The BBC and OBR claim that failing to cut disability benefits could ‘destabilise the economy’ while ignoring the spendthrift approach to tens of billions on military spending that really spirals out of control, argues DIANE ABBOTT MP
THE Labour leadership is adopting a scorched-earth policy to social programmes and public spending, with no section of society safe from their cuts. The consequences will be very grave for some of the poorest in society, for society as a whole and for the Labour Party.
In the first year of a Labour government, we have had cuts to the winter fuel allowance, a refusal to budge on the two-child benefit cap, cuts to sickness and disability benefits, and a tightening of departmental spending overall, which means cuts for some and a squeeze for the NHS.
This list is growing longer all the time. The latest target is the provision of special educational needs (SEN) spending in our schools, which ministers claim is spiralling out of control. There is also the beginning of a concerted PR campaign to abolish the “triple-lock” on the state pension, even though the meagre amount provided is one of the lowest in western Europe and insufficient for a decent retirement.
The main exception to this all-round austerity drive is military spending, which is really spiralling out of control. In fact, the pace of spending cuts elsewhere is designed to fill the real hole in government finances caused by the commitment to raise military spending to 5 per cent of GDP, a promise given to placate Donald Trump by Keir Starmer at the Nato summit.
Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Acclaimed author Michael Lewis wrote a book about the first Trump administration entitled The Fifth Risk, outlining the consequences when people who don’t understand how the government of a vast, complex and multifaceted nation works are put in charge of said government.
The bestseller was more gripping and fascinating than any work of fiction. It outlined the realities that followed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promises to shrink the federal bureaucracy. In it, Lewis quotes lawyer Max Stier, who he describes as the American with the greatest understanding of how his nation’s government worked. Stier offers the truism that “the basic role of governments is to keep us safe.”
You might deduce that this means those in charge during, and ahead of, emergencies should know what to do and how to do it. And, they have to want to do it. In the case of Trump term one, there was often evidence that some or all of these three elements were lacking. Evidently, planning for distant risk was not something that Trump and his team were interested in prioritising.
Fast forward to July 2025, and US headlines are filled with images of devastating flash floods in which more than 100 Texans, many of them children, lost their lives. In Kerr County, outside of San Antonio, water levels of the Guadalupe River rose to what was considered a once in a “100-year catastrophe”. Nobody saw it coming, or at least not to the extent that it did. Despite official warnings, the result was one of the worst natural disasters ever faced by the state.
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Days earlier, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was passed in the Senate with a tight 51:50 majority. Republican Texas senator Ted Cruz was among the supporters of a bill which will cut funding for the National Weather Service (NWS) by 6.7% in 2026. These come on the back of earlier resource reductions to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).
Within days of the Texas floods, Democrats were calling for an investigation into whether previous budget cuts might have affected capacity for flood preparedness in Kerr County.
For the bereaved, talk of culpability will hardly bring solace. And any immediate political blame game presents as unseemly in the middle of so much personal tragedy. But a New York Times article reported that “some experts say that staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate response”. Such speculative language does not offer clarity or reassurance, and even the often brash president has thus far refrained from finger pointing.
Nonetheless, uncomfortable conversations are necessary, as it is clear that slashing federal funding does not serve the nation well. Trump already had budget cutting form, as his first-term efforts to slash NOAA and related programme funding demonstrated.
In 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was also targeted for staff and funding reductions. This came along with the appointment of EPA chiefs who appeared uninterested in prioritising the climate crisis. More recently, the controversial spending cuts agency the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), headed by Elon Musk, included NOAA in its sights.
Yale University’s Center for Environmental Communication said that while there was no clear evidence that budget cuts had affected weather forecasting in the Texas case, Trump’s planned additional cuts would affect some of NOAA’s key flash flood forecast tools. This includes the Flash project, which improves accuracy, timing and specificity of warnings, such as those that occurred in Texas on July 4. It also said that the weather service had lost many of its most senior staff, which would increase the risks associated with weather-related tragedies.
