Politics & Stuff

[NikkiCFC 8,341]

Thank you Rachel for speaking about this. 

[Vesper 30,234]

Jonathan Ames Legal Editor

Good morning.   Governments and civil servants love jargon and this morning David Gauke has given them a gift with “earned progression”.   Gauke, a former Conservative justice secretary, has provided the first of two independent reviews to the current office holder, Shabana Mahmood, that are designed to sort out the prisons and the courts. Gauke’s report, published at 6am this morning – handily in time for a full blast on Radio 4’s Today programme – is primarily aimed at easing overcrowding in the jails.   To put you out of your misery, the early progression model will involve offenders progressing through three stages: custody, during which they will be “incentivised” to behave well, post-custody, where they will be managed under strict supervision, and something called an “at-risk” stage, where they are not actively supervised but can be recalled if they commit further offences.   Sir Brian Leveson – the former judge who spent hours listening to an angry Hugh Grant during an inquiry into media practices – is still to produce the second report ordered by Mahmood, which will aim to tackle the ever-growing backlog of cases in the crown courts. Be warned: you’re on jargon alert.    We have a bumper Times Law today, including our Student Law supplement and the winning essay in our annual competition organised by the newspaper and One Essex Court.    In the main Times Law section we look at the government’s controversial plans to stem rising immigration and the Law Commission’s proposed overhaul of the law around wills. We also have a comment from last year’s Bar leader, who calls on the government to stop talking and walk the walk on backing the UK’s legal services.   Last week’s question to readers – which asked whether the Criminal Cases Review Commission should be ditched and a new miscarriages of justice watchdog created from scratch – elicited many one-word answers of: yes. Scroll down for a selection of the slightly longer responses.   And this week’s question: should the government implement a programme of “earned progression” for convicted criminals? Email me using the button below and I’ll feature some of your best responses in the newsletter next week.   By the way, if you are a London-dweller, you might be interested in our new newsletter all about life in the capital. You can sign up here.   Until next week,   Jonathan

[Vesper 30,234]

5 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

Thank you Rachel for speaking about this. 

it is ALWAYS about the money and the grift with Trump

always

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

6 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

Thank you Rachel for speaking about this. 

Reminds me of this. No one saw it coming, happened so quickly

 

[Vesper 30,234]

Predatory Lenders in the Operating Room

Medical credit cards have gone mainstream, preying on sick people at their most vulnerable.

https://prospect.org/health/2025-05-28-predatory-lenders-operating-room-medical-credit-cards/

 

Christopher Crim’s troubles started when his husband, who has cystic fibrosis and is in end-of-life hospice care, needed a tooth pulled. Crim took him to a dentist near their home in Tennessee, and while he was in the bathroom, the dentist pulled all of his husband’s teeth, not one, and left a bone sticking out of his husband’s gums.

The ensuing pain was so severe that his husband couldn’t sleep, even on morphine and oxycodone. So Crim rushed him to a new dentist, who estimated that surgery to fix the problem would cost $6,000. Crim and his husband didn’t have that kind of money. His husband is on Medicaid, but they couldn’t find any providers who would accept the dental coverage. Hospice has already forced them to sell their house and drain their savings. “Everything’s gone,” he said.

After the dentist agreed to shave a bit off the price, and after Crim pawned their wedding bands, he still faced a balance of about $1,500. That’s when he was taken into the back of the office, and a female employee told him he could cover the remainder with a CareCredit card. The cards, issued by Synchrony Bank, can only be used at participating providers to cover medical charges.

Immediately, Crim was approved for $1,500 in credit, and he remembers the woman telling him it was interest-free for the first year. She filled everything out on a computer and then handed him a stack of papers to sign. His husband was still in pain, waiting to be operated on. “We were in a hurry to get him back there and get his mouth fixed, so I just signed,” he said. He never got a copy of the paperwork. “He was suffering so bad, and I thought, ‘Whatever it costs, whatever I have to do to make him comfortable while he’s dying, I’ll do it,’” he said. “I couldn’t have been more vulnerable.”

Crim routinely paid above the minimum payment on his statements. Then, a couple of months ago, he said he got a bill from CareCredit, which stated that the bank was adding $700 in interest to the $900 he still owed. “I’m like, ‘Well, they made a mistake, of course they had to have made a mistake,’” he said. But when he called Synchrony, protesting that he was told the card was interest-free, he was informed that was only true if he paid the entire amount off before the year was up. Otherwise, a year’s worth of interest would automatically be added to the amount owed. He had never received any paperwork stating that, and all he saw on the company’s app was what he owed. “Nobody stressed to me, ‘You got to pay that $1,500 off in a year or you’re going to pay the interest,’” he said.

MEDICAL CREDIT CARDS OPERATE like retail credit cards you might get at The Gap or Home Depot, but instead of a cashier making the pitch at the checkout—a mildly annoying but hardly a life-or-death experience—a nurse or receptionist at a health care practice urges patients to sign up. “It’s a person who you want to be able to trust the most, but they’re deeply conflicted,” said Julie Morgan, a former associate director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who researched medical credit cards.

Many people don’t even realize they’re being signed up for a credit card; they think it’s interest-free financing through their health care provider. Others aren’t given the chance to understand the terms. Most providers do all of the paperwork on a tablet, flashing it in front of a patient when it’s time to sign. Consumers report never getting any paperwork after the fact, either at the office or in the mail. And they often receive the ultimate hard sell, with no other choice but to sign if they want to get recommended care that, as in the case of Crim’s husband, they desperately need.

Some people may not even be aware of what’s happening at all until after they’re already signed up. In CFPB listening sessions, Morgan said, she and her colleagues heard of instances where people were given anesthesia and came out of it to find out they had been signed up for a card while they were under.

Medical credit cards are moving further and further into all parts of the health care system.

The bottom line is that medical credit card holders often have no idea what they’re getting into. “Had they known, [they] would never have signed up in the first place,” said Mona Shah, senior director of policy and strategy for Community Catalyst, a health care nonprofit, who has heard from people about their experiences.

That’s because, as Crim found out, medical credit cards have a nasty surprise that few consumers understand when they open accounts: Although the cards promise to be interest-free for an introductory period, typically a year, that’s only if consumers manage to pay off the entire balance before the period is over. Deferred interest, as it’s known, silently accrues the entire time and gets added immediately once the introductory period is up. That’s a hidden trap that could put people on the hook for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The typical medical credit card has an annual percentage rate (APR) of 26.99 percent interest, compared to an average of 16 percent for regular credit cards. Consumers who aren’t able to pay off the charges before the deferred interest kicks in end up paying about one-quarter more than the original amount they were charged. American consumers paid $1 billion in deferred interest between 2018 and 2020.

Then there are the junk fees. “There’s a lot of money in late fees,” said Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. So much so that Synchrony Bank joined the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce just ahead of a lawsuit against the CFPB’s rule that would have capped credit card late fees at $8 in a possible effort to help give the group standing in its favored court. That was before the agency, during President Donald Trump’s second administration, abandoned it.

Synchrony reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it made $3.7 billion in interest and fees from CareCredit accounts last year. In response to a request for comment, the company said, “Our financing offers include a variety of clear disclosures as part of the application process and on monthly statements that help consumers understand their deferred interest, individual payment terms and the length of their promotional period.”

There are other dangers for consumers. Once someone uses a card to pay for services, they give up the ability to negotiate over charges and dispute any billing errors, or even to have insurance coverage like Medicaid retroactively applied once they get it. Nonprofit hospitals are barred from aggressive debt collection tactics, but the financial institutions that collect on medical credit card debt don’t have to adhere to those rules. Some patients have been billed for future work they ultimately decided not to get—but still had to pay the charges anyway.

Medical credit cards can really ding credit scores, and not just by showing a hard credit inquiry. Wu pointed out that many patients are given lines of credit that match up exactly with the cost of a procedure, immediately maxing them out, which harms a credit score.

MEDICAL CREDIT CARDS ORIGINATED to cover so-called “elective procedures” that were unlikely to be covered by insurance. They’re commonly pushed in dentists’ offices and at veterinarians, where insurance coverage is spotty to nonexistent. Jeannie Lisak, a former dog groomer, opened a CareCredit card to cover care for her own dogs—she had five at the time, and now she has nine—because sometimes she just couldn’t afford the bill. “I’d do anything for them,” she said. “I would go without before my dogs would.”

Lisak thinks it’s possible she had the terms explained to her, but “I didn’t totally understand it,” she said. She kept using the card whenever one of her dogs would need something, typically once a month, and each payment would start a new interest-free period that would eventually end and hit her with interest. “The interest keeps adding on and adding on,” she said. She estimates she’s paid $5,000 in interest at this point.

Paying off that kind of amount means “I forgo things,” she said. “I would rather be pocket poor than not pay my bills.” She’d love to close out the card and not have to keep paying interest, but she needs it to cover the vet bills she can’t afford up front.

The cards have grown in usage dramatically in recent years. In 2013, 4.4 million people had a CareCredit card; that number jumped to 11.7 million ten years later. CareCredit is the most common medical credit card, but they are also offered by Wells Fargo and Comenity. There has been a “surge” in the last four or five years in particular, Shah said.

One reason for this growth is that medical credit cards are moving further and further into all parts of the health care system, including in hospitals and at primary care doctors’ offices. They’ve even started to expand into the “wellness” space, and cover products like weight loss semaglutides.

 

Many patients don’t even realize they’re being signed up for a credit card; some were enrolled while under anesthesia.

The cards offer concrete benefits for the providers who push them on patients. Although providers don’t receive the entire amount on the card, given that the bank takes its cut, the CFPB found that financial institutions market the cards as a way to get paid quickly, and to get people to approve costly care they might not otherwise agree to, or care that wouldn’t be covered by insurance. Instead of having to deal with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of health insurance billing to get paid far in the future, or even having to eat the cost entirely if someone fails to pay out of pocket or qualifies for charity care, practices get paid up front immediately. They don’t have to spend any time or resources chasing patients for payment and collecting on medical debt. Providers are also incentivized to get patients on cards with worse terms by being promised a bigger cut for certain interest rates or other features. CareCredit paid providers $12 million to promote its product in 2018.

In a statement to the Prospect, CareCredit said that it “requires all our partners to undergo training to learn how and when to discuss the CareCredit credit card clearly and transparently with consumers. This required training, as well as provisions in our contracts, prohibit partners from presenting our financing solutions to patients while they are being treated or during any type of impairment, to ensure that CareCredit is offered in a fair and compliant manner.”

The CFPB has previously taken action to curb the abuses consumers can face. After receiving hundreds of consumer complaints, in 2013 it forced CareCredit to pay $34 million back to consumers for “deceptive credit card enrollment tactics” that left consumers uninformed about the deferred interest. “Deferred-interest products can be risky for consumers in the best of circumstances, and today’s action ensures that CareCredit will no longer profit from consumer confusion,” then-CFPB Director Richard Cordray said at the time. In addition to reimbursing consumers, the company, owned at the time by GE Capital Retail Bank, also had to enhance its disclosures with better descriptions of deferred interest and warn consumers before the promotional period ended, as well as train anyone who marketed the cards.

But that order sunsetted under the first Trump administration. Complaints from consumers and lawyers started to recur. So in 2023, the CFPB, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department, launched an inquiry into medical credit cards. Last June, the agency said it was “continuing to assess how financial institutions offer these products and whether they put borrowers at risk.” That was a signal that the agency was planning to supervise financial firms’ actions around the cards, as well as health care providers’ role, potentially teeing up enforcement actions against both.

But now the CFPB barely exists, an early victim of President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE operation. The new leadership has attempted to halt work and lay off most of the staff repeatedly, only to be stopped, at least temporarily, by federal courts. But even if the employees are saved, the agency is disavowing many of its powers and dropping its existing enforcement cases. The potential of the agency acting to protect new categories of consumers is dim at best.

“There are these really important protections that the agency has,” Shah said. “By gutting the agency, it really puts individuals at risk.”

