The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. ICE cooperation agreements operate in darkness; NPR found Walton County deputies making immigration arrests under a program whose details have been hard to come by. The opacity serves a deportation machine that treats migrants as disposable labor.
[Job-finding rates have fallen most sharply for workers who were almost always employed, and the drop is concentrated in AI-exposed roles](https://www.businessinsider.com/usually-employed-workers-struggle-with-job-market-shifts-ai-impact-2026-8). Capital leverages technological displacement to weaken the bargaining power of the entire working class, not just the precarious, even as Treasury yields climb on threats of new Iran sanctions — financial discipline for the empire, immiseration for workers.
[The administration presses NATO allies to demonstrate loyalty to Trump's policies before cutting military assets defending the alliance](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/us-presses-allies-on-ideological-loyalty-ahead-of-troop-cuts), even as alliance jets scrambled to shoot down a drone over Latvian airspace. Militarism functions as both imperial discipline and a jobs program for defense contractors, while Washington tightens an oil blockade on Cuba now in its sixth month — economic war against socialism packaged as alliance management.
[From the Oval Office, Trump told reporters a friend had suggested he start calling his political opponents jihadists, making clear he had one candidate in mind — Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan physician](https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-jihadist). Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione was charged with two federal stalking counts in the 2024 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and Wall Street–backed nonprofits use selective, opaque logic to defund charities — even as a Nevada judge dismissed fake-elector charges against six Republicans, the ruling class closes ranks.