Ossoff and El-Sayed: Two Senate races and what they say about the Democratic Party

ANALYSIS

Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democratic favourite, is running for re-election in Georgia in the 2026 US midterms while Abdul El-Sayed is a Senate candidate in the battleground state of Michigan. The two Democrats have very different profiles and platforms, underscoring divergences within the party. They could also determine the party's future ahead of the 2028 presidential election.


Issued on: 04/10/2026 - 
FRANCE24

By: Leela JACINTO

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff (top left) is running for re-election in the November 2026 US midterms while Abdul El-Sayed (top right) is the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Michigan. © Graphic studio FMM (composite)


Top Republicans have had it in for Senator Jon Ossoff and Abdul El-Sayed, both Democratic candidates for the US Senate, for a while now. As the November 3 midterms approach, campaign battles get more stinging, bruising – and at times, amusing.

Ossoff, the incumbent senator from Georgia running for re-election, has long been in President Donald Trump’s sights. But the 37-year-old Democrat can give as good as he gets.

Just months after Trump called the Georgia Democrat “Senator Os(jerk!)off” in a Truth Social post, Ossoff hit home with a quip on the president’s zealous aide, Natalie Harp. While accusing Trump of not wanting to “do the job”, Ossoff remarked that the US president simply wants to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace".

The Republican response came swift and hard, with White House communications staff labeling Ossoff a “lightweight”, “Jon Jackoff” and “the biggest cuck loser”, among other epithets.

El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan, has also been the target of virulent attacks. At the Republican midterm convention in Texas, Senator Ted Cruz accused El-Sayed, whose parents are Egyptian immigrants, of seeking to implement Sharia law. Hecklers in the crowd roared back, “He should be shot,” sparking headlines in the US press. Weeks later, Cruz was at it again. In an interview with a conservative radio show, the Texas senator warned of a “green-red alliance of Marxists and Islamists” who are “taking over” the Democratic party.

Two candidates, two states, one goal

In the 2026 US midterms, Ossoff and El-Sayed are both trying to defend Democratic seats in high-stakes races. The Georgia senator is running for re-election after serving his first term in the US senate. In Michigan, El-Sayed is running for the seat vacated by outgoing Democratic Senator Gary Peters.

The two candidates also happen to be running against two Mikes: Ossoff’s Republican opponent is Mike Collins, who currently holds a seat in the US House of Representatives. El-Sayed is taking on Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent, veteran and staunch Trump ally.

As Senate candidates, Ossoff and El-Sayed have very different profiles.

The Georgia politician is ahead in the polls and is viewed as a rising Democratic star, a potential “hot presidential possibility” for the 2028 White House race. Feisty, media savvy and with choirboy looks, Ossoff is the country’s youngest serving senator and the only Democrat in the chamber to be seeking re-election in a state Trump won in 2024. Within the party, Ossoff is viewed as a moderate Democrat, capable of appealing to a broad base of voters in one of America’s right-leaning southern states.

Sen. Jon Ossoff speaks at a campaign event at the Georgia Theater on September 13, 2026 in Athens, Georgia. © Elijah Nouvelage, AFP via Getty Images

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has never held elected office. The 41-year-old physician and public health expert is considered a left-wing politician, part of a wave of progressive Democrats focused on affordability and state services.

Democratic nominee for US Senate Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, August 7, 2026. © Paul Sancya, AP

But in a battleground state that is home to cities with major Muslim communities such as Dearborn, “the capital of Arab America”, his position on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis often overshadows his economic justice messaging – and grabs global headlines. El-Sayed narrowly won his party’s nomination in August after a nasty primary against his pro-Israel rival Haley Stevens that exposed bitter divides within the party. In a state that regularly sends Democrats to the US Senate, the Michigan race is considered a tossup.

They are two candidates running in different states, but both are critical to the common Democratic goal of attempting to wrest control of the Senate in the November elections. “They're both important states where Democrats have sometimes struggled, perhaps Georgia more than Michigan, but they’re both seen as important wins for Democrats," said Matt Duss from the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, who is a leading progressive in the Democratic party.

"Obviously, Abdullah El-Sayed is an Arab Muslim who is taking a much more progressive populist approach. But Ossoff has been a leader on the issue of anti-corruption, which is a major issue in American politics, and particularly for the progressive left. So they've both been offering what will be really important arguments for the party going forward.”
Left or right or in-between

The 2026 midterm race has increased attention on a progressive, leftward trend in the Democratic party that has picked up steam since Trump returned to the White House last year.

Democratic Socialism – a largely anodyne political ideology in many parts of the world, but which has long been stigmatised in the private capital-driven USA – is now the subject of polls and headlines across the country.

