With record-breaking temperatures sweeping across the southeastern United States, the Department of Energy took emergency steps Tuesday to keep the power running, the Daily Caller reported.
The Department of Energy authorized Duke Energy Carolinas to temporarily run certain generating units at full output in an effort to prevent electrical outages as the summer heatwave threatens the region’s power supply.
The emergency order is part of a broader initiative by the Trump administration to strengthen a national power grid that, according to recent assessments, is vulnerable during periods of high demand such as this year’s extreme summer weather. Issued Tuesday, the DOE directive allows Duke Energy Carolinas to exceed some standard operating limits until Wednesday night.
Duke Energy Carolinas delivers electricity throughout the Carolinas, with its parent company serving customers across seven states—Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The order comes as these areas experience a prolonged heatwave expected to last several days.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated the measure enables Duke Energy Carolinas to maintain a steady power supply during a period when demand is expected to peak. “This order ensures Duke Energy Carolinas can supply its customers with consistent and reliable power throughout peak summer demand,” Wright said Tuesday.
The order follows a similar one issued less than a month earlier. On May 23, Energy Secretary Wright directed a grid operator to continue operating a coal-fired plant in Michigan to address stressed grid conditions in the region.
Just days after that earlier intervention, New Orleans—also under the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)—experienced a large-scale blackout on May 25. The incident underscored worries about the readiness and durability of the power grid during extreme weather.
According to a 2024 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, several large grid operators face what the agency called an “elevated risk” of falling short in meeting summer electricity needs. This has prompted calls for reliable backup generation, especially during periods of extreme heat or cold.
Utilities often rely on fossil fuels to compensate for energy shortages during high-demand periods. Industry experts have stressed the need for dependable sources, noting that coal, nuclear, and natural gas remain key to ensuring a consistent flow of power during critical times.
The Trump administration has aimed to reverse course on regulations implemented under President Joe Biden that focused on clean energy and environmental protections. Since returning to the office, President Trump declared a national energy emergency on day one, a sign of his focus on traditional energy production.
Critics of Biden-era policies argue that regulatory limits and expansions of renewable energy efforts have contributed to supply constraints. Wright and other officials pointed to the early retirement of coal plants and fewer permits for fossil fuel development as reasons for the grid’s shortcomings.
In contrast, the current administration supports loosening such rules to keep fossil fuel-based plants in operation longer and available for peak usage events such as the current heat surge.
The emergency power order for Duke Energy Carolinas gives the utility short-term flexibility to meet region-wide energy needs. However, it also signals a potentially challenging summer ahead if high heat continues and demand remains elevated.
Officials have asked consumers to be mindful of their electricity use during peak hours, suggesting reduced usage of major appliances and increased thermostat settings to help ease strain on the network. Such voluntary actions could forestall additional orders or outages as heat persists.
Energy Secretary Wright emphasized that “under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Energy will use all tools available” to provide affordable, secure, and dependable power to American households and industries as the summer progresses.
Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett (TX) is no longer seeking her party's top seat on the powerful House Oversight Committee after a cool reception from her fellow Democrats.
The controversial lawmaker said she would have launched an impeachment inquiry into President Trump if Democrats won back the House and she became chair of the Oversight Committee.
Her flashy, aggressive style was too much for most Democrats, who elected California Rep. Robert Garcia, a 47-year-old staunch leftist born in Peru.
Garcia had the backing of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus and California's Democratic delegation, the biggest in Congress.
This is only Garcia's second term as a congressman. He was among the Democrats who traveled to El Salvador to advocate for the return of accused trafficker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in a spectacle that reinforced the party's image as weak on immigration and crime.
Democrats are still without direction months into Trump's second term, but they seem to realize that Crockett's attention-grabbing style is not what will help them convince voters that they are serious about governing. Crockett is aware of that perception.
“It was clear by the numbers that my style of leadership is not exactly what they were looking for and so I didn’t think that it was fair for me to then push forward,” Crockett told The Dallas Morning News.
