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unemployment
Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
"We have moved from development blocked to development reversed," said the UN official behind a new report.
Sep 25, 2026
Israel’s US-backed military assault on Gaza has not only caused mass death and destruction; it has also created “the world’s most severe economic crisis on record,” according to Pedro Manuel Moreno, the acting secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Moreno presented a recent report at a press conference on Thursday showing that 92% of economic establishments in Gaza—including shops, factories, restaurants, and farms—have been damaged or destroyed since Israel launched its assault on the territory in October 2023 and reduced most of its infrastructure to rubble.
Less than 1.5% of cropland across the strip remained accessible and undamaged, while more than half of its hospitals and primary health clinics have been rendered nonfunctional.
Compared with 2022, Gaza’s main productive sectors have been almost entirely wiped out: Agricultural and industrial output were each down 94%, while construction was down 99% in 2025. With most of its economic capacity destroyed, unemployment in the exclave skyrocketed to 78% in 2025, while tremendous scarcity led prices to soar to 274% above 2022 levels.
Dropping to just 17% of its 2022 level, Gaza’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita cratered to $212 in 2025, equivalent to about 58 cents per person per day.
"Productive capacity is wiped out while the entire population is displaced and condemned to multidimensional poverty," said UNCTAD's coordinator for assistance to the Palestinians, Mutasim Elagraa, who led work on the report. "By multidimensional poverty I mean not just income poverty; it's also a lack of proper shelter, a lack of access to basic services like health and education and sanitation."
"Before the onset of this crisis in October 2023, two out of three residents were poor," Elagraa continued. "Today, everyone in Gaza is multidimensionally poor."
These conditions have increased the territory's reliance on outside aid, which Israel has often blocked, leading UN experts and human rights organizations to accuse its leaders of using starvation and deprivation as "weapons of war."
The International Criminal Court has found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who gave a defiant speech denying Israel's responsibility for genocide at the UN General Assembly Thursday—bears criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
The report estimates that $71.5 billion will be needed for recovery and reconstruction, as well as $35.2 billion in physical infrastructure damage and $22.7 billion in economic and social losses.
"Restoring the collapsed health system, rebuilding destroyed education infrastructure and other public infrastructure will need to go together while restoring productive capacity, employment, functioning markets and the ability for businesses to operate," Moreno said. "Peace cannot be built on a collapsed economy."
Though the report emphasizes how Israel's bombardment has brought near-apocalyptic conditions upon the strip, it notes that Gaza's economic deprivation dates back decades before the Hamas-led attack in October 2023, which was the catalyst for the unprecedented assault.
It noted that 59 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine had severely stunted its economic growth, particularly as it tightened its blockade of Gaza in the last two decades.
Previous UNCTAD analyses have shown that between 2006, a year before Israel began its land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza, and 2022, Gaza's real GDP per capita fell by 37% while its productive economy, including agriculture and manufacturing, was hollowed out by Israel's restrictions on movement and imports. Even before 2023, nearly half of Gaza's workforce was unemployed, roughly two-thirds lived in poverty, and 80% depended on international aid.
“The central message of this report we are talking about today is that about six decades of occupation have hollowed out the Palestinian economy and de-developed it,” Elagraa said. “We have moved from development blocked to development reversed, and now decades of human development that has been achieved in Gaza has been wiped out."
"Although the intensity of destruction is far more in Gaza" than in the West Bank, he said, the report showed the "destruction" to be "a dramatic escalation of a pattern that dates back to 1967 with the onset of occupation."
"The report," he said, "maintains that history did not start in October 2023."
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AI Is Changing Work—Our Unemployment Insurance System Must Change With It
A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers, and would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work.
Jun 25, 2026
For millions of workers, the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of work is no longer theoretical. It is already showing up in layoffs, hiring freezes, shrinking departments, and growing anxiety about whether the paycheck families rely on today will still exist tomorrow.