A CFPB WITH AN INTEREST in protecting consumers could simply ban cards with deferred interest under the existing Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act. Wu pointed out that the Federal Reserve did in fact ban deferred interest under the law after it was passed, before later reversing course. The law “prohibits retroactive increases in interest rates, but they wrote regulation to allow it,” she said. “It’s been really harmful.”

Michael Tomaso was disappointed to hear that the federal government isn’t likely to crack down on medical credit cards, even if he wasn’t surprised. He showed up at a Florida dentist in 2019 in search of preventative care. A specialist took him into a treatment room and began listing off all the services she said he needed, totaling $5,718 worth of work. She told him his dental insurance wouldn’t cover any of it, and then she mentioned opening up a CareCredit account, he said. The specialist started applying for him without explaining the terms. When he asked for copies of the paperwork she had shown him on a screen, she refused to give any to him.

“This was a way for them to get me to pay for some of the work, which would go into their pocket even if they knew I couldn’t pay it all off,” he said.

The growth in medical credit cards is fed by the fact that so many people in the U.S. are uninsured or underinsured.

The amounts he had to put on the card kept stacking up. The dentist eventually decided to stop taking insurance, which meant Tomaso was on the hook for $63 for every regular cleaning. He had a few cavities filled at a cost of over $1,000, and multiple times he had to go back within a year because the fillings fell out, costing him more. The dentist pressed him into getting add-ons like $50 fluoride treatments. “All that extra stuff is just a money grab for them,” he said.

Tomaso is on a fixed income, and he wasn’t able to pay off the charges before the deferred interest kicked in. That meant he paid $1,244.13 in interest in 2024 alone, according to a statement he shared with the Prospect. Since opening the account in 2019, “I probably have paid $5,000 or $6,000 in interest on about maybe $2,500, $3,000 worth of work,” he said.

He finally decided to pay off the card, which was no small feat—it meant reducing what he spent on food and clothing. “There was a period there where I was eating ramen noodles because that was all I could afford after I paid my credit card bill,” he said. He couldn’t always afford to put gas in his car. After it was all said and done, he estimates he paid four times as much as the original charges. That’s money he could really use today. “I’m still living with the consequences of it,” he said.

Some consumers have turned to private attorneys in an attempt to get relief. Last year, a class action lawsuit was launched against Synchrony Bank, the parent company behind CareCredit. Plaintiff S.G. opened a CareCredit card in 2021 to cover $2,000 in order to get emergency veterinary care for his cat, Pumpkin. According to the lawsuit, if he made the minimum payments on his bill, it would take him 14 years to pay it off and he would end up paying $7,752.

The lawsuit, which purports to cover anyone who has signed up for a CareCredit card and accrued interest at a rate of more than 16 percent, alleges that the bank is engaging in “unfair and deceptive business practices,” said Marc Dann, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, and gets people to sign up “under duress.” The lawsuit also alleges that the interest rates the cards charge after the zero-interest period is over are usurious, in violation of some states’ interest rate caps and other protections. Sometimes, Dann’s firm will file a class action lawsuit and no other potential plaintiffs will speak up. That’s not been the case with this one: “We’ve gotten dozens and dozens of calls from people who are similarly affected,” he said.

CareCredit declined to comment on any pending litigation.

Synchrony includes a “very strong” arbitration agreement in its terms, a high hurdle for plaintiffs to overcome for class action status, Dann noted. Synchrony has already filed a motion to dismiss the case and to compel arbitration. The CFPB isn’t bound by such terms and could take enforcement action to protect all consumers—if it were interested in acting.

BEFORE TRUMP WAS RE-ELECTED, the CFPB was focusing a lot of its attention on the instances where consumers were signed up for medical credit cards when they shouldn’t have even had to pay out of pocket, such as those who qualified for financial assistance or were covered for the procedure through insurance, Morgan said. Those are “straight-up unfair or deceptive practices,” she said.

Venus has brought her own lawsuit after going through that very experience. Venus, who asked to use only her first name out of embarrassment about what happened to her, went to her dentist in California in 2022 for two teeth she thought were infected, and was told she needed to have multiple teeth pulled and to get dentures. The cost, she was told, would be $14,000, an amount she simply didn’t have. Her only source of income is $1,500 a month in disability benefits. An employee from the office told her she could apply for “credit” to cover it, which she was told was interest-free. She assumed it was some sort of loan or financing. She doesn’t remember being asked if she wanted to sign up. The employee just filled out paperwork for her on a tablet while Venus’s mouth was open with the dentist’s tools in it. She never got the chance to read the details or even sign her name.

She had both Medicaid and Medicare and told the dental office staff so, handing them her cards when she arrived. But the office never filed any charges at all with her insurance, even though the work should have been covered, according to her lawsuit. And because she had already paid for the procedure, she wasn’t able to submit her own claim afterward.

“I was expecting them to be honest,” she said. “I’m trusting them to know what they’re doing.”

 

KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR/AP PHOTO

Synchrony Bank, which makes cards for retail brands, is the parent company of CareCredit, the biggest medical credit card.

When Venus went back into the office a few days later, she told them she had changed her mind and didn’t want her teeth pulled. But she was told it was too late to change her mind. Not only did they pull teeth, but they pulled far more than she expected, including a tooth that had been fixed at her previous appointment and a tooth that hadn’t been bothering her at all. “When I found out, I was really upset,” she said. Venus wasn’t even able to use the dentures made for her against her will—they didn’t fit properly, which meant she couldn’t fully close her mouth and they cut into her gums when she ate. She said they made her look like “the donkey on Shrek.”

It was only about a month after her first appointment—before she had actually received the dentures—when she received her CareCredit card in the mail, with a lump-sum charge of $12,000, that she realized she had been signed up for a credit card.

Venus did what she could to pay it off, spending hundreds of dollars a month that sometimes ate up nearly a third of her monthly income. She had never before put more on a credit card than she could afford when the bill came due. To make payments, “I robbed Peter to pay Paul,” she said. Because her money was “tapped out” after CareCredit payments, she couldn’t afford groceries, so she started frequenting food banks. She had to borrow money from a friend to make her rent and car payments. She had to miss church events because she couldn’t afford the gas to get there. At one point, she was threatened with having her utilities shut off because she couldn’t pay the bill given how much she was paying to Synchrony.