Crockett came dead last in a closed-door vote by the Democratic steering committee, which recommended Garcia for the position of ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) also quit after a poor showing from the steering committee, and Garcia defeated the sole remaining candidate, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Ma.)
The position was opened up after Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly died from cancer at age 75, mere months after he defeated challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Ny) for the ranking member job.
Connolly's death in office sparked a fresh debate on the Democratic party's aging leadership, which has faced criticism from the left over its cautious approach to confronting Trump.
Democrats dismissed an impeachment attempt from 77-year-old rabblerouser Al Green (D-Tx.) almost as soon as it was introduced Tuesday, with 128 Democrats helping to block the resolution.
Crockett pushed back on Democratic critics of her impeachment plans, saying she would have used the Oversight Committee to conduct an impeachment inquiry into Trump's conduct rather than try to remove Trump from office, something Democrats have tried unsuccessfully in the past.
Ultimately, Crockett said she's staying true to herself, and it's working for her so far.
“At the end of the day, I am who I am, and I believe that my authenticity is what works, and it definitely works for my district in the state of Texas,” Crockett said.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'There is perhaps no area where the media is more willing to lie, mislead, and obfuscate than when it comes to immigration enforcement'
National Public Radio, in a fight against President Donald Trump to keep millions of taxpayer dollars coming despite its leftist ideology that offends millions of Americans and pushes political talking points as news, has unleashed a tearjerker headlined, "A journalist known for covering immigration is arrested by ICE."
However, to reprise Paul Harvey's famous one-liner, the "rest of the story," from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, notes that Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran national was arrested because he is "in our country ILLEGALLY."
The government statement pointed out Guevara "was arrested by Dekalb County, Georgia police for willful OBSTRUCTION after he refused to comply with local police orders to move out of the middle of the street. Following his arrest by local authorities, ICE placed a detainer on him. Following his release, he was turned over to ICE custody and has been placed in removal proceedings.'
Other responses, collected by Twitchy included:
"Example number 6,302,903,231 of what is wrong with American 'journalism.'"
"This is exactly why @NPR needs to be defunded."
"There is perhaps no area where the media is more willing to lie, mislead, and obfuscate than when it comes to immigration enforcement."
"Articles like this is why I don't want to fund npr."
Ironically, a lawyer representing three Colorado-based NPR stations suing over President Trump's executive order regarding defunding public media, according to his bio, "Steve Zanbserg," just unleashed a commentary at Complete Colorado insisting that it was unfair to "punish" the tax-supported organizations for what he claims is their "private speech."
He discusses now the taxpayer money, a "benefit" to selected groups like NPR and such, cannot be withheld based on a dislike of "the content of private speech."
He said NPR and its cohorts are private and nonprofit groups, yet it is only those groups that have benefited from public subsidies: Hundreds of other general news organizations, including those that are nonprofits, have not.
He explains, "To make the obvious unconstitutionality of Trump's executive order clear, consider this hypothetical: a future Democratic president signs an executive order commanding the IRS to withdraw tax-exempt status from any religious or non-profit organization that publicly opposes a Democratic party priority. No problem, right? After all, the argument is that no non-profit organization (e.g. the Catholic Church or the NRA) is entitled to a federal tax exemption, a form of public subsidy. If so, the government would be free to withhold that completely discretionary benefit — one that increases the burden on all non-exempt taxpayers — exclusively because it disagrees with those organizations' speech, right? No, of course not."
Yet, of course, that is almost exactly what Barack Obama's IRS did back in the 2008 election, when it deliberately withheld IRS status approvals for organizations that disagreed with Democrat talking points at that time. The IRS notably demanded from applicants details about the subject of their prayers, and much more.
The IRS eventually paid damages to some victims of its campaign, orchestrated by, among others, Lois Lerner.