But the most important question is not simply which jobs AI will eliminate. It is whether workers will have any real support when those jobs disappear.
While policymakers, executives, and economists debate which industries will thrive and which occupations will disappear in the age of AI, working Americans are focused on more immediate concerns: paying rent, affording groceries, covering childcare, and figuring out how they would support their families if their income suddenly vanished.
Workers are right to worry, because the system meant to help them through job loss is already failing to meet this moment.
While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone.
America’s unemployment insurance system was built for a different era entirely, one in which AI was nonexistent. It was built for an era that assumed stable full-time employment, long-term employer relationships, and relatively predictable layoffs. Today’s economy looks nothing like that.
Millions of workers now move between part-time jobs, contract work, temporary positions, caregiving responsibilities, and periods outside the workforce entirely. But unemployment insurance rules still exclude many of those workers from receiving help when they need it most.
Today, only about 1 in 4 unemployed workers receive unemployment benefits nationwide. In some states, fewer than 13% received support at all. And even when workers do qualify, benefits are often too low and too short-lived to keep families financially stable while they search for new work.
The result of this broken system is families scrambling to avoid financial free fall: draining savings accounts, falling behind on rent, or taking the first low-paying jobs they can find because they can’t afford to wait for something better.
That disconnect is already visible. While the number of unemployed workers has climbed sharply over the past year, unemployment claims have remained relatively flat—not because people are unaffected, but because so many workers are locked out of a system that no longer reflects the realities of modern work.
The first wave of AI disruption is already here. As adoption of these technologies increases, more workers will cycle between jobs, more families will navigate periods of unemployment, and more people will be forced to rebuild after losing work through no fault of their own.
And those burdens will not fall equally. Women—especially Black women, who are disproportionately represented in clerical and administrative jobs—are among the workers most vulnerable to displacement. Workers of color already face persistently higher unemployment rates because of structural inequities in the labor market. Yet when they lose work, they are significantly less likely to receive unemployment benefits and the economic stability those benefits are supposed to provide.
That reality is colliding with an already fragile economy. Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that college graduates are now experiencing recession-level rates of unemployment. Over the last year, unemployment among young college graduates averaged 5.5%—the highest sustained level outside the brief peak of the Covid-19 pandemic since the aftermath of the Great Recession.
These are graduates who were told that if they worked hard, earned a degree, and applied themselves, they would find stability and opportunity. Instead, many are entering a labor market defined by uncertainty and shrinking opportunities, all while facing a weakening safety net.
That is why modernizing our unemployment systems must be part of the AI conversation.
A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers. It would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work. It would make it easier, not harder, for eligible workers to receive support. And it would actually be prepared to withstand economic downturns.
Unemployment insurance should be understood for what it truly is: economic infrastructure.
Just as roads and bridges help goods move through the economy, unemployment insurance helps people move through economic change without falling into crisis. A strong UI system gives people the stability to search for good jobs instead of being pushed into the first low-wage position available. It stabilizes families, communities, and local businesses during periods of disruption.
The age of stable employment is fading. More workers will inevitably face periods of transition, disruption, and job loss in the years ahead.
While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone. Modernizing unemployment insurance is not simply a matter of compassion. It is a matter of economic readiness.
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Please Note, Trump's Vicious Attack on Migrant Workers Has Not Created a Golden Age of Job Creation for Americans
It was Trumpian silly to think that mass deportation of immigrants was going to lead to a huge wave of jobs for native born workers.
Jun 08, 2026
It probably is not a surprise to most people outside the Trump administration, but it looks like their mass deportation has not done much to help the native-born workforce. The unemployment rate for native-born workers in May was 4.2%. That’s up from 4.1% last May, and 3.8% in May of 2024, when Joe Biden was in the White House, and immigrants were taking all the jobs.