In barely two weeks, for instance, a Gallup poll found that Socialism is more popular than ever, with 43 percent of Americans holding a positive view. But The New York Times, citing another poll, informed readers that roughly half of US voters view socialism unfavourably.

For many Democratic strategists, that means a "Socialist" label is not a problem in primary race, but broadening a Socialist candidate's appeal in a general election could remain a challenge.

“In some ways, these are more differences in tone and manner and style rather than in policy,” said Richard Johnson, a US politics and policy expert at Queen Mary University of London.

While Ossoff is widely viewed as a moderate, Johnson notes that, “what people call moderate Democrat today is not what people called a moderate Democrat 20 or 30 years ago. Twenty or 30 years ago, a moderate Democrat was much more to the right of a moderate Democrat today because the whole party has moved much more consistently to the left.”

‘About three letters’

The party’s leftward move has put the focus on the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political group founded in 1982 that spent decades in obscurity before the 2016 presidential primary catapulted Sanders to national prominence before his defeat to Hillary Clinton. While Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, the Vermont senator is not formally affiliated with DSA.

The group got a boost in 2018, when DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the New York primary and went on to win a House of Representatives seat. A high-profile breakthrough came in late 2025 with the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor.

Since the DSA is a movement that aims to promote progressive issues and not a political party, it can be a source of messaging gymnastics and sometimes panic for Democrats on the campaign trail. In a CBS interview last week, Florida's Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon stressed that "this is not about three letters" amid Republican criticism of her DSA membership. Nixon was one of the big surprises of the 2026 Democratic primaries, when the African-American self-described “former single mama” overcame a vast fundraising disadvantage to defeat former military officer and fellow Florida Democrat Alex Vindman.

While most analysts place El-Sayed on the left of the political spectrum, the Michigan candidate is not a DSA member. “El-Sayed has made it clear that he is not a Socialist. He describes himself as a capitalist who understands capitalism, that’s where his critique of capitalism comes from. But still, he is arguing for many things that DSA argues for. So, however he may identify himself, there is a formation behind him that includes the DSA that sees his message as consistent with their broader agenda,” explained Duss.
US Mideast policy on the ticket

A distinctive feature of the 2026 midterms race is the prominence foreign policy has played on the campaign trail. That’s largely because Trump’s Iran war has seen an overlap of domestic and international issues.

“The Iran war is raising gas prices, impacting the global economy and the US economy. But it's also feeding into a longstanding sense among many American voters, both Democrat and Republican and Independent, that America has been wasting time, resources and energy on all of these wars, particularly in the Middle East,” said Duss.

“But in the Democratic side, especially, I think Gaza continues to be a very severe tension point between the progressive left and the conservative establishment,” he added, referring to Israel’s military onslaught on the Palestinian enclave after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

In Michigan, while El-Sayed’s platform is focused on providing healthcare and cost-of-living issues, the spotlight in the bitter primary race was on the two candidates’ positions on Israel.

His Democratic rival, Stevens, ran on a pro-Israel platform and raised a record $60 million, around half of which came from sources affiliated with pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). El-Sayed criticised Stevens for taking AIPAC donations, calls Israeli military onslaught in Gaza a genocide and opposes unconditional US aid to Israel. Stevens supported continuing US aid to Israel without conditions.

“The Democratic party is changing quite a lot on this issue. The party used to be pretty much as pro-Israel as the Republican Party. Now many Democratic voters are much more sceptical on Israel. There are elements where you can see the grassroots moving the party in a direction that's different from where it has been in the last few decades,” said Johnson.

Following El-Sayed’s primary win, Michigan Democrats – including Stevens and establishment figures such as Senator Elissa Slotkin, who holds the state’s other seat in the chamber – have rallied behind their candidate in the race against Republican Mike Rogers.

But it’s been a tripwire issue. El-Sayed has had to downplay his relationship with leftwing influencer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with him during the primary. Barely weeks after his primary victory, the Democratic candidate apologised to the state’s Jewish Democratic caucus for comments he made after a synagogue attack in March.

The controversies have sparked debates over whether El-Sayed, who won the primary by just 15,000 votes, can sway undecided voters and an estimated 130,000 Jewish Americans who live in Michigan, 61% of whom identified with or leaned Democrat, according to a 2021 study.

It also fuels Republican attacks as they eye a crucial Senate seat in a battleground state. Shortly after El-Sayed was projected to win the August primary, Trump declared it was “great news” for the Republicans in a Truth Social post. “El-Sayed, a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, is the projected winner in this race with the Socialist,” Trump wrote. Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, released a statement claiming that after spending “years hunting terrorists” he was now “running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11”.

