December 17, 2025

GOP Forcing Eight Million Student Loan Borrowers Into Repayment

The most affordable of all the federal repayment programs is ending sooner than planned after Trump conspired with red-state attorneys general to kill it.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/

Workers who had been repaying their student loans via President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program are looking down the barrel of an even more difficult 2026 than expected. The program is likely ending, the Trump administration announced last week, so those who were enrolled must switch to a new plan, any of which will increase their monthly payments. SAVE is an income-driven student loan repayment program mandated by statute and consistent with what five presidents had instituted for over three decades without any legal challenges. It expedited loan forgiveness and allowed low-income borrowers to make monthly payments as little as $0.

That was too generous for attorneys general in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Missouri, and North Dakota, who together sued last July. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would have eliminated SAVE and three other income-driven repayment programs, forcing borrowers to change plans by July 1, 2028. But a deal Trump cut with the red-state attorneys general will move that kill date up if a judge approves the settlement terms, which will force nearly eight million borrowers into an untimely repayment. “This is a policy choice by the Trump administration to make it worse for everybody, and we’re all going to pay the price,” said Mike Pierce, co-founder and executive director of Protect Borrowers and a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulator who was the higher-education lead subject matter expert.

The end of SAVE comes as Republican policy choices are increasing costs across the board. Trump’s international tariff program, which recently required taxpayers to bail out farmers for $12 billion, has raised prices on imported goods, while the end of enhanced subsidies for health insurance on Affordable Care Act marketplaces will cause switches to plans with less coverage or dropping insurance entirely, as the Prospect recently reported. New burdens on student loan borrowers have gotten less attention, but they add to affordability pressures for millions of Americans.

Some borrowers said having to make student loan payments now would require that they take a second job. One nonprofit worker shared their story on condition of anonymity. SAVE allowed them to make no monthly payments on $21,000 in federal student loan debt, they said, though they still paid $10 a month because paying nothing “sounded weird.” Plus, someone at student aid advised them years ago that paying a little bit was a good practice, so they didn’t want to encounter “some bureaucratic thing” years later where they actually were required to make small payments. But then the servicer changed three times and more advice was not forthcoming.

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December 17, 2025

TPM/Josh Marshall Podcast - I Beg Your Pardon (Fetterman trying to get war criminal Netanyahu a pardon from Herzog)

Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) accepted a silver-plated pager from Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a gift commemorating Israel's September 2024 attack on Hezbollah operatives that killed over 30 people and injured over a thousand. @TrackAIPAC via X

December 17, 2025

Vanity Fair: Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth's War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2)

part 1 here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220871736

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-susie-wiles-interview-exclusive-part-2

https://archive.ph/M40yh



DAY 289
November 4, 2025

The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)



Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.” Not far from where we sat was a gaping hole where the East Wing had been until just days before. I asked her about the fierce criticism that followed its demolition to make way for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom. “Were you surprised by it?” “No,” Wiles replied. “Oh, no. And I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.” Was she saying that Trump was planning more, as yet undisclosed renovations? “I’m not telling.”

T-MINUS 232 DAYS
June 2, 2024

“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” —Fox News’s Rachel Campos-Duffy
“Yeah....I think I would.” —Trump

For many of Trump’s followers, it’s an article of faith that the US government has long been run by an elite cabal of pedophiles. Less conspiratorially but no less seriously, others question whether politicians and powerful people either participated in or knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women, from his posh Manhattan town house to his private Caribbean islands. Perhaps most critical to Trump followers, though, is the fact that Trump indicated a willingness to release the files—and didn’t. As this article went to press, grand jury material from the Epstein records was due to be released in December. Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”

In February, Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House, including Liz Wheeler, Jessica Reed Kraus, Rogan O’Handley, and Chaya Raichik. The binders turned out to contain nothing but old information. “I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” As Noah Shachtman reported in Vanity Fair, “dozens and dozens” of FBI agents at the New York field office were tasked with combing through the Epstein files. Many observers assumed they were looking for (and possibly redacting) Trump’s name. “I don’t know how many agents looked through things, but it was a lot,” said Wiles. “They were looking for 25 things, not one thing.”

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December 17, 2025

Beware of Trump's global broligarchy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2025/12/15/trump-business-corruption-investigation-kushner-witkoff-oligarchs/

https://archive.ph/JqRMM



In May, a man named Ismail Terlemez was arrested in Belgium as the result of a corruption probe run by agents from the FBI and the U.S. Defense Department’s investigative arm. The indictment alleged that Terlemez, who worked in NATO’s procurement office in Brussels, had received bribes from a co-conspirator in 2019 and 2020 as part of a scheme to rig the bidding for NATO contracts. The investigators were sure that they had Terlemez, a Turkish citizen, dead to rights.