“It made me feel kind of helpless,” she said. “I saw myself as stupid because I just got sucked into it.”

Eventually she was forced to stop paying because she couldn’t afford her basics. Venus’s lawsuit is a cross-complaint, filed after Synchrony Bank sued her to collect the debt, which it says is $5,045.81. Her complaint asks for a public injunction that would block her dentist from applying for financial products on behalf of patients while they’re being treated and for failing to bill insurance, plus another to block Synchrony from marketing and selling products through California dental providers. The bank hasn’t responded to Venus’s complaint yet.

CALIFORNIA PASSED A LAW that went into effect in 2020 that bans deferred interest on medical credit cards, while barring providers from filling out applications and signing people up for cards in treatment areas or while sedated. Venus’s lawsuit accuses her dentist of violating the law’s provisions. The original version of California’s bill would have gone further, by prohibiting providers from offering or promoting the cards at all. But the credit card industry and dentists lobbied to water it down.

With the CFPB dismantled and disempowered, “it’s up to the states now,” Wu said. States likely can’t go after the banks issuing the cards because they are preempted by federal regulators, but they can regulate whether, when, and how health care providers market the cards and sign patients up. Besides California, Illinois and New York have passed laws that rein in those practices. Lawmakers in Maine considered doing something similar, but Synchrony fought hard and, in the end, defeated the bill.

Ultimately, the growth in medical credit cards is fed by the fact that so many people in the United States are uninsured or underinsured. “They’re filling a void left by our incomplete health system,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president at the Community Service Society of New York. In 2023, 26.4 million Americans were completely uninsured. Medical credit cards initially thrived in dental offices because so few people have dental insurance. A handful of states leave it out of Medicaid coverage, and Medicare mostly doesn’t cover it; dental isn’t a required coverage in Affordable Care Act plans.

High deductibles and co-pays leave even the insured with bills they can’t afford, and medical credit cards are pitched to fill in the gap. Meanwhile, as health care costs grow, so too does the ability to pitch a patient on paying for procedures with a credit card.

If the country had universal health care, as virtually every other developed country does, medical credit cards would likely have no market. “The reason that this is happening in the United States is that we have a for-profit health care system,” Shah said.

The surprise $700 in interest Christopher Crim said he had accrued after his interest-free period ended was money he simply didn’t have. His husband receives Supplemental Security Income, while Crim receives disability benefits. Crim has back problems that keep him from working, not to mention that he cares for his husband full-time.

“He’s my whole life,” he said. They live in a rented garage in their landlord’s backyard. To feed themselves, Crim buys six-packs of steaks and they eat them with rice every day. “We don’t go out, we don’t spend money on gas unless we absolutely have to,” he said.

Today, he still owes about $2,000. Had he known that he was at risk of owing interest if he didn’t pay off the charges within a year, he never would have signed up, he said. “I would have found some way to pay it.” Or, at the very least, he would have made sure to pay off his balance in time to avoid the interest. “I’m not dumb,” he said. “I’ve never missed a payment on any of my credit cards.”

“I cut the card up,” he said. “I’ll never use that card again once I pay it off. I’m done with it.”

[Vesper 30,234]

Elon Musk has just tweeted that Trump is in the Epstein files.

 

[Fernando 6,585]

hhehehe I remember the left and liberals hating on Musk and now he is fighting with the right. 

Guess Musk is on a world of his own. 

[Vesper 30,234]

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

hhehehe I remember the left and liberals hating on Musk and now he is fighting with the right. 

Guess Musk is on a world of his own. 

The Elon-Trump Feud Is Oligarchy in Action

Two deranged megalomaniacs think they own the American government. Of course they end up fighting.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-06-elon-musk-donald-trump-feud/

Elon Musk and Donald Trump attend a presidential campaign event at the Butler Farm Show, October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

 

I had been wondering if Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have a falling out. Two ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt, terminally online, megalomaniacal narcissists do not tend to make reliable partners. Augustus and Agrippa they are not. Yet until this week, they seemed to at least maintain a cordial front.

At the time of writing Thursday evening, the sequence of events went something like this. On Tuesday, Musk posted on Twitter/X that Trump’s enormous reconciliation bill was “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” that would jack up the budget deficit. On Thursday, Musk pressed the attack, complaining about the “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” and whining that he had bought the government fair and square. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted. “Such ingratitude.”

Trump responded on Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” he added.

Elon immediately escalated, posting that SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon rocket program, which is currently the only U.S.-based way to transfer astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (though he later walked that back), asserted that Trump “is in the Epstein files” and that “is the real reason they have not been made public,” suggested he would start a new political party, called for Trump to be impeached and replaced with J.D. Vance, and predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession.

No doubt there will be more petty, Mean Girls-esque drama by the time this article is published. But this is certainly a real dispute. They may patch things up later, or pretend to, but a fake conflict does not typically escalate to accusations of pedophilia right out of the gate. This is just what happens when people like Trump and Musk hold the reins of power.

A few initial observations about this slap fight: First, it is largely pretextual. Reporting indicates that Musk is upset that the bill does not have enough pork, namely the EV tax credits that have hitherto benefited Tesla, and a fat FAA contract for SpaceX. He has not breathed one word about the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich that are the actual reason the bill would blow up the deficit. If we take the “PORK” complaints at face value, Musk seems upset that Medicaid and food stamps were merely gutted instead of abolished entirely.

This is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power.

Second, Musk is correct that Trump is in at least some Epstein files; Gawker reported back in 2015 that he was included in the “little black book” of people who had traveled on his infamous private jet. Trump himself has been photographed and filmed partying with Epstein several times, and told New York in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy … He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” One Florida businessman told The New York Times that back in the ’90s, he said to Trump, “Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls,” but “Trump didn’t care about that.”

That said, Musk may not be innocent here either. Epstein reportedly helped his brother Kimbal Musk find a girlfriend, and Epstein claimed to the Times in 2018 that he had helped Musk find a new chairman for Tesla, though Musk denied it. Musk was also photographed with Epstein’s notorious fixer Ghislaine Maxwell in 2014, though again Musk claims he was photobombed.

