El-Sayed Plays ‘The Price Is Wrong’ With Michigan Voters to Expose Cost of Trump Trade Wars

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US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed

US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed played “The Price Is Wrong” with Michigan voters in a video posted online on September 8, 2026. 

(Photo: screenshot/@AbdulElSayed/X)

“Come on down! All this could be yours… except the price is WRONG because of Trump’s tariffs.”

Julia Conley

Sep 08, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Modeled on the familiar logo of a long-running daytime game show, US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed displayed a hand-drawn picture of a dollar sign along with the words “The Price Is Wrong” in a video posted to his official social media accounts Tuesday—and offered Michigan voters the chance to play his version of the game, inspired by President Donald Trump’s policies.

“This is probably true of everything you’re buying right now,” said El-Sayed, who is running against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers after winning the Democratic primary election last month, as he pointed to the handmade sign. “We’re going to ask Michiganders about just how much everything has gotten more expensive over the last year because of Trump’s tariffs and his war in Iran.”

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Consumer Confidence Hits Lowest Level in Months as US Faces ‘Trump’s Reckless Tariffs and War With Iran’

First up, a voter learned that a container of 100 Tide detergent pods, which now costs nearly $30, cost just under $22 a year ago at this time—before Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran, leading to the retaliatory measure of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting spike in oil and gas prices.

“That’s almost a 30% increase in price for the same Tide pods,” said El-Sayed.

A package of Target brand toilet paper cost $6 last year, and another voter guessed it’s currently marked at $8.50—off by 50 cents, said El-Sayed, who revealed the package would now cost $9 at a Target store in Michigan.

Target-branded protein powder cost $40 last year, and Trump’s policies have raised the price to $54 this year, said El-Sayed, while a one-pound bag of coffee beans from Tim Hortons is nearly a dollar more than it was last year, priced now at $9.32.

El-Sayed released the video as Canada imposed its new retaliatory tariffs targeting about $20 billion in US imports, in response to the 50% tariffs Trump announced late last month on a range of Canadian goods including dairy products, paper, and cement.

According to a June poll by Epic-MRA, 63% of Michiganders—including 35% of Republicans—opposed Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, which he first announced last year along with levies on numerous other countries that he said had treated the US unfairly in trade.

About three-quarters of voters in that poll said they thought Trump’s tariff policy was fueling higher prices for everyday goods.

The Midwest Economic Policy Institute found in July that due to Michigan’s shared border with Canada and the close ties shared between the auto industries in Michigan and Ontario, Michigan households were paying as much as $3,200 in extra costs due to Trump’s tariffs—about 142% more than the rest of the US.

“Donald Trump is launching this trade war for his own vanity, and he’s asking Michigan families to pay the price,” El-Sayed said in a statement last month. “Trump has been failing Michigan through these chaotic tariffs and bad trade deals for far too long, and Mike Rogers won’t do anything but rubber-stamp them.”

At Michigan Advance, columnist Rick Haglund warned last month that Michigan would likely “pay a steep price for Trump’s reckless actions.”

“Canada is Michigan’s largest trading partner with about $70 billion in goods flowing across their borders in 2024, the latest available data,” said Haglund. “Thousands of jobs are connected to Michigan auto parts manufacturers, farmers, and others who export goods to Canada.”

Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran has also been linked to spiking diesel prices, which is driving up transportation costs—and as a result, consumer prices—for many everyday goods like those featured in El-Sayed’s mock game show.

“Americans are paying way more for everyday goods they have to buy at the grocery store, all because of this insane war that is spiking the price of gas, spiking the price of diesel, spiking the price of your everyday goods,” said El-Sayed. “And now, a trade war that’s expanded with Canada.”

“Americans are sick and tired of playing ‘The Price Is Wrong,’” he added. “I think it’s time for us to play ‘The Price Is Right.’”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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‘Bombshell’ Report Says UAE Explicitly Warned Netanyahu of October 7 Attack

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ISRAEL-US-IRAN-WAR-NETANYAHU

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem on March 19, 2026.

 (Photo by Ronen Zvulun/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Haaretz also reported that Hamas immediately offered to release all the Israeli hostages it had taken in the attack, demanding nothing in return, but Israel refused the deal.

Julia Conley

Sep 08, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Policy experts in the US and Middle East on Tuesday were among those responding to an “astonishing” new investigation from Haaretz, which detailed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was alerted weeks before the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack that a “major event” was being planned by the Palestinian group—an assault that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and which Israel has responded to by slaughtering more than 73,000 Palestinians so far in Gaza.

Highlighting revelations contained in an upcoming book called Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment, by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, the Israeli newspaper reported that Netanayahu dismissed a warning about the attack from United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed, which came in a phone call in September 2023.

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An adviser to bin Zayed said that according to the president, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “was preparing for a major event” and “Israel should be ready.”

X post: https://x.com/MairavZ/status/2097181940071714836?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097181940071714836%7Ctwgr%5Ee199983d36a58cf566fe8720e39f388005249d43%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fdid-netanyahu-know-about-oct-7

The UAE leader advised Netanyahu to “find an economic solution” for Gaza and to calm tensions in the West Bank to “prevent escalation.”

At the time, Hamas had been holding talks for months with intermediaries in hopes of pushing Israel to lift its blockade on Gaza, which it had imposed at varying levels of intensity for nearly two decades, since Hamas won legislative elections in 2006. Before the 2023 attack and Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza—which has been called a genocide by human rights groups and Holocaust experts—Israel’s blockade had left 80% of Palestinians in Gaza dependent on aid and had raised the poverty rate from 40% in 2005 to 61.6% in 2023.

Hamas’ talks had also focused on exchanging four Israeli prisoners who had been held in Gaza for several years for Palestinian prisoners, more than 5,200 of whom were being held in Israel at the time.

Haaretz reported that an intermediary known as “coal eyes,” a member of the Fatah political party in Palestine who was trusted by both Hamas and the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, was told by Sinwar: “Convey a message to them that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary.”

The intermediary then conveyed the message to bin Zayed, who spoke directly to Netanyahu.

https://twitter.com/i/status/2097237236630638897

The Israeli prime minister, who is facing several opponents as he aims to hold onto power in Israel’s upcoming elections, scheduled for October 27, reportedly told the UAE president that Israel was prepared for any attack and that the government believed Hamas was planning to operate in the West Bank.

He did not inform security or intelligence leaders about the information he received from the bin Zayed, Haaretz reported.

Netanyahu called the Haaretz report an “absolute lie” on Tuesday, while his top rival in the elections, former military commander Gadi Eisenkot, said on social media that the prime minister “received dozens of warnings for October 7 and ignored them all.”

“His is unfit,” said Eisenkot.

As Middle East Eye noted Tuesday, it has previously been reported by media outlets in Israel and elsewhere that Netanyahu had received a warning from Egyptian intelligence in the days before the Hamas-led attack.

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Haaretz also reported that Hamas offered to release all the civilians it had taken captive during the October 7 attack, in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The group did not demand anything in return, but Israeli officials reportedly rejected the offer.

The Israel Defense Forces have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps and have killed thousands of children as well as journalists and aid workers in Gaza—all while claiming to be targeting Hamas. Attacks have continued, killing hundreds of Palestinians, even after a ceasefire deal was reached last October.

Settler attacks have also ramped up in the West Bank as Israeli officials have pushed to further annex the territory and make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Julia Conley

Julia Conley is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Book: “The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government”

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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

First published 2011

One of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “10 Books Everyone Should Read”.

This fascinating study of democracy in the 21st century is a much-needed call for citizens to reach across the aisle and put power back into the hands of individuals—not Big Government.

Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer outline a simple but revolutionary argument for why our most basic assumptions about democracy need updating for the 21st century. They offer a roadmap for those looking for a way forward from an American life marked by divisive conversations. 

In a world with widespread political upheaval, a deep wellspring of civic engagement and collective action is emerging. America is finding that our cultural and political dialogue is spiking over everything from racial and social justice to fighting the ever-widening income gap, to climate change—even how we might best collaborate as active citizens to heal our democracy. 

Timely, inspiring, and highly charged, The Gardens of Democracy is a much-needed call to action for citizens to embrace their roles in a democratic society. To model positivity and good citizenship, plus ensure liberty and justice for all, we must achieve compromise by reaching across the aisle and putting the power to execute programs back in the hands of individuals, not big government. 

We must redefine how we view prosperity in order to move from a dog-eat-dog mentality that perpetuates the top 1% to a communal and inclusive movement that illustrates that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.

(Goodreads.com)

Book: “Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House”

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Craig Unger

Argo meets Spotlight, as journalist Craig Unger, New York Times bestselling author of American Kompromat and House of Bush, House of Saud, reveals his thirty-year investigation into the secret collusion between Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and Iran, raising urgent questions about what happens when foreign meddling in our elections goes unpunished and what gets remembered when the political price for treason is victory.

It was a tinderbox of an accusation. In April 1991, the New York Times ran an op-ed alleging that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign had conspired with the Iranian government to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after the 1980 election. The Iranian hostage crisis was President Jimmy Carter’s largest political vulnerability, and his lack of success freeing them ultimately sealed his fate at the ballot box. In return for keeping Americans in captivity until Reagan assumed the oath of office, the Republicans had secretly funneled arms to Iran. Treasonous and illegal, the operation—planned and executed by Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey—amounted to a shadow foreign policy run by private citizens that ensured Reagan’s victory.

Investigative journalist Craig Unger was one of the first reporters covering the October Surprise—initially for Esquire and then Newsweek—and while attempting to unravel the mystery, he was fired, sued, and ostracized by the Washington press corps, as a counter narrative took hold: The October Surprise was a hoax. Though Unger later recovered his name and became a bestselling author on Republican abuses of power, the October Surprise remained his white whale, the project he worked on late at night and between assignments.

In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists. Timely and provocative, with powerful echoes of our Trump-era political scandals, Den of Spies demonstrates the stakes of allowing the politics of the moment to obscure the writing of our history.

About the author

“I don’t like to be wrong,” says Craig Unger, the author of a new book that sets out to prove the infamous October Surprise conspiracy. “And worse, I don’t like to be called wrong when I’m right.” (Benedict Evans for The Atlantic)

Craig Unger

Craig Unger is an American journalist and writer. His most recent book is The Fall of the House of Bush, about the internal feud in the Bush family and the rise and collusion of the neoconservative and Christian right in Republican party politics, viewing each group’s weltanschauung and efforts concerning present and potential future US policy through a distinctly negative prism. His previous work, House of Bush, House of Saud explored the relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. Craig Unger’s work is featured in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Unger has served as deputy editor of the New York Observer and was editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for The New Yorker, Esquire Magazine and Vanity Fair.

(Goodreads.com)

Labor Day 2026: Record-High Popularity, Record-Low Power for America’s Unions

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UNITE HERE Local 17 hospitality workers strike outside Target Field in Minneapolis, June 22, 2026. Steven Garcia/NurPhoto via AP.

September 7, 2026 (Prospect.org)