Zanbserg continued, "The above hypothetical is not meant to say, nor even to suggest, that Trump's claim that NPR and PBS programming 'fuel[s] partisanship and left-wing propaganda' is even remotely accurate. In fact, it is not. But that is utterly beside the point. Even if it were true — that these two private organizations produced decidedly 'biased' or one-sided journalism — the First Amendment unmistakably prohibits any government official from withholding a federal benefit in retaliation for his/her displeasure with the viewpoints presented by those speakers. And that's why the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the lawfulness of Trump's executive order should, and will, prevail."
He said he believes in "subsidies" for "public media" so that reporters don't worry about angering the folks who pay them, and "to ensure all Americans are served even when it's not commercially profitable."
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
A commentary has come up with a stunningly direct solution to the problem created by federal judges who oppose President Donald Trump's border security plans that include deporting illegal alien criminals when they order them un-deported, or brought back.
Specifically, there's a case involving a Boston judge, Brian Murphy, who has demanded the government not deport a list of criminals who had been convicted of crimes including attempted first-degree murder, homicide, assault and more.
The criminals had been en route to South Sudan when the judge interrupted the deportation, ordering that the U.S. must maintain custody of them, so ICE officers have been guarding the criminals in a make-shift location in Djibouti.
According to the column by M.D. Kittle at the Federalist, "Murphy, like the other rogue judges who have attempted to stop the executive branch from carrying out the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws (as the Second Branch is empowered to do), demand the kind of due process rights for illegal immigrants reserved for criminal proceedings. They have no such rights."
In fact, Lora Ries, of the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center, has explained, "The administrative immigration judges are Justice Department employees in the executive branch; they are not federal judges under the Article III Judiciary of the U.S. Constitution. That means deportable aliens in deportation proceedings do not have the same rights as a person in a criminal trial, such as being innocent until proven guilty, the right to a taxpayer funded public defendant, etc. Removing a deportable alien is not a criminal sentence."
Kittle suggested Trump "likes a good deal," and perhaps it's time for one.
"How about this one: The administration agrees to bring back the violent criminals only if Murphy agrees to put them up at his house while the illegal immigrants receive 'time enough to express any concerns.' Maybe Enrique Arias-Hierro could bunk with the Murphy family. I'm sure the illegal immigrant wouldn't reoffend and violate the Boston judge's due process rights."
That illegal alien, in fact, is from Cuba. "His criminal history includes convictions for homicide, armed robbery, false impersonation of official, kidnapping, robbery strong arm," the column said.
Murphy, in fact, has ruled that the administration could not deport criminal aliens to third-party countries when their own nations refused to take them back. When the Supreme Court overturned Murphy's ruling, he simply said that ruling didn't apply to the case he was handling and his ruling still stood.
The column pointed out the idea to house the criminals is like that used by two Republican governors to "hit self-righteous, sanctuary leftists where they lived."
That would be Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who "triggered" Democrats in 2022 when they began busing and flying "undocumented migrants" to Democrat-controlled cities and locales like Martha's Vineyard, "the posh playground of liberal elites including Barack and Michelle Obama."
Under Biden's practices, America's borders were wide open and millions, even tens of millions of illegals entered. Among those were gang members and even terrorists.
Trump now is working to clean up the "millions-fold mess left by his predecessor."
And it is that agenda that "rogue federal judges have attempted to stop."
The column noted the eight convicts at issue in the Murphy case include:
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
A new testimony has surfaced confirming what reports have documented over recent months and years: That Christianity is alive and well inside Iran, now run by the extreme Islamic regime that took over by force nearly 50 years ago.
Even by some descriptions thriving.
A report at Not the Bee explains the testimony comes from Ramin Parsa, born in Iran in 1986, who has experienced being kidnapped by Islamic morality police and tortured.
He had been taught to hate.
"In the school, everything was Islamic. In our textbooks, we had the caricatures of Israeli soldiers killing these Palestinian babies. And the babies crying… it was not real but they wanted to sow the seed of hatred in our hearts toward the Jews and Israel," the report said he explained.
At one point, he came upon a gospel message on a Christian television station. He paid attention.
Ultimately, he prayed, "Jesus, if this is true, if you are truly the son of God, if you died for me on the cross – if you rose from the dead – I ask you to come into my life, show me. I want you to show me. I want you to prove it to me."
That moment, "Heat went through my hand. It went through all of my body. I started shaking and I started crying. I felt a love I had never felt before. I felt a peace I had never felt before. I felt as if a 500-lb weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I began to feel love, even for the people who beat me and tortured me."
He now works with, among other projects, a ministry helping those in Israel targeted by Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7.
Not the Bee noted it's not the first word that Christianity is moving across Iran.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is predicting more wildfires because of President Donald Trump's policies, the Daily Caller reported. The state is about to go into its hot, dry season that often sparks off these fires no matter who is president.
Newsom has mismanaged his state into several crises, including wildfires. However, the California Democrat is blaming Trump for these preventable natural disasters rather than proactively preparing.
"Donald Trump isn’t just threatening CA’s disaster aid, he’s also pushing for dangerous cuts ahead of wildfire season. A 63% REDUCTION in the U.S. Forest Service’s budget. A 30% REDUCTION in workforce — 10,000 employees … He is literally playing politics with people’s lives," Newsom posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday.
Donald Trump isn’t just threatening CA’s disaster aid, he’s also pushing for dangerous cuts ahead of wildfire season —
A 63% REDUCTION in the U.S. Forest Service’s budget. A 30% REDUCTION in workforce — 10,000 employees.
The agency is the nation’s largest firefighting entity.… pic.twitter.com/YrVKfyaBPv
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 20, 2025
For decades, legal roadblocks have hindered the effective implementation of forest management techniques in the name of environmental conservation. Fallen trees, dead leaves, and other materials pile up on forest floors.
Measures like controlled burns or cleanouts are tied up in litigation as the material dries out and becomes kindling waiting for a spark. Like most things Democrats have destroyed in the process of trying to help, this has been done to millions of acres of wilderness.
Meanwhile, Newsom and his ilk are looking to blame the inevitable results on Trump's climate change policies and cuts. In a second post made on Saturday, the governor said Trump was engaged in "sabotage" because an article claimed that 20% of the National Guard troops the president deployed were fighting wildfires.
This adds to the predictions Newsom made last month ahead of fire season. He stated that the cuts the Trump administration made to the bloated bureaucracy, including the Forest Service, would create "rampant uncertainty ahead of peak wildfire season."
Other Democrats are making similar predictions, including California Sen. Alex Padilla. In February, Padilla claimed Trump's "flagrantly illegal" budget cuts to conservation agencies would "jeopardize communities that depend on a robust federal response to our wildfire crisis."
Of course, wildlife expert and author Bob Zybach could see right through these accusations. "The problem isn’t all these massive numbers of wildfires," Zybach, who has run the Oregon Websites & Watersheds Project for nearly 30 years, told the Daily Caller.
"The problem is the financial end of it. It’s not Trump, it’s the people, the litigants, who keep suing to shut down the timber industry which has allowed the fuels to build up," Zybach charged.
Zybach said this is more than just a state problem, as federal regulations under then-President Bill Clinton massively hindered proper forest management long before Newsom. "In the 1970s and ’80s, California and Oregon didn’t have these fires," Zybach said.
"Then we put in the Clinton plan, the Northwest Forest Plan … I was on the cover of the national magazine Evergreen in 1994 and said, ‘If we put in the Clinton plan, we’re going to have catastrophic wildfires.’ And my predictions were accurate," Zybach noted.
These fires happen every year, and Newsom can spend this time preparing resources. Instead, Newsom and his cronies are too busy blaming Trump for a problem that has been brewing for decades and is made worse by climate change hysteria.
President Trump urged U.S. oil producers to keep gas prices down as the Iran-Israel conflict threatened to disrupt the oil trade - but prices actually dropped Monday as a cease-fire took hold.
The stabilizing economic outlook is sure to frustrate Democrats, who want to see chaos in the Middle East drag Trump down.
Trump's demand to increase domestic production came as Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critically important route in the global oil trade. Roughly 20% of the world's oil passes through the strait.
"To The Department of Energy: DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!! And I mean NOW!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!”
The threat of an oil crunch seemed to fade Monday as Trump announced a cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Instead of rising, oil prices fell. The drop-off continued Tuesday.
“I love it. It dropped almost $10 yesterday,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One Tuesday morning. “We have a lot less conflict, so it came down.”
Iran's oil threats were met with some skepticism by geopolitical experts, and the United States warned that Iran would be committing "economic suicide" by choking off its most valuable export.
In a surprising move, Trump declared Tuesday that China can continue to buy oil from Iran, adding, "Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also. It was my Great Honor to make this happen!" The statement seemed to shift from Washington's longstanding policy of isolating Iran's economy. China is Iran's largest oil buyer.
The White House later clarified that Trump was referring to the Strait of Hormuz staying open and not sanctions relief.
Trump campaigned for the White House in part on combating inflation, and recent low gas prices have given the president something to boast about. But the tensions in the Middle East have led to uncertainty in the market.
The president highlighted the volatility of the situation Tuesday as he blasted Israel and Iran Tuesday for appearing to violate the peace agreement that he brokered.
“I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran, either, but I’m really unhappy with Israel going out this morning,” Trump said.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f—- they’re doing.”
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'If America's policy makers continue accepting these distorted narratives ... they will be compelling Americans to subsidize their own decline'
For years, the U.S.-India relationship has been sold as a mutually beneficial "strategic partnership." Trade agreements are marketed as balanced, offshoring is rebranded as economic modernization and the displacement of American workers is masked behind talking points about innovation and global cooperation.
But beneath this polished narrative lies a stark truth: The partnership has become a one-sided arrangement, heavily tilted in India's favor, enabled by U.S. multinationals, Indian lobbying and economic misdirection.
The latest example comes from the India-based Global Trade Research Initiative or GTRI, which now claims the U.S. runs a $35-$40 billion trade surplus with India. This new characterization of the trade balance between the U.S. and India uses selective accounting tactics, such as counting offshore labor operations in India as American exports, while ignoring the long-term damage to U.S. wages, employment and innovation capacity.
The official U.S. trade deficit with India, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, remains substantial. In 2024, the United States recorded a $46.08 billion goods deficit with India, an increase from the previous year. While the Global Trade Research Initiative argues that this gap is offset by other revenue streams, such as student tuition payments, software exports, digital services and intellectual property royalties, these claims require closer scrutiny.
It's true that India is a growing consumer of U.S. technology and services. In 2024, total U.S. exports of goods and services to India reached $82.1 billion, a 10.3% increase over 2023. But imports from India also rose to $128.2 billion, up 6.7%, widening the overall trade deficit to $46.1 billion.
Reframing the deficit
The Global Trade Research Initiative attempts to reshape this trade gap by including loosely associated or tangential revenue flows in its analysis, such as digital advertising income, licensing fees and revenues earned by U.S. companies operating in India.
While these revenues may appear in corporate accounting books, they often have little to no bearing on actual trade flows between the two countries. In many cases, the value is created and consumed entirely within India, booked through third-country tax jurisdictions and excluded from official trade statistics maintained by institutions such as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the World Trade Organization. Therefore, including such figures in bilateral trade balance calculations not only violates established global trade accounting standards, it actively obscures the real asymmetry in the U.S.-India economic relationship.
This misrepresentation is not accidental; it is intentional and serves a high-stakes political objective.
As President Donald Trump intensifies efforts to reassert America's economic sovereignty and address long-standing trade deficits, India faces pressure to open its markets, reduce tariffs and eliminate non-tariff barriers. In this context, reframing the deficit becomes a tactical necessity for India. By inflating U.S. gains through creative accounting, India seeks to portray the relationship as balanced, thereby neutralizing demands for reciprocity and delaying enforcement actions that would disrupt its export-driven model.
India has much to gain from maintaining this illusion of parity. It wants continued access to the U.S. market for goods and services, protection of its visa-dependent labor supply chain and uninterrupted flows of American capital, contracts and technology.
At the same time, it remains one of the most protectionist economies in the world, with high tariffs, opaque regulatory processes and a digital economy increasingly shielded by localization mandates and indigenous innovation schemes to become "self-reliant" India. GTRI's economic spin is thus designed to protect this one-sided arrangement by misleading American negotiators, media and lawmakers into believing India is playing fair, when in fact it is extracting significant benefits while offering minimal concessions in return.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has explicitly attacked President Trump's "protectionist" "American First" policies, saying "Many countries are becoming inward focused and globalization is shrinking, and such tendencies can't be considered lesser risks than terrorism or climate change." Meanwhile, India's policies and budgets often include import duties to "provide adequate protection to domestic industry" and "promote creation of more jobs." Critics have even remarked that India's "Make in India" slogan has become, in effect, "Protect in India."
According to Rick Rossow, former deputy director at the U.S.-India Business Council, India's strategy has always been "pro-investment and anti-trade."
By reframing the deficit through distorted metrics, India is not engaging in honest diplomacy; rather, it is executing a long-term influence strategy. And unless U.S. officials look beyond surface-level numbers and examine the underlying capital flows, labor displacements and regulatory asymmetries, the trade relationship will remain fundamentally unequal, hidden behind the illusion of balance.
One of the most egregious distortions in the Global Trade Research Initiative narrative is its treatment of Indian student spending in the United States as a form of "export revenue" contributing to a U.S. trade surplus.
According to GTRI, Indian students studying in America inject over $25 billion annually into the U.S. economy, $15 billion in tuition and $10 billion in living expenses. From this, they argue that education represents one of the most significant and undercounted U.S. "exports" to India. This is not only false, it's a deliberate manipulation of established trade definitions.
At the heart of this argument lies a fundamental misunderstanding – or willful misrepresentation – of how global trade balances are measured. Under internationally accepted accounting standards used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, student spending is classified as "personal travel" or "consumption expenditure by nonresidents," not as a commercial export of goods or services between nations. It is a private expense made by individuals voluntarily choosing to reside temporarily in the United States.
In other words, when an Indian student pays tuition at Purdue or rents an apartment in Ann Arbor, that is not India sending American money for a product. It is an individual participating in the U.S. economy, no different than a tourist buying a Broadway ticket or a foreign national eating at a restaurant in San Francisco. GTRI attempts to retrofit these personal financial decisions into a bilateral trade framework to fabricate a U.S. surplus where none exists.
Moreover, education-related travel is already captured in the BEA's international transactions account under "Exports of Services: Travel (Education-Related)", a line item that includes all spending by international students in the U.S. But even in this context, it remains a subset of consumer spending, not the kind of commercial export one would expect in a trade negotiation or tariff discussion. Including it as a central pillar of the U.S.-India economic relationship is both misleading and irrelevant to the structural trade imbalance.
GTRI's framing also obscures the true cost of this education pipeline. While universities benefit from full-tuition international students, the broader American public does not. Indian students often use international F-1 student visas to secure U.S. work authorizations under Optional Practical Training (OPT) and STEM OPT loopholes, which allow them to work for up to three years post-graduation without being subject to employer-sponsored visa caps and labor protections.
From 2023 to 2024 there were a recorded 378,175 jobs that went to international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities. And according to the Pew Research Center, the OPT program has grown 400% from 2008-2016.
These programs, poorly monitored and exploited by multinational corporations, function as backdoor immigration channels that displace qualified American graduates in STEM and tech roles. So while universities gain revenue, the American workforce loses essential job opportunity.
If India, through its think-tank GTRI, insists on classifying student tuition payments as part of a U.S. trade surplus, then by that logic, the United States should equally account for the far larger and more impactful flows of capital into India – namely remittances, foreign aid and direct investment.
Indian students who often remit income earned during and after their education back to India contribute to a reverse flow of wealth. Once they secure employment under OPT or H-1B, their presence is frequently used by outsourcing firms to build long-term foreign labor pipelines, creating a net drain on U.S. job availability and wage growth.
