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'If we choose to allow technology to plunge us into a new age of inequity,' writes Penny, 'then maybe we deserve to be replaced by robots.' (Photo: Universal Robots)
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that's obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. "If machines produce everything we need," Hawking wrote in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared - or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution."
As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it.
According to two new books by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the automation of up to 60 per cent of current jobs in America, and by extension other nations, is all but inevitable. This time, as Martin Ford argues in Rise of The Robots, education and upscaling won't help us. There will simply be fewer jobs to go around, as everything from accountancy to journalism will be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently by machines. The result, as Jerry Kaplan agrees in Humans Need Not Apply, is that billions will be left destitute - unless we radically rethink our way of keeping people fed.
We've seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it's not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right - it's the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.
There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford's basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That's fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn't you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don't you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal - and that's the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice - but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes - but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn't matter whether you're a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern - the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else's profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us.
The automation crisis need not be a crisis at all - but the simplest solutions are too radical to be raised by anyone but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a job title with the authority of "Archbishop of Canterbury" under the moral logic of modern economics. Martin Ford is neither an economist nor a political theorist, but I imagine that when he says that in order to save us all from armies of robot scabs, "a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules will be required", powerful people will listen. Kaplan and Ford's books propose the same solution, and it's one that socialists have been suggesting for generations: a universal basic income. This is not a new idea. Campaigners for social justice have long proposed a basic income as a way to solve every social ill caused by the fact we all have to earn a living, from drug trafficking to gender inequality. Kaplan and Ford, however tell us that there's an even more important reason to consider it - because it might be the only way to save capitalism from itself.
The logic is solid: if nobody can afford to buy the goods and services all these robots are producing, global markets will collapse. World capitalism cannot be sustained, Ford argues, on luxury consumption alone. It turns out that the only way to save the system might well be massive wealth distribution and total reorganisation of the wage system.
That sounds rather a lot like socialism to me. Ford insists that it isn't - it's merely common sense, and everyone knows that socialism can't be common sense. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Kaplan nor Ford push beyond their policy proposals to imagine what such a future - a world where everyone is guaranteed an income, and wage work is a choice - could really look like. This, surely, is the most thrilling promise of an automated future. What could we become, as a species, if most of our useful years were not taken up by working, looking for work, or doing essential domestic and caring tasks to sustain that work? One thing's for certain: it's either going to be wonderful, or it's going to be disastrous. If we don't get fully automated luxury liberalism, in Ford's words, "the plutocracy [might] shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones."
Automation offers us two options. Just two. The first is that we finally, collectively, break our addiction to disaster capitalism and do what needs to be done to create a future where human beings can reach their full potential. The second is that we don't. And we might not. Just because the answer to the "threat of mass unemployment" is obvious does not mean that we will take it. It is just as likely that the magical thinking of market fundamentalists will prevail in the field of automation just as it has in the field of environmental protection and topple us all into a chaos where only the very rich can survive, for a time, alone in their climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. That's the other solution. Whether it's the solution we choose will determine, far more than any job-thieving algorithm, what it truly means to be human. As Professor Hawking observed: "So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
If we choose to allow technology to plunge us into a new age of inequity, then maybe we deserve to be replaced by robots. If the human race can't get it together to fix this basic bug in our collective survival matrix, then maybe it's time for us to step aside and let the metal guys have a try. Perhaps it would be kinder, if capitalism continues its current suicide canter, to breed our children and grandchildren of sterner stuff than flesh - with hearts that don't break in the face of inhumanity, because they are made of silicon and steel.
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Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that's obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. "If machines produce everything we need," Hawking wrote in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared - or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution."
As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it.
According to two new books by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the automation of up to 60 per cent of current jobs in America, and by extension other nations, is all but inevitable. This time, as Martin Ford argues in Rise of The Robots, education and upscaling won't help us. There will simply be fewer jobs to go around, as everything from accountancy to journalism will be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently by machines. The result, as Jerry Kaplan agrees in Humans Need Not Apply, is that billions will be left destitute - unless we radically rethink our way of keeping people fed.
We've seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it's not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right - it's the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.
There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford's basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That's fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn't you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don't you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal - and that's the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice - but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes - but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn't matter whether you're a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern - the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else's profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us.
The automation crisis need not be a crisis at all - but the simplest solutions are too radical to be raised by anyone but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a job title with the authority of "Archbishop of Canterbury" under the moral logic of modern economics. Martin Ford is neither an economist nor a political theorist, but I imagine that when he says that in order to save us all from armies of robot scabs, "a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules will be required", powerful people will listen. Kaplan and Ford's books propose the same solution, and it's one that socialists have been suggesting for generations: a universal basic income. This is not a new idea. Campaigners for social justice have long proposed a basic income as a way to solve every social ill caused by the fact we all have to earn a living, from drug trafficking to gender inequality. Kaplan and Ford, however tell us that there's an even more important reason to consider it - because it might be the only way to save capitalism from itself.
The logic is solid: if nobody can afford to buy the goods and services all these robots are producing, global markets will collapse. World capitalism cannot be sustained, Ford argues, on luxury consumption alone. It turns out that the only way to save the system might well be massive wealth distribution and total reorganisation of the wage system.
That sounds rather a lot like socialism to me. Ford insists that it isn't - it's merely common sense, and everyone knows that socialism can't be common sense. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Kaplan nor Ford push beyond their policy proposals to imagine what such a future - a world where everyone is guaranteed an income, and wage work is a choice - could really look like. This, surely, is the most thrilling promise of an automated future. What could we become, as a species, if most of our useful years were not taken up by working, looking for work, or doing essential domestic and caring tasks to sustain that work? One thing's for certain: it's either going to be wonderful, or it's going to be disastrous. If we don't get fully automated luxury liberalism, in Ford's words, "the plutocracy [might] shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones."
Automation offers us two options. Just two. The first is that we finally, collectively, break our addiction to disaster capitalism and do what needs to be done to create a future where human beings can reach their full potential. The second is that we don't. And we might not. Just because the answer to the "threat of mass unemployment" is obvious does not mean that we will take it. It is just as likely that the magical thinking of market fundamentalists will prevail in the field of automation just as it has in the field of environmental protection and topple us all into a chaos where only the very rich can survive, for a time, alone in their climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. That's the other solution. Whether it's the solution we choose will determine, far more than any job-thieving algorithm, what it truly means to be human. As Professor Hawking observed: "So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
If we choose to allow technology to plunge us into a new age of inequity, then maybe we deserve to be replaced by robots. If the human race can't get it together to fix this basic bug in our collective survival matrix, then maybe it's time for us to step aside and let the metal guys have a try. Perhaps it would be kinder, if capitalism continues its current suicide canter, to breed our children and grandchildren of sterner stuff than flesh - with hearts that don't break in the face of inhumanity, because they are made of silicon and steel.
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that's obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. "If machines produce everything we need," Hawking wrote in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared - or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution."
As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it.
According to two new books by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the automation of up to 60 per cent of current jobs in America, and by extension other nations, is all but inevitable. This time, as Martin Ford argues in Rise of The Robots, education and upscaling won't help us. There will simply be fewer jobs to go around, as everything from accountancy to journalism will be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently by machines. The result, as Jerry Kaplan agrees in Humans Need Not Apply, is that billions will be left destitute - unless we radically rethink our way of keeping people fed.
We've seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it's not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right - it's the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.
There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford's basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That's fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn't you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don't you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal - and that's the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice - but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes - but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn't matter whether you're a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern - the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else's profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us.
The automation crisis need not be a crisis at all - but the simplest solutions are too radical to be raised by anyone but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a job title with the authority of "Archbishop of Canterbury" under the moral logic of modern economics. Martin Ford is neither an economist nor a political theorist, but I imagine that when he says that in order to save us all from armies of robot scabs, "a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules will be required", powerful people will listen. Kaplan and Ford's books propose the same solution, and it's one that socialists have been suggesting for generations: a universal basic income. This is not a new idea. Campaigners for social justice have long proposed a basic income as a way to solve every social ill caused by the fact we all have to earn a living, from drug trafficking to gender inequality. Kaplan and Ford, however tell us that there's an even more important reason to consider it - because it might be the only way to save capitalism from itself.
The logic is solid: if nobody can afford to buy the goods and services all these robots are producing, global markets will collapse. World capitalism cannot be sustained, Ford argues, on luxury consumption alone. It turns out that the only way to save the system might well be massive wealth distribution and total reorganisation of the wage system.
That sounds rather a lot like socialism to me. Ford insists that it isn't - it's merely common sense, and everyone knows that socialism can't be common sense. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Kaplan nor Ford push beyond their policy proposals to imagine what such a future - a world where everyone is guaranteed an income, and wage work is a choice - could really look like. This, surely, is the most thrilling promise of an automated future. What could we become, as a species, if most of our useful years were not taken up by working, looking for work, or doing essential domestic and caring tasks to sustain that work? One thing's for certain: it's either going to be wonderful, or it's going to be disastrous. If we don't get fully automated luxury liberalism, in Ford's words, "the plutocracy [might] shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones."
Automation offers us two options. Just two. The first is that we finally, collectively, break our addiction to disaster capitalism and do what needs to be done to create a future where human beings can reach their full potential. The second is that we don't. And we might not. Just because the answer to the "threat of mass unemployment" is obvious does not mean that we will take it. It is just as likely that the magical thinking of market fundamentalists will prevail in the field of automation just as it has in the field of environmental protection and topple us all into a chaos where only the very rich can survive, for a time, alone in their climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. That's the other solution. Whether it's the solution we choose will determine, far more than any job-thieving algorithm, what it truly means to be human. As Professor Hawking observed: "So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."
If we choose to allow technology to plunge us into a new age of inequity, then maybe we deserve to be replaced by robots. If the human race can't get it together to fix this basic bug in our collective survival matrix, then maybe it's time for us to step aside and let the metal guys have a try. Perhaps it would be kinder, if capitalism continues its current suicide canter, to breed our children and grandchildren of sterner stuff than flesh - with hearts that don't break in the face of inhumanity, because they are made of silicon and steel.
"The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' latest effort to block additional American arms sales to Israel failed again late Wednesday at the hands of every Republican senator and some Democrats.
But a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus voted in favor of Sanders-led resolutions that aimed to halt the Trump administration's sale of 1,000-pound bombs, Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits, and tens of thousands of assault rifles to the Israeli government.
The first resolution, S.J.Res.41, failed by a vote of 27-70, and the second, S.J.Res.34, failed by a vote of 24-73, with the effort to block the sale of assault rifles to the Israeli government garnering slightly more support than the bid to prevent the sale of bombs.
The following senators voted to block the assault rifle sale: Sanders, Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Angus King (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
And the following senators voted to block the sale of additional bombs: Sanders, Alsobrooks, Baldwin, Blunt Rochester, Duckworth, Durbin, Heinrich, Hirono, Kaine, Kim, King, Klobuchar, Luján, Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Murray, Schatz, Shaheen, Smith, Van Hollen, Warnock, Warren, and Welch.
Three Democratic senators—Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan—did not vote on either resolution.
"Every senator who voted to continue sending weapons today voted against the will of their constituents."
In a statement responding to the vote, Sanders said growing Democratic support for halting arms sales to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an indication that "the tide is turning" in the face of Israel's "horrific, immoral, and illegal war against the Palestinian people."
"The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza," the senator said. "The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future."
Wednesday's votes revealed a significant increase in support for halting U.S. military support for the Israeli government compared to earlier this year, when only 14 Democratic senators backed similar Sanders-led resolutions.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who did not vote on the Sanders resolutions in April, said Wednesday that "this legislative tool is not perfect, but frankly it is time to say enough to the suffering of innocent young children and families."
"As a longtime friend and supporter of Israel, I am voting yes to send a message: The Netanyahu government cannot continue with this strategy," said Murray. "Netanyahu has prolonged this war at every turn to stay in power. We are witnessing a man-made famine in Gaza—children and families should not be dying from starvation or disease when literal tons of aid and supplies are just sitting across the border."
The Senate votes came days after the official death toll in Gaza surpassed 60,000 and a new poll showed that U.S. public support for Israel's assault on the Palestinian enclave reached a new low, with just 32% of respondents expressing approval. The Gallup survey found that support among Democratic voters has cratered, with just 8% voicing approval of the Israeli assault.
"The vast majority of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide, and have repeatedly demanded that their party's elected officials in Congress stop helping President Trump deliver more and more weapons to Israel with our tax dollars," Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, said Wednesday. "Tonight proved that an increasing number of Democrats in the Senate–more than half of the Democratic caucus–are hearing that demand."
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, called the vote "unprecedented" and said it "shows that the dam is breaking in U.S. politics."
"Our job is to increase the pressure on every member of Congress to stop all weapons and military funding," said Miller. "For 22 months, the U.S. has enabled, funded, and armed the Israeli government's slaughter and starvation in Gaza, and still the majority of senators just voted to continue sending weapons to a military live-streaming its crimes against humanity."
"The overwhelming majority of Americans want to stop the flow of deadly weapons to the Israeli military and end U.S. complicity in its horrific genocide against Palestinians," Miller added. "Every senator who voted to continue sending weapons today voted against the will of their constituents."
The Republican coalition targeted California and New York, both home to doctors who have been targeted by legal cases for allegedly providing abortion pills to patients in states with strict bans.
While a recently filed lawsuit in Texas jeopardizes the future of telehealth abortions, some Republican state attorneys general don't want the GOP-controlled Congress to wait for the results of that case, and this week urged leaders on Capitol Hill to consider passing federal legislation that would restrict doctors from shipping pills to patients to end their pregnancies.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority ended nationwide abortion rights with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization three years ago, anti-choice state lawmakers have ramped up efforts to restrict reproductive freedom. At the same time, some Democratic officials have enacted "shield laws" to protect in-state providers and traveling patients.
Led by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, 16 state AGs on Tuesday wrote to top congressional leaders from both parties, calling on them to "assess the constitutional authority it may have to preempt shield laws."
Griffin also sent cease-and-desist letters to two entities shipping abortion medication within the United States and two website companies that provide services to LifeOnEasyPills.org. Reporting on the AG's press conference, South Carolina Daily Gazette noted that "if the entities don't cease advertising abortion pills in Arkansas, Griffin said his office may bring a lawsuit against them for violating the state's deceptive trade practices law."
While Griffin also "said he believes what he is asking lawmakers to do is different from a federal abortion ban that the closely divided Congress has seemed hesitant to tackle," according to the Daily Gazette, advocates for reproductive rights disagreed.
Responding to the letter to Congress on social media, the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All shared a petition opposing a national abortion ban. It says that Republican President Donald Trump "has proven time and time again that he is out of touch with the 8 in 10 Americans who support protecting abortion rights."
"On the campaign trail he spewed whatever lies he could to get him reelected. Now he'll use the Project 2025 playbook to further restrict our right to access abortion, contraception, fertility treatments, and more," the petition warns. "We must stop him."
Yesterday, 16 Republican attorneys general sent a letter to congressional leadership urging them to override state telemedicine abortion shield laws.Sign the petition below to stand up to Republican lawmakers!act.reproductivefreedomforall.org/a/no-nationa...
[image or embed]
— Reproductive Freedom for All (@reproductivefreedomforall.org) July 30, 2025 at 3:48 PM
In addition to Griffin, the Tuesday letter is signed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The GOP coalition targeted two states, arguing that "when New York or California refuses to respect a criminal prosecution or a civil judgment against an individual who is accused of violating the abortion laws of another state, they are refusing to give full faith and credit to that state's judicial proceedings."
Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against a provider in New York. He sued Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), for providing two drugs used in medication abortions—mifepristone and misoprostol—to a 20-year-old resident of Collin County.
In February, on the same day that Texas State District Judge Bryan Gantt ordered Carpenter to pay over $100,000 in fines and fees, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sought to extradite the ACT doctor. Her state classifies mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous controlled substances.
While Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the extradition warrant sought by Murrill and the district attorney, New York is one of nearly two dozen states with shield laws for reproductive healthcare, and its Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said that "I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana—not now, not ever."
On Monday, Paxton took legal action against Taylor Brucka, the clerk in Ulster County, New York, for refusing to make Carpenter pay the $100,000 penalty. Bruck told The Guardian that "it's really unprecedented for a clerk to be in this position" and "I'm just proud to live in a state that has something like the shield law here to protect our healthcare providers from out-of-state proceedings like this."
Meanwhile, another case involving a California doctor emerged in Texas earlier this month: A man filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Rémy Coeytaux for allegedly mailing to Galveston County medication that his girlfriend used to end her pregnancy. His lawyer is Jonathan Mitchell, an "anti-abortion legal terrorist" who previously served as the state's solicitor general and was the chief architect of its law that entices anti-choice vigilantes with $10,000 bounties to enforce a six-week ban.
Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, recently told Mother Jones that "the whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court... both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act," a dormant 1873 law that criminalized the shipping of "obscene" materials, including abortifacients.
"Despite their repeated claims they wanted to protect Social Security, the Trump administration said the quiet part out loud," said one critic in response to the billionaire treasury secretary's candid comments.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday admitted that a provision in Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a mechanism for privatizing Social Security—something President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he won't do.
Speaking at a policy event hosted by the far-right news site Breitbart, Bessent touted the so-called "Trump accounts" available to all U.S. citizen children starting next July under the OBBBA signed by the president earlier this month.
"In a way, it is a backdoor way for privatizing Social Security," the billionaire former hedge fund manager said of the accounts. "Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out—that to the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow, and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, that's a game-changer."
Responding to Bessent's admission, Tim Hogan—the Democratic National Committee senior adviser for messaging, mobilization, and strategy—said that the treasury secretary "just said the quiet part out loud: The administration is scheming to privatize Social Security."
"It wasn't enough to kick millions of people off their healthcare and take food away from hungry kids," Hogan added. "Trump is now coming after American seniors with a 'backdoor' scam to take away the benefits they earned. Democrats won't stand by as Trump screws over working families in order to give more handouts to billionaires."
House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement: "Today, the treasury secretary said the quiet part out loud: Republicans' ultimate goal is to privatize Social Security, and there isn't a backdoor they won't try to make Wall Street's dream a reality. For everyone else though, it's yet another warning sign that they cannot be trusted to safeguard the program millions rely on and have paid into over a lifetime of work."
Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, mocked Trump's promises to preserve the key program upon which more than 70 million Americans rely—and called him out for eviscerating the Social Security Administration (SSA).
"So much for Donald Trump's campaign promise to protect Social Security," Altman said in a statement. "First, he gave Elon Musk the power to gut SSA. Now, Trump's treasury secretary has said the quiet part out loud. He is bragging about the administration's goal to privatize Social Security."
"First, they are undermining public confidence in Social Security by making false claims about fraud (which is virtually nonexistent) and wrecking the system's service to the public," Altman continued. "Then, once they have broken Social Security, they will say that Wall Street needs to come in and save it."
"That is a terrible idea," she added. "Unlike private savings, Social Security is a guaranteed earned benefit that you can't outlive. It has stood strong through wars, recessions, and pandemics. The American people have a message for Trump and Bessent: Keep Wall Street's hands off our Social Security!"
Alliance for Retired Americans executive director Richard Fiesta said that "Bessent let the cat out of the bag: This administration is coming for Social Security."
"We're not surprised—but we are alarmed because this administration has already taken multiple steps to weaken and dismantle Social Security," Fiesta added, highlighting the weakening of the SSA, false fraud claims, and "the massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations" under the OBBBA that experts say will hasten the Social Security Trust Fund's insolvency.
The progressive watchdog Accountable.US called Bessent's remarks "a shocking confession."
"Despite their repeated claims they wanted to protect Social Security, the Trump administration said the quiet part out loud: The Big Ugly Betrayal is a backdoor way to privatize Social Security," Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk said in a statement.
"Once again the administration is risking the financial security of millions of Americans in order to protect a system rigged in the favor of big corporations and billionaires," Carrk added.
In another blow to Social Security recipients, the Trump administration is set to implement a new policy next month that is expected to further increase wait times for basic services. As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, starting in mid-August, SSA will no longer allow seniors to use their phones for routine tasks they've been able to perform for decades.