But fundamentally, this is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power. Both Trump and Musk are aspiring autocrats, one with a propaganda death grip on a critical mass of disgruntled low-information voters, the other the richest man on Earth who also owns an important communications platform. Unlike, say, a union leader or political boss who represents and is therefore accountable to some organized constituency, they both have wide latitude to indulge their deeply erratic whims. Outside of a tiny minority of unhinged ideologues, nobody voting for Trump wanted to obliterate America’s scientific dominance, or to destroy America’s international reputation by killing millions of Africans, or to start a nonsensical trade war with every country simultaneously. There is no large organic constituency for any of this.

At the same time, both Trump and Musk are mutually dependent, and can therefore inflict serious damage on each other. Musk may be right that Trump would not have won without his money, but without Trump on the ballot money alone did not let Musk buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Musk is also right that NASA and the Pentagon have become totally reliant on SpaceX for their basic operations, but by the same token SpaceX depends on government contracts. Its Starlink service is reportedly somewhat profitable, but its future prospects of massive growth depend on the (dubious) prospect of government-funded missions to the moon and Mars. If Musk really tries to hold NASA and the Pentagon hostage, well, that has not worked out well for oligarchs in similar circumstances—but that won’t look great for Trump either.

That is government by ultra-billionaire and reality TV charlatan. Terrible, idiotic policies nobody asked for might only be stopped because two world-historical megalomaniacs could not sit down and hash out their differences.

Edited June 6 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

As Prof Jeffrey Sachs said -you can have the most unhinged president, it doesnt matter, its all a distraction from the puppet masters pulling the strings and the real policy makers

[OhForAGreavsie 6,078]

5 hours ago, Vesper said:

The Elon-Trump Feud Is Oligarchy in Action

Two deranged megalomaniacs think they own the American government. Of course they end up fighting.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-06-elon-musk-donald-trump-feud/

Elon Musk and Donald Trump attend a presidential campaign event at the Butler Farm Show, October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

 

I had been wondering if Elon Musk and Donald Trump would have a falling out. Two ultra-wealthy, ultra-corrupt, terminally online, megalomaniacal narcissists do not tend to make reliable partners. Augustus and Agrippa they are not. Yet until this week, they seemed to at least maintain a cordial front.

At the time of writing Thursday evening, the sequence of events went something like this. On Tuesday, Musk posted on Twitter/X that Trump’s enormous reconciliation bill was “massive, outrageous, pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” that would jack up the budget deficit. On Thursday, Musk pressed the attack, complaining about the “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” and whining that he had bought the government fair and square. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted. “Such ingratitude.”

Trump responded on Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” he added.

Elon immediately escalated, posting that SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon rocket program, which is currently the only U.S.-based way to transfer astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (though he later walked that back), asserted that Trump “is in the Epstein files” and that “is the real reason they have not been made public,” suggested he would start a new political party, called for Trump to be impeached and replaced with J.D. Vance, and predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession.

No doubt there will be more petty, Mean Girls-esque drama by the time this article is published. But this is certainly a real dispute. They may patch things up later, or pretend to, but a fake conflict does not typically escalate to accusations of pedophilia right out of the gate. This is just what happens when people like Trump and Musk hold the reins of power.

A few initial observations about this slap fight: First, it is largely pretextual. Reporting indicates that Musk is upset that the bill does not have enough pork, namely the EV tax credits that have hitherto benefited Tesla, and a fat FAA contract for SpaceX. He has not breathed one word about the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich that are the actual reason the bill would blow up the deficit. If we take the “PORK” complaints at face value, Musk seems upset that Medicaid and food stamps were merely gutted instead of abolished entirely.

This is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power.

Second, Musk is correct that Trump is in at least some Epstein files; Gawker reported back in 2015 that he was included in the “little black book” of people who had traveled on his infamous private jet. Trump himself has been photographed and filmed partying with Epstein several times, and told New York in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy … He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” One Florida businessman told The New York Times that back in the ’90s, he said to Trump, “Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls,” but “Trump didn’t care about that.”

That said, Musk may not be innocent here either. Epstein reportedly helped his brother Kimbal Musk find a girlfriend, and Epstein claimed to the Times in 2018 that he had helped Musk find a new chairman for Tesla, though Musk denied it. Musk was also photographed with Epstein’s notorious fixer Ghislaine Maxwell in 2014, though again Musk claims he was photobombed.

But fundamentally, this is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power. Both Trump and Musk are aspiring autocrats, one with a propaganda death grip on a critical mass of disgruntled low-information voters, the other the richest man on Earth who also owns an important communications platform. Unlike, say, a union leader or political boss who represents and is therefore accountable to some organized constituency, they both have wide latitude to indulge their deeply erratic whims. Outside of a tiny minority of unhinged ideologues, nobody voting for Trump wanted to obliterate America’s scientific dominance, or to destroy America’s international reputation by killing millions of Africans, or to start a nonsensical trade war with every country simultaneously. There is no large organic constituency for any of this.

At the same time, both Trump and Musk are mutually dependent, and can therefore inflict serious damage on each other. Musk may be right that Trump would not have won without his money, but without Trump on the ballot money alone did not let Musk buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Musk is also right that NASA and the Pentagon have become totally reliant on SpaceX for their basic operations, but by the same token SpaceX depends on government contracts. Its Starlink service is reportedly somewhat profitable, but its future prospects of massive growth depend on the (dubious) prospect of government-funded missions to the moon and Mars. If Musk really tries to hold NASA and the Pentagon hostage, well, that has not worked out well for oligarchs in similar circumstances—but that won’t look great for Trump either.

That is government by ultra-billionaire and reality TV charlatan. Terrible, idiotic policies nobody asked for might only be stopped because two world-historical megalomaniacs could not sit down and hash out their differences.

Pass the popcorn please.

[OhForAGreavsie 6,078]

2 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

As Prof Jeffrey Sachs said -you can have the most unhinged president, it doesnt matter, its all a distraction from the puppet masters pulling the strings and the real policy makers

Time was the wealthy used their money to employ politicians to do their bidding. Nowadays they cut out the middle man, take office, and attempt to act directly.