“There's been so much attention on El-Sayed being an observant Muslim and much of it is, unfortunately, very bigoted and inflammatory,” said Duss. “Going back to 9/11, there has been an unfortunate tendency to see Muslim Americans as a source of threat. I completely reject that. And I think many Americans reject that.”
‘An almighty battle’ within the party

Ossoff, whose father is Jewish, has managed to negotiate the minefield of the Mideast crisis in US politics relatively unscathed.

On the Senate floor, Ossoff has attempted a balancing act between supporting Israel’s right to defend itself while criticising the humanitarian impact of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza policies.

Last year, for instance, Ossoff voted to block a proposed US arms export to the Israeli police. But he also voted against another resolution that would have blocked the sale of air-to-ground munitions to Israel. “Despite my opposition to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza, I believe the United States must continue to support the Israeli people,” said Ossoff in a press statement. Both resolutions were introduced by Sanders and failed the floor vote.

“Georgia is a more conservative state [than Michigan], Senator Ossoff has a read on his own politics,” said Duss, while noting that Ossoff’s vote to block arms exports to the Israeli police “took some courage”. The former foreign policy adviser to Sanders admitted that, “Personally, I wish he would go farther. I think he can go farther, and I would expect that if he wants to play a role as a leader in the Democratic Party in the future, he is going to need to go farther.”

In terms of policy shifts, Johnson believes the 2026 midterms will have a limited impact even if the Democrats manage to take over Congress. “I think government shutdowns in the US will be more likely to happen. If they win, the Democrats will use bargaining over budgets basically to try to extract some policy concessions over Trump, perhaps on immigration or such issues. But I think these will be fairly modest policy changes,” he explained.

The real impact of the November elections, Johnson predicts, will be the Democratic bench or the likely party candidates the midterms propel into the 2028 presidential race.

If El-Sayed and Ossoff win their respective races, the two men could influence their party’s future trajectory, according to experts.

“If El-Sayed wins the Senate, I think he is well very well-positioned to play a major national role, perhaps not running for president right now, but he is a very skilled candidate, a very courageous voice. And the United States is changing,” said Duss.

While Ossoff has dismissed speculation about his presidential ambitions, analysts believe the Democratic “star of the south” could be a strong candidate for the 2028 White House race.

“If Jon Ossoff is going to become the next [presidential] nominee, I think he’ll have a hell of a fight on his hands because I think the left of the party is going to really want someone that they view as a less compromising figure politically,” said Johnson. “The next Democratic primary is likely to see an almighty battle between the moderates and the left of the party.”

Amazon Is Deploying AI to Spy on Its Workers and Bust Unions Before They Form

Internal company documents obtained by a Canadian labor board show how Amazon is tracking workers’ every move.

By Jonathan Rosenblum ,

Truthout

September 30, 2026

A worker walks inside Amazon's LCY3 Fulfillment Centre in Dartford, 

east of London, U.K., on June 4, 2026.

JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP via Getty Images

The 18th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.

It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.

Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.

Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.

Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.


Amazon Is Using AI to Disempower Workers. The US Labor Movement Must Fight Back.
Amazon is using AI in terrifying ways to disempower workers. We must fight back.
By Jonathan Rosenblum , Truthout June 6, 2026

Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.

Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing.

In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.

“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.

The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.

Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.


“Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”

Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”

Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.

Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.

Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.


Union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.

But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.

Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”

Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.

All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)

Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”

The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.

Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”

But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.

Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”

To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”

Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jonathan Rosenblum

Jonathan Rosenblum is a union organizer, member of the National Writers Union, and part-time Amazon delivery driver. He serves as Activist in Residence at the Center for Work and Democracy, Arizona State University.

Trump’s Dismantling of Student Loan Aid Is Crashing Down on Debtors This Week

Organizers are calling to stop the collections, the wage garnishments, and the credit score reductions.

By Kristin Collier ,

Truthout

September 28, 2026

Veteran and student loan borrower Bonni Snider holds up a "I Am Not Profit" sign prior to a special forum on the rising cost of education at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on May 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Student Borrower Protection Center


Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

“It is so much money,” Jacqueline Wheelock said to me about the monthly payment amount she will soon be forced to pay for her student loans.

Until last summer, she wasn’t thinking about this bill. Under the repayment plan known as SAVE (short for Saving on a Valuable Education), she could afford her payments, so she made them, month after month, never missing one or paying late. At the lowest, Wheelock paid $35 each month, and at the highest, she paid $110.

But now, in the wake of the Trump administration’s termination of SAVE, like 7 million other Americans, Wheelock must find a new plan — and soon — that works for her.