This outcome shouldn’t be a big surprise to people who have given the issue much thought. Most of the jobs that immigrants do are not ones that native-born workers are lining up for. Few people born in this country want to work on farms picking lettuce or tomatoes or in meat-processing plants. It’s the same story with low-paying jobs such as home health care aides or custodians.
It was Trumpian silly to think that mass deportation of immigrants was going to lead to a huge wave of jobs for native born workers. In fact, as much research has shown, immigrant workers tend to act as complements to native-born workers, not substitutes.
This is perhaps most clearly seen in the construction industry, where close to 30% of the workforce are immigrants. The availability of lower-cost immigrant labor allows many projects to go forward that would not otherwise. In this way, it is a net job gainer for native-born workers. This is likely true in many other areas as well.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that immigrants never lower the wages of native-born workers. There are likely cases where workers on H1-B visas have reduced the wages of workers in some occupations, even if the effect of the program in general may still be positive. I am also confident that if we eased the immigration barriers to foreign-trained doctors, the pay of our doctors would not still be twice as high as in other wealthy countries, thereby lowering healthcare costs.
Also, negative impacts may not be reversible. There is now solid evidence that opening trade to China cost the US millions of manufacturing jobs. That doesn’t mean that putting up tariffs will bring the jobs back. Half a century ago, the meat-packing industry had many good-paying union jobs that were later taken by low-paid immigrants. Chasing away immigrants now will not bring those good-paying jobs back.
Anyhow, the results to date are clear. Trump’s mass deportation has not led to any sort of windfall for native-born workers. As the Trumpers say, “Trump was wrong about everything.”
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'People Are Loving What's Happening,' Trump Claims While Massacring Iranian Children as US Oil Prices and Unemployment Spike
"Republicans in Congress and President Trump are focused on spending $1 billion a day on a needless war with Iran that is already jacking up prices for Americans," noted one expert.
Mar 06, 2026
President Donald Trump made clear in a new interview with Politico that he either doesn't understand or won't accept the US public's response to his and Israel's war on Iran, which they're waging while Americans face rising unemployment and gasoline prices on top of high costs for other essentials, from groceries to housing.
According to Politico White House bureau chief Dasha Burns:
Speaking in a phone call Thursday, Trump was entirely on offense. He brushed off worries about the impact of the Iran war on gas prices and US ammunition reserves, and he insisted that the military onslaught was popular with voters. Many recent public polls show the opposite is true, although a survey released Thursday by Fox News found voters have mixed opinions on Iran...
"People are loving what's happening," Trump said. "We're taking out a threat to the United States of America, major threat... and doing it like nobody's ever seen before."
A roundup of recent polling collected and published Friday by Strength in Numbers data journalist G. Elliott Morris shows roughly half of Americans disapprove of the war on Iran, while only 38% approve.
Despite the polling, the GOP-controlled Congress has refused to rein in Trump's assault on Iran. Democratic US Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) and four Democrats in the House of Representatives—Congressmen Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Greg Landsman (Ohio), and Juan Vargas (Calif.)—voted with nearly all Republicans this week to block a pair of war powers resolutions.
In the interview with Politico, Trump described the Iranian military as "decimated," and said that "we'll work with the people and the regime to make sure that somebody gets there that can nicely build Iran but without nuclear weapons."
As of Thursday, the Iranian government put the death toll at 1,230 people, including around 175 killed in a reported "double-tap" strike on a girls' elementary school. Israel has denied responsibility and top US officials have only said they're looking into it. A New York Times analysis concluded that the United States was "most likely to have carried out the strike," which killed mostly children. According to Reuters, US investigators also believe that American forces were behind the bombing.
Separately, the Times reported that two boys' schools—one elementary and one middle—southwest of Tehran "appeared to have been damaged on Thursday during the bombing campaign being conducted by the United States and Israel," though unlike with the earlier attack in Minab, "there were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries."