But then, in July, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was dropping all charges against Terlemez—who had left NATO to found a well-connected Turkish defense company—and he was freed. We don’t have any direct evidence that the decision was politically motivated, but the timing struck observers as suspicious. The Justice Department action came just two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a NATO summit in The Hague.

It’s not hard to imagine Trump deciding that he ought to do a favor for his friend Erdogan. True, Washington and Ankara have had their differences in recent years, sometimes involving contentious trade issues. But the two leaders actually have plenty in common. Both like to combine business with politics, often cutting in members of their own families. Trump has his son-in-law Jared Kushner; Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak, just like Kushner, is a walking conflict of interest who actually served for a time in government. Trump wants to build a new ballroom for the White House using donations from his political supporters; Erdogan built himself a monumental presidential palace that also attracted controversy for its financing.

Like Trump, Erdogan scourges his enemies with lawsuits, accusations of treason, and demagogic social media posts. “Whenever they have a problem with Erdogan, they ask me to call because they can’t speak to him,” Trump told a Politico interviewer recently, without specifying who “they” were. “He’s a tough cookie. I actually like him a lot. I think, actually, you know, look, he’s built a strong country, strong military.” Forget human rights. Who wouldn’t do a favor for a guy like that?

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December 17, 2025

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) on MS NOW: We are going to war with Venezuela, Trump will do whatever it takes to go to war

December 17, 2025

Vanity Fair - Susie Wiles Speaks Her Mind

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-susie-wiles-interview-exclusive-part-1

https://archive.ph/vf5Fw



On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.

Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.

Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her. We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.)



Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman. “So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.” “I don’t think there’s anybody in the world right now that could do the job that she’s doing,” Rubio told me. He called her bond with Trump “an earned trust.” Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

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December 16, 2025

RPR Soundsystem Live @ [a:rpia:r] Release Party (Bucharest, Romania) 30/03/2007 (parts 1, 3, and 3)... classic Rominimal

Rominimal, The Underground Tech-House Sound Of Romania

https://www.electronicbeats.net/guide-to-rominimal-2017/



When the promoters behind the Romanian party and festival series Interval announced its closure last December, we took it as proof that their project to open up their countrymen’s hearts and minds to international sounds had failed. Romanians, we thought, had signaled once again that they would only dance to an insular group of homegrown DJs who push a particular sound purveyed by local artists known as “rominimal.” “There’s absolutely no demand or awareness for someone like Ben UFO or Jackmaster,” Interval’s Stefan Maritiu told us in 2016 in our feature on Bucharest’s response to the fire at a concert venue that took the lives of over 60 people in 2015. “They wouldn’t gather a crowd of 200 in Bucharest even if they were playing back-to-back.”

Rominimal DJs, on the other hand, draw thousands to never-ending parties in their home country and to festival stages abroad. That’s especially true for the style’s number-one flag-bearers, [ar:pia:r], the trio made up of Rhadoo, Petre Inspirescu and Raresh. While older tech-house DJs are credited with creating the initial germ for “rominimal,” it’s [ar:pia:r] whose names have become synonymous with the style’s post-Villalobosian squelch and click, its simmering atmospherics, dubby basslines and hypnotic micro-melodies. Their work over the last decade or so has inspired a wave of newer Romanian artists—all of whom are male except for Alexandra, who DJs and runs a label but hasn’t yet released a track of her own—who have collectively made rominimal into a bona fide genre that we’ve traced in the guide below.


Of course, the story of rominimal begins with [a:rpia:r], a phonetic contraction of their initials: R(hadoo), P(etre Inspirescu) and R(aresh). We’ve decided to start our guide to important rominimal releases with this first offering on their record label and to leave it there, as an overview of the sub-genre could easily be entirely taken up by cuts from each individual member (i.e. Inspirescu’s “Sakadat”, Raresh’s “Vivaltu” or Rhadoo’s “Circul Globus”). This first release contains the blueprint for all that followed: a dogmatic application of Villalobos’ school of minimalism with meditative loops, clicky drums, swinging basslines and subtle, emotive pads that eventually rise from the low end.

December 16, 2025

Eggplants in a North-South Sauce

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015156-eggplants-in-a-north-south-sauce

https://archive.ph/kWE2f



The cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey calls this "one of our most beloved family dishes, very much in the Hyderabadi style, where North Indian and South Indian seasonings are combined." Over the years, she has simplified the recipe. "You can use the long, tender Japanese eggplants or the purple 'baby' Italian eggplants," she says, "or even the striated purple and white ones that are about the same size as the baby Italian ones. Once cut, what you are aiming for are 1-inch chunks with as much skin on them as possible so they do not fall apart." Serve hot with rice and dal, or cold as a salad.