Flood water in Texas rose spectacularly fast causing dozens of deaths.
Cuts and the climate
Across the board, Doge has targeted other agencies that the public rely on in a crisis, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), where plans to reduce staffing by about 20% are currently coming into effect. With responsibility for managing natural and climate-fuelled disasters from hurricanes to floods, the agency has become busier in recent years as disasters have evolved from seasonal to perennial.
Rob Moore, the director of flooding solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an influential environmental body, argued that “America’s disaster safety net is unraveling.”
There are likely to be more floods, and other nature-based catastrophes with multiple probable causes and features. While outright prevention may not always be possible, governmental risk and disaster management can help to preclude the devastation seen on July 4 in Texas.
The problem with responding to long-term risk with short-term or inadequate solutions is that one day, an existential threat could arrive for which the US will not be ready. The danger may not even be as overwhelming as a global pandemic or nuclear threat. It could be as mundane as a local river overflowing. For those who lost their loved ones in Texas, there is nothing distant about their anguish.
A country with the world’s largest economy does not have to cut federal bureaucracy corners. Wasting tax dollars is never a vote winner, but funding vital emergency services like Fema and the National Weather Service is a fundamental feature of an advanced democracy. As is investing in the technology and personnel to do all possible to predict flash floods. Trump would do well to remember this as he meets the bereaved in Kerr County.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US President Donald Trump, and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a Cabinet Meeting. Photo: White House
The billionaire president claimed that trade relations with Brazil are unfair to the US. Lula has called a meeting to discuss a response.
US President Donald Trump has announced that products imported from Brazil will be subject to 50% tariffs starting in August. The application of the tariffs was announced in a letter published on Wednesday, July 9, on social media.
Addressed to the President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the message begins with a direct defense of Jair Bolsonaro and criticism of “the way Brazil has been treating the former president”, which he classified as an “international disgrace”.
Referring to the case against Bolsonaro in the Supreme Court (STF), Trump emphasizes: “This trial should not be happening. It is a witch hunt that must end IMMEDIATELY!”
It is worth noting that the US president has no authority over the decisions of the Brazilian judiciary.
In his letter to Lula, he states that the decision on tariffs is based on attacks on free elections and freedom of expression in Brazil.
“(As lately illustrated by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which has issued hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to US Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market),” Trump declares.
After the political justification, he adds that trade relations with Brazil are unfair to the United States. However, the trade balance between the two nations has been in surplus for the US for more than ten years.
The percentage announced by Trump for Brazilian products is the highest among those most recently defined by the US government. In the letter, the US president argues that the country should distance itself from its trade relationship with Brazil.
He goes so far as to say that the 50% rate “is far too low” to bring about a level playing field between the two nations. According to Trump, the US Trade Representative’s Office (USTR) will launch an investigation into Brazil under the US Trade Act.
The intention of this type of approach is to determine whether there has been any violation of trade agreements. If irregularities are found, the US may take action through the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In a threatening tone, Trump states that if Brazil decides to take similar measures in response to the new tariff, the US will raise the rate by another 50%. He ends the letter by saying that the decision may be modified upward or downward depending on Brazil’s relationship with the US.
“If you wish to open your heretofore closed Trading Markets to the United States, and eliminate your Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter,” he writes.
Reaction
After the letter was released, President Lula called an emergency meeting to discuss Brazil’s response to Trump. According to information released in the press, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, also minister of Development, Industry, Trade, and Services, Fernando Haddad (Finance), Mauro Vieira (International Relations), and Rui Costa (Chief of Staff) are participating in the meeting.
On social media, Workers’ Party senator and leader of the Senate, Jaques Wagner called for respect for Brazil and criticized the measure, which he attributed to a “request from the Bolsonaro family”.
