sweat.

But those numbers only hint at the political power our richest now wield. Billionaire control over our nation’s major media outlets far exceeds the influence of direct billionaire political spending.

The six billionaires with wealth over $200 billion all control either a major media outlet or a major social media platform. Musk, of course, owns Twitter. Zuckerberg, through Meta, controls Facebook and Instagram. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Larry Ellison’s son, David, holds a controlling interest in Paramount, the media giant that owns CBS and is seeking to acquire control of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons also have their eyes on the US operations of TikTok. Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain the largest shareholders of Alphabet, the corporate colossus that controls Google and YouTube.

What does that billionaire lock grip over our largest media translate into? Everything from a Washington Post editorial page that rails against wealth taxation to the placing of America’s most respected weekly network TV news show, “60 Minutes,” in the censorious hands of the right-wing ideologue Bari Weiss.

America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration. The challenge of breaking that cycle could hardly be more daunting.

The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable. Let’s not let that happen.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.


Bob Lord
Bob Lord is Senior Advisor, Tax Policy at Patriotic Millionaires and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow.
Full Bio >

We’re Renting Our Lives Away to Enrich Tech Lords and Wall Street Oligarchs

In the new, out-of-control rental economy, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.



An “Apartments for Rent” sign hangs in front of a building  in Miami Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann
Dec 30, 2025

Common Dreams


On Sunday, both President Donald Trump and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”
.


Big Tech Ramps Up Propaganda Blitz As AI Data Centers Become Toxic With Voters


As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.

There was a time when you bought things.

It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.


You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

That America is disappearing.

Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.

Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job—a college education—has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt—the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students—and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.

The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone—banking, work, navigation, healthcare—being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.

Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.

Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.

And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy—all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits—America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

It’s gotten so bad that apps—which also acquire and then sell our data—have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy—not billionaires—sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.






Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >

Another Hollywood star sounds off on Trump's MAGA-fied nation as he bids adieu to America

Robert Davis
December 30, 2025 

RAW STORY

Actor George Clooney and Amal Clooney host their annual fundraiser 'The Albie Awards' in London, Britain, October 3, 2025. REUTERS/Maja Smiejkowska/File Photo

Hollywood star George Clooney sounded off on Trump's MAGA-fied America in a new cover story for Variety Magazine published on Tuesday as he announced that he's leaving the country to live in Europe.

The interview was published after Clooney and his family were granted French citizenship, according to reports.

Clooney spoke to Variety about the state of the media following Paramount-Skydance-owned CBS News' hiring of Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief. Weiss, a controversial former opinion writer at The New York Times, has been at the center of multiple controversies since taking over, including the decision to spike a story about the Trump administration's efforts to send deportees to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador

“Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak,” Clooney told the outlet. “Am I worried about film studios? Sure. It’s my business, but my primary loyalty is to my country. I’m much more worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press.”

Clooney also chimed in on recent Supreme Court rulings and the state of the Trump administration. He expressed optimism about America recovering from the Trump administration.

“Just straight up, it’s the economy, stupid,” Clooney said. “It’s more expensive now than it was when Joe Biden left office. And powerful people tend to overplay their hands. I think that cruelty, like separating children from their parents, although popular with small groups of people, doesn’t play well with most Americans.”

Read the entire Variety interview by clicking here.

George Clooney slams networks that rolled over for Trump in profane rant

George Clooney on November 2, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via CBS This Morning / YouTube)

Carl Gibson

December 30, 2025 

ALTERNET

Actor, director and producer George Clooney recently threw several jabs at media companies that settled with President Donald Trump rather than fight his lawsuits in court.

During a Tuesday interview with Variety while promoting his new film "Jay Kelly," Clooney not only spoke about the president — who he said he used to "know very well" — but about networks that he feels enabled Trump during the early part of his second term. He specifically harped on CBS, having just played legendary CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow in a stage production of the film Good Night and Good Luck (which he co-wrote, starred in and directed).

At the time of the play, CBS' parent company, Paramount, settled with Trump for $16 million after the president sued them over 60 Minutes' interview with 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. After Paramount settled, the Trump administration approved the company's proposed merger with media giant Skydance.

CBS' new owners then installed conservative columnist Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of the vaunted network's news division. Weiss recently made headlines for killing a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration's deportations to an El Salvadoran mega-prison without due process, though a Canadian broadcaster ran the segment, which then spread virally through social media.

"Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak," Clooney told Variety. "I’m worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press."