In addition to discussing Iran, Trump told Politico that "Cuba's going to fall, too," but "they want to make a deal." He also addressed Venezuela, whose president was recently abducted by US forces and replaced with a deputy who agreed to let Trump control the nationalized oil industry; his frustration with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who continues to combat a Russian invasion; and his recent spat with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which the president "fired" because of its refusal to let the Pentagon end the AI firm's policies against autonomous killer robots and mass surveillance of Americans.
With Trump focused on various conflicts abroad, Americans are contending with some of the consequences, including the impact on petroleum. Business Insider reported Friday that "the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline climbed to $3.32 on Friday, according to AAA—that's an 11.4% increase from last week's price and the highest level since August 2024."
Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed Friday that the US economy lost 92,000 jobs last month.
"Trump's reckless economic agenda has forced the labor market into the negative, threatening the livelihoods of American workers," responded Alex Jacquez, a former Obama administration official who's now chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative. "As the president piles on blanket tariffs and oil prices soar, today's report confirms he's sent the economy straight into a stagflation spiral."
The new jobs data came after the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that a record number of US workers are raiding their retirement savings. The top reasons for the surge in 401(k) withdrawals were avoiding eviction or paying off medical expenses.
Americans are facing an even more dire healthcare situation this year, due to Medicaid cuts in Trump and congressional Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which also gave the rich more tax breaks—as well as their refusal to extend expired Affordable Care Act subsidies that helped tens of millions of people pay for health insurance.
"We should all be concerned about the slowing economy we've seen in the second Trump administration," Angela Hanks, a former Department of Labor official who's now chief of policy programs at the Century Foundation, said Friday. "The economy lost thousands of jobs this month including in healthcare and social services, the main sectors previously propping up the labor market."
"Healthcare, childcare, and manufacturing—sectors Americans rely on—all lost jobs last month with no plan from the Trump administration on how to fix it," Hanks added. "Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and President Trump are focused on spending $1 billion a day on a needless war with Iran that is already jacking up prices for Americans."
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Working People Must Recognize the Basis of Class Struggle
Polls suggest that working people are becoming more aware that our economic model is failing them. Regrettably, this increasing discontent stops at addressing the symptoms rather than the cause cemented into our economic model.
Mar 01, 2026
Currently working people are inveterately distracted with attacks on the Constitution by MAGA gangsters, thugs, and reprobates.
Another distraction is the heinous protection of the international cabal of rich men guilty of exploiting young girls in the Epstein criminal network.
A third distraction is indoctrinating working people into supporting a glutted military budget while cutting programs for working people.
Distractions
General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned working people in 1961 of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model.
It results in violations of international laws to protect corporate profits in foreign countries like Venezuela; that includes the murder of innocent civilians in cruising boats.
However, a not so obvious din of these distractions is designed to numb Americans from zeroing in on the foundation of their chronic economic adversity and anxiety.
That foundation is the wage and salary construct of our economic model.
Economic Model Decline
The symptoms of the decline of our economic model are well documented.
The Ludwig Institute of Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported a functional unemployment rate in November 2025 of 24.8%. LISEP reported a real inflation rate of 9.4%.
Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, (ALICE) reported that 42% of households in the US were below the ALICE threshold of poverty.
The underemployment rate reported by the Burning Glass Institute in February 2024 was 52% for college graduates.
These are chronic symptoms of an economic model that cannot provide an equitable and moral distribution of employment opportunities. If you harbor the belief that anyone here can become rich or wealthy, think again.
Progressives recognize that the Republican Party has devolved into a fascist cult. The evidence is Project 2025 and screams daily that our government is being replaced by rich con artists inside the Trump administration swamp.
However, polls do suggest that working people are becoming more aware that our economic model is failing them.
Regrettably, this increasing discontent stops at addressing the symptoms rather than the cause cemented into our economic model.
Many progressive politicians, scholars, academics, and journalists go to the water's edge of the cause, but cravenly avoid a discussion of the that cause.
Upton Sinclair’s assertion in 1935 is applicable:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. (“I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked”)
Root Cause
The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model. To understand how that model is inherently exploitative and inequitable, the basics must be understood.
