WILL CLIMATE-DRIVEN HEATWAVE MAKE THE CASE AGAINST BIG TECH DATA CENTERS? The rise of global temperatures has made oppressive summer heatwaves an annual occurrence, and for many Americans, air conditioning is no longer optional, Stephen Prager noted at CommonDreams (7/2).
But as scorching temperatures bear down on the US once again this summer, affecting more than 250 million people across the country, some are suddenly being forced to share the precious cool air with data centers that have popped up in their towns to power the breakneck build-out of artificial intelligence technology.
To keep their massive arrays of computer servers cool, these complexes require large amounts of energy even in normal times. But during a heatwave, the demand becomes even greater.
As power grids become strained, residents of communities with data centers are being asked to make sacrifices in the form of cost, comfort, and potentially safety.
In Henrico County, Virginia, which has 37 data centers, thousands of county employees received an email in Jne from County Manager John Vithoulkas warning them that beginning on July 1, the rate paid by “government and school facilities will increase dramatically—by 25%, increasing costs by an estimated $5 million next fiscal year.”
“To mitigate the impact of higher electric costs, I am asking that we, collectively, make slight adjustments to conserve electricity across our individual workspaces,” he said in the email, which was obtained by 404 Media. “Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day,” he continued. “Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight.”
He also informed them of the high cost of running “space heaters,” which Frank Landymore of Futurism.com suggested was a thinly veiled way of telling residents to turn down the AC, since nobody would be using space heaters in 100-degree heat.
It was a signifier of what’s happened across the entire mid-Atlantic grid, whose largest operator, PJM Interconnection, is experiencing record energy demand.
According to Reuters, the grid that supplies power to 67 million people has seen a roughly 1,000% increase in capacity prices since 2024 as a result of the AI boom, which is already being passed onto consumers in the form of higher bills.
To reduce the risk of outages caused by an overburdened grid, the US Department of Energy granted PJM the authority to require data centers to operate backup diesel generators.
Under the emergency order, Politico reported, data centers are allowed to produce enough diesel emissions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would categorize it as a “possible human carcinogen.”
The result has been what Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, told The Associated Press could be “a disaster for the local air quality” in communities with data centers.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, where a Markley Group data center sits in the working-class Sacred Heart neighborhood, residents told the AP that they were staying inside to avoid smelling the diesel fumes being belched up near their homes.
TRUMP BRAGS ABOUT BEING SOFT ON CRYPTO INDUSTRY THAT BROUGHT HIS FAMILY $5 BILLION. President Donald Trump boasted about how lax his administration has been in pursuing investigations into the cryptocurrency industry, Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams (7/6).
Speaking at the White House July 6, Trump attacked former President Joe Biden’s administration for prosecuting cryptocurrency industry figures for a wide variety of crimes related to money laundering and fraud.
“They were very violently against [the crypto industry],” Trump said. “They were putting people in jail. What they were doing to the crypto world, it was horrible. It’s amazing that it survived that onslaught, it was a weaponization of government.”
Trump explained he drew support from the industry by coming out in favor of it during the 2024 presidential campaign, adding that “every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I said, ‘You’re lucky I’m president.’”
During his second term, Trump has not only taken a hands-off approach to the crypto industry; he also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023.
This pardon drew allegations of corruption given that Binance has been a major financial booster of World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture backed by the Trump family that has added billions of dollars to their total wealth.
Even as Trump has personally raked in money from selling his own memecoin, many of his supporters who invested in it have lost significant sums of money.
The New York Times reported that nearly 1 million people who invested in the Trump memecoin have recorded losses totaling $3.8 billion since its launch in 2025.
The Times noted, “Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down” because he “collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.”
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, ripped the president for boasting about going easy on the industry that he’s personally profiting from.
“The Trump family has made over $5 BILLION in corrupt crypto deals,” Casar wrote in a social media post. “Now Trump is openly bragging that his government won’t investigate cryptocurrency-related crimes. Corruption, plain and simple.”
DESPITE TRUMP’S DEMAND FOR AI INVESTMENT, TREASURY WARNS INDUSTRY POSES ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ TO US ECONOMY. While President Donald Trump’s administration has regularly hyped up the development of artificial intelligence, a draft US Treasury Department report warns that the AI industry could be a financial bubble that will ultimately damage the American economy, Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams (7/6).
NOTUS, which obtained a copy of the Treasury Department analysis, reported on Monday that it “is a significant departure from the Trump administration’s public tone, which has focused on encouraging unrelenting investment to unlock exponential growth.”