Americans really like unions. Last week, Gallup released its annual survey of the public’s assessment of the labor movement, and found that unions’ approval rating stood at 71 percent—the highest it’s been since 1957. While 89 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents approved of unions, even 52 percent of Republicans felt that way as well.
Moreover, fully 47 percent of our fellow Americans said they wanted unions to have more influence than they currently have, which is a record high for this century. Only 23 percent said they wanted unions to have less influence.
Gallup wasn’t the only entity asking questions about unions’ influence last week. On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its own survey, which found that the share of the nation’s economic output—its work product—going to wages and benefits was, at 52.8 percent, the lowest since the Bureau began measuring it in 1947. This followed another government study in May that found that wages and benefits comprised the lowest share of the nation’s income—51 percent—since, again, the government started measuring such matters in 1947.
As the labor share has been declining, the capital share has been rising. The same May study showed that profits’ share of the nation’s income had risen to 12.1 percent, the highest level since 1950. The gap between wages and profits has ballooned over the past six years. Inflation-adjusted wages have increased by just 3 percent since late 2019, while profits have risen by 50 percent.
Pundits who wonder why the number of American socialists is growing should contemplate that last set of statistics.
There are any number of reasons why the share of America’s economic output and Americans’ income is at record lows for workers, but the evisceration of unions—the only real vehicle through which workers can exert power—over the past seven decades is the primary cause. In the early 1950s, more than a third of the nation’s private-sector workers were unionized, and in many states outside the South, the unionized share stood at 40 percent or even higher. Unions’ power—strikes and the threat of strikes—was such that companies with union contracts regularly raised wages and benefits in the quarter-century following World War II, and many companies with no union contracts were compelled to match the wages and benefits of the unionized companies in their industry, for fear of losing their workers to them.
As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein recently noted in our pages, the power of unions like the United Auto Workers “forced managers of America’s greatest industry, and all those who followed the patterns it set, to double the real wages of American industrial workers in little more than a generation. That was a singular accomplishment, never repeated in American history, before or since.”
That, however, was then. Since that time, the erosion of workers’ legal protections when they seek to form or join a union (an erosion propelled by employers, judges, and Republicans and not significantly countered by Democrats) has defeated countless organizing campaigns, while financialization, offshoring, and legislation that facilitated wealth concentration and capital’s political influence have combined to decimate unions. Where once they represented one-third of the nation’s private-sector workers, today they represent a mere 6 percent.
None of the tech giants or retail behemoths that dominate today’s economy are unionized; the merest hint of workers seeking to organize prompts a level of management retaliation for which the word “disproportionate” is laughingly inadequate. Baristas at 700 Starbucks vote to unionize; the company refuses to bargain with them. Employees at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022; the company has yet to begin bargaining with them—and when its warehouse workers in one Quebec warehouse were able to unionize, thanks to Canada’s more equitable labor laws, Amazon’s response was to shutter not just that warehouse but all seven of its warehouses in Quebec.
Democrats have periodically sought to put some teeth back into the National Labor Relations Act, under whose current version management faces no meaningful punishment for violating its terms by illegally firing a worker involved in organizing. Going all the way back to the Johnson administration, Democrats seeking to restore workers’ rights have never been able to surmount the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster hurdle.
If they have trifecta control of the federal government after the 2028 elections, and move to scrap the filibuster so they can enlarge the Supreme Court, Democrats must also scrap it when it comes to reforming labor law. And merely passing their current version of that reform, the PRO Act, won’t be enough to rebalance the relations between owners and workers. Unless they’re resigned to perpetuating an economy in which a half-decade’s rise of 3 percent in workers’ wages requires a rise of 50 percent in profits, they must repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. By so doing, they would not only end right-wing states’ use of “right to work” statutes to block unionization, but they would also restore workers’ freedom to boycott companies—not those at which they themselves were employed—whose workers are on strike.
It was through such measures that American worker power soared in the 1930s and ’40s, and how labor stays strong in nations where secondary boycotts are still legal. (When McDonald’s attempted to break the labor system in Denmark, it was brought to its knees by boycotts that blocked the delivery of everything from menu paper to food.) If workers in this country are to regain the power they once had, and if America’s current race to become the most economically unequal nation on the planet is not arrested and reversed, the Democrats are going to have to curtail much of capital’s clout and, as the new Gallup poll shows record support for, increase labor’s influence. (If repealing Taft-Hartley strikes some Democrats as extreme, they might remember that the bill was vetoed by that dangerous radical, Harry Truman, before it was overridden by Republicans and Southern Democrats.)
And if the Democrats are at all serious about regaining the long-term support of the working class, they’re going to have to do what Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats did 90 years ago to win that support in the first place: empower America’s workers. That would entail alienating most big-time investors and C-suite occupants who dominate our political economy, of course, but that’s a necessary condition for American restoration.

Lurie and Mamdani could not be more different

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Plus: Big Tech money moves into D10 …. and will the Planning Commission approve a project without knowing what it is? That’s The Agenda for Sept. 7-14

By Tim Redmond

September 6, 2026 (48hills.org)

Want more of Tim Redmond’s incisive analysis and reporting? Subscribe to his weekly Agenda newsletter for stories you won’t find on the site.

It’s hard to avoid comparisons between Zohran Mamdani and Daniel Lurie these days. Two unlikely mayors, taking over troubled cities. There are the contrast stories.

There are the stories that say they aren’t that different.

But as we get close to the one-and-two-year anniversaries of the elections that put them in office, it’s worth looking at some basic facts. They show that Mamdani and Lurie have operated at the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Mamdani froze the rent on 1 million apartments. Wikimedia images photo

Mandani is using local government to make the city safer and more affordable. Lurie is allowing Big Tech to take over local government,  celebrating a boom that has caused rents to soar and evictions to rise to alarming levels.

Mamdani froze rents on more than 1 million apartments. Lurie has refused to consider anything that expands rent control. Mamdani is raising taxes on the rich to pay for better transit and affordable child care. Lurie opposes any new taxes on the rich and has tried to eliminate a tax that funds affordable housing.

Lurie is welcoming the displacement of thousands of renters

Lurie is making it more difficult for unhoused people to get housing and is relying on the private sector to solve a crisis that the private sector created. In the process, he’s filled the county jail with people who suffer from mental illness and substance use problems.  

No comparison, really.

The Big Tech takeover of local politics, which has turned the SF Democratic Party into a laughingstock, just gets worse and worse. Last week, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen put $500,000—that’s right, half a million—into an independent expenditure committee to support Theo Ellington for D10 supe. We have never seen anything close to this kind of IE money is a district supe race.

Larsen doesn’t live in D10. He doesn’t, as far as I know, have any businesses in D10. Why does he care that much who the D10 supervisor is?

A few thoughts.

Big Tech wants total control of the city. Right now, a majority of the supes side with the mayor and the tech companies, but there’s an election in November, and it’s possible, if unlikely, that the situation could change.

The incumbent Supervisor Shamann Walton has been in independent voice, unafraid to take on the mayor and Big Tech. Walton has endorsed D. J. Brookter. Brookter supports rent control, affordable housing, a public bank, and development that doesn’t displace existing residents. From his platform:

We should not demolish existing affordable or rent-controlled housing to build new housing when viable alternatives exist on vacant or underutilized sites that would not displace tenants.

He’s not the kind of candidate that the libertarian Big Tech folks want to see in office.

Also: Larsen and his allies support more police drones, and it’s likely that if the cops get more surveillance, it will start in Bayview Hunters Point. The SFPD spy unit operates out of Larsen’s Ripple Labs office.

Walton told me:

I think it’s pretty disgusting to see something like this happen in San Francisco. This truly makes me wonder what could be going on behind the scenes. We have never seen a donation like this in a supervsior’s race. I believe voters will see right through this because District 10 is not for sale. Elections have always been competitive (as they should); it’s hard to understand why this is legal.

Whatever the specific motivations, this is another profound and serious step in the Big Tech takeover of City Hall.

The Planning Commission will consider Thursday/10 an application that would allow a developer to demolish a seven-story downtown building that once housed Golden Gate University and build … we don’t know.

It’s a weird application. The developer wants to tear down the building at Mission and First, but it’s not clear what would replace it. The application says the developer will build

one of two distinct land use programs (“variants”). The first variant (the “Commercial Variant”) is a 700-foot-tall (752 feet to the top of the parapet), approximately 1.22-million-square-foot building that would include a mix of office space and laboratory space. The Project Sponsor proposes two options for the Commercial Variant in terms of relative amounts of office and laboratory uses: one option with 813,214 square feet of office space and 403,518 square feet of laboratory space (“Commercial Variant Option 1”) and one option with 555,390 square feet of office space and 661,342 square feet of laboratory space (“Commercial Variant Option 2”). The second variant is a 649-foot-tall (698 feet to top of the parapet), approximately 992,000- square-foot building that would include a mix of office space and 385 residential dwelling units consisting of 64 studio, 221 one-bedroom, 60 two-bedroom, and 40 three-bedroom units.

Those are pretty different proposals.

The AI boom is making office space attractive again, but lost of empty space remains downtown. And the city seems to be trying to prioritize housing, although this would be the top of the luxury market.

I’ve been covering city planning for 40 years, and I can’t remember the last time a commission approved a project without knowing exactly what it is. This will be a test of the new commission.

The meeting starts at noon.

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Tim Redmond

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.

First Thing: German far-right leader thanks Elon Musk after landmark election win praised by Russia

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Populist, far-right, anti-immigration AfD wins vote in eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Plus, 50 years since The Muppet Show first hit our screens

Martin Belam Mon 7 Sep 2026 (TheGuardian.com)

Prefer the Guardian on Google

Good morning. A far-right leader who has won an important state election in Germany has thanked Elon Musk for his support, as voices in Europe warn the result is a serious moment for the continent. No far-right party has led or formed a government in Germany since the defeat of nazism at the end of the second world war.

Ulrich Siegmund, the Alternative für Deutschland’s lead candidate, thanked Musk on X after the tech billionaire said “Well done!” in German to the AfD co-founder Alice Weidel. The populist, far-right, anti-immigration party won the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

During its campaign, the AfD sought to capitalise on a mood of nostalgia for the communist East Germany and discontent among east Germans. The party has promised a remigration and deportation offensive, to ban rainbow flags in schools and halt the building of new windfarms. It wants to change the slogan of the state from “Think Modern” to “Think German”, and reintroduce the singing of the country’s national anthem in schools.

  • Will the AfD be able to form a state government? Despite its resounding victory, the party fell just short of a majority. It was seeking an absolute majority in the state legislature to govern alone and overcome the so-called “firewall” of the mainstream parties, which refuse to work with it. The final results showed the AfD falling three seats short, with 39 lawmakers in an 83-member legislature.
  • What has been the reaction in Washington and Moscow? Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the election projection without comment on his Truth Social site. The Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev took a screengrab of Trump’s post and praised a “historic win for the pragmatic AfD”. The AfD is pro-Kremlin, urging a stop to support for Ukraine and pushing for Ukrainians in Germany to no longer receive refugee status.

Mamdani opens Office of Worker Power

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September 7, 2026 (Prospect.org)

DAYEN ON TAP
Mamdani opens Office of Worker Power

The new city agency intends to connect workers who want to unionize with resources and organizing contacts, and use worker stories of exploitation to inform policy.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has established the Office of Worker Power, a first-in-the-nation initiative to connect workers with education, resources, and organizations to help them form a union or demand better working conditions on the job. The office will also allow workers more input into city labor policies and assist them in reporting violations by their employers, Mamdani wrote in an executive order.
Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice and a former acting U.S. labor secretary, will coordinate efforts on the office, and Tony Perlstein, a longtime union organizer most recently with the United Auto Workers, will become its first executive director. The staff head count of the office and its budget have yet to be determined.
Mamdani signed the executive order in front of workers in the construction, hotel, caregiving, and food service industries. It builds upon a series of efforts to empower workers in New York City, like backing delivery drivers in their fight with Amazon over employee misclassification that denies benefits. The Mamdani administration has secured $104 million in tips for delivery workers by enforcing the law on deceptive tipping practices, and recently partnered with New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg to enforce laws against wage theft.
The announcement also comes on the heels of a new report on inequality in New York City, showing that the top 0.1 percent received more than half of all New Yorkers’ income growth between 2019 and 2024, while real median incomes in the city fell.
“History has proven that worker power is the solution when an economy becomes too skewed,” said Deputy Mayor Su in a press briefing. “When workers can organize, everything changes. When they can build lasting, durable power, power that lets them transform their work experience, and by extension their lives, everything changes.”
The Office of Worker Power is intended to work across agencies to connect and inform workers. It will not engage in direct union organizing and will not replace any unions or worker centers. Its mission is to help workers who may want a union but don’t know how to go about it with the information they need to get started, as well as the contacts with groups that can assist them further. This, officials said, will give workers the knowledge and the courage to assert themselves on the job.
The Mamdani administration also envisions public hearings on worker rights issues and other convenings that bring workers together, along with research that highlights key topics and informs policy proposals for the city council.
The communication is intended to be two-way, with workers explaining their challenges to the office and having that lead to policy positions on things like workplace safety, misclassification, the use of new technology like artificial intelligence, or exploitation based on citizenship status.
“The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement.
Perlstein, who will run the office, is a former longshoreman at the Port of New York and New Jersey who became secretary-treasurer of the local longshore worker union. He has a background in organizing workers across several sectors, most recently as a director in the UAW’s organizing department.
“I’ve been part of many campaigns, some successful, some not,” Perlstein told reporters. “For me this is not just about the material gains that workers win, but it’s also the transformative process that workers go through as they learn to build together and struggle … through the process of organizing, people transform.”
The executive order also charges Deputy Mayor Su with establishing enforcement principles on worker protections across city agencies, signaling a strong push to hold employers who violate the law accountable. In particular, the order states that city agencies should investigate workplace violations even when no complaint has been filed. Traditionally, agencies have waited for a complaint to start investigating.
“Oftentimes the most vulnerable workers do not report,” Su said, citing reasons like fears of retaliation or a lack of understanding about their rights. “So it is not enough for government to simply wait until workers come forward.” The order stresses that companies with large numbers of low-wage workers and “a history of labor violations or other indicators of poor compliance with labor standards” should be prioritized for investigation.
In addition, the order seeks to protect workers from being targeted or discriminated against for any reason, but particularly for their immigration status. “The right to organize and … the right to be protected by New York City’s labor laws do not depend on immigration status,” Su said.
But the Office of Worker Power, putting the administration in New York City firmly on the side of worker organizing, is the showpiece. Considering that the administration also represents management in negotiations with public employees, it’s an unusual position for a city government, but it’s necessitated, officials say, by the severe drop in union density over the past half-century. New York City has union density among private-sector workers of around 12.5 percent, according to the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York. This is far above the national average, but that number was double in the 1980s.
“There was a poll taken that 70 percent of Americans support unions,” Perlstein said. “And yet, even in this city, 13 percent are in a union. So there is a huge gap between what workers want and what workers have.”
Given the Trump administration’s assault on worker organizing through rulings at the National Labor Relations Board and cutbacks at the Labor Department, a counterweight in the nation’s largest city is vital but also may run into the stone wall that is federal labor law.
I asked Deputy Mayor Su about this. “For this mayor, he’s been very clear that we are going to do the right thing regardless of what the federal government does,” she said. “People are also watching what happens in New York City … What is possible when you have a strong municipal government doing the right thing and delivering for the people of a city?”

‘Absolutely Bonkers’ and ‘Unacceptable’: Trump Posts Map Showing US Takeovers of Other Nations

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President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a map showing the US flag over not only the United States but also Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Caribbean, Mexico, and multiple countries in Central America.​

President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a map showing the US flag over not only the United States but also Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Caribbean, Mexico, and multiple countries in Central America.

 (Image via President Donald Trump/Truth Social)

“As always, he is telling us what the plan is,” said one critic. “We must take it seriously.”

Jessica Corbett

Sep 07, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

US President Donald Trump has spent his second term threatening takeovers of various other countries, from Canada and Cuba to Greenland, and on Monday he shared on social media a map that fueled fresh fears of his imperialist “Donroe Doctrine.”

The map on Trump’s Truth Social platform shows the US flag over not only the United States but also Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and multiple countries in Central America and the Caribbean.

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The post was swiftly condemned across platforms, with Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) declaring that “this is unacceptable.”

X post: https://x.com/MichaelEMann/status/2097027970153988339?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097027970153988339%7Ctwgr%5Eb1be98cd7226273b4252b551bf54e9ea93ed6397%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-takeovers

Journalist Stephen Robinson wrote on X that “another world leader posting something like this would have to apologize before their immediate removal.”

Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot and former Democratic US Senate candidate from Kentucky, wondered, “What would we do and say if the Chinese president posted a map of China taking over the Western Pacific?”

Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former prime minister of Sweden, similarly said: “What would happen if Xi Jinping posted a map where [China] has taken over all of East Asia, and [President Vladimir] Putin one of [Russia] having absorbed all of Western Europe? It would have been seen as either insane or dangerous—or both.”

While some critics called Trump “absolutely bonkers” and “f*cking insane,” Dr. Brian Goldman, a Canadian emergency physician who’s also an author and broadcaster, asserted: “That’s not insanity. That’s intention.”

Democratic strategist Michelle Kinney agreed, saying: “As always, he is telling us what the plan is. We must take it seriously.”

Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, suggested that “the reason why Republicans attack education is so that people don’t recognize the history that repeats itself.”

Without directly mentioning Trump or his map, Mexican President Sheinbaum said in Spanish on Monday, “We reaffirm that Mexico is neither nor will be a colony or protectorate of any foreign country. Proudly we are a free, independent, and sovereign nation.”

While Trump is a prolific poster, the map followed a series of posts from Sunday—including other maps and images produced with artificial intelligence—that led progressive influencer Harry Sisson to conclude that the president was “having a mental health episode online” and call for his removal from office.