On a more positive note, if Dopey Donnie follows through on his threat to withdraw government contracts from Musk companies it will be a good thing. A very good thing. How a single man can have been allowed to gain control over so much vital US infrastructure, both military and civil, is mindboggling. The politicians who allowed this have created a real life Blofeld; a maverick who can threaten to switch off parts of that infrastructure which the USA, and the world come to that, can't do without.

In case of emergency we might think Dopey could order a forced takeover of certain Musk operations but who knows what fail safes Musk might have built into his systems. Who needs Ian Fleming. 😞

Edited June 6 by OhForAGreavsie

[Vesper 30,234]

Outrage after Republican representative disparages Sikh prayer in the US House

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/us-house-prayer-republican-mary-miller

A Republican congresswoman is facing widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.

Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post on X saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.

Miller at first mistakenly identified Singh as a Muslim and said that it was “deeply troubling” someone of that faith had been allowed to lead prayer in the House and it “should never have been allowed”, Miller posted on X.

“America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it,” Miller continued. “May God have mercy.”

Miller first edited her post to change Muslim to Sikh – then opted to delete it.

Her comments triggered swift outrage, with the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, saying: “It’s deeply troubling that such an ignorant and hateful extremist is serving in the United States Congress. That would be you, Mary.”

Similarly, David Valadao, a Republican congressman of California, said on Friday: “I’m troubled by my colleague’s remarks about this morning’s Sikh prayer, which have since been deleted. Throughout the country – and in the Central Valley – Sikh-Americans are valued and respected members of our communities, yet they continue to face harassment and discrimination.”

Jared Huffman, another Democratic US House member from California, wrote on X: “I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With [representative] Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said on X: “It’s deeply troubling that someone with such contempt for religious freedom is allowed to serve in this body. This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as free nation, and I believe the conduct of its legislators should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.”

Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, also weighed in on Miller’s tweets, saying: “What’s deeply disturbing is the blatant ignorance and anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim xenophobia coming from my colleague across the aisle. There is no place in our country, and especially the halls of Congress, for this hate and intolerance.”

Meng went on to add: “The tweet may have been deleted, but we still have the receipts.”

The Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus (Capac) also condemned Miller, saying she had engaged in “anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim bigotry”.

“Sikhs and Muslims practice two separate and distinct religions, and conflating the two based on how someone looks is not only ignorant, but also racist,” Capac said in a statement.

The Sikh Coalition also responded on X, saying: “To be clear, deleting the tweet is not enough. Congresswoman Miller should apologize for her remarks – to both the Sikh and Muslim communities, because no one should be targeted on the basis of their identity.”

Similarly, the Hindu American Foundation said: “Whichever version of the tweet [Miller] was going with, it is racist, xenophobic and plainly un-American to lash out over a Sikh prayer. When you took your oath of office [congresswoman] Miller, you swore to uphold our constitution, whose first amendment prohibits your establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.”

Miller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

 

same POS:

VIDEO: Mary Miller Praises Hitler, Says His Views on Indoctrinating Youth Should Be Emulated

June 26, 2022

Miller in a PREPARED speech in front of U.S. Capitol on 1/5/21: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said whoever has the youth has the future.”

Taylorville, IL — Mary Miller is no stranger to espousing extreme rhetoric and behavior. Just two days after taking the oath of office, Miller praised Adolf Hitler in a PREPARED (!) speech in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, saying his views on indoctrinating youth should be emulated.

 

 

[OhForAGreavsie 6,078]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

Outrage after Republican representative disparages Sikh prayer in the US House

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/us-house-prayer-republican-mary-miller

A Republican congresswoman is facing widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.

Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post on X saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.

Miller at first mistakenly identified Singh as a Muslim and said that it was “deeply troubling” someone of that faith had been allowed to lead prayer in the House and it “should never have been allowed”, Miller posted on X.

“America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it,” Miller continued. “May God have mercy.”

Miller first edited her post to change Muslim to Sikh – then opted to delete it.

Her comments triggered swift outrage, with the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, saying: “It’s deeply troubling that such an ignorant and hateful extremist is serving in the United States Congress. That would be you, Mary.”

Similarly, David Valadao, a Republican congressman of California, said on Friday: “I’m troubled by my colleague’s remarks about this morning’s Sikh prayer, which have since been deleted. Throughout the country – and in the Central Valley – Sikh-Americans are valued and respected members of our communities, yet they continue to face harassment and discrimination.”

Jared Huffman, another Democratic US House member from California, wrote on X: “I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With [representative] Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said on X: “It’s deeply troubling that someone with such contempt for religious freedom is allowed to serve in this body. This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as free nation, and I believe the conduct of its legislators should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.”

Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, also weighed in on Miller’s tweets, saying: “What’s deeply disturbing is the blatant ignorance and anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim xenophobia coming from my colleague across the aisle. There is no place in our country, and especially the halls of Congress, for this hate and intolerance.”

Meng went on to add: “The tweet may have been deleted, but we still have the receipts.”

The Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus (Capac) also condemned Miller, saying she had engaged in “anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim bigotry”.

“Sikhs and Muslims practice two separate and distinct religions, and conflating the two based on how someone looks is not only ignorant, but also racist,” Capac said in a statement.

The Sikh Coalition also responded on X, saying: “To be clear, deleting the tweet is not enough. Congresswoman Miller should apologize for her remarks – to both the Sikh and Muslim communities, because no one should be targeted on the basis of their identity.”

Similarly, the Hindu American Foundation said: “Whichever version of the tweet [Miller] was going with, it is racist, xenophobic and plainly un-American to lash out over a Sikh prayer. When you took your oath of office [congresswoman] Miller, you swore to uphold our constitution, whose first amendment prohibits your establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.”

Miller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

 

same POS:

VIDEO: Mary Miller Praises Hitler, Says His Views on Indoctrinating Youth Should Be Emulated

June 26, 2022

Miller in a PREPARED speech in front of U.S. Capitol on 1/5/21: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said whoever has the youth has the future.”

Taylorville, IL — Mary Miller is no stranger to espousing extreme rhetoric and behavior. Just two days after taking the oath of office, Miller praised Adolf Hitler in a PREPARED (!) speech in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, saying his views on indoctrinating youth should be emulated.

 

 

America is sleep walking to its own destruction. That's already a disastrous situation but have people noticed how the right-wing lunatics are trying to reverse Britain's fading addiction to the religion drug? How they talk about restoring our judeo Christian values? It's intentional. They are deploying religion for its original purpose; a thought control mechanism. 

[Vesper 30,234]

TRUMP: The US could survive without almost anybody… except me.

 

Crazier than a shithouse rat

[OhForAGreavsie 6,078]

29 minutes ago, Vesper said:

TRUMP: The US could survive without almost anybody… except me.

 

Crazier than a shithouse rat

Wow! That genuinely made me laugh out loud. Hands up any American who would be willing to risk life without trump?

[Vesper 30,234]

What to expect in Rachel Reeves’s spend, spend, spending review

Labour is going big on infrastructure, the NHS and AI. Can the chancellor convince some voters we’re not back in austerity — and others that taxes won’t rise to pay for it?

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/labour-rachel-reeves-spending-review-uk-budgets-9tmk9xmfh

As Rachel Reeves is so fond of telling her cabinet colleagues, she didn’t get into politics to talk about fiscal rules.

This week she will attempt to counter claims she has become the “austerity chancellor” by announcing hundreds of billions of pounds of investment.

The chancellor’s position on ruling out borrowing for day-to-day spending and not raising taxes again has fuelled speculation that she will introduce swingeing spending cuts. However, her team hopes that Wednesday’s spending review will be remembered more for the chancellor’s largesse than her Scrooge-like tendencies.

Despite announcing £40 billion in tax rises — including £25 billion from employer national insurance contributions — and changing the fiscal rules to allow her to borrow to invest, Reeves has so far failed to win much political credit for unlocking an additional £300 billion for investment. On Wednesday she hopes all that will change when she explains how that money will be spent over three years.

The centrepiece will be a £86 billion package for research and development to fund new drug treatments and investment in longer-lasting batteries and AI breakthroughs — up to £500 million will go directly to mayors to fund “innovation clusters” across the country.

The funding, worth more than £22.5 billion a year by 2029-30, will be given to Liverpool to accelerate drug discovery, Northern Ireland to develop defence equipment and south Wales to assist with the design of cutting-edge semiconductors that power devices such as mobile phones and electric cars. Alongside this, nearly £5 million is being invested to kick-start a partnership between the high-growth regions of Manchester and Cambridge, strengthening the link between these hubs of innovation to attract more business investment.

Long-planned transport and infrastructure projects, including the Sizewell C nuclear power plant and a new generation of mini-reactors, and a new railway line between Liverpool and Manchester, will also be approved to fend off Reform UK.

Sir Keir Starmer and Reeves have been criticised for failing to construct a narrative about what this government is for. Since the local elections, when they lost two thirds of their council seats, they have clearly moved from insisting that they need to deal with the finances they inherited to conceding that they need to spend money to improve people’s lives.

This week Reeves will set the budgets of her cabinet colleagues’ departments, which will determine what the year-old Labour government can achieve in the next four years. It will be followed in a fortnight’s time by the industrial strategy as she attempts to give Labour MPs a better economic story after last month’s humiliating U-turn over winter fuel payments for pensioners.

The chancellor is said to have been heavily involved in the decision to extend free school meals to 500,000 more children whose parents are in receipt of universal credit and wants to see investment in crumbling school buildings so they are better than those in which she was taught. To that end, she is expected to fund dozens of new school buildings.

Schools will receive an extra £4.5 billion a year, taking funding for each pupil in England to its highest level yet, according to The Observer. This will pay for teachers’ pay rises announced by the government last month, and an overhaul of special educational needs and disabilities provision.

HM Revenue & Customs is to receive £500 million to overhaul its digital operation to allow AI to take notes and answer queries. The tech will instantly summarise calls to HM Revenue & Customs, so staff spend less time typing up notes and more time helping people. Millions of people will also be able to get instant answers about their tax affairs by consulting the “Ask HMRC” digital assistant.

This is projected to save HMRC about £200 million a year in efficiency savings and productivity gains by 2028-29. As part of an effort to save costs, HMRC is also planning to send 75 per cent fewer letters by 2028-29, saving about £50 million a year. A similar approach will be taken by the NHS, as appointment reminders, invitations, health screenings and test results will be sent to people’s phones, leading to 50 million fewer letters being sent out each year and savings of £200 million.

At present, according to the Treasury, HMRC handles approximately 100,000 calls each day, the DVLA processes about 45,000 letters daily and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs still manages more than 500 paper form-based services.

The Foreign Office will also soon be embracing the digital age. AI will be used to assist diplomatic briefings, while there are also ambitious plans being pioneered by spy agencies to combine files with open-source data to analyse a counterpart’s vulnerabilities and interests before a negotiation. This is expected to help to reduce the number of directors in London from 50 to 30.

On Thursday, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, will give a speech at Mansion House that will include more details on the spending review. This is expected to include plans to spend more than £700 million on embassy buildings, including potentially the refurbishment of the one in Beijing.

Allocating billions of pounds is the easier part of the spending review for Reeves, but the squeeze on day-to-day spending is likely to dominate the headlines. Real-terms spending will grow by an average of 1.2 per cent a year over the three-year spending review period, well down on the 2.5 per cent over Labour’s first two years.

Among the Whitehall departments that have already been forced to make savings is the Department for Work and Pensions, which announced £3.4 billion in welfare cuts in April. The changes, which have prompted a backlash among Labour MPs, are due to be voted on before the end of the month. However, disability claimants could be given more time to seek support as part of a series of tweaks to the proposals to soften the blow, which could be announced as soon as this week. Any changes to the two-child benefit cap are not expected until the autumn budget.

The Department of Health and Social Care is expected to be the biggest winner with a boost of up to £30 billion at the expense of other public services. Since Labour came to power, the NHS has already had an additional £22.6 billion as a “down-payment” on the forthcoming ten-year plan. Significant amounts of the extra day-to-day spending cash will probably be diverted to pay awards for doctors and nurses.