The following is a simplified example on that process.
The primary purpose of our economy is to return a private profit to the business owner.
The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing.
There are two types of investment that the business owner must spend.
First is expenditures on space, plant, machinery, tools, hardware, software, technological advances, and raw materials. This includes legal registrations, licenses, permits, and financial services. Often, the business owner inherits the business so this expenditure may be minimized.
Next, the business owner must purchase the physical or mental efforts of the employees. It is realized in the form of wages and salaries.
The employees create the products or services that the business owner sells in the market. In spite of the delusions of many business owners, no business owner creates those products or services alone. It is a social process.
If the business owner paid the employees the salary and wages equal to the value of the products or services created by them, there would be no profit.
Hence, there would be no reason to continue the business. Moreover, the business owner must compete with other business owners to sell as much as possible and minimize costs. Parenthetically, layoffs and recessions crushing working people are the usual remedy for the business owner.
Specific Example
The business owner must sell the products or services created by the employees at a price above the amount spent on wages and salaries.
In this example, a male employee works a typical nine to five workday.
In that workday, the employee works for wages or a salary that will allow him to maintain himself or his family.
However, inside that workday is the key to the exploitation and moral flaw in this economic process. It appears that the employee is being paid for working a full day, but that is not the case.
The business owner must calculate the amount paid to the employee based on how much is required for a private profit.
The employee is working some hours to provide a profit for the owner and some hours to maintain himself or his family.
In this example, in one workday the business owner pays $50 an hour for all the initial expenditures listed above to create one product.
The employee must be paid to create the product or service. By an arbitrary calculation of the business owner, it is $10 an hour.
The business owner must sell the product or service in the market by charging an amount above what has been spent already to produce it. It was created for $50 plus $10 which equals $60.
However, the business owner must sell the product or service for $70 each to obtain a profit of $10. The “new” value of the product or service is $70, yet it cost $60 to create.
If the employee created a product or service that is worth $70, it is inescapable that the employee is not being compensated for the value that he created. This is basic exploitation of unpaid labor and, in most spiritual belief systems, immoral.
Perceptive Voices
Pope John XXIII wrote on this subject:
We therefore consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner. (Mater et Magistra May 15, 1961)
Martin Luther King commented on this moral flaw:
We are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism... There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children (1966)
Malcolm X, American Muslim leader, spoke at one of his speeches at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1964:
You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.
Consequences
The inherent exploitation of our economic model begins at the wage and salary level. From there we organize, produce, transport and distribute goods and services. Private profit for the business owner supersedes all other values.
In the US we have seen the values of community, family, and social sentiment diminished. Those values are overwhelmed by a tsunami of advertising urging working people into a conspicuous consumption of material items whether needed or not.
Simultaneously is the harsh economic reality for working people. The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing. Those opportunities are quality and affordable healthcare, smart and accessible education, safe and comfortable housing, healthy nutrition, and a clean environment.
This dilemma can be addressed by providing the material opportunities above with policies formed by the best of spiritual and secular values.
That can only be realized by a transition to an economic model based on realistic democratic principles and collective profits.
Otherwise, the present economic immiseration and despair will continue to transform working people into a morass of fear and hatred seeking scapegoats to blame. They will become an alienated, vapid mass of untethered individuals at the mercy of the soulless and parasitic oligarchs who live off the products and services of their labor.
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Report Details How Trump Economic Agenda ‘Will Make Ordinary Families Reliably Poorer in the Future’
In just one year, Republicans' 2025 budget package is expected to increase income inequality at quadruple the rate seen over the past 40 years.
Feb 24, 2026
President Donald Trump's economic agenda "will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future," according to the author of a report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
Josh Bivens, EPI's chief economist, said Trump's slashing of federal spending and jobs, mass deportations, chaotic tariffs, and anti-labor policies were suppressing hiring and wages, draining household and business spending, and slowing economic growth.