In 2024 alone, India received approximately $129 billion in inward remittances, 28% of which came from the U.S. – the largest single remittance source for India's economy. These outflows represent real earned income leaving the U.S. economy and directly bolstering India's GDP. If India is going to distort trade logic by including private tuition payments as national income, then it must also reckon with the scale of wealth, investment and development subsidies flowing from the United States into India, none of which are ever acknowledged in GTRI's conveniently narrow calculations.
Misclassifying offshoring as U.S. gains
In its attempt to reframe the U.S.-India trade deficit, the Global Trade Research Initiative also misleadingly counts revenue from Global Capability Centers (GCCs) operated by U.S. corporations in India as part of a supposed American "trade surplus." This framing is fundamentally flawed. GCCs are offshore units – outsourced operations intentionally set up by U.S. firms to cut costs by shifting high-paying white-collar jobs from the United States to low-wage labor markets like India.
These centers do not generate export revenue or contribute to America's GDP. Instead, they represent capital outflows, where U.S. companies pay Indian-based employees and infrastructure to perform work that would otherwise be done by Americans. Indeed, the very function of a GCC is to replace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor, often reducing labor costs by 50-80% per employee.
For instance, a $140,000 software engineering role in the U.S. is commonly offshored and replaced with a $45,000 job in India, a direct wage-suppression tactic that not only destroys American incomes and career paths, but also drains local economies of tax revenue and consumer spending.
But according to GTRI's logic, because companies like Amazon, Microsoft, JPMorgan and Google generate digital services revenue from Indian-based Global Capability Centers, some of which may be booked in U.S. corporate accounts, that somehow constitutes a U.S. economic win. This is a fundamental misrepresentation of how GCCs function economically and why they are, in fact, a mechanism for capital outflow and labor arbitrage, not trade inflow.
While revenues may technically be booked in the United States, these centers do not drive American exports; rather, they displace American workers. They should be understood for what they are: job-exporting, wage-suppressing mechanisms that facilitate capital outflow, not trade inflow. U.S. multinationals have poured more than $300 billion into India over the past two decades, fueling Indian infrastructure, technology parks and manufacturing capacity. Framing them as contributors to a U.S. surplus is not only misleading; it conceals the very offshoring engine that is hollowing out the American middle class.
GTRI lumps in the gross revenues earned by U.S. digital giants (e.g., Google, Meta, Microsoft) in India without accounting for local cost and operations, revenue booking across jurisdictions and, most critically, the fact that many of these revenues are generated inside India, often through localized operations, content moderation centers and sales teams. In many cases, these companies reinvest heavily in India or engage in transfer pricing, whereby profits are booked in tax havens, not the U.S.
This maneuver lowers U.S. multinational enterprises' (MNEs) tax jurisdictions while reducing the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and raising the host country's GDP. The use of transfer pricing by digital giants to shift profits into low- or no-tax jurisdictions means revenue from Indian users may be booked in Ireland, Singapore or Bermuda, not the U.S. GTRI's assumption that this revenue counts toward the U.S. trade surplus, citing $15-20 billion in revenue as part of the U.S. trade surplus, is factually incorrect and totally misleading.
In fact, a 2020 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report clearly outlined how digital services companies structure their international operations and why revenue earned abroad is not always taxable, reportable or traceable to the United States in a way that would qualify it as part of the U.S. trade surplus.
Yet, by presenting revenue as a "U.S. surplus," GTRI implies that this money benefits the American economy. But as the Congressional Research Service notes, this revenue does not translate into U.S. tax gains or trade credit, especially when it's routed through foreign subsidiaries. The CSR report also details a 2% "Equalization Levy" – India's version of Digital Service Taxes (DSTs) – a fact undermining GTRI's claim that the revenue constitutes a legitimate U.S. trade surplus. In fact, India doesn't even view the activity as contributing to its own economy, let alone to the U.S. But the U.S. does not necessarily record those revenues as national income either, meaning neither country treats this revenue the way GTRI does.
The illusion of balance, the reality of betrayal
At its core, the Global Trade Research Initiative effort to recast the U.S.-India trade relationship as one of balance, let alone surplus, rests on economic sleight-of-hand, not statistical truth.
India's campaign to redefine the trade deficit is not a misunderstanding; it is a geopolitical tactic.
As trade negotiations with President Trump intensify, India has every incentive to soften the numbers, obscure the imbalance and delay enforcement. Its overall goal, however, is not parity, but preservation for continued access to U.S. markets, expanded visa pipelines and unfettered flows of U.S. capital and technology, all while maintaining protectionist barriers and repatriating economic gains.
Meanwhile, American workers are left jobless, American innovation is offshored and America's economic sovereignty continues to erode.
The U.S. must stop treating statistical propaganda as economic reality. GTRI's manipulated data is not just bad math, it is designed to manipulate American lawmakers into surrendering leverage at the negotiating table. If America's policy makers continue accepting these distorted narratives, they will not only fail to correct the trade deficit, but they will be compelling Americans to subsidize their own decline.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
The network claims the information was based on a bombing assessment report done by the Defense Intelligence Agency after the strikes
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is rebuking CNN after the network ran a story based on "leaked" sources claiming that the damage the U.S. attack on Iran inflicted over the weekend only set Tehran's nuclear ambitions behind by "a few month."
CNN reported Tuesday that three sources indicate the attack Saturday "did not destroy the core components of the country's nuclear program and likely only set it back a few months."
The network claims the information was based on a bombing assessment report done by the Defense Intelligence Agency after the strikes.
Leavitt rebutted the report on social media, pointing out the CNN story was put together "by the same 'reporter' who wrote the very first FAKE NEWS story claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation."
That reporter is Natasha Bertrand.
Besides Leavitt, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also discounted the report, telling Fox News the attack "obliterated" Iran's nuclear capabilities.
"Based on everything we have seen — and I've seen it all — our bombing campaign obliterated Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons," Hegseth said. "Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target — and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission."
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, whom many in the political world say is a "rising star" among Democrats, threw a tantrum in Congress Tuesday after she came in last place in her bid to become the top Democrat on the powerful House Oversight Committee.
In video of the committee posted online, Crockett is seen shouting foul language at her congressional colleagues who were urging her to "calm down."
"No! Because this is what y'all do! So I'm trying to get clarification," Crockett yelled.
"If you don't want me to be … Don't tell me to calm down! Because y'all talk noise and then you can't take it. 'Cause if I come and talk sh** about her, y'all gonna have a problem."
Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., admitted having physical trouble understanding his fellow lawmakers amid the commotion.
"I don't know if you've noticed that I have two hearing aids," Comer said. "I'm very deaf. I'm not understanding. Everybody's yelling. I'm doing the best I can."
Democrats selected Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., as their ranking member on the 47-person panel.
Crockett told reporters: "It was clear by the numbers that my style of leadership is not exactly what they were looking for, and so I didn't think that it was fair for me to then push forward and try to rebuke that."
"They were clear that I was the one that made the least sense in their minds.
"I accept that, and I think that you have to make sure that you are going to be able to work with leadership if you are going to go into a leadership position," she added.
"I think the people may be disappointed, but at the end of the day, we've got to move forward in this country, we've got to move forward for this world, and I don't want to be an impediment."
This was Crockett's second defeat in looking to ascend the rungs of congressional leadership. She was looking to replace the committee's former top Democrat, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who died in May.
Journalist Nick Sortor reacted to Crockett's tantrum, stating: "Running for Congress should require a minimum IQ. Crockett's become the face of ghetto. And she seems to enjoy that for some reason. Texas needs to dump her a**."
Others indicated:
"In the early round of voting Jasmine Crockett got 6 votes. One of them was from herself. She came in last to 76 year old Kweisi Mfume – who many people had never even heard of before. Maybe Trump should text her about this. "
"Crockett thinks being vile and vulgar is an asset. It just makes her a loser."
"Kamala 2.0."
"Can they censure her for speaking out of turn and in ebonics?"