With the increasing costs of medicines, technology and an ageing society there may be little left to fuel the health secretary Wes Streeting’s ambitions, which are due to be announced in the ten-year plan for the NHS next month.

Analysts claim that holding the Department of Health’s capital budget flat in real terms over the period may have serious consequences for the government’s new hospitals programme and existing NHS buildings.

Siva Anandaciva, director at the King’s Fund health think tank, said: “Dilapidated buildings and outdated equipment lead to poorer care for patients and severely hamstring efforts to improve how productive the NHS is.

“If the NHS’s access to long-term capital investment is going to be held down yet again, there simply won’t be enough money available to both replace the existing and increasingly unsafe buildings parts of the NHS use, while also building the modern community-based facilities the future health service will need if the government’s hopes to transform the health service are going to be realised.”

Reeves’s decision to prioritise health, after agreeing an increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, has led to a series of rows with other cabinet ministers. And despite the defence lift, pressure on the budget is likely to continue. The Nato chief, Mark Rutte, who is meeting Starmer on Monday, is said to be pushing for members of the military alliance to commit 5 per cent towards defence-related spending at a summit this month. In reality, 3 per cent is more likely.

The chancellor and John Healey, the defence secretary, are said to back plans for a “defence, security and resilience bank”, modelled on institutions such as the World Bank, which could command as much as £100 billion in capital and would be funded by western governments.

This weekend, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, are still holding out over funding for police and councils, and have warned Reeves during heated negotiations that cuts will put some of the government’s pledges on crime and housing at risk. A source said: “Nothing’s settled until everything is settled and we are still working final things through with No 10 and the Treasury.”

Sources close to Cooper denied that she had had a “bust-up” with Reeves but admitted there had been “tough conversations”. The Treasury offered a front-loaded settlement under which there would be more money upfront but tighter budgets in the second and third years, according to a source familiar with the discussions. A senior Whitehall source blamed Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, for the last-minute negotiations with the outstanding departments.

Another source added: “If you want a glimpse into the dystopian AI future, where the world is run by autocratic robots devoid of any emotion or humanity, then you need to spend five minutes in a meeting with Darren Jones.”

It’s not just within the cabinet where wariness of the Treasury is growing. The public now trust Reform as much as Labour on the economy despite Starmer warning that the party’s sums don’t add up and comparing Nigel Farage to Liz Truss.

According to a poll of more than 2,000 people by the think tank More in Common, voters were as likely to trust Reform as Labour on the economy (both at 22 per cent). In a head-to-head between Starmer and Farage, the public were split; 51 per cent chose the prime minister and 49 per cent chose Farage.

Britons tended to think Reform posed a threat to the economy, but many thought it was worth the risk. By a margin of 46 per cent to 29 per cent, voters thought that a Reform government would pose a risk to the economy — but 40 per cent said that Reform could not be any worse than the other parties. By a large margin of 49 per cent to 15 per cent, voters supported Reform’s policies on tax and welfare.

A quarter of Britons thought we were returning to austerity, and a further 27 per cent thought we never left. Only 22 per cent said that we were not returning to austerity. In slightly better news for Reeves, the perception of public services and public finances slightly improved compared with October when the government released its first budget, although views on the economy remained very negative. Satisfaction with public services rose from minus 56 to minus 37, and satisfaction with public finances rose from minus 61 to minus 49. But satisfaction with the economy remained at minus 56.

Luke Tryl, the director of More in Common, said: “After a rocky first year, avoidable missteps and U-turns, it’s not an understatement to say this spending review is a make-or-break moment for the government’s relationship with the public.

“The good news [for Labour] is the public have low expectations for the spending review with most assuming it won’t make Britain any better; the bad news is many people are now starting to look at Nigel Farage’s offer on the economy.

“It’s striking that despite voters’ concerns about Reform’s inexperience they are now as trusted as Labour on the economy, and Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer are neck-and-neck on economic competence.

“If Labour are to have a hope of arresting Reform’s momentum they will have to use next week to show that they get it, are taking real steps to improve living standards, improve public services and shielding the most vulnerable from the impact of cuts.”

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, described the spending review as a “growth test” for Whitehall. He is among a group of mayors across England advocating for the devolution of powers to local authorities to implement visitor levies on overnight stays, aiming to boost tourist infrastructure and regional growth.

Andy Burnham

The proposed visitor levy, similar to those in Scotland and Wales, would involve a small charge on overnight accommodations. The Liverpool city region estimates it could generate nearly £11 million annually. 

Burnham said: “The spending review is a growth test for Whitehall and I’m waiting and hoping it passes it. Its usual modus operandi is to trade in fudges and play the long game while keeping hold of all the cards. The problem is growth doesn’t come from that.”

Edited June 8 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,234]

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

6 hours ago, Vesper said:

Trump has caused the LA riots. 

For years every time I have been there you see queues of Hispanics outside all the large corporate shops and warehouses early in the morning -its cheap disposable labour for the billionaires.

Sending in troops to cause trouble, and letting the rich employers off the hook. Classic tactics by the idle rich.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola says the images of children being killed during Israel’s war on Gaza are “painful” and have left him “deeply troubled”.

The Spanish manager of the English Premier League club urged the world to speak up instead of choosing to stay silent “in the face of injustice”

“It’s so painful what we see in Gaza. It hurts all my body,” Guardiola said.

“Maybe we think that when we see four-year-old boys and girls being killed by bombs or being killed at a hospital, which is not a hospital any more, it’s not our business. Yeah, fine, it’s not our business. But be careful – the next four- or five-year-old kids will be ours.”

 Half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are children.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 17,400 children, including 15,600 who have been identified, in Gaza. Many more remain buried under the rubble and are presumed dead.

AP Press

[Vesper 30,234]

UK places sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers for inciting West Bank violence

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich face travel bans and asset freezes as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway also impose measures

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/10/uk-and-allies-sanction-two-far-right-israeli-ministers-itamar-ben-gvir-bezalel-smotrich-over-monstrous-gaza-comments