While a recession is not yet inevitable, Bivens argued that worrying signs are already on the horizon, with 1.4 million fewer new jobs than expected in 2025 and unemployment ticking up to 4.4%, up from the low of 3.4% in April 2023.
For low-wage earners, the past year has been particularly rough. After seeing unusually fast growth during the presidency of Joe Biden, real wages for the bottom 10% of earners fell by 0.3% in 2025.
The report predicts that Republicans' 2025 budget package will reduce “aggregate demand” in the coming years. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts $100 billion annually from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while allowing health insurance subsidies that saved families thousands to expire, which the report projects will cause many families who rely on these benefits to pull back spending in the economy.
While the law reduced taxes, the vast majority of those benefits went to the wealthiest earners, whose spending was already much less constrained by their incomes.
The report notes the astonishing increase in inequality caused by the law. Between the years of 1979 and 2019, which were considered to have seen an explosion of wealth inequality, the share of income claimed by the richest 10% increased by about 0.25% per year.
It found that the GOP budget law will, in just one year, increase the top decile's share of wealth by a full percentage point. In other words, the rate of inequality will "quadruple in its first year."
Aside from this major driver of inequality, the report also says that the Trump administration's hostility toward collective bargaining rights and its mass firings of federal workers would further suppress wages by making the labor market less competitive, and that the president's erratic tariff regime would make those wages less valuable by fueling inflation.
“Disastrous policy choices that led to excess unemployment, slower growth in the economy’s productive capacity, and rising inequality have made life less affordable for typical families in recent decades," Bivens said. "The Trump administration’s policies double down on the worst policy decisions of this period and will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future, even if an outright recession or spiking inflation does not happen."
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Alone for the Holidays? Blame Late Stage Capitalism
Loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Dec 29, 2025
The holidays can be the loneliest time of year, when isolation, family fractures, and economic strain become especially hard to bear. The shopping frenzy and glittery lights don’t substitute for real belonging—they often make its absence more painful.
Worse, many people blame themselves for not feeling the cheer. Scroll through Instagram or watch a holiday film, and it appears as though everyone else is finding love, meaning, and connection this holiday season. If you’re not, it’s easy to believe you’ve done something wrong.
But loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Self-help culture offers some useful advice about boundaries, rest, and self-care. But it rarely acknowledges the larger truth: Loneliness is not something most people can solve on their own. The answer isn’t “retail therapy” or a vacation in Maui. It’s building belonging into our collective experience.
We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top.
That means addressing an economic system that systematically excludes growing numbers of people from security, dignity, and meaning. It means reclaiming political system that have been captured by moneyed insiders. And it’s creating the shared spaces—especially in-person spaces—where people are welcomed to contribute, be known, and find support.
How Did Isolation Get so Widespread?
For decades, we were told that rugged individualism was the path to success. We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top. Relationships were treated as less important rather than necessities. Capitalism required a flexible labor force, and we reorganized our lives accordingly.
At the same time, political participation has increasingly been reduced to fundraising. Those without wealth are invited to donate or volunteer, but many sense—accurately—that real power belongs to those who can write big checks. The rest of us have little influence over the decisions shaping our lives.
The places that once supported everyday connection have also eroded. Public squares, community centers, and informal gathering places have been replaced by commercial spaces designed for efficiency and extraction, not belonging. And the economy that once supported a middle class has been hollowed out by big corporations with little use for Midwest steel mills or family farms, leaving behind empty downtowns, shuttered factories, and frayed social ties.
During the road trip across the United States that led to my book, The Revolution Where You Live, I encountered small towns and urban neighborhoods that were quiet, even desolate. That experience stayed with me during a visit to Tübingen, a town in Germany, where I asked a friend about a strange noise drifting through the streets. She laughed. “That is the sound of people talking,” she said. The town square had been closed to traffic and was filled with market stalls, laughter, and neighbors greeting each other as they shopped for holiday gifts.