Preparation

Step 1
Pour the oil into a very large frying pan and set over medium-high heat. When hot, put in the asafetida and the urad dal.

Step 2
As soon as the dal turns a shade darker, add the mustard, cumin, nigella and fennel seeds, in that order.

Step 3
When the mustard seeds begin to pop, a matter of seconds, add the onions. Stir and fry for a minute. Add the garlic and the eggplant. Stir and fry for 4 to 5 minutes or until the onions are a bit browned.

Step 4
Add the grated tomatoes, stock, salt and cayenne. Stir to mix and bring to a boil. Cover, turn heat to low, and cook about 20 minutes or until the eggplants are tender, stirring now and then.

December 16, 2025

Eggplants in a North-South Sauce

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015156-eggplants-in-a-north-south-sauce

https://archive.ph/kWE2f



The cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey calls this "one of our most beloved family dishes, very much in the Hyderabadi style, where North Indian and South Indian seasonings are combined." Over the years, she has simplified the recipe. "You can use the long, tender Japanese eggplants or the purple 'baby' Italian eggplants," she says, "or even the striated purple and white ones that are about the same size as the baby Italian ones. Once cut, what you are aiming for are 1-inch chunks with as much skin on them as possible so they do not fall apart." Serve hot with rice and dal, or cold as a salad.



Preparation

Step 1
Pour the oil into a very large frying pan and set over medium-high heat. When hot, put in the asafetida and the urad dal.

Step 2
As soon as the dal turns a shade darker, add the mustard, cumin, nigella and fennel seeds, in that order.

Step 3
When the mustard seeds begin to pop, a matter of seconds, add the onions. Stir and fry for a minute. Add the garlic and the eggplant. Stir and fry for 4 to 5 minutes or until the onions are a bit browned.

Step 4
Add the grated tomatoes, stock, salt and cayenne. Stir to mix and bring to a boil. Cover, turn heat to low, and cook about 20 minutes or until the eggplants are tender, stirring now and then.

December 16, 2025

The Internet's Tollbooth Operators

Tim Wu’s ‘The Age of Extraction’ chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/internets-tollbooth-operators-wu-review/





When the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee first imagined a network of interlinked documents in the late 1980s, he envisioned something as vast as the cosmos and as open as the sky—a medium in which knowledge would circulate as freely as air. “This is for everyone,” he typed during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies in London, reaffirming the principle that had guided him from the start: universality. (It’s also the title of his new book.) The early web was public infrastructure, not private property, an experiment in what he called “intercreativity,” the ability of groups to make things together.

That aspiration is the distant mirror of the world Tim Wu, Joe Biden’s lead adviser for competition policy in the first two years of his presidency and now a law professor at Columbia, surveys in The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. He addresses the gnawing sense that everything online, from shopping to streaming to socializing, has been designed not for us but against us. The book follows Wu’s earlier works like The Master Switch, The Attention Merchants, and The Curse of Bigness, offering an accessible genealogy of how societies have built, depended on, and been constrained by systems that mediate access to daily life. Digital platforms hoard personal data, degrade their own products, and devise ever more insidious ways to hold our attention; The Age of Extraction chronicles the loss of control that accompanies this destructive capacity.



Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality” and helped shape the modern case for tech regulation, released his book just as Big Tech’s political power grows—its top oligarchs flanked President Trump at his inauguration—and as the backlash to their dominance and what it has done to daily life fortifies and expands. Just two months ago in these pages, the Prospect reviewed author and internet activist Cory Doctorow’s streetwise, uncommonly lucid account of the perils of the platform giants: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It’s not surprising that the two worldviews are similar: Wu and Doctorow attended the same elementary school in Toronto.

Doctorow’s observations are lacerating, and he has a gift for the grotesque analogy. Yet his argument in Enshittification never feels doctrinaire. Beneath his pamphleteer’s fury is a technologist’s love for what the web once promised and might still become. He reminds us that the internet’s decline wasn’t inevitable—it was policy-driven. Antitrust law atrophied. Venture capital rewarded growth over governance. Where Doctorow rages from the barricades, Wu lectures from the front of the seminar room. His book, though slimmer and less acrobatic, carries the weight of a seasoned antitrust scholar. Yet he doesn’t avoid gut-level revulsion: In a section about Amazon, he likens the company’s ad racket, which charges third-party sellers premium fees for high placement in search results, to a “Tony Soprano school of business” shakedown.

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