The problem is, she can’t find one that is remotely affordable. The cheapest plan available will cost her $285 but extend her repayment — and the total amount she pays — significantly. And the income-driven options that would qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, a program meant to relieve debtors after 10 years of qualifying payments and work in a public service job, would cost her between $693 and $733.

“Where the fuck is that money coming from?” she asked me. “I can’t work any harder. There’s nothing else I can cut out. My basic needs have to be met.”


Here’s How You Can Challenge Wage Garnishment for Defaulted Student Loans
The Trump administration announced that it will start forcibly collecting money from student loan debtors. By Braxton Brewington , Truthout January 10, 2026


Trump’s Dismantling of SAVE Plan Hits First Wave of Borrowers This Wee


Wheelock, who was contacted by her servicer on July 8, was among the first wave of debtors to receive notice that it’s time to make the switch. That notice was the start of a clock. Once sent, borrowers have 90 days to make the decision or the decision will be made for them: They’ll be automatically enrolled in the Standard Repayment Plan which is among the most expensive options. For the debtors alerted on July 1, their deadline is September 29.


“I can’t work any harder. There’s nothing else I can cut out. My basic needs have to be met.”

SAVE’s termination followed two years of legal challenges, spearheaded by GOP-led states that claimed, essentially, that then-President Joe Biden didn’t have the authority to make this plan and that the plan itself was too generous, designed to achieve mass cancellation after his first effort was blocked by courts. Though another lawsuit could shift the loan options again, possibly reinstating an older repayment plan (REPAYE) that’s been phased out (illegally, the plaintiffs say), it’s unclear when the judge will rule.

When a student loan payment makes it impossible for debtors to meet their basic needs, they have two options: don’t pay the loan or don’t meet your needs. Right now, there is evidence of both, each of which comes with devastating consequences.

In a recent survey of 7,500 people conducted by Protect Borrowers and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — which included AFT members, educators, health care workers, and public employees — 74 percent of respondents said they were living paycheck to paycheck. Over half of them said they were “losing sleep” because of their debt, and 32 percent of them reported that they avoided medical treatments when faced with financial stress. “Falling behind or going into collections on student loans are significantly associated with forgoing mental healthcare and counselling, seeing a doctor or specialist, follow‐up care, prescriptions and dental care,” summarized researchers in a 2019 study of the relationship between student debt delinquency and health care.

Meanwhile, over 9 million debtors are in default on their loans, a status reached after not making payments for 270 days. Another 1.5 million are in the late stages of delinquency and may enter default in the coming months. Defaulted loans can lead to a lowered credit score, wage garnishment, or the loss of Social Security income.

This cascade of harmful outcomes robs debtors of money they already didn’t have, leading to new levels of insecurity and new consequences — an endless punitive loop.


The Student Loan System Has Sunk Into Dysfunction Under Trump



It’s not just that debtors cannot afford the new plans they are being forced to choose from, it’s that the entire loan apparatus that would allow them to make this painful choice has broken down and is, at the moment, beyond repair.

Since SAVE’s termination and the introduction of a new Trump-era repayment plan called RAP (Repayment Assistance Plan), debtors have received confusing and sometimes contradictory information about when they need to switch plans, which plans they should switch into, and how much those plans will cost them. Additionally, sometimes Federal Student Aid has the wrong information on how many qualifying payments they’ve made for their income-driven repayment plan or toward PSLF. And in some cases, debtors’ payment counts have actually dropped without notice or explanation.

This summer, some debtors were mistakenly quoted $50 monthly payments — a number that drove them to make decisions about their plans — before being told it was another error and that what they actually owed would be hundreds of dollars higher. Others were told they were in default, and that default was reported to credit agencies, but, in fact, they were not. Debtors told me this error not only harmed their credit, but also made them feel terrified and ashamed.

When people want clarity, want a human voice to guide them through all the errors and impossible choices, they struggle to reach someone. Debtors report waiting hours on the phone only to sometimes get the wrong information, or be told that the representative doesn’t have the answer, before they are passed elsewhere.


Debtors Are Mobilizing to Demand Change



The student loan landscape is on fire, and everyone, whether they have loans or not, should be rushing to put it out.

A coalition of 89 organizations representing “millions of students, borrowers, workers, veterans, people of color, people with disabilities, and consumers” are calling for an “emergency hearing” so that legislators can look into the widespread dysfunction and hold the administration accountable.

This should happen, but it’s not enough.

The coalition writes that they are “sounding the alarm” on the state of student loans, which makes me wonder: Why wouldn’t our elected leaders have heard it yet? It’s so loud, so persistent, so wild and grating, that it’s all some of us hear.


If elected leaders don’t understand the scale and the depth of debtors’ suffering, it means they are not doing their jobs. And if they don’t care, they shouldn’t have them.

“I’m having trouble thinking of our future together,” Wheelock told me when we spoke in late summer. She’d recently gotten engaged, and rather than celebrating that commitment, she worried that their marriage will mean her loan payments spike even higher.

For debtors in the trenches of repayment, struggling to feed themselves, struggling to find or sustain their housing, to pay for treatments, to care for their family, all they can hear is the alarm. It’s everywhere.

If elected leaders don’t understand the scale and the depth of debtors’ suffering, it means they are not doing their jobs. And if they don’t care, they shouldn’t have them.

Last week, state student loan ombudsmen representing over 100,000 borrowers wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and key legislators to request that the department “take immediate corrective action, including delaying mandatory repayment plan transitions until these operational failures are fully resolved.”

In other words, halt everything until they have a system that works.

Debt Collective organizers and allies gather in lower Manhattan on July 14, 2026, for a Debtors’ Assembly and to hear from local representatives and organizations supporting student debtors.Debt Collective

This letter was preceded by a call for a payment pause by an emerging flank of the student debt coalition, which includes member organizations such as the Debt Collective, Student Debt Crisis Center, and Democratic Socialists of America. These organizations have continued to organize their members on the ground, empowering them to contact their representatives, tell their stories, and escalate their shared demand.

The demands of this group are necessary and clear. They meet the scale of the moment. Stop the collections, the wage garnishments, the credit score reductions. Stop the payments. Send in the firefighters, put out the fire.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Kristin Collier

Kristin Collier is the author of What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System. Her writing has been published in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, and Longreads. She is a visiting professor in Metro State’s Higher Education in Prison Program (TREC).

  

Though seen as a threat to humanity, AI reporting in the West reflects a clear chain of dominance and dependence

University of Sharjah

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While the world is focused on the possibility of artificial intelligence threatening the human race if its intelligent agents run out of control, mainstream news media are constructing narratives that suggest another form of linguistic power at work across the globe.

Analyzing more than 43,000 English-language newspaper articles, a new study reveals a highly stratified AI narrative through which the media unequally allocate authority, reinforcing the technology’s prominent role in contemporary life.

The study, published in the International Journal of Communication, examines English-language newspaper sources in the United States and Europe up to December 31, 2024. The final corpus comprised 43,027 newspaper articles, including 9,684 from the US and 33,343 from Europe. The authors employed computational text analysis alongside interpretive examination of the corpus.

“The findings reveal a striking hierarchy in who is given visibility and authority in the story of AI,” said Massimo Ragnedda, professor of Media, and communication at the University of Sharjah. “The United States is predominantly positioned as a technological innovator and leader, and Europe as a regulator and normative evaluator.”

As for China, a leading AI power alongside the US, the authors note that Beijing “appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival associated with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat.”

Other actors such as countries in Africa and Latin America are largely absent from the narrative or positioned primarily as sites of implementation, risk, or developmental need.

AI and narrative control

Although AI is almost omnipresent worldwide, the authors’ findings reveal that the meanings the public associates with it–as reflected in the analysis of thousands of news stories–are geopolitically and linguistically shaped according to the geographical sphere they represent.

“We conceptualize this pattern as discursive stratification,” explained Prof. Ragnedda, the study’s senior author, adding that the power asymmetry points to “an unequal distribution of narrative authority in which some actors are repeatedly positioned as legitimate authors and interpreters of technological futures, while others appear mainly as recipients, sites of implementation, or objects of technological change.”

The literature, particularly recent political-economy scholarship, views AI not simply as an unprecedented technological innovation with far-reaching consequences for human life, but also as a sphere beset by rivalries over power distribution, geopolitical competition, and infrastructural concentration.

In addition to its innovative and technological prowess, the research frames AI as an inequality regime in which communicative power, visibility, value, and opportunity are redistributed through unequal linguistic structures of control.

“Accordingly, we conceptualize news not as a mirror of technological change, but as a narrative infrastructure,” the researchers note. For them, the technology is “a discursive and institutional system through which AI becomes publicly legible and some actors are positioned as innovators, regulators, threats, or absences.”

Who shapes the AI debate?

The implications of the findings are significant, as they shift the focus from AI as an advanced technology with the potential not only to transform the world but perhaps even to contribute to its annihilation to another form of power that deserves due attention, namely what this transformative innovation means in terms of the distribution of the sharing of communicative power.

The study examines the issue of the global debate about AI in a nuanced light. According to Prof. Ragnedda, “AI does not simply determine what we talk about; it also helps determine who is recognized as having the authority to speak about the technology and whose futures are considered worth imagining.”

