The Dictatorship
In the PR battle for AI data centers, tech giants got a blue-collar ally
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Building trades unions — long fashioned as the voice of the American worker — are now intertwined with the richest companies in the world as they create America’s artificial intelligence economy.
Unionized workers are employed on a huge number of massive data center projects and scrambling to recruit new apprentices to feed the explosive demand.
They’ve also become an ally of tech giants and tech-friendly government officials, echoing the talking point that the United States is in a critical national security race with China for AI superiority.
Unions are a visible force in helping counter fierce opposition in communitiesand hostile legislation in Congress and legislatures, often aligning with traditional Republican pro-business constituencies and forcing Democrats to choose between them and progressives who want to take a harder line.
Unions have aggressively answered complaints about data centers in ways that executives at tech giants and the development firms rarely do, unafraid to bluntly confront concerns about energy and water shortages, rising electric and water bills, or noise and quality-of-life objections.
“When people say, you know, ‘data centers are the root of all evil,’ we’re just saying, ‘look, they do create a hell of a lot of construction jobs, which we live and work in your communities,’” said Rob Bair, president of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council.
Instead of “being just a blunt ‘no,’” Bair said, communities should figure out what they need and ask the tech companies for it — such as improvements to the project’s plans or millions of dollars for local schools. “If you don’t ask, you’re never gonna get,” he said.
Data centers a boon for unions
With data center construction accelerating, unions are expanding training centers and seeing their ranks grow faster than many union leaders have ever seen.
Unions in a number of states are reporting skyrocketing man hours, apprentice classes doubling in size and training centers undergoing expansions in anticipation of more work coming.
Data centers consume at least 40% of work hours done by members of the Columbus-Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, a top official, Dorsey Hager, estimated. It’s at least 50% for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26 in metropolitan Washington, D.C., spokesperson Don Slaiman said.
The umbrella North America’s Building Trades Unions said it hit a record number of members and apprentices in 2025.
The organization’s president, Sean McGarvey, compared it to the build trades’ expansion in the 1950s. He attributes today’s growth to data centers, power plants and legislation under former President Joe Biden that subsidized the construction of semiconductor and electric vehicle battery factories, energy efficiency projects and grid transmission improvements.
Data centers’ voracious energy needs are setting off a power plant construction boom and delivering a one-two punch of new life to unions whose members also build and maintain boilers, ductwork, pipelines and other power infrastructure.
The Boilermakers Local 154, whose members have watched power plants shut down in southwestern Pennsylvania, went from recruiting zero apprentices for four years to now assembling a class of over 200 — and they need more, union official Shawn Steffee said.
For their part, tech giants say they need to train hundreds of thousands more workers in skilled trades. They are spending tens of millions of dollars on training programs, including partnerships with unions that they hire to build their multibillion-dollar projects.
“Across the country, highly skilled union construction workers are laying the foundation for the AI economy,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a joint statement in March with McGarvey’s organization.
Google said the majority of labor used to build its data centers is unionized, and pointed to a $10 million grant to a union-backed electricians training program that it said would help expand the electrician workforce pipeline by 70%.
‘The data centers would still be getting built’
Mark McManus, the general president of the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters, whose members work on pipelines, data centers and power plants, acknowledged criticism that organized labor is getting in bed with the richest, most powerful companies in the world.
But he rejected it as unrealistic.
“If we chose as a union to have a moratorium on building the data centers because we didn’t believe it was right for America, the data centers would still be getting built,” McManus said. “They’re not stopping because of organized labor.”
His union has a strong relationship with tech companies, is hitting all-time highs in membership and, based on an internal survey, has members working on over 90% of the data center projects in the United States.
“That’s a market share that we don’t have in a lot of other industries,” McManus said. “So it’s pretty near and dear to us.”
It’s difficult to pin down exactly how many data center projects involve union labor. An Associated General Contractors of America survey late last year suggested that the labor composition of data center construction likely mirrors the makeup of commercial construction, which is roughly one-third union, an AGC spokesperson said.
Showing up in towns and statehouses
National unions have negotiated labor agreements on major projects, including an Oracle and OpenAI Stargate campusin Michigan and the “Project Blue” data center campus in Arizona, with more in the works.
When Gov. Josh Shapiro stood with Amazon executives to announce that the tech giant would spend $20 billion on two data center projects in eastern Pennsylvania, Bair stood with them.
“This is really unique, what we’re building here in this commonwealth. People coming together with common purpose to get stuff done,” Shapiro said.
In statehouses, unions have worked against Maine’s since-vetoed proposal for a statewide data center moratorium; standards proposed in Illinois, including requiring data centers to supply their own energy; and an end to Virginia’s sales tax exemptionthat helped make it the world’s biggest data center destination.
