The war between the United States and Iran persists in a dangerous strategic stalemate. As Washington maintains a punishing economic and maritime blockade, Tehran continues to restrict passage through the Strait of Hormuz, imposing mounting costs on the United States, its allies, and the global economy. Neither side appears prepared to concede.

The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier strike group to the region, while the Trump administration is reportedly considering strikes against Iranian nuclear and energy infrastructure, potentially using the GBU-43/B bomb, known as the “mother of all bombs.” Both moves support the possibility of the United States attempting to break this stalemate through force. Iran, meanwhile, has in recent weeks intensified attacks on commercial vessels attempting to transit Hormuz outside its designated route, with strikes becoming more frequent and destructive.

Washington appears to be continuing to misread the Iran it is confronting. The wars of 2025 and 2026 accelerated a fundamental shift in Tehran’s strategic thinking, away from years of relative restraint and toward a determination to impose sustained costs on the United States and its allies. Iranian leaders increasingly believe that their earlier restraint invited further attacks rather than deterring them, and that absorbing more punishment without retaliating forcefully would only encourage additional aggression.

Tehran is still willing to negotiate, but it is far less prepared to give up its leverage based on American assurances that it has little reason to trust.

A failure to understand this changed posture makes another round of American or Israeli strikes particularly dangerous: Rather than compelling Iran to surrender, it would likely provoke an even more damaging Iranian response. Tehran’s growing willingness to escalate does not mean it has abandoned diplomacy. The challenge for President Donald Trump is that the Iran emerging from this war is one less willing to yield to coercion, which remains open to a settlement based on meaningful reciprocal concessions.

Washington’s Options—and Their Limits

The central question is whether Washington is preparing to break the stalemate militarily. But as Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Whether Trump chooses to escalate therefore depends on his assessment of the political objectives at stake and whether further military force can advance them. The buildup of American forces alone tells us little about that calculation, particularly after months of warfare and economic coercion have failed to compel Tehran to yield.

How Washington perceives the war will determine what it believes it can do to break the current stalemate. If Washington sees continued economic hardship as eventually forcing Tehran to accept its demands, it can maintain the blockade and continue the war of attrition. But if the United States and Israel launch another major attack, it would suggest at least one of them no longer believes the current balance of pressure is working in their favor, or that they can afford to wait for Iran to buckle. Such an escalation would presumably seek to shift that balance by inflicting enough additional damage to compel Iranian concessions, particularly on the nuclear issue, where Tehran has resisted demands to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium upfront, and over the future of the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is seeking a new arrangement that preserves its leverage over maritime traffic.

Further attacks are likely to backfire, particularly given Tehran’s growing conviction that restraint has only invited further aggression. Iran has considerable scope to intensify its own pressure through Hormuz and strikes on regional energy infrastructure, driving up oil prices more, further disrupting global markets, and making the war even more costly for Washington to sustain. Tehran may also escalate on its own if it concludes that the existing level of disruption is insufficient to force American concessions. In either case, a new round of escalation could shift the balance of pressure further against Washington, leaving Trump in an even more difficult position despite inflicting greater destruction on Iran.

For Tehran, the experience of the war has reinforced the belief that surrendering its leverage before securing concrete American concessions would leave it vulnerable to renewed pressure and attacks.

A failure to understand Tehran’s own political calculus is a persistent problem in Washington, and one often at the root of maximalist attempts to compel changed behavior by coercion or force. Should the Trump administration pursue force despite Tehran’s changed posture, it will be repeating the failure of many presidencies before it.

The remaining options are political. Trump could unilaterally ease or end the blockade and effectively abandon the effort to compel Iran’s surrender, though that appears unlikely under present circumstances. Another similar possibility, according to CNN, is a final, spectacular military strike, potentially involving the “mother of all bombs,” designed to give Trump a symbolic “victory” he can declare before withdrawing. Some military planners have reportedly discussed what amounts to a “fireworks show,” even if the strikes fail to achieve Washington’s stated objectives. But such an exit would depend on Iran’s response, and Tehran could instead retaliate with further attacks on shipping and regional energy infrastructure, making it harder for Trump to declare the war over.

More realistically, Washington could negotiate a compromise to end the confrontation, accepting that any durable settlement will require meaningful concessions from both sides, including reciprocal steps on sanctions, Hormuz, and the nuclear issue.