Clooney also tore into ABC News, which settled with then-President-elect Trump in December of last year after he sued the network over anchor George Stephanopoulos' assertion that Trump had been found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the case, found Trump liable for sexual abuse and not assault, but clarified that the two were effectively the same thing as the public understood them. Clooney lamented that both major networks chose to concede rather than stand up for themselves.

"If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, 'Go f—— yourself,' we wouldn’t be where we are in the country," Clooney said. "That’s simply the truth."

Click here to read Clooney's full interview.

France grants citizenship to George and Amal Clooney and their twins Ella and Alexander

Via AP news wire

Tuesday 30 December 2025 




Call them Monsieur and Madame Clooney.

France’s government says that George Clooney, his wife Amal and their twins Ella and Alexander have been awarded French citizenship.

The naturalizations of the Kentucky-born star of the “Oceans” series of heist movies and his family were announced last weekend in the Journal Officiel, where French government decrees are published.


The government notice indicated that human rights lawyer Amal Clooney was naturalized under her maiden name, Amal Alamuddin. It also noted that George Clooney's middle name is Timothy.


The couple purchased an estate in France in 2021. In an interview with Esquire in October, Clooney described their “farm in France” as their primary residence — a decision the 64-year-old actor and his 47-year-old wife made with their children in mind.

“I was worried about raising our kids in L.A., in the culture of Hollywood,” he told the magazine. “I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”

Growing up away from the spotlight in France, “they’re not on their iPads, you know?” he said. "They have dinner with grown-ups and have to take their dishes in. They have a much better life."


Representatives for George Clooney did not respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment Monday.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Clooney retained his American citizenship. Amal Clooney was born in Lebanon and raised in the U.K. The 8-year-old twins were born in London.

Trump suffers setback in bid to strip protected status from hundreds

Robert Davis
December 30, 2025
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump was handed another court loss on Tuesday after a federal judge temporarily halted his bid to strip 300 South Sudanese nationals of protected status, according to a new report.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts issued an order prohibiting the administration from deporting the nationals, which she argued would cause them "irreparable harm."

“These significant and far-reaching consequences not only deserve, but require, a full and careful consideration of the merits by the Court,” Kelley wrote.

Department of Homeland Security officials blasted the judge's order.

“Yet another lawless and activist order from the federal judiciary who continues to usurp the President’s constitutional authority," DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin posted on X. "Under the previous administration Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."

Read the entire report by clicking here.

Trump strips legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants in historic crackdown

Ariana Figueroa,

States Newsroom
December 30, 2025


A 7-year-old American girl, whose mother is a Mexican immigrant, attends a Christmas Eve service at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, whose constituents are majority migrants, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, U.S., December 24, 2025. REUTERS/Adam Gray

Since Inauguration Day, more than 1.5 million immigrants have either lost or will lose their temporary legal status, including their work authorizations and deportation protections, due to President Donald Trump’s aggressive revocation of legal immigration.

It’s the most rapid loss in legal status for immigrants in recent United States history, experts in immigration policy told States Newsroom. The Trump administration curtailed legal immigration by terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 1 million immigrants and ending Humanitarian Parole protections for half a million more individuals.

“I don’t think we’ve ever, as a country, seen such a huge number of people losing their immigration status all at once,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.

The move to strip so many immigrants of their work authorization is likely to not only affect communities, but also batter the economy, both immigration and economic experts told States Newsroom.

“Seeing well over 1 million people lose their work authorization in a single year is a really huge event that has ripple effects for employers and communities and families and our economy as well,” Gelatt said.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by immigrant rights groups and TPS recipients themselves challenging the terminations as unlawful.

“This is the continuation of the Trump administration attack against the immigrant community, and specifically about the TPS program, a program that, for many of us has been a good program, a life-saving program,” said Jose Palma, a TPS recipient from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which is part of several TPS lawsuits.

Who is granted Temporary Protected Status?

A TPS designation is given because a national’s home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, war, natural disasters or some other unstable condition.

When Congress created the program in 1990, it was initially meant to be temporary, which is why authorizations can be as short as six months and as long as 18 months.

Immigrants who are granted TPS must go through background checks and be vetted each time their status is renewed, but the program does not provide a path to citizenship.

Under the Biden administration, the number of TPS recipients grew, as did the category of humanitarian parole.

That policy decision was heavily criticized by Republicans, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to reevaluate TPS country designations for terminations during her Senate confirmation hearing this year.