Pennsylvania state Sen. Katie Muth said it has been difficult to collect support from fellow Democrats for her legislation to regulate data centers when it is competing with union-backed legislation that she views as weaker.
“The unions don’t want to promote anything that would impede data center development,” Muth said.
Union representatives have made their presence felt at packed council meetings in municipal buildings from St. Louis to Spring City, Pennsylvania.
Sometimes it’s not in a good way.
Speaking to the City Council in Joliet, Illinois, Alicia Morales complained that union members — who sat in the front row holding “vote yes for union jobs” signs — had been disrespectful and “bullied a lot of people” entering the meeting.
Sometimes, union representatives are the only people in a packed municipal meeting room to speak in favor of a project.
“I just want to commend you guys, thanks for being the adults in the room,” Chuck Curry, the president of Ironworkers Local 395, told City Council members in Hobart, Indiana, at a January meeting on an Amazon data center. “Knowing the tax structure, knowing business, that most of the people here don’t know.”
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s top officials and brothers of the country’s new supreme leader emerged into public view Sunday to attend the funeral prayers for the late Ayatollah Ali Khameneisignaling a new confidence in their safety as calls grew for the killing of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Their presence before hundreds of thousands of people in the capital Tehran would have been unthinkable during the Iran war, which saw airstrikes in its opening moments on Feb. 28 kill the 86-year-old Khamenei, his family members and other officials.
Israel also targeted others who appeared publicly during the war, in at least one case likely using their public appearanceto fix their position for a strike.
But still unseen was Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. He is believed to be in hiding after reportedly being wounded in the airstrike that killed his father. Israel has threatened to kill him as well as he leads a theocracy now negotiating with the United States over a permanent end to the war and over Iran strangling traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global energy supplies.
Ziba Naderi, a 42-year-old nurse attending the funeral Sunday, said Iran needed to follow whatever Mojtaba Khamenei commands in regards to the nation.
“I heard the call for revenge, but our leader should say what we need to do,” she said. “And we must listen to him.”
Funeral includes prayers and calls for revenge
Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a 97-year-old Shiite cleric, led the prayers at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla for Khamenei and his late family members.
On hand were Khamenei’s sons Masoud, Meysam and Mostafa, who haven’t been seen since the war. Revolutionary Guard head Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, who only had been photographed for the first time since the war on Thursdaycould be seen in the crowd by Associated Press journalists, flanked by plainclothes security forces as he wore a black baseball cap.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Esmail Qani, who leads the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force, also attended.
Their appearances came as posters and graffiti at the Grand Mosalla called for the killing of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mohammad Rasouli, a poet who emceed the event prior to the prayers, drew calls of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
Speaking to the crowd over loudspeakers at the funeral, Rasouli asked, referring to Trump, “Why is the most bastard man in the world still alive?”
The question drew cheers from the crowd, and again when Rasouli said “the world is no longer a good place for” Trump. It marked the first, direct threat to Trump’s life by an official during the funeral.
Trump threats grow at funeral
The American president was giving a speech at the same time across the world in Washington, D.C., for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.
“We’ve had tremendous success,” Trump said about the U.S. military. “You look at Venezuela, you look at Iran. We wiped it out, wiped out their military.”
A far-larger crowd for the funeral than the day before attended Sunday. Mourners dressed in black walked to the site, carrying banners and flags honoring Khamenei and also calling for Trump’s killing.
“I came here to shout and seek revenge,” said Gholamreza Sabooni, 29-year-old man who works in a grocery. “They killed our imam, we should kill their leader, Trump.”
U.S. federal authorities have been tracking Iranian threats against Trump and other administration officials for years. That stems from Trump ordering the 2020 killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimaniwho had led the Quds Force. Iran repeatedly has denied plotting to kill Trump, though hard-line propaganda footage long has suggested Trump was in Tehran’s crosshairs.
Trump meanwhile promised to destroy Iran’s very civilizationduring the war among a variety of other threats.
Funeral postpones talks with US
Khamenei’s body will be transported to cities in Iran and neighboring Iraq, with authorities planning to drive his casket and others through the streets of Tehran on Monday. Authorities have shut down streets, airspace and daily life for the mourning, which will end Thursday as he is buried at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Khamenei’s place of birth.
Authorities offered no attendance count for the event Saturday and Sunday. Other cities across Iran also held mourning ceremonies.
For now, talks over reaching a permanent end to the war are on hold until the end of the funeral. Having a major turnout could prove important as Iran tries to leverage its hold on the Strait of Hormuzin negotiations as concern lingers that Israel could attack again.
“Our foreign policy should not be shaped in a way that allows our martyred leader’s blood to be dishonored and other countries can afford to do such things, without any serious response from our government and diplomatic system,” mourner Mohammad Reza Sharifi said.
The Dictatorship
Trump mixes patriotism with partisanship as he celebrates America’s ‘joyous’ 250th anniversary
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trumpmixed partisan politics with patriotic appeals on Saturday as he commemorated the 250th anniversary of American independence,a moment he declared “one of the most joyous and glorious milestones of all time.”
Speaking in Washington after storms prompted a roughly two-hour evacuation of the National Mall, Trump honored veterans, including several from World War II and one of the first Black officers to lead a Special Forces team in combat in Vietnam. They appeared before flags that symbolized some of the most significant and challenging moments in American history, from the one that was draped over Abraham Lincoln’s casket to the one that flew on the plane piloted by the Wright Brothers.
Yet Trump also leaned into partisan territory unusual for an Independence Day address, which presidents typically use as a moment to unify the country. Instead, he stumped again for the SAVE America Act,an elections bill that’s encountering challenges even from Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress. He highlighted his support for the Second Amendment and revived denunciations of communism,which are becoming an increasingly central part of Trump’s message ahead of the November midterms.
The speech capped a holiday that Trump has gone to great lengths to shape to his own tastes. He was introduced by two musical performers who often appear at his trademark rallies, including Lee Greenwood, who performed “God Bless the USA.” The event organizers were largely aligned with the White House, supplanting a bipartisan organization that was launched by Congress a decade ago.
“We will always be on top,” Trump said. “We will never let our country fall. We will always be the best.”
Trump didn’t talk about himself as much as he does during his normal rally speeches. Still, he still found time to include a joke about seeking a third presidential term and about World War II’s “greatest generation.”
“They are the greatest generation,” Trump said. “I hate to admit that, but they are.”
Anticipation for the milestone holiday has been building for much of the year, serving as an opportunity for Americans to reflect on their complicated history as onetime colonists of an empire who became a superpower of their own. Organizers of celebrations months in the making had to adjust or cancel activities entirely as much of the East Coast sweltered under heat that approached and in many cases surpassed triple digits.
Heat is defining the big weekend in many places
Severe weather prompted the cancellation of celebrations in Hartford, Connecticut, along with Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Spectators at Boston’s fireworks and concert were told to briefly seek shelter before events later resumed. An evacuation was also ordered in Philadelphia. New York and Pittsburgh moved forward with fireworks but shifted the time to accommodate the shifting weather.
The disruption was particularly acute in Washington, where signs at the Great American State Fair posted an alert shortly after 7 p.m. ET encouraging participants to leave the area. Crowds gathered in museums, subway stations and federal buildings near the Mall. At the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center they waited in chairs and sat on the floor to cool off in the air conditioning.
Crowds were building in the area several hours before the evacuation. Tina Hale, 58, of Cohoes, New York, watched three of her grandchildren children dip their hands into a pool of water near a museum. Hale pointed toward the sky and urged them to look up as three military jets roared above the crowd.
“If that doesn’t make you proud to be an American,” she said.
David Koshko, 42, and his wife, Jennifer Koskho, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, came to Washington for a baseball game but planned to stay for the city’s fireworks show. After baking in the heat for hours during the Pittsburgh Pirates’ win over the Washington Nationals, they took a break in the shade of an overpass near the National Mall to plot their next stop.
“Just to be a part of the 250 years (anniversary) is an amazing thing,” said David Koshko, a commercial driver and veteran of the Marine Corps reserves.
In Philadelphia, fireworks began to crack as early as midday in the birthplace of the nation near the site where the Declaration of Independence was adopted by delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Hundreds of visitors were gathering at Independence Hall in the sweltering heat to await the celebrations coinciding with the France-Paraguay World Cup knockout game at Philadelphia Stadium, which began with commemorations of the holiday.
“It’s one big party in here,” Carlos Alban, who traveled to Philadelphia from Chicago to watch the match, said as he arrived at the stadium, adding that he spotted a fan in the parking lot dressed as one of the Founding Fathers.
In New York, tall ships, with their masts, rigging and white sails outlined against a blue sky, made a procession around the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River, recalling the fanfare around America’s 200th anniversary in 1976.
The 43 ships were followed by a display of aerial might with a stealth bomber and the Navy’s Blue Angels. Patrouille de France, the French Air Force’s acrobatic teams, flew over New York Harbor with their red, white and blue trails, evoking images of the American flag.
“We got up early and just rode our bikes about a mile down here to come see the scene,” said Oona Moore, a Jersey City, New Jersey, resident who took in the New York festivities. “We saw the tall ships and we saw the planes, you know, all different manner of military aircraft. I’ve never seen it so close and in the sky at the same time.”
At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, people took the Oath of Allegiance to become U.S. citizens. They stood with eyes closed and hands over hearts for the national anthem.
In Phoenix, Steven Dortch, 25, and his brother JayLn Dortch, 23, gathered at Granada Park to try to forge a new July 4 cookout tradition. JayLn Dortch said young people in the U.S. give him hope by thinking for themselves and not taking the words from older people at face value.
He said the country needs to keep in mind the everyday, hardworking people who “keep America going.”
The Dictatorship
Ketanji Brown Jackson eviscerated Clarence Thomas’ ‘colorblind Constitution’ fantasy
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause does, in fact, apply to all people born in the United States. Only five justices reached that conclusion — a much closer decision than it should have been. (The sixth, Brett Kavanaugh, joined the majority on purely statutory grounds.) The primary dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas accused his colleagues of expanding the meaning of a clause narrowly tailored to help newly emancipated Black Americans.
The dissent was yet another bit of ahistorical storytelling from Thomas, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was simply not willing to abide. Though Jackson joined Chief Justice John Robert’s majority opinion defending the constitutionality of universal birthright citizenship, she also filed her own concurring opinion on the case. In 20 pages, the most junior justice on the bench provided a tour de force of narrative history to counter her oldest colleague’s claims.
The dissent was yet another bit of ahistorical storytelling from Thomas, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was simply not willing to abide.
Jackson has long used the history and context behind the drafting of the Constitution and its amendments as an intellectual counterweight to so-called “originalist” legal scholars. From their standpoint, laws must only be interpreted as their drafters intended.
Soon after her confirmation in 2022, Jackson explained during a hearing on a case involving the Voting Rights Act that, counter to her conservative colleagues’ claims, there was no justification for reading the Reconstruction Amendments, ratified after the Civil War, as being blind to race. As she explained at the time: “[W]hen I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, in a race-conscious way.”
Jackson has continued to press that viewpoint even as Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito have worked to tear down many of the protections Congress passed over the years to prevent discrimination against minorities. The two men have crafted an informal doctrine that, in essence, says any law passed specifically addressing race is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. In a case last month on the so-called “shadow docket” of emergency petitions, the court’s conservatives gave a nod to “our colorblind Constitution” in allowing Alabama to eliminate a congressional district held by a Black representative.
With the birthright citizenship clause, though, Thomas found the rare exception. He wrote that the court’s ruling “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.” In other words, the 14th Amendment was only meant to deal with making sure formerly enslaved Blacks were granted citizenship and nobody else. Anyone who is not “domiciled” in the U.S., including undocumented immigrants, doesn’t fall under that aegis in Thomas’ view.
In her concurrence, Jackson wiped the floor with Thomas’ blatant cherry-picking of history. “The Court’s conception of a color-blind Constitution and the Government’s (and principal dissent’s) cramped, group-specific reading of the Citizenship Clause are two sides of the same coin, stemming from a basic misunderstanding of the relevant history,” she wrote.
Meetings of freed Blacks before and during the Civil War came together to produce the “political and intellectual scaffolding” that would be incorporated into the 14th Amendment and, much later, the Black Civil Rights Movement, Jackson noted. In the attendees’ discussions, there was little doubt that they were already Americans, albeit ones deprived of their rights.
“The citizenship thesis of the Colored Conventions was thus not that some new status should be created and conferred on freed Blacks,” Jackson wrote. “It was instead that freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil.”
The overwhelming sentiment from those gatherings and the subsequent debates in Congress completely rejected Thomas’ argument for a narrow scope for birthright citizenship.
Jackson has effectively become the chief historian of the court’s liberal wing
“That bears repeating,” Jackson wrote, “Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups. Instead, those whose gatherings helped galvanize the push for full equality understood that ‘[a] diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny.’”
Jackson also noted that during debates over the amendment in the Reconstruction Congress, there were arguments made toward limiting the 14th Amendment’s scope. Chinese and Roma immigrants were held up as potential exceptions that should be made to allowing anyone born here to be citizens. Those concerns were rejected and, as Jackson put it, “the Citizenship Clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the Colored Conventions and their allies in Congress.”
In her brief time on the court, Jackson has proved herself to be a vital balance to Thomas and Alito’s assertion that only conservatives can lay claim to arguments regarding America’s “history and traditions.” Because while it is said it is the victors who write history, there will always be those willing to twist reality into a story for their own ends.
Jackson has effectively become the chief historian of the court’s liberal wing, and her concurrence in this case showcases the importance of that role. Her clear-eyed reading of the thinking behind Reconstruction, America’s second founding, is vital to keeping the Supreme Court honest about the actual intent of those radical Republicans, who gave us the blueprint for a country free from antebellum America’s worst sins.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
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