The two sides remain far apart, however, on what a negotiated settlement would entail. Tehran continues to insist on seven conditions for ending the war, including lifting the blockade and sanctions, and presented mediators with a proposal during the United Nations General Assembly in September. The proposal reportedly builds on the June Islamabad memorandum of understanding (MOU), but changes the sequencing of concessions: Washington would first have to fulfill Iran’s conditions, including lifting the blockade and releasing frozen Iranian assets, before Tehran eases its restrictions on Hormuz and enters substantive nuclear negotiations.

This reflects Tehran’s deep distrust of Washington, rooted in what Iran sees as the United States’ failure to honor its commitments under the June MOU and by the subsequent resumption of major hostilities for 13 days in July. Washington, by contrast, is pressing for immediate nuclear concessions, including renewed inspections and removal of enriched uranium, while offering more limited economic relief and the release of frozen Iranian assets.

The central impasse is therefore not simply over the terms of a possible agreement, but over who must deliver first. For Tehran, the experience of the war has reinforced the belief that surrendering its leverage before securing concrete American concessions would leave it vulnerable to renewed pressure and attacks.

Against this backdrop, the battle over Hormuz has become an increasingly costly contest of adaptation and counter-adaptation, illustrating Tehran’s determination to impose economic costs rather than simply absorb American pressure. The United States and its Persian Gulf partners have developed an elaborate ship-to-ship transfer system in which smaller shuttle tankers carry oil through the strait, hugging the Omani coast, often under US military protection and with their tracking systems switched off, before transferring their cargoes to larger vessels in the Gulf of Oman. Many of these crossings take place at night while still under Iranian fire. Nevertheless, alongside Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, this has helped restore substantial volume of oil exports despite Iran’s restrictions, and at a price premium. Tehran has responded by sharply escalating attacks on vessels using these routes, including tankers involved in ship-to-ship transfers. The conflict has also expanded to the Red Sea, where Iran-aligned Houthis have attacked Saudi shipping and energy infrastructure and curtailed the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint, while a separate drone strike launched from Iraq temporarily shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline. These workarounds and countermeasures have kept both sides in the fight, but at mounting economic cost. The ship-to-ship transfer system is being pushed to its limits, freight and insurance costs have soared, Brent oil remains well above $100 a barrel, US gasoline and diesel prices have surged to record levels, and the resulting inflationary pressures are driving up borrowing costs across the American economy.

Realistic Paths to End the War

Iran’s increasingly aggressive campaign around Hormuz illustrates how profoundly the war changed Tehran’s approach to deterrence. As I argued in a recent Quincy Institute report, the wars of 2025 and 2026 have accelerated Tehran’s shift from strategic patience toward a doctrine of persistent counter-escalation. Tehran’s leaders now operate from an assumption that earlier restraint invited further attacks rather than deterring them, a changed posture revealed in a willingness to weaponize Hormuz and threaten the wider regional economy despite the enormous damage Iran itself has suffered. Another major American or Israeli attack is therefore unlikely to restore the old pattern of Iranian restraint. Instead, it could strengthen Tehran’s conviction that only sustained pressure on American and allied interests can deter further attacks and compel Washington to compromise.

Yet a more confrontational Iran is not necessarily an Iran unwilling to negotiate. As I argued in a separate Center for International Policy report, American policy has repeatedly underestimated Tehran’s capacity for pragmatism while overestimating the likelihood that mounting pressure will produce capitulation. Iran has a long history of pursuing diplomatic openings when its leaders perceive a credible opportunity to advance national interests, from the Rafsanjani and Khatami presidencies to the negotiations that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement. Even amid the present war, Tehran continues to put forward proposals for a negotiated settlement. What changed is its assessment of the risks of making concessions without reliable guarantees of American reciprocity. Tehran is still willing to negotiate, but it is far less prepared to give up its leverage based on American assurances that it has little reason to trust.

Washington retains overwhelming conventional military superiority, but months of warfare have shown the limits of pursuing maximalist objectives, whether Iran’s unconditional surrender or the collapse of its government.

Trump would be wise to recognize both realities. The June Islamabad MOU, together with Iran’s subsequent proposal at the UN General Assembly, offers a starting point for renewed diplomacy. The June understanding envisaged reciprocal steps, with Washington easing its blockade and economic restrictions and Tehran loosening its grip on Hormuz and eventually addressing its stockpile of highly enriched uranium through new nuclear negotiations. Reviving that framework would require the two sides to agree on a credible sequence of verifiable concessions, particularly given the latest collapse of trust following July’s renewed fighting.

Neither side would get everything it wants, but an agreement along these lines would offer Trump something that months of military escalation have failed to deliver: a way to end the war without inviting another round of potentially catastrophic Iranian retaliation in the region. Washington retains overwhelming conventional military superiority, but months of warfare have shown the limits of pursuing maximalist objectives, whether Iran’s unconditional surrender or the collapse of its government.

The question now is whether Trump will continue seeking capitulation through military pressure, or recognize that the war has made Tehran more determined to resist coercion while remaining open to a negotiated compromise.

Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all?

The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible. A recent Forbes headline declared, “MIT Says AI Is Forcing a Rethink of College Itself.” AI is not forcing universities to purchase licenses, revise courses, shift budgets, or surrender influence over educational infrastructure to private vendors. People make those decisions. They should have to explain and defend them. Who was consulted? What alternatives were considered? And whose interests are being served? California State University signed a $16.9 million OpenAI agreement in 2025. A statewide student leader said her association wasn't consulted; officials cited an advisory committee with student and faculty members.

A university exists to cultivate independent thought, critical judgment, curiosity, and the ability to work through difficult questions. Reading closely, developing an argument, recognizing errors, and revising one's thinking are not incidental steps on the way to an answer. They are part of what education is for. What happens when students are encouraged to rely on systems that can perform much of this work for them?

Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public.

The available research offers no warrant for treating adoption as an educational obligation. A 2026 meta-analysis of 35 studies reported moderate gains across varied educational settings. A review of 67 higher-education studies found better outcomes when AI was used within carefully structured, inquiry-based teaching. Those findings deserve consideration, but they do not settle whether AI belongs in the learning process. In the latter review, stronger results depended on deliberate human instruction, and neither review establishes that AI reliably develops lasting, independent learning or provides benefits that effective teaching without it cannot achieve.

Better assignments are not necessarily evidence of better learning. A polished paper produced with ChatGPT does not show that its author has become a better writer. Short-term performance measures tell us little about what students may be losing when they outsource reading, writing, and reasoning. Assisted performance is not intellectual development, and making learning easier does not necessarily make education better. Nor can learning-outcome studies settle the questions that institutions routinely sidestep: Who should own educational infrastructure, what student work may be collected, whose labor may be automated, and whether students and faculty can refuse participation. Those are ethical and political decisions, not matters of test scores alone.

Yet narrowly demonstrated benefits are being used to support sweeping institutional ambitions. Universities must consider training, faculty workload, verification, privacy, dependence on proprietary systems, and what happens when a vendor changes its prices or rules. Once courses depend on a platform, leaving can become disruptive and expensive. Public money finances the infrastructure, faculty labor makes it part of everyday teaching, and the resulting dependence can give vendors greater leverage over academic decisions. Public institutions should disclose the full costs, contractual obligations, data protections, and exit plans before committing resources and educational authority. These are questions of public accountability, not merely technical procurement.

For faculty, promised efficiency can mean additional labor. Professors redesign assignments, check unreliable citations, devise oral defenses, interpret shifting policies, and struggle to determine whether students have done the intellectual work being assessed. That verification work consumes time that could otherwise go toward mentoring, substantive feedback, and sustained classroom discussion—costs rarely visible in claims of efficiency. At the same time, AI is promoted to automate feedback, lesson planning, and other forms of professional judgment. Faculty are asked to help install the very systems that may eventually diminish their autonomy.

Students face another danger in the language of “personalized learning.” Systems built around continuous assessment, behavioral prediction, and linked records can turn intellectual development into an expanding data profile. Students should be free to misunderstand, hesitate, write badly, and change their minds without every misstep becoming a permanent record. These are conditions for learning, not inefficiencies to be recorded and corrected. And when students' writing, questions, and personal circumstances pass through commercial systems, privacy cannot be an afterthought. Students deserve to know what is collected, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether they can decline without jeopardizing their education.

Universities normalize tools that make it harder to determine whether students worked independently, then turn to monitoring technologies to establish whether they did. Instead of asking whether the original technology undermines assessment, institutions risk treating surveillance as the solution.

Beyond the classroom, students face demands to “upskill” for an AI-driven economy. Employers may promote AI proficiency while using automation to cut labor costs, reduce professional discretion, and concentrate control. The political question of who controls automation and receives its benefits is being recast as an individual problem of employability. Universities should not simply prepare students to accommodate those decisions. They should equip students to ask whose knowledge AI absorbs, who benefits, and what protections workers need—including collective bargaining and enforceable rights.

Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public. They should teach about AI: its ownership, limitations, social consequences, and deployment in mass surveillance, violent and repressive policing, and warfare, as well as the environmental costs of its infrastructure. But understanding a technology is not the same as making students dependent on it. Faculty and students deserve a meaningful voice in whether it enters their classrooms, including the right to refuse. A right to refuse means little if opting out carries academic penalties or leaves students without an equivalent route through a course.

Before committing another dollar to AI platforms, universities should weigh those investments against smaller classes, tutoring, disability services, libraries, and the time and resources faculty need to teach. The burden of proof belongs to those proposing to change the conditions of learning. At stake is more than control over software: It is the university's authority over the purposes and human relationships that give education its meaning. Universities should not surrender that authority merely because a technology has become widely available.

By Ralph Nader October 23, 2026 Progressive candidates should be winning landslide victories over corporatist Republicans and replacing corporate Democrats on the merits of an authentic people-first agenda and legislation that makes big corporations and their government toadies our servants, not our masters.  If progressive candidates fail to deliver, they, too, should be replaced. Voters, have a civic duty…

Our billionaires seem to be in a competition for most awful human being alive. We have Larry Ellison, along with son, taking over CBS and immediately destroying its prized news show, 60 Minutes. They appointed Bari Weiss, a right-wing apparatchik, to oversee CBS’s entire news operation. She has immediately sought to make the news more Trump-friendly. This has led to many reporters being fired and threats to others to make their reporting toe the Trump line or risk being fired. Many of the network’s longest-serving reporters just quit.

The fun doesn’t stop here. The Ellison clique is also getting control of CNN through Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Presumably we can look forward to more Trump-friendly reporting there also.

To be clear, neither of these networks was a paragon of objective reporting before the Ellison family takeover. Both networks regularly marginalized and belittled progressives in the US and around the world. But they did at least have an ostensible commitment to objectivity, unlike, say, Fox News.

Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions.

Then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to view the huge Meta social media platforms as important mechanisms for pushing his political agenda. Last Saturday, the Instagram site for the No Kings march went down for four hours, exactly when it was being most widely used. Meta claimed there was no political motive; it was just incompetence.

We might be more inclined to accept the incompetence story if there wasn’t a comparable picture in Brazil in the lead-up to its presidential election. Lula, the incumbent president, is locked in a tight race with Flavio Bolsanaro, a right-winger who is openly allied with Donald Trump. It seems that the sites of supporters of Lula and his supporters have repeatedly run into the same sort of technical difficulties with Meta.

Then we go to everyone’s favorite evil billionaire, Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit intention of using it as a vehicle to support his politics. He not only opened the gates to all sorts of racist, sexist, and harassing material; he has throttled the accounts of many progressives so that their comments are less widely viewed.

Musk also has teamed up with Ellison, who was given a controlling stake in TikTok, after Donald Trump wrestled it away from its Chinese owner. TikTok decided to suspend the account for the documentary Musk, just before its initial release. Musk apparently gave the film a bad review, which was enough to get it banned from TikTok for at least a period of time. Musk is also contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to get some of the most awful people on the planet elected as governors or senators.

This crew of centibillionaires sees the purpose of government to make themselves ever richer, and are prepared to use their money to ensure that it does. Their use of campaign contributions for this purpose is widely recognized, but that is only part of the story.

Their control of major media outlets is at least as important. If a television or radio ad can affect people’s votes, then surely what people hear between the ads also can affect their votes.

Allowing the rich to dominate the media and social media to the extent they do is at least as much an offense to democracy as their hundred-million-dollar campaign contributions. It is essential to weaken their control.