Career analysts at the department find that, while many AI firms are on firmer financial footing than the dotcom companies in the late 1990s, they are also much more deeply integrated with the US economy.
Because of this integration, these firms “pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed, or various chokepoints stymie growth,” wrote NOTUS.
The report also says that the investments being made into AI infrastructure are so big that they risk damaging the entire financial system if they do not meet certain metrics for productivity growth and profitability.
“Fears of an AI bubble have grown over the last year, including on Capitol Hill, among some Wall Street observers and executives, inside think tanks and even within the ranks of top AI principals,” the NOTUS report added. “Prominent economists and institutions... have also raised concerns about overvaluation of AI firms and the risks they pose to the broader economic system.”
Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), noted in an analysis published July 3 that AI’s long-promised boost to productivity isn’t yet showing up in data.
Citing the most recent jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Baker found that AI’s impact on productivity growth at the moment is “invisible.”
“The index of aggregate hours grew at a 1.3% rate in the quarter. With [gross domestic product] growth likely coming in close to 2%, we are looking at productivity growth around 1%,” Baker explained. “That follows growth of 0.3% in the first quarter and 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025. There is zero evidence of any sort of productivity uptick in these data.”
Baker argued that this was a contrast with the dotcom era, when productivity growth averaged roughly 2.8% over a four-year period in the late 1990s before the bubble burst.
“We would need rates of productivity growth in the neighborhood of 4% to generate the sort of profits needed to make sense of current market levels,” Baker wrote. “It is surprising that the continuing weakness of productivity doesn’t bother stock investors more.”
There are also questions about AI’s ability to turn a profit.
A July 6 report in The New York Times highlighted the predicament of Chinese tech company Alibaba, whose open-source AI model has become extremely popular while at the same time being unprofitable.
“In the first three months of this year, Alibaba reported $1.3 billion in revenue from AI-related products—less than 4% of its total revenue,” reported The Times. “That pales in comparison with the company’s plan to spend more than $55 billion by the end of next year to build out its AI infrastructure.”
Richard Lin, a vice president at the Silicon Valley firm Datastrato, told the Times that concerns about AI profitability extend beyond Alibaba and to the industry as a whole.
“There isn’t an AI company with a sustainable business model right now,” said Lin. “It’s not a healthy industry.”
TRUMP ADMITS PRO-DEMOCRACY RESOLUTION WOULD DESTROY GOP. US President Donald Trump July 5 attacked a pro-democracy resolution ntroduced by key House Democratic caucus leaders, warning that the measure’s adoption would strike a fatal blow to the Republican Party, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (7/6).
“They do this, and the Republican Party is DEAD!” Trump wrote in a social media post, citing a Politico story on the resolution. The proposal, unveiled in July by the heads of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, calls for the restoration and strengthening of voter protections gutted by the US Supreme Court as well as court reforms—including possible expansion of the number of justices and term limits.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the CPC, wrote July 5 that Trump’s post amounted to an acknowledgment that “the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans.”
“At least he admits it,” the progressive leader wrote on social media.
Politico reported that while the resolution “stands virtually no chance of adoption” in the current GOP-controlled Congress, “it is the latest indicator of how the Congressional Black Caucus and other key Democrats want to respond to the April decision that cleared the way for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts”—a reference to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
Trump seized on the ruling to push state-level Republicans to aggressively gerrymander their maps ahead of the critical 2026 midterm elections. The president is also pressuring congressional Republicans to force through legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and documentation requirements nationwide, potentially blocking millions of American citizens from casting ballots under the pretext of cracking down on noncitizen voting—something that is already illegal and rare.
Trump is currently holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage in a bid to get the stalled SAVE America Act through Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) affirmed that Republicans intend to attach the assault on voting rights to a filibuster-proof budget reconciliation package in a last-ditch effort to get the measure through the Senate, where it has not received enough support to clear the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshold. Trump has called for elimination of the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, but Senate Republicans have thus far declined to remove the barrier.
DEMOCRATIC VOTERS ARE KICKING ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATES TO THE CURB. Democratic voters are mad as hell about the state of the country—and they are punishing even their own lawmakers for it, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (7/6).
Five incumbent House Democrats have lost primary bids so far to political upstarts, including most recently longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, who fell to progressive Melat Kiros in the June 30 primary.
Meanwhile, three House Democrats who ran for statewide office lost their primaries in Illinois and Texas, with three others at risk of succumbing to the same fate. And multiple other longtime Democratic elected officials—including Maine Gov. Janet Mills and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett—were also rejected by Democratic primary voters in their own states.
In sum: Democrats are facing an anti-establishment fervor similar to the one the Republican Party has been grappling with since 2010, with primary voters demanding that their elected officials stop the opposing party’s president—even when their position in the minority prevents them from doing just that.
Most concerningly, however, is that this anti-establishment undercurrent could cost Democrats in must-win statewide races this fall, the same way it has for Republicans over the years.
It’s likely why Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the Wolverine State’s Democratic Senate primary on Sunday, which is a race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
McMorrow’s support had collapsed in the three-way contest between Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing former public health official who has the support of high-profile Democratic Socialists, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“When they go low, we don’t go high,” El-Sayed said, according to Politico. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”
However, national Democrats fear that El-Sayed and his brand of politics could be less electable in a swing state like Michigan. And political prognosticators now wonder whether McMorrow dropping out paves the way for Stevens to consolidate moderate support and beat El-Sayed in the Aug. 4 primary.
McMorrow, for her part, did not endorse either candidate. She said that whoever wins the primary will have her “full support.”
While Michigan’s Senate field is yet to be set, the anti-establishment rage Democratic primary voters are unleashing is already causing problems in Maine.
Democrat Graham Platner’s victory in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary is imperiling Team Blue’s chances at winning back the Senate, as Platner’s list of personal transgressions could cause him to lose the race to odious and cowardly Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Republicans know all too well how scandal-plagued nominees can cost winnable races.
In 2010, the anti-establishment undercurrents stopped Republicans from winning back the Senate even as the GOP romped its way to victory in the House. That’s because Republican primary voters nominated unelectable freakazoids in races in Nevada and Delaware.
The same thing happened in 2022, when Republicans nominated scandal-ridden and bizarre candidates in Senate contests in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, leading Democrats to retain their Senate majority.
This November is likely to be favorable to Democrats since President Trump’s unpopularity is dragging Republicans down with him.
But if the past is prologue, even wave years can’t push some candidates across the finish line if they are too radical or scandal-ridden to appeal to voters. Let’s hope Democrats don’t learn that lesson the hard way.
ISRAEL REPORTEDLY PLOTTED TO ASSASSINATE TOP IRANIAN NEGOTIATORS TO DERAIL PEACE TALKS WITH US. Trump administration officials reportedly believed that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators—including the country’s foreign minister—during peace talks with the US in an effort to sabotage diplomatic progress, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (7/3).
The New York Times reported July 2 that “American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.” In response, the US “went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials,” according to The Times, which cited unnamed current and former American officials.
The US and Israel have killed dozens of top Iranian officials since launching their illegal joint war in late February. But the allied countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list in late March, opening the possibility of high-level negotiations to end the war.
But Israel remained bent on targeting the negotiators, according to The Times, whose reporting was corroborated by the Washington Post.
The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April, when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Pakistan’s capital to meet with US Vice President JD Vance:
Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.
But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.
Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.
Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mohammadi and the two officials said.
The Post reported that “cracks emerged” between the US and Israeli approaches to the war following Israel’s assassination of top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March.
“They’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump told reporters in late March, suggesting Israel’s assassination campaign was making it difficult to find potential negotiating partners.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the new reporting that “Israel is a state that, on paper, is a US partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine US diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the US engages with in crucial negotiations.”
“I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi added.
At present, the Israeli government is endangering tenuous US-Iran peace talks with its continued assault on Lebanon, which Iran has made a key factor in the negotiations.
US OLYMPIC ATHLETE INDICTED FOR TOUCHING TRUMP’S INFAMOUSLY BOTCHED REFLECTING POOL RENOVATION. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro on July 2 announced her office had secured a felony indictment against former US Olympic athlete David Hearn for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams (7/2).
In a press conference announcing the charges, Pirro accused the 67-year-old Hearn of “forcefully and violently pulling up and removing the bottom liner” of the Reflecting Pool last month.
“We will not allow our sacred monuments to be roped off or diminished or in any way impacted by disgruntled individuals who think that they and not the rest of the nation have the right to decide what should happen,” Pirro said. “These landmarks and monuments belong to all of us, and they must be protected for generations to come.”
If convicted, Hearn faces up to 10 years in prison.
The Olympian was first arrested last month after he was seen reaching into the pool, which had been undergoing renovations ordered by President Donald Trump.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Hearn said that he simply put his hand in the water and touched a piece of lining in the pool that was already peeling off.
“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told the paper. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
Norm Eisen, an attorney who is representing Hearn, accused the Trump administration of using his client as a scapegoat for the botched pool renovation, which has been plagued by intense algae blooms, peeled lining, and dead ducks.
“These charges are outrageous and should be alarming to every American,” said Eisen. “This indictment reflects the administration’s efforts to shift blame from their own failures.”
“On the eve of our nation’s Independence Day,” Eisen continued, “Americans should be deeply concerned by the misuse of government power against an ordinary system based on a concocted narrative.”
JOBS REPORT FOR JUNE OFFERS ‘GRIM WARNING SIGNS’ FOR CASH-STRAPPED WORKING FAMILIES UNDER TRUMP. As President Donald Trump’s team on July 2 tried to paint the June jobs report as positive, economists and congressional Democrats called it “weak” and “disappointing,” with some also ripping the Republican administration’s harmful policies, from sweeping tariffs and the Iran War to the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (7/2).
The nation’s economy added just 57,000 jobs in June, or roughly half of what economists had anticipated, according to the latest monthly report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS noted that “both the unemployment rate, at 4.2%, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, changed little in June.”
The Department of Labor (DOL) agency also revised job gains down for May by 43,000 and April by 31,000, and said that “over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.5%.” That’s notably lower than the 4.2% annual inflation rate detailed by BLS a few weeks ago, as Americans struggle to afford groceries, housing, and other basic necessities during Trump’s second term.
“Today’s weak jobs numbers are grim warning signs of a struggling labor market,” Alex Jacquez, a former Obama administration official who is now Groundwork Collaborative’s chief of policy and advocacy, said in a statement.
“Job gains reflect temporary seasonal hires and other workers separated from the broader economy while the majority of the labor force is frozen,” he explained. “Working Americans increasingly report that their paychecks can’t keep up with Trump’s high prices, but are not confident they’ll be able to find better opportunities. They’re instead focused on trying to keep up with the president’s price hikes.”
Angela Hanks, a former DOL senior official who’s now chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, similarly called the report “yet more evidence of a fragile economy under President Trump, with job growth coming in well below expectations and sizable downward revisions to the last two months.”
“While the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 4.2%, this number only tells us how many people are working—it doesn’t tell you whether people can afford to live,” she stressed. “The reality behind today’s jobs numbers is that the cost of living continues to outpace paychecks: 43% of Americans now say they’re worse off financially than they were a year ago, and year-over-year wage growth came in at 3.5%, below overall inflation of 4.2%—meaning that real wages are falling.”
“Looking beyond the topline numbers, more than half of all June job growth was concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, continuing a trend of these sectors propping up much of our economy,” she pointed out. “The labor force participation rate declined sharply and widely, with nearly every demographic group seeing declines, which partially explains the drop in the unemployment rate. Moreover, certain racial and age disparities actually worsened: Black youth unemployment rate rose to a whopping 26.8%, as did Hispanic youth unemployment, coming in at 20.1%—a reminder that this economy is not delivering for workers who are struggling the most.”
TRUMP PROVIDES $300 MILLION IN EARTHQUAKE RECOVER MONEY TO VENEZUELA, SITS ON $8 BILLION IN STOLEN OIL REVENES. The Trump administration has seized at least $8 billion worth of Venezuela’s oil wealth since it overthrew President Nicolás Maduro in January, according to The New York Times.
Now, as Venezuela struggles to cope with a catastrophic pair of earthquakes in late June that killed at least 3,300 people and left tens of thousands injured and homeless, and 41,000-50,000 people reported missing, the US is providing just $300 million in humanitarian aid, a small fraction of the money it purloined Stephen Prager noted at CommonDreams (7/6).
The Associated Press reported on July 6 that international rescue teams have begun to pull out as hopes of finding missing loved ones alive dwindle each day after the disaster.
Shortly after deposing Maduro, US President Donald Trump declared that the US “took over Venezuela ... and the oil is flowing.”
Economist Francisco Rodriguez has found that during the first quarter of 2026, after Trump overthrew Maduro and the US began expropriating Venezuelan oil, the country experienced the lowest rate of economic growth since 2021, even as oil exports rose.
As Roxanna Vigil, a former senior sanctions policy adviser at the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, explained in an article for the Council on Foreign Relations last month, “almost 100 million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”
“While the Trump administration has repeatedly framed this control as benefiting both countries, it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds,” she added.
According to an initial report by the United Nations Development Program, the quakes caused $6.7 billion worth of damage.
Former US Ambassador to Venezuela Jimmy Story credited what he said was a “robust” US effort to provide aid. But he told Reuters that it called into question “the transparency over the oil fund,” and asked, “Will these funds be released for the disaster response?”