Design Matters
Today’s loneliness epidemic creates vulnerability. When people lack meaningful connection, they are more susceptible to groups that promise belonging, identity, and purpose—whether at political rallies or in online spaces. For some, belonging is created by excluding other identities and even spewing hate. Research suggests isolation can contribute to radicalization, though it does not determine it. Belonging can be mobilized toward many ends.
Isolation also takes a toll on physical and mental health, contributing to higher rates of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, depression and even dementia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What Would It Look Like to Design for Belonging Instead?
At a time of impending war, political extremism, climate crisis, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, this may seem like the least urgent question to ask. But moments of upheaval are also moments of reinvention. The direction we take depends in part on whether people feel they have a place, a voice, and something to offer.
Designing for belonging starts with economic participation. Workplaces and businesses can be designed to offer participation, dignity, and a shared stake through cooperatives, employee ownership, and models that reward contribution rather than extraction. We can stop giving tax breaks and head starts to corporations that drain communities, and leave behind pollution and unemployment. Instead we can support enterprises with long-term commitments to place: those that make food, housing, healthcare, and childcare affordable and rooted.
People power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible.
It also means rebuilding shared spaces—places where people can simply be, or sing, talk, trade, make art, share food, teach, and support one another. Inviting places where people come to get to know those of different races, generations, ways of life—and where fear and prejudice lose their grip simply because people are no longer strangers.
Political and social movements can use language that invites people in as collaborators, not just donors or spectators. Belonging that is at the center of our work can counter the burnout that plagues so much civic and social change work. When people experience the dignity of having something to offer, the sense of community and mutual support can make participation as joyful as a good party
Belonging may feel like a squishy topic at a time of authoritarianism, war, and corporate dominance. But people power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible. Connection and belonging are easy to overlook when they are present, but when they are missing, our health, sense of purpose, and optimism suffer. Authentic connections are sources not only of well being but of power—and together they form the foundations for a better, more inclusive world.
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Whatever Happened to Trump’s 'Golden Age' for American Workers?
Trump administration policies have lowered wages, reduced employment, and made work less safe.
Dec 29, 2025
Although President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.
Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from former President Joe Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25%.
America’s farmworkers, too―many of them desperately poor―are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost US farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.
As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30% of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official US government poverty level.
“Since Inauguration Day... the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people."
Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers. Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by bringing them up to the federal minimum wage level, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage. In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.
Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it thanks to inflation. And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving such workers of key labor rights, including minimum wages and overtime pay.
Not surprisingly, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025 that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8%.
Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.
Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any sort of clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the huge wind farms off the East Coast is predicted to cause the firing of thousands of workers.
Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging, and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving US manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 US manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.
Consequently, US unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4%, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6%. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.
Worker safety and health have also been seriously undermined by the Trump administration. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30%, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.
Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80%.
Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year. Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and, also, weakened workplace safety penalties for businesses.
In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for 1 out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.
In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day... the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack: On federal workers. On our unions and collective bargaining rights. On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on... On our democracy itself.”
Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the president and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.
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As Americans Face Affordability Crisis, Two-Thirds Say Trump Policies Mainly Favor the Rich
Sen. Tammy Baldwin said that when Trump gives his economy high marks, "it is so clear that he's talking about the economy for him, his billionaire friends, his billionaire Cabinet members."
Dec 22, 2025
As Americans increasingly struggle with the cost of living, nearly two-thirds now say President Donald Trump's policies favor the wealthy over everyone else, according to poll results published Sunday.
When respondents were asked by a CBS News/YouGov poll back in March who they felt the president's policies were most geared toward, already a majority, 55%, said the wealthy were benefiting the most, while 33% said his policies benefited everyone equally. Just 1% said his policies would most benefit the poor.
Since then, Trump has imposed a series of regressive tariffs that have driven inflation up, costing the average family an extra $1,200 this year, according to an estimate by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress.
