The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. Newly surfaced contracts show the drug-pricing deals the administration sold as wins for patients were written for the companies. The agreements with Pfizer and Eli Lilly carry tariff protections, overseas pricing inducements and broad confidentiality clauses — terms kept off the public ledger because they serve capital, not the sick. The secrecy is the tell: deals that helped people would not need hiding.
In Britain, a jury handed the state a defeat. Sarah Cotte was acquitted, a verdict the World Socialist Web Site calls a humiliating defeat for the prosecution and for the wider campaign, led by successive Conservative and Labour governments, to "criminalise solidarity with Palestine." The frame-up collapsed in front of ordinary jurors — the machinery built to punish dissent still has to face the people it targets.
At home the president is touting 25 top achievements, even as polling shows voters fixed on inflation, jobs and the cost of living — the gap between the boast and the grocery bill. Abroad, Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Trump for signing a bill expanding sanctions on Russia, an escalation whose costs land far from those who order it — the blowback comes home regardless.
And the state turns its reach on its own people. The NAACP has sued to block armed federal agents from polling places before the midterms; an appeals court just rejected the third-country deportation policy for denying detainees a meaningful chance to contest; and crews have begun the $46 billion border wall in Big Bend. As the planet heats, adaptation rarely reaches the most vulnerable — power, like every policy above, routed around the people who need it most.
Zoom out: As the administration trumpets its record, secret contracts shield the drug giants, its wars escalate abroad, and the state turns armed agents, deportations and walls on the people at home while working people still carry the cost of living and the heat.