The study is also important because its analysis and findings are not solely confined to AI as a technological infrastructure. It views the technology as a narrative infrastructure. “The stories repeatedly told about AI help shape perceptions of who leads, who regulates, who threatens, who benefits, and who remains largely unheard,” said Prof. Ragnedda.

The authors are upbeat about the implications of their findings. They write, “The study contributes to communication research by showing how framing, sourcing hierarchies, and thematic emphasis shape the symbolic geography of AI.”

“In doing so, the article advances communication scholarship beyond descriptive analyses of representation toward a structural account of narrative authority in global media systems.”

Prof. Ragnedda concludes, “The question is therefore not only who builds AI. It is who gets to define what AI means, and whose voice is missing?”

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DOI

10.65476/4614hy26

Method of Research

Content analysis

Article Title

News Media, Narrative Authority, and the Global Ordering of Artificial Intelligence

AI’s social norms and their implications for society

PNAS Nexus

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As more and more people turn to LLMs for advice on interpersonal matters, the ethical foundations behind the tools’ replies increasingly have the power to shape individual lives and, at scale, the social fabric itself. Alexandre S. Pires and colleagues explored the social norms of 21 LLMs by asking them to judge fictional people as “good” or “bad” after learning how the people made a range of interpersonal decisions, such as whether to spend time and energy helping a person with a problem or whether to give food or money to another person. While all models broadly approved of helping and sharing with people who had already shown themselves to be good, the models’ judgements of dealings with ill-reputed individuals differed. Most—but not all—LLMs tested assigned a good reputation to those who cooperated with bad recipients. Gemma 2 27B IT and Llama 3.1 8B tended to endorse shunning bad individuals and therefore judged that cooperating with them was bad. When it came to deciding not to help or share with bad people, LLMs disagreed. GPT-4o tended to penalize people for not cooperating with bad people. Llama 3.3 70B did not, typically arguing that the bad people should be punished for their prior lack of cooperation, so refusing to help them is fine. Gemini 1.5-Pro and Grok 2 were inconsistent in their judgements. Most LLM model families seem to be evolving toward a norm called Simple Standing, in which cooperating is always good and defecting against bad individuals is also deemed good.

The authors modeled the consequences of universalizing the various philosophies underpinning the LLMs judgements. If everyone operated under the rules of Simple Standing, cooperation would ensue, but not at the high levels that would be reached under a sterner framework, in which you should always fail to help bad people or be judged as bad yourself.

LLM-based assessments also depended on the gender and perceived cultural background of the recipients as well as the overall context of the fictional situation. According to the authors, prompting interventions, such as instructing the model to adopt norms that promote overall cooperation, have a limited and inconsistent effect across LLMs.
 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

How large language models judge and influence human cooperation

Article Publication Date

29-Sep-2026

DEJA VU

White House bars CNN from covering upcoming Trump trip

Roshni Majumdar 

DW with AP

September 25, 2026

CNN said its journalists have been barred from accompanying President Donald Trump on his upcoming trip to Tennessee. The episode marks the Trump administration's latest salvo against the major cable news network.

Trump banned reporters from CNN from White House grounds earlier this week, with main networks having suspended coverage in solidarity as well

Image: Bonnie Cash/UPI Photo/Newscom/picture alliance


American news broadcaster CNN said its journalists were not allowed to board Air Force One for a planned trip with President Donald Trump on Saturday.

CNN was scheduled to travel on Air Force One to Knoxville, Tennessee, where Trump was expected to watch a college football game.

The news organization was to be the representative of the TV press pool for the weekend, meaning that it would cover the president and share video and information with the four other big networks that are part of the press pool.

CNN was replaced by Real America's Voice News, a conservative network, the Associated Press reported.

The episode represents the latest showdown between the Trump administration and media networks that the president believes to be unfavorable in their coverage.

Trump bans CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House

Trump earlier this week barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House after he said the networks report "fiction and lies."

Major TV networks, including DW, then cut off their pooled coverage of the president in solidarity.

A federal judge temporarily struck down the ban in a ruling on Thursday after the outlets filed a lawsuit.

But the order from the judge addressed "hard passes" to the White House grounds and didn't directly address pool duties.

Edited by: Rana Taha


Roshni Majumdar Roshni is a global breaking news writer and digital editor for DW, based in Germany.@RoshniMaj

Trump’s Diversionary Assault on the First Amendment

As the many disasters of his presidency pile up, President Donald Trump turned to a familiar foil and a proven strategy: Attack the press to distract public attention from his failures.


A television camera is pointed at the entrance to the West Wing of the White House on September 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Daniel Heuer/Getty Images)

Steven Harper
Sep 26, 2026

Common Dreams

President Donald Trump is in trouble and he knows it.He promised “no more foreign wars,” but started a war with Iran that he has lost.
He promised to tame inflation, but tariffs and his war of choice have made it worse.
He promised to deport only the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has terrorized American cities as agents sometimes arrested, detained, wounded, or killed US citizens.
He promised to make the United States the most respected country in the world, but he has destroyed America’s reputation and alienated its allies.
He calls himself the best president in history, but his approval rating has dropped to the mid-30s—his lowest ever and approaching President Richard Nixon’s final approval rating of 24% shortly before his resignation in 1974.
He tells his audiences to pretend he’s on the ballot in November, but many Republican congressional candidates are distancing themselves from him.
Sen. John Curtis (R) from ruby-red Utah is not up for reelection, but he has urged an investigation into the Trump family’s financial dealings and the potential for corruption.
Trump promised lower interest rates on home mortgages, but 30-year fixed-rate mortgages now exceed 7%—the highest since May 2024.
He promised gasoline below $2.00 per gallon, but the price has soared to an average of $4.50 per gallon. The price of diesel has increased even more dramatically—to a record-shattering $6.50 per gallon.

The list goes on and on. So Trump turned to a familiar foil and a proven strategy: Attack the press to divert public attention from his failures.
Same Old Playbook

CNN, MSNOW, and Politico won the first round in Trump’s latest attempt to subvert the First Amendment. But Trump’s shiny object consumed the media. His goal now is to extend the controversy.

Act I

While many of his most senior advisers were away at 3:00 pm on Friday, September 18, Trump announced on social media that he was banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. At first nothing happened, but by Saturday morning the press passes for reporters at those organizations no longer allowed them past White House security.

On Monday morning, September 21, the news organizations sued the Trump administration for violating their First Amendment right to a free press and their Fifth Amendment right to due process of law.

On Tuesday, September 22, the White House sent the organizations what it purported were notices of the revocations, giving them until Friday to respond.

Act II

At a court hearing on Wednesday, September 23, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted the laughable argument that the White House letter sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, September 22—days after Trump revoked the press passes—somehow satisfied the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process prior to any revocation.

The DOJ also told the judge that amorphous “national security” concerns justified revoking the passes. But Trump’s own statements of his reasons for the revocation undercut that argument.

Without reaching the First Amendment issues, the court based its constitutional ruling on Trump’s failure to provide due process. Judge Timothy J. Kelly—a Trump appointee—granted a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to restore the revoked press credentials immediately.

Act III

Judge Kelly issued his opinion around 1:00 am on Thursday, September 24. But as the business day began, the affected reporters’ press passes were still disabled, prompting the news organizations to file an emergency motion before Judge Kelly. The Justice Department responded with a declaration stating that press access had been restored at 9:55 am, so the judge cancelled the hearing.

But that evening, reporters for CNN and MSNOW were turned away from the state dinner arrivals at the White House, where Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Act IV

To satisfy Trump, government attorneys are probably working on a new strategy. Here’s one possible scenario:The White House imposes less drastic restrictions on its disfavored press outlets. Slow walking the reinstatement of press passes and preventing CNN and MSNOW reporters from covering arrivals at the state dinner for President Xi Thursday night could be previews of coming attractions.
The White House gives the news organizations new notices and an opportunity to be heard before suspending their press passes again. The notices would concoct arguments, probably with a focus on Trump’s favorite phrase for justifying his consolidation of power—“national security.”
The White House would then revoke the press passes.
The news organizations would file another lawsuit challenging the revocation.
Trump would lose again, but he would press ahead in the hope that eventually the US Supreme Court would bail him out. If Trump loses in the DC Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court probably would refuse to take the case—leaving his loss in place.
If the Supreme Court accepted the case, I predict it would issue a 7-2 opinion—with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting—confirming that the First Amendment still means what it says.
All of this will take time. And most importantly, it will remain a big news item that diverts at least some attention away from the broader failures of Trump’s presidency.
“The People’s House”

Trump has been eager to tear down the East Wing, reshape the White House grounds, turn the interior into a gilded spectacle, and otherwise impose his dramatic construction ideas at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yet shortly after revoking the press credentials of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, he told reporters: “It’s sick. I mean, there’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff.”

In the next sentence, he revealed himself: “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine. But I don’t have to let them into my, into the people’s house.”

Trump thinks the White House belongs exclusively to him. But his lease ends in two years, and no security deposit is sufficient to cover the profound damage he is inflicting on the nation.

Meanwhile, it is vital to beat back Trump’s repeated assaults in the Constitution. But it’s also important to remember that among the most important underlying goals of his most outrageous actions is diverting Americans from the mess that he has made of the country.