He also passed what has often been described as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history. After July's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the top 1% of earners are poised to pay over $1 trillion less in taxes over the next decade.
Meanwhile, its cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies are expected to result in around 15 million people losing health insurance, while roughly 4 million—including 1 million children—will see cuts to their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
When CBS/YouGov asked the same question nine months later, the number who said Trump's policies favored the wealthy had shot up by 10 points to 65%. The number who said they'd benefit everyone equally has dropped by about the same amount, and Trump convinced no one that he was primarily looking out for the poor.
Trump's approval ratings have hit record lows in 2025, with the economy—once the area where Americans had the greatest faith in him—now serving as one of the biggest sources of backlash.
Last week, after months of delay, a Labor Department report showed that unemployment had climbed to 4.6% in November, the highest rate since 2021—nearly 50,000 manufacturing jobs, which Trump's tariffs are supposedly meant to protect, were shed between February and September. At the same time, wage growth has decelerated to 3.5% year-over-year, the department said.
Just 18% told CBS News/YouGov they felt as if they were financially better off since Trump took office, while 50% said they were worse off. Thirty-two percent said they were about the same.
When not simply pretending that the economy has improved under his watch—as he did in his primetime address last week—Trump and his allies have blamed economic sluggishness on his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
But Americans largely do not buy this framing: 47% say Trump's policies are more responsible for the state of the US economy today, while just 22% still predominantly blame Biden, and another 22% say both are equally to blame.
Last week, Trump said his economic performance deserves an "A++++." But just 5% of voters gave him an A. Instead, 24% gave him an F, another 25% gave him a D, and 26% gave him a C.
In a post on social media, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said that when Trump gives his economy high marks, "it is so clear that he's talking about the economy for him, his billionaire friends, his billionaire Cabinet members."
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Trump Economy 'Stalling Out' as Unemployment Rate Hits Highest Level in 4 Years
"Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families."
Dec 16, 2025
Federal data belatedly released Tuesday shows that the US unemployment rate rose to the highest level in four years last month as President Donald Trump's administration continues its assault on the government's workforce and American corporations lay off workers at a level not seen in decades.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, up from 4.4% in September, according to the Labor Department report, whose release was delayed due to the recent government shutdown.
US employers added 64,000 jobs last month following the loss of 105,000 jobs in October, fueled by the Trump administration's large-scale layoffs of federal workers. The manufacturing sector, which Trump has promised to bolster with his tariff regime, shed 5,000 jobs in November, according to the newly published federal data.
Over the past six months, the US has averaged just 17,000 jobs added per month—a number that underscored concerns about the frailty of Trump's economy.
"Today’s long-awaited jobs report confirms what we already suspected: Trump’s economy is stalling out and American workers are paying the price," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative. "Far from sparking a manufacturing renaissance, Trump’s reckless trade agenda is bleeding working-class jobs, forcing layoffs, and raising prices for businesses and consumers alike. Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families.”
Another notable trend in today's payroll release is the gradual slowdown in nominal wage growth. As the unemployment rate rises, workers struggle to find jobs and have less leverage when it comes to demand higher wages. Both indicate a slowdown in affordability for workers and their families.
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— Elise Gould (@elisegould.bsky.social) Dec 16, 2025 at 10:17 AM
The new figures were released after Trump kicked off a tour of battleground states in an effort to defend his economic policies, which voters—including many of the president's own—increasingly blame for driving up prices. Trump and White House officials have insisted, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the US economy is stronger than it's ever been.
Julie Su, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former acting head of the Labor Department, said Tuesday that "for months, Donald Trump and his administration have been hiding data about the economy, leaving workers and employers in the dark when trying to make critical hiring decisions."
"But you can’t hide the reality every American knows," said Su. "An economy where costs are too high for people to afford the basic necessities and also can’t find jobs is an economic crisis that requires massive change so that working people can actually come out on top."
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