“This program has been abused and manipulated by the Biden administration, and that will no longer be allowed,” Noem said during her hearing.

Before the Trump administration came into office in late January, there were more than 1.3 million immigrants in the TPS program, hailing from 17 countries. Under the first Trump administration, there were roughly 400,000 TPS recipients.

“Almost a million new people got onto TPS protections under President Biden, so we saw a really rapid expansion, and now we’re seeing a very rapid contraction, which is all to say that in the first Trump administration, there weren’t so many people who had TPS,” Gelatt said.

Noem has terminated TPS for immigrants from 11 countries, and the more than 1 million immigrants affected will lose their protections by February.

Noem extended six months’ protection for South Sudan earlier this year, but decided in November to terminate protections by January. She most recently terminated a TPS designation for Ethiopia on Dec. 12.

The other countries with TPS termination are Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.

“We’ve never seen this many people lose their legal status in the history of the United States,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said. “This is totally unprecedented.”

People losing their status are also concentrated in certain areas. Florida has more than 400,000 TPS recipients, and Texas has nearly 150,000. Bier said he expects certain industries with high TPS workers to feel the impact, such as construction and health care

Haiti, Venezuela

Immigrants from two countries — Haiti and Venezuela – make up a majority of recipients set to lose their TPS protections, at nearly 935,000 people.

Venezuelans, who make up 605,000 of those 935,000 TPS recipients, were first granted protections during Trump’s first term.

On his final day in office in 2021, his administration issued 18-month deportation protections for Venezuelans — known as Deferred Enforcement Departure, or DED — citing the country’s unstable government under President Nicolás Maduro.

“Through force and fraud, the Maduro regime is responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory,” according to the Jan. 19, 2021 memo. “A catastrophic economic crisis and shortages of basic goods and medicine have forced about five million Venezuelans to flee the country, often under dangerous conditions.”

After the Trump administration’s 18-month DED designation, the Biden administration issued the TPS designation for Venezuelans who came to the U.S. in 2021 and again in 2023. The move created two separate TPS groups for Venezuelans.

“The bottom line is that removing the 935,000 Venezuelans and Haitians would cause the entire economy to contract by more than $14 billion,” said Michael Clemens, a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University.

He added that not all the TPS recipients are in the labor market. Some are children or elderly dependents who cannot work. Clemens said the TPS workforce population of Haitians and Venezuelans is about 400,000.

Humanitarian Parole program

Separately, under the Biden administration, nearly 750,000 immigrants had some form of humanitarian parole, granting them work and temporary legal status due to either Russia’s war in Ukraine or efforts by the administration to manage mass migration from Central American countries.

DHS has moved to end humanitarian parole for 532,000 immigrants hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, opening them up for deportation proceedings.

“The onslaught of attacks that we’ve been seeing on temporary forms of immigration status, specifically with a humanitarian focus, is truly saddening and concerning,” said Alice Barrett, a supervising immigration attorney at the immigrant rights group CASA.

Not every recipient has been affected. The agency has kept humanitarian parole for 140,000 Ukrainians who came to the United States after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and 76,000 Afghans who were brought in after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from their country.

But since the National Guard shooting last month in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national granted asylum, the program is under increased scrutiny and all immigration-related paperwork from Afghans has been halted.

Court decisions influential

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end TPS.

During the president’s first term, he tried to end TPS for Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.

This time is different, said Palma of the National TPS alliance.

“The only thing different right now is that the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with termination of TPS, even though lower courts are saying, ‘No, we should stop the cancellation of TPS for now, until it’s clear whether the decision was illegal or not,’” he said.

So far, in emergency appeals, the high court has allowed the Trump administration to move forward in stripping legal status for the two groups of Venezuelan TPS recipients and individuals in the humanitarian parole program.

Barrett at CASA, which is leading the legal challenge of TPS termination for Cameroon and Afghanistan, said when it comes to TPS termination, “what we are seeing in the second Trump administration is a supercharged version of what we saw in the first Trump administration.”

“We are essentially seeing during this administration more actual terminations happening early on even while litigation is pending, which has certainly been disappointing for members of the community, because they’re still left in this limbo,” she said.

Barrett added that even when TPS recipients try to apply for longer-term legal status they face multiple hurdles.

“For example, we are seeing them questioned or denied relief at asylum interviews because they did not apply for asylum within one year of entering the United States, even though the Code of Federal Regulations clearly creates an exception to this one-year filing deadline for people who have been in other valid status before applying for asylum,” Barrett said.

“These members of our community who have been in lawful status therefore now risk being placed in removal proceedings and even (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention, where conditions are increasingly inhumane and dangerous,” she continued.

TPS recipients are still continuing to fight in the courts and share their stories, Barrett said.

“These cases are still in progress, and we remain hopeful that despite preliminary rulings leaving so many hardworking individuals and their families in a state of uncertainty, upon thorough review and litigation of these cases the courts will recognize the improper nature of recent TPS terminations and restore status for those seeking safety here in the United States,” she said.

This story is published in partnership with Creative Commons.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

Pam Bondi scrubs post accidentally revealing drug deaths went way down under Biden

Matthew Chapman
December 30, 2025 

RAW STORY



U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 7, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Attorney General Pam Bondi has quietly removed a post she made to X on Tuesday that purported to tout the success of the Trump administration's anti-drug efforts — but instead accidentally revealed how much progress on combating overdoses was made by the preceding Biden administration.

The original post showed a graph tracking overdose deaths across various regions of the United States, crediting the across-the-board decline to President Donald Trump's tough policies cracking down on trafficking.

"Since day one, the Trump Administration and this Department of Justice have been fighting to end the drug epidemic in our country," wrote Bondi. "President Trump closed the border. DOJ agents have seized hundreds of millions of potentially lethal fentanyl doses. We are aggressively prosecuting drug traffickers and cartel leaders. These are the results."

Commenters, however, were quick to point out that the chart only showed data up to October 2024, before the presidential election had even taken place.

As of the evening, liberal network Meidas Touch confirmed that the original post to Bondi's account has been wiped from X.

Ironically, a number of previous reports have indicated that contrary to Bondi's claims, drug prosecutions have actually plummeted under the Trump administration, as federal agents have been pulled off those cases to handle low-level immigration enforcement to prepare for mass deportation

Trump hit with ominous health prophecy from shamans: 'United States should prepare'

PRES. J.D. VANCE

Matthew Chapman
December 30, 2025

RAW STORY

As the New Year approaches, a group of Peruvian shamans has gathered in the capital city of Lima for an annual prediction event — and according to The Daily Beast, they are urging the United States to brace itself for President Donald Trump's health to decline in 2026.

“The United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill,” said Juan de Dios Garcia, as "shamans gathered on a beach in colorful traditional Andean ponchos, carrying posters of world leaders, including one of Trump," per the report.

The shaman prophecies are not anything scientific and don't carry real predictive power, although at least some of what they have guessed in previous years has come true, the report noted.

"While a 2024 prophecy that 'a nuclear war' would occur between Israel and Gaza did not come true — instead, a ceasefire was put in place — the shamans correctly predicted in 2023 that former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori would perish within 12 months. Fujimori, who had been imprisoned for human rights abuses, died at the age of 86 in September of the following year."

The shamans' prediction this time may be based on awareness of recent news about the 79-year-old U.S. president's recent health scares and rumors.

A number of experts have expressed fear that Trump has been in mental decline for years, and there are signs of physical ailments as well, including bruising on the hands and swollen ankles. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that causes blood to pool in the legs due to poor circulation.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has denied any issues and insists the president is in "excellent" health. However, Trump himself seems to recognize he can't carry on forever, with some experts speculating that the jockeying of members of his administration to be his heir apparent, combined with Trump's intensifying focus on naming buildings and institutions after himself, are signals that Trump has grown more aware of his own mortality

Shamans predict Trump will 'fall seriously ill' in 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., December 2, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Carl Gibson

December 30, 2025

 ALTERNET

A group of South American shamans known for making bold end-of-year predictions are now issuing an ominous warning about President Donald Trump's heath.

The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that during the annual ritual in which Peruvian shamans issue forecasts about world leaders, the shamans singled out the 79 year-old Trump and warned Americans that a significant health event could impact the president in the next 12 months. Shamans made their prediction about Trump while holding his portrait and wearing traditional Andean robes. They also bore portraits of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"The United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill," said shaman Juan de Dios Garcia in the Peruvian capital city of Lima.

The shamans are not always correct in their predictions, as they incorrectly predicted in 2024 that a nuclear war would break out in the Middle East as a result of the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. However, they did correctly forecast the death of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori in 2023, with Fujimori dying from tongue cancer complications in September of 2024.

Trump has prompted concerns about his health for much of 2025, after he was seen with a large bruise on his hand while meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in February. Trump was later diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) after reporters noticed his ankles were frequently swollen (one symptom of CVI is blood pooling in the lower extremities).

Last week,, former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller said on The Bulwark's podcast that he believed Trump would experience "a health event" in the coming year. Bulwark columnist Mona Charen agreed, adding that the president was "declining noticeably."

In the first year of his second term, Trump was also seen in public falling asleep on multiple occasions, including during a Cabinet meeting in December while Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio was speaking. The president also exhibited bizarre behavior this year, including when he once randomly walked onto the roof of the White House, and when he wandered off at an event while on an official visit to Japan.

Click here to read the Beast's full report.

Trump bemoans dead bald eagle in US — using photo of dead falcon in Israel

Robert Davis
December 30, 2025 
RAW STORY



President Donald Trump appeared to get his birds mixed up on Tuesday when he made a snide social media post about wind energy.

On Truth Social, Trump posted a picture of a dead bird in a field of wind turbines. "Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!" the caption reads. It was amplified by the White House and viewed millions of times on X.

However, the bird in the picture isn't a bald eagle, as the president claims. It's an Israeli falcon.

"Unfortunately for Trump’s effort to sow outrage among American patriots at what he proclaimed to be an image of the national bird laid low, closer inspection reveals the photograph does not show a bald eagle and was not taken in the United States," The Guardian reported after Trump posted the image. "The image actually shows a falcon that was killed at a wind farm in Israel eight years ago."

The Guardian also noted there were clues as to what kind of bird was in the picture that Trump seemingly overlooked "in a rush."

"The first is that the bird is missing the distinctive markings of a bald eagle. The second is that the turbine blamed for its death appears to have Hebrew writing on it," according to the report.

Trump has consistently bashed wind energy, and his second administration has rolled back several Biden-era clean energy programs. In December, Trump halted permits on thousands of new wind energy projects, citing reasons stretching from national security risks to the number of birds that die in wind farms each year.

Judge Delays Dominion’s Offshore Wind Suit Awaiting U.S. Data

Dominion Energy is suing to restart offshore work on its wind farm (Dominion Energy)

Published Dec 30, 2025 6:02 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

The first showdown over the U.S. Department of the Interior’s efforts to stop the construction of five offshore wind farms is being delayed as a U.S. District Court in Virginia waits for data from the government. Dominion Energy’s efforts to gain a temporary restraining order to permit it to restart work were delayed, with the next hearing set for January 16.

Dominion Energy and its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is one of five that were ordered to stop offshore work by the Department of the Interior, which made vague claims about national security concerns due to radar clutter caused by the turbine blades and towers. The government cited new confidential data from studies by the Pentagon as the justification for the orders.

The five projects are all under construction, and in the case of Coastal Virginia and Vineyard Wind 1 in Massachusetts nearing completion. Dominion asserted in its court filing that the stop-work order is costing the company $5 million a day and said it could jeopardize completion of the wind farm on time in 2026 and the stability of the power grid, which needs more electricity. Coastal Virginia was expected to generate its first power in early 2026.

Offshore work on the five projects was stopped, but the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did permit them to take steps to protect safety. The Vineyard Gazette newspaper reported yesterday, December 29, that the Massachusetts project was also permitted to continue power generation from the partially installed project. It began sending its first power in January, and as of the summer, reports said it had more than 20 of its 62 turbines commissioned. The State of Massachusetts, in a recent filing, said the project was capable of producing 572 MW of its planned 800 MW capacity. Vineyard Wind 1, which the newspaper says was expected to finish construction by the end of the year, is the second commercial-scale project generating power, following South Fork Wind in New York, which completed its commissioning in 2024.

Dominion Energy was the first of the developers to file suit, calling the actions to stop the work unconstitutional and a violation of BOEM rules. Judge Jamar Walker did not rule on the merits of the motion for a temporary restraining order, but converted the case to a motion for a preliminary injunction. If granted, the injunction would permit offshore work to resume while the legal case proceeded.

The government responded to the suit, telling the District Court that it estimated it could provide the classified information on which the stop-work order relies during the week of January 5. The court said that the information it “critical to evaluating” the request. It further directed the government to inform it by December 31 if it would supply the confidential information to Dominion Energy’s representatives.

The government is directed to supply the information to the court by January 9, along with a response from Dominion. A hearing in Norfolk on January 16 will consider the converted motion for the preliminary injunction.