Politics

Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had worked to help U.S. diplomats understand his homeland. Then DOGE put his family’s lives at risk by exposing his sensitive work for a U.S.-funded nonprofit.

• Errors: DOGE staffers exposed a sensitive U.S.-funded Afghanistan program and falsely suggested a contractor was involved in an off-books mission.
• Consequences: DOGE’s public outing led to a Taliban intelligence service crackdown in Kabul.
• Fight: The Afghan scholar whom DOGE exposed is fighting to clear his name after his family was forced to flee the country.

A New York state appeals court on Thursday overturned as overly punitive a nearly $500 million civil penalty against President Donald Trump, but left in place a finding of fraud based on records that inflated the value of Trump’s business holdings.

A five-judge panel of the New York Appellate Division for the First Department disagreed over aspects of the case and the trial court’s ruling that awarded $465 million to the state after finding Trump liable for fraud, issuing three opinions that spanned more than 300 pages.

Two judges concluded that the finding of liability against Trump was correct, two said errors in the trial court meant a new trial should be held, and one judge said the case was wrongly decided.

Still, all five judges agreed the penalty was excessive, and the two judges who’d called for a retrial joined the two upholding the decision “for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal” to the state’s highest court, according to the decision.

Photo: "Musk, Milei Trump" by [argentina.gob.ar Gobierno argentino] is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Republished under Creative Commons, Original Article by People's World.

NEW ORLEANS—Multibillionaire Elon Musk won and workers lost as a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the National Labor Relations Board’s structure is unconstitutional.

If upheld, the August 19 decision, authored by Donald Trump-named Appellate Judge Donnald Willett, throws U.S. labor law up for grabs.

Willett’s ruling was approved 3-0 by a panel of three GOP-named judges. It leaves unanswered the question of what comes next.

If the decision stands, the U.S. could return to the Wild West days of widespread and sometimes violent corporate repression of workers, reminiscent of the 1930s.

But by ruling the NLRB’s makeup, and that of its administrative law judges, unconstitutional, the ruling also could set workers free from the corporate-created obstacle course unions must hurdle to win recognition and achieve first contracts.

Congressional Republicans and federal judges, at corporate behest, have erected that legalistic maze against union organizing and tactics since 1947.

The probability that Musk eventually triumphs is high. Judge Willett specifically noted that on March 5, the Justice Department abandoned defense of the NLRB’s administrative law judges, and of the board itself–after Republican anti-worker President Donald Trump took power.

Brought case and won

Musk brought the case, and won in U.S. District Court in rural and deep-red Texas, before a Trump-named judge there. Then, the Democratic Biden administration was still in power and it took the case higher up. Trump named two of the three appellate judges, including Judge Willett. GOP President George W. Bush named the other.

Two other employers also contended the NLRB was unconstitutional and the New Orleans-based appellate panel, one of the most right-wing courts in the country, rolled all three together.

“These disputes do not implicate wages, hours, working conditions, or even union representation. They have nothing to do with employee boycotts, union organization, or labor strikes,” Judge Willett declared.

“Nor do the employers seek to block the board from adjudicating any particular unfair-labor-practice charge. Rather, the claims concern the separation of powers” in the U.S. Constitution.

“The employers challenge the structure of the board itself—specifically, whether its members and administrative law judges are too insulated from presidential removal.” They are, and that makes the NLRB unconstitutional, the appellate court ruling says.

“Administrative law judges may be removed only ‘for good cause’” and are insulated from arbitrary firings, Judge Willett added. That’s too limiting, the ruling declares.

Musk’s SpaceX and the other two firms involved committed unfair labor practices—the formal name for labor law-breaking. SpaceX fired workers who stood up for themselves, in this case over severance pay, or lack of it.

The other two firms broke labor law for other reasons. But all said the shielding of the administrative law judges from presidential firing is unconstitutional, and thus so is the entire NLRB structure. They sought and got preliminary injunctions from federal courts in deep-red rural Texas.

Willett’s ruling in the appellate court upheld the injunctions, sided with Musk and said his firm and the others would suffer “irreparable harm” if they had to obey rulings from unconstitutionally protected administrative law judges.

“ALJs are inferior officers insulated by two layers of for-cause removal protection—an arrangement the Supreme Court and this circuit have both held unconstitutional,” Judge Willett declared.

The employers sued “for declaratory and injunctive relief against” the NLRB because the board is “presently pursuing an unconstitutional administrative proceeding against them.”

Neither Musk nor unions had any immediate comment on the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat.

But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs.

Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees.

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos.

The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail.

• Slashed Autism Funding: RFK Jr. promised to identify the causes of autism but has eliminated parts of his agency actively investigating them and has cut millions in funding for autism research.
• Silent on Rollbacks: Once an ardent environmentalist who took on big polluters, RFK Jr. has been silent on Trump’s dismantling of efforts to combat climate change and pollution.
• Conflicting Priorities: RFK Jr. helps lead an administration that is reversing regulations on pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.

Any such effort, said one democracy watchdog, "would violate the Constitution and is a major step to prevent free and fair elections."

After months of degrading transgender athletes under the guise of protecting women’s sports, right-wing media weirdos are suggesting the WNBA “embrace” the sexualization of its players

MAGA media personalities can’t stop talking about the WNBA — not because of the players’ athleticism, but because people keep throwing adult toys onto the court during games. After degrading transgender athletes under the guise of protecting women’s sports, right-wing media weirdos are once again demonstrating their utter disdain for women athletes by mocking the incidents and suggesting the WNBA “embrace” the sexualization of its players.

Whether the goal is to rough up liberals, hunt down brown people, or help Donald Trump obscure his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Republican governors are glad to dispatch troops to help the president occupy the nation's capital.

• Law enforcement officers responded to protests against immigration raids in and around Los Angeles between June 6 and 14 with excessive force and deliberate brutality.
• Local, state, and federal law enforcement’s aggressive response to these protests violently oppressed the public’s right to express outrage and the media’s right to report safely.
• All law enforcement agencies involved should respect the right to protest and ensure that those responsible for abuse are held to account.

Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.

Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.

At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel's public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation.