This is a web version of The Lever ’s daily email newsletter.
🔥 New in The Lever : Democrats say their Paramount merger deal is a victory. The fine print suggests otherwise .
👀 Watch : This U.S. senator is blaming his colleague’s behavior on a “failure of leadership.”
👇 Further down in this newsletter:
- The tech trend luring banks into riskier behavior.
- Which Senate contender is facing accusations of pay-for-play?
- Are voters willing to pay for domestic manufacturing?
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STORIES TO GO
In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.
💢 A Venezuelan man driving for DoorDash was shot and wounded by immigration enforcement officers in Austin, Texas, this weekend.
🚨 A grand jury declined to bring criminal indictments in the death of Nolan Wells, a Black teenager who was found dead off the Mississippi coastline this summer.
🎤 President Donald Trump is addressing the United Nations General Assembly today.
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TODAY'S TOPLINES
Does AI want another 2008? Banks adopting artificial intelligence are taking on more substandard loans and lending less to small and medium businesses, government economists say. A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco finds that AI use in credit analysis, fraud detection, and other banking activities is lucrative for banks, generating cost savings and higher loan volumes — but borrowers are paying the price. Banks with higher levels of AI adoption, on average, give out a “much smaller” share of small-and-medium-sized business loans, worth less than $1 million, than those with lower AI adoption. Twenty-one percent of loans issued by low-AI banks fell under this category, compared to just 12 percent of those issued by high-AI banks.
🏦 Banks with higher levels of AI adoption also show a greater proclivity for risky “problem” loans, that is, ones that are “substandard or with doubtful repayment.” This disparity between high- and low-AI adoption banks is especially pronounced in small institutions.
💵 Researchers measured banks’ commitment to AI adoption by tracking job postings requiring AI-related skills. Notably, large banks have a higher share of job openings requiring AI knowledge than their smaller counterparts, and banks, on average, hire AI-trained workers at a higher rate than other industries.
📢 Bluesky , Reddit , LinkedIn , X , Substack , Threads , Mastodon , and Facebook .
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Very concerning, Susan. A criminal probe into an alleged pay-for-play scheme involving Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R) was killed by the Trump administration shortly after the president returned to office last year. According to a bombshell new report in ProPublica , a top Collins donor told the FBI that his defense firm was promised lucrative government contracts in exchange for donations to the senator’s super PAC.
🕵️ Hoping to evade serious jail time over 2022 corruption charges, Martin Kao detailed a sprawling conspiracy in which he used shell companies and straw donors to gift nearly $1 million to dozens of lawmakers — including Collins — in exchange for over $40 million in taxpayer-funded contracts. Kao told prosecutors his company never actually produced the products slated for purchase by the U.S. military…making the contracted work practically useless.
👀 Kao’s testimony extended into 2024, and revealed “enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties,” according to ProPublica . The investigation was led by the agency’s leading anti-corruption unit, known as CR-15 — but this team was quickly “purged” by FBI Director Kash Patel after the Trump administration took over in 2025.
💬 An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.”
🥊 Collins is vying to keep her seat in a race against former state lawmaker Troy Jackson, the Democrat’s replacement for Graham Platner. Jackson’s establishment-aligned, out-of-state party advisers are reportedly “frustrated” by the longtime Sanders’ ally’s “backwoods cadence,” “insistence on taking questions,” and “unapologetically progressive stances” — and are pushing him toward the “center.”
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The Fine Print In Democrats’ Hollywood Merger Surrender
Democrats promised to play hardball, then accepted loophole-ridden pledges leaving Paramount’s $111 billion megamerger intact.
The Lever Luke Goldstein
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DAY IN DATA
Only 38 percent of Americans support tariffs associated with a $100 annual increase in household costs. (Source: Cato Institute )
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TAKE ACTION
Support Prop 40, America’s First Billionaire Tax! Prop 40 is a one-time, emergency 5% tax on Californians worth more than $1 billion — just about 200 people who, between them, hold a combined $2 trillion. The billionaire tax collected will be used to protect Californians' access to health care.
As Senator Bernie Sanders says, "It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to life-saving medical care. Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires."
Representative Ro Khanna agrees: "It's a matter of values. We believe billionaires can pay a modest wealth tax so working-class Californians have Medicaid."
We need to build momentum for a billionaires' wealth tax. First, we'll help to pass it in California. Then, we'll take our fight nationwide!
Join This Action
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DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS
🪿 Caught in action. View 2026’s best bird photographs .
🍻 It’s that time of year again. Break out your lederhosen for Oktoberfest.
🎙️ Scales. Lemurs may use the same voice-projecting technique as opera singers.
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AI Lending Is Risky Lending
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at LeverNews.