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


Steven Harper
Steven J. Harper is an attorney, adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School, and author of several books, including Crossing Hoffa -- A Teamster's Story and The Lawyer Bubble -- A Profession in Crisis. He has been a regular columnist for Moyers on Democracy, Dan Rather's News and Guts, and The American Lawyer. Follow him at https://thelawyerbubble.com.
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Hollow core of Trump's 'preposterous' press ban exposed by shock leak disclosure: expert

Bennito L. Kelty
September 23, 2026

RAW STORY

Former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin flagged a reason that the White House's argument for a media ban is 'preposterous.' (CNN/Screenshot)

A CNN analysis keyed in on the latest bombshell revelation about a White House leaker to tear into President Donald Trump's media ban.

On Wednesday, former federal prosecutor and columnist Jeffrey Toobin spoke with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper about the hearing regarding Trump's media ban. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly was still expected to rule on a temporary restraining order sought by lawyers for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, who were kicked out of the White House by the ban.

Cooper brought up that the Department of Justice argued to keep the ban in place by citing national security concerns. Toobin said, "It's understandable why the White House is trying this, because the courts are at their most deferential to the executive branch when it comes to national security."

However, Toobin tore into the DOJ's and White House's national security argument and noted how they've undercut it themselves. He mentioned reporting that came out shortly after Wednesday's hearing and while Kelly still hadn't ruled on the case.

In a letter made public through a court filing on Tuesday, the White House justified banning Politico by citing an article with high-level information about the Iran war and characterized it as a leak that endangered national security. However, Status reported on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance was responsible for leaking the information in question to Politico.

Toobin brought it up as he ripped the DOJ's national security argument, saying, "One of the articles that the White House is complaining about, the source for that was JD Vance, the vice president of the United States."

He continued, "So, they're trying to kick Politico out of the White House for a story where the source was JD Vance. I mean, it just shows how preposterous this argument is."

The Washington Post noted that the White House also called the information that Politico reported "misinformation," even though it came from Vance.

Free Press Defenders Demand End of ‘Horrifying’ ICE Detention of Journalist Luis Galeano

“If our government can close off channels of exchange and the free flow of ideas, it is no more than a dictatorship.”


Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents walk a detainee out of the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California, on July 27, 2026.
(Photo by Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Sep 18, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A coalition of 15 press freedom advocacy organizations on Friday demanded the release of Nicaraguan journalist Luis Galeano, who was arrested by federal immigration enforcement officials earlier this week.

The groups—which include Free Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF)—released a letter decrying Galeano’s detention at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Monday.

The organizations expressed concern about Galeano being potentially deported back to Nicaragua, where he could face imprisonment for his past work exposing that government’s human rights abuses. According to a Wednesday report in The Guardian, Galeano fled his home country eight years ago shortly after police raided the news outlet where he worked.

The groups also said Galeano’s detention marked “a troubling escalation of attacks on journalists and media workers, particularly immigrant journalists, who consistently provide much-needed journalism and civic information for their communities.”

Galeano was taken into custody despite entering the US legally in 2018 and having a pending asylum case. The Nicaraguan journalist also has a work permit and a Social Security number.

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, called Galeano’s arrest “horrifying,” while noting that the Nicaraguan is “the latest in a long line of journalists who came to the United States to report on issues of the day and instead face deportation.”

“These cases aren’t just about cracking down on immigration,” said Benavidez. “They are about cutting off community access to vital coverage and scaring reporters from holding those in power accountable. If our government can close off channels of exchange and the free flow of ideas, it is no more than a dictatorship.”

Edith Rodríguez Cachera, vice president of RSF Spain, pointed out that Galeano was also a citizen of Spain, and urged the Spanish government to secure his freedom.

“Spain cannot stand by while one of its citizens, a journalist persecuted for doing his job, is detained in the United States and faces the risk of being sent back to a country he fled because of severe repression,” said Rodríguez Cachera, “where his safety could be seriously endangered if he is deported. Spain must use every diplomatic and consular instrument at its disposal to safeguard his security and prevent his return to a country where he will likely be targeted due to his journalistic work.”

Galeano’s wife, Deykell Santamaría, said in an interview with El País published Thursday that she has been able to contact her husband during his detention, but she still fears “for his safety, his freedom, and his integrity if he were to be sent to Nicaragua.”

Javier Melendez, a longtime friend of the detained journalist, was even blunter about what would happen to Galeano were he to be deported, describing it as nothing less than a “death sentence” in an interview with The Guardian.

The El País report noted that US Reps. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) have expressed concerns about Galeano’s detention, with Salazar saying that the US government should “always know how to distinguish between a criminal and a political exile.”