X post: https://x.com/harryjsisson/status/2096696549090730273?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2096696549090730273%7Ctwgr%5Eb1be98cd7226273b4252b551bf54e9ea93ed6397%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-takeovers

“This man is unwell. 25th Amendment NOW,” Sisson said, cataloging posts on a range of topics, from Trump’s recent renaming of Lake Ontario amid tough trade talks with Canada, to the suggestion that New Mexico should be dubbed “New America.”

The latter was ripped by several Democratic officials, including New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, who responded that her state’s name “isn’t up for debate—it’s been ours since before the United States existed.”

“What is up for debate? Who’s showing up for working families,” she continued. “While the president tries to distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran, gas prices keep soaring. Americans are also spending more at the grocery store, losing access to healthcare and wondering if they’ll ever be able to afford a home. Under Democratic leadership here in New Mexico, we’re providing families with free childcare and college, protecting access to healthcare, and investing in housing. While the White House wastes time coloring on maps, Nuevo México is busy doing the work.”

In addition to waging an illegal war on Iran, Trump this term has invaded Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and take control of the country’s oil reserves, become the US commander-in-chief to bomb the most countries, and killed over 225 people by blowing up boats allegedly smuggling drugs through international waters. He’s also threatened to seize the Panama Canal and possibly attack nations including Colombia and Mexico.

As Iran has responded to Trump’s war by restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the president has teased declaring the key waterway a US territory and naming it after himself. He’s also dubbed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” and fought to put his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

With the US midterm elections less than two months away, some Democrats in Congress have stepped up their critiques of Trump’s foreign policy—including a delegation of progressive congressional lawmakers and candidates who headed to Uruguay last month for the third Pan-American Congress.

Shortly after that gathering, delegation member Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) stressed that “progressives reject the violent, imperialistic Donroe Doctrine, and believe in a foreign policy rooted in cooperation, diplomacy, and sovereign equality.”

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Jessica Corbett

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Trump’s War on Mail-in Voting is Hitting a Brick Wall—But the Danger is Far From Over

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North Carolina Board Of Elections Test Voting Machines Ahead Of Election

Absentee ballots are prepared to be mailed at the Wake County Board of Elections on September 17, 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

 (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

Allowing Trump’s mail-in voting restrictions to take effect “would be a break-glass moment for our democracy,” said one critic.

Brad Reed

Sep 06, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

President Donald Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting is running into a brick wall, although many critics are warning that the dangers to democracy are far from over.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Trump is “running out of options” to change mail-in voting rules that “don’t involve significant upheaval,” as states have already started sending out ballots to voters.

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In March, Trump signed an executive order that instructed the United States Postal Service to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to its voter lists.

However, that order is currently tied up in court, and both Wisconsin and North Carolina last week began mailing out ballots to voters, the Post reported.

Don Millis, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told the Post that “there’s no practical way for Wisconsin clerks to comply” with Trump’s orders, adding that the president’s schemes targeting mail-in voting are likely to “hurt the Republican turnout more than the Democratic turnout.”

The Trump administration has been pushing the US Supreme Court to intervene to allow the president’s executive order to take effect.

However, as noted in a Politico report published on Friday, nine other states are set to send ballots to voters over the next two weeks, which would make a last-minute ruling by the court an unprecedented disruption in the democratic process.

“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect,” Ben Hovland, senior fellow for democracy at the Center for American Progress, told Politico. “It’s hard to even imagine… It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”

However, Hovland said that Trump’s election meddling effort could still do real damage to the country because it can “dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote” and “establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”

Hovland’s concerns about the president’s intentions were echoed in a Sunday report in The New York Times, which found voters across the country expressing confusion about the voting process and anxiety over whether their votes will be counted this year.

Pima County, Arizona Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly told the Times that her office has received a flood of calls from worried voters, and she said that the president’s relentless push to restrict voting by mail has left her unable to provide reassuring answers.

“I wish that I could tell my constituents to not worry,” said Cázares-Kelly, “and I can’t.”

Rich Cooper, elections manager in Clark County, Washington, similarly told the Times he has been unable to ease voters’ worries about what rules will govern this year’s elections.

“The biggest thing they want to know is if things are going to change,” Cooper said of voters expressing concerns. “We have to tell them we just don’t know yet.”

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Brad Reed

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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