“At the request of the Bolsonaro family, Donald Trump has announced a 50% tax on all Brazilian products, in an authoritarian and unilateral manner. The US president is confusing who he is addressing. Brazil will not be anyone’s backyard. We are the ones who decide our own lives. Let this be clear: Brazil belongs to Brazilians, not to lackeys!” he posted.
This was first published in Portuguese at Brasil de Fato.
Salon (7/3/25): “The funds going towards deportation would…be enough to fully fund the program to end world hunger for four years.”
And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.
Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.
Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation:
Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.
Scant attention to ICE expansion
“What happens if we spend more than the military budget of Russia on deportation?” was not a question the New York Times (7/3/25) thought needed answering.
And yet many US corporate media outlets have paid scant attention to this aspect of the bill and refrained from delving too deeply into the matter of what exactly this massive ramping up of ICE portends for American society. According to a search of the Nexis news database, while half (50%) of newspaper articles and news transcripts mentioning the reconciliation bill from its first passage in the House (May 20) to its signing into law (July 4) also mentioned Medicaid, less than 6% named Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.
Even many of those that did mention ICE barely gave it any attention. On July 3, for example, the New York Times presented readers with “Nine Questions About the Republican Megabill, Answered,” which in response to the first question—“Why is it being called a megabill?”—did manage to mention “a 150% boost to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget over the next five years.” However, there was no further discussion in the article’s remaining 1,500-plus words of potential ramifications of this boost—although there was a section devoted to the “tax break for Native Alaskan subsistence whaling captains.”
That was more than CNN’s intervention managed, also published on July 3, and headlined “Here’s Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle.” The article aced a couple of no-brainers, including that “corporate America” would be “better off” thanks to the bill, while “low-income Americans” would be “worse off.” But there was not a single reference to the ICE budget—or who might “struggle” because of it.
‘Detention blitz’
Washington Post (7/4/25): “Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to…companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees.”
This is not to imply, of course, that there are no articles detailing what ICE has been up to in terms of persecuting refuge seekers, visa holders, legal US residents and even US citizens—who supposedly have greater protections under the law—and how all of this stands to get worse, in accordance with the impending deluge of anti-immigration funds.
In its report on ICE’s looming “detention blitz,” the Washington Post (7/4/25) noted that “at least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year,” and cited the finding that ICE is “now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes.”
The Post article also contained sufficiently thought-provoking details to enable the conscientious reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the ultimate purpose of manic detention schemes. (Hint: it’s not to keep America “safe.”) For instance, we learn that the share prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest detention companies contracted by ICE, which have notoriousreputations for detainee mistreatment—“each rose about 3%… as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts.”
Lest there remain any doubt as to the centrality of profit flows to the immigration crackdown, the article specifies that GEO Group and CoreCivic “each gave $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Federal Election Commission data.”
This article, however, came after the legislation was passed.
A Post opinion piece (6/30/25), meanwhile, put a human face on some of ICE’s victims, such as Jermaine Thomas, born to a US soldier on a military base in Germany. Following an incident of “suspected trespassing” in Texas, Thomas was deported by ICE to Jamaica, a country he had never set foot in. Other victims spotlighted by the Post include 64-year-old Iranian immigrant Madonna Kashanian, nabbed while gardening at her house in New Orleans, and a six-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia who was arrested at an immigration court in California while pursuing his asylum case with his family.
It was also possible, if one sought it out, to find reporting on what the cash infusion entails from a logistical perspective: more agents, more arrests, more racial profiling, increased detention capacity, and a deportation system that runs “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours,” as ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons charmingly put it.
‘Police state first’
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (Jacobin, 7/3/25): “Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement.”
Gutting Medicaid is certainly an angle on the reconciliation bill that deserved the media attention it got, and will devastate millions in this country. But the massive infusion of money and power to ICE will likewise devastate millions with a ballooning police state that unleashes terror, rips apart families and creates a network of concentration camps across the country. Given ICE’s contemporary track record and de facto exemption from the constraints of due process, the public desperately needs a media that will connect the dots in order to convey a bigger-picture look of what America is up against.
In an interview with Jacobin magazine (7/3/25) on how “ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick—a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council—made the crucial observation: “You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.”
This is precisely the analysis that is missing from corporate media coverage of the bill. Beyond making life hell for the undocumented workers on whose very labor the US economy depends, ICE has become a tool for political repression as well—as evidenced by a slew of recent episodes involving the abduction and disappearance of international scholars whose political opinions did not coincide with those of the commander in chief of our, um, democracy.
Take the case of 30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar studying childhood development at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While walking to an iftar dinner in March, Öztürk was accosted by six plainclothes officers, some of them masked, and forced into an unmarked van, after which she was flown halfway across the country to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her crime, apparently, was to have co-written an opinion piece last year for the Tufts Daily (3/26/24), in which she and her co-authors encouraged the university to accede to demands by the Tufts Community Union Senate by recognizing the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.
Öztürk’s case is hardly an isolated one. There’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University who was seized by masked agents outside his Virginia home and swept off to an ICE facility in Texas. There’s Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian former PhD student at Cornell who sued the Trump administration over the crackdown on Palestine solidarity and then self-deported, explaining that he had “lost faith [he] could walk the streets without being abducted.” And the list goes on (Al Jazeera, 5/15/25).
‘Homegrowns are next’
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (NPR, 4/15/25): The Trump administration believes it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
In the twisted view of the US government, of course, opposing the US-backed genocide of Palestinians equals support for “terrorism”—and in Trump’s view, basically anything that goes against his own thinking and policies potentially constitutes a criminal offense. It follows that Öztürk-style politically motivated kidnappings by the state are presumably merely the top of a very slippery slope that US citizens, too, will soon find themselves careening down—especially as Trump has already exhibited enthusiasm at the prospect of outsourcing the incarceration of US citizens to El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next,” he told Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele.
The line between citizens and residents has been intentionally blurred, with the Trump Justice Department announcing it was “Prioritizing Denaturalization”—that is, stripping citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This draconian punishment has been proposed for Trump’s political enemies, from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to former BFF Elon Musk. Trump has also taken aim at the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, potentially turning millions of other Americans into ICE targets.
Somehow, the elite media have not deemed it necessary to dwell even superficially on the implications of super-funding a rogue agency that has essentially been given carte blanche to indiscriminately round people up—be they undocumented workers, political dissidents, or just somebody who “looks like somebody we are looking for.” As for CNN’s write-up on “who stands to gain from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” it’s definitely not all the folks currently living in a permanent state of fear, deprived of basic freedoms like movement, speech and thought.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
‘Perhaps the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel will reach a temporary deal again, with more aid allowed in. Even so, no one few expect that a lasting peace would result.’ Photograph: Getty
Visiting Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu delighted in telling Donald Trump that he had nominated him for the Nobel peace prize. The Israeli prime minister cited Mr Trump’s efforts to end conflicts in the Middle East. But in truth he is grateful to the US president for joining his war against Iran last month and for allowing carnage in Gaza to continue after a brief pause. He is also eager that the US president does not strong‑arm him into another ceasefire. Perhaps the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel in Qatar will reach a temporary deal again, with hostages released and possibly more aid allowed in. Even so, few expect that a lasting peace would result.
Words matter. They have become so detached from reality when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza that it is not merely absurd, or despicable, but obscene. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has laid out plans for a “humanitarian city”: this means forcing all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp that the military would bar them from leaving. Prof Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust, used the accurate words: it would be “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them”. The “emigration plan” which Mr Katz says “will happen”, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, is in fact an ethnic cleansing plan. No departure can be considered voluntary when the alternative is starvation or indefinite imprisonment in inhuman conditions.
…
Destroying Palestinians’ means of survival, planning the removal of Gaza’s population and envisioning its outright destruction are surely not merely brutal acts but ones committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – the definition of genocide in the UN convention.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