One good place to start would be reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts the huge social media platforms from liability for third-party content. This gives social media platforms an advantage over broadcast and print outlets, which are liable for harms (defamation or fraud) caused by third-party content. Fox News famously paid out $787 million for spreading third- party lies about the 2020 election. Section 230 can be amended in a way that levels the playing field and favors smaller non-profit or subscription-supported platforms.

The other route is to increase support for alternative media. There has been serious progress in this area. The Local News Act was recently signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This measure gives a subsidy of up to $20,000 per reporter for news outlets to cover local news. Several other states are considering similar measures.

It’s a long way from measures giving modest subsidies for local news to the multibillion-dollar media outlets and social media platforms that dominate what people see and hear. But these are an important foot in the door. If these measures succeed and are popular, they can spread to other states and possibly be implemented nationally.

In any case, if we are serious about limiting the ability of the billionaires to buy democracy, we have to go beyond worrying about campaign contributions. If these horrible billionaires control everything we see and hear in the media and on social media, they won’t have to spend a penny on elections to keep their candidates in power. Those concerned about democracy need to recognize this fact.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

• Youth protests erupt in Albania, torching buildings and clashing with police over corruption and a Kushner-backed resort, while similar fury flares in Italy, France and beyond as citizens demand that governments deliver for them. Meanwhile, Kushner blasts a Vanity Fair excerpt as “outrageous” fabrications after it alleges he leveraged secret UAE- and Saudi-linked bank accounts holding hundreds of millions for influence-peddling with Trump.

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we also discuss:

• Middle East Crisis: Israeli forces kill two Palestinian gunmen who wound five Israelis near Hebron, prompting Netanyahu to order a West Bank lockdown days before the election. The U.S. orders non-emergency personnel and families to leave Saudi Arabia as Iranian-backed Houthis ramp up attacks on airports and infrastructure. Billionaire donor Peter Thiel privately slams the Iran war, saying “we should not have done it” and warning of mistakes, even while affirming support for Trump.

• Ilhan Omar vows to abandon her raided D.C. home, citing death threats and safety fears after federal agents seize phones and other items in an immigration probe. Meanwhile, federal documents drop a bombshell by listing Ilhan Omar under the name Elmi—matching her ex-husband—fueling the probe into possible immigration fraud and marriage claims.

• Trump and Vance dangle disaster aid as midterm leverage, linking relief for storm-hit states like North Carolina to Republican wins while blue areas wait longer.

• Health/environment: Scientists declare nearly all shallow coral reefs critically endangered as climate change drives them toward collapse within decades, threatening marine life and coastal communities worldwide. Calley Means, key RFK Jr. ally who helped forge the fracturing MAHA-Trump alliance, quits the administration amid broken food and health promises.

• El Paso GOP chair Michael Aboud blasts Sacha Baron Cohen as a “liar and a pervert” and plans to sue after the comedian allegedly tricks him into appearing in the new Ali G film.

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The Pentagon’s self-described “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth recently announced a plan to live stream the execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, a wheelchair-bound veteran convicted of a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.

President Donald Trump eventually backed away from the live-stream plan. But not before Americans across the political spectrum agreed that—whatever Hasan’s crime—live streaming an execution crossed a line. In one poll, 80% opposed it.

That’s not surprising. Live streaming the slaughter of a human being, especially when the spectacle is cheered on by a defense secretary who claims to worship his troops’ killing power, their “lethality,” above all else—including their loyalty to the Constitution—falls outside any definition of morality.

The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

The thought of kids pulling out their phones on the playground, or adults glued to their tablets at work, to witness an execution is uniquely horrifying. But much of the official criticism of Hegseth’s proposal to make the execution public also had a particularly chauvinistic quality to it.

Some argued that it would lower the integrity of the US to the level of “other” countries. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said: “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

Yet beyond the issue of live streaming, the underlying act of state-sanctioned homicide itself sounds a lot like what “they” do. The death penalty is so normalized in the United States that we don’t even recognize how depraved “normal” executions are by the rest of the world’s standards.

Last year, only 17 countries recorded official executions, according to Amnesty International. China led the list with the most executions, followed by Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yemen (with 51) and the United States (with 47) rounded out the top five. During that same year, no executions at all occurred in Europe or Central Asia. And for the last 17 years, the United States has been the only country in the Americas to officially execute anyone.

The US embrace of the death penalty as other countries abandon it is disