Just when it seemed the geopolitical horrors in the Middle East couldn’t get worse — Israel went from killing Palestinians in Gaza to launching a war against Iran. The offensive started while President Donald Trump was pressing for an Iran nuclear deal that would limit the country’s capacity to build nuclear weapons — and Trump reportedly greenlit Israel’s attack.

Today on Lever Time, editor-in-chief David Sirota speaks with Matt Duss, former Senate foreign policy aide for Bernie Sanders and current executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, to explore what triggered this new offensive, and what role the U.S. government is playing. Is the endgame here World War III?

The national deficit usually feels like an abstract talking point: America’s permanent credit card bill that just keeps getting bigger, without ever coming due.

But suddenly, our national debt has a real cost. As President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts threaten to add trillions to the deficit, every major credit rating agency has now downgraded the United States’ credit rating, suggesting that the U.S. is no longer a reliable borrower — a move with potentially disastrous, far-reaching consequences for the global economy.

To unpack what’s at stake, David Sirota sits down with Stephanie Kelton, a world-renowned economist and pioneer in Modern Monetary Theory, to ask her big questions: What does a credit downgrade mean? Should we really be thinking about America’s spending and debt like it’s a household budget? And how exactly could too much national debt bankrupt the country?

The answers, argues Kelton, necessitate transforming our perception of money itself.

There’s a new evil genius on Capitol Hill, one that privacy experts warn could empower tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to issue their own private currencies. The Senate is poised to pass the GENIUS Act, which would give so much free rein to such “stablecoins” that it could destabilize the rest of the economy.

Today on Lever Time, Arjun Singh sits down with Lever reporter Luke Goldstein to understand the GENIUS Act, how it could turn Big Tech companies into unregulated banks, and why this should be a concern for the rest of us.

You can read Luke’s full story on the GENIUS Act and the future of “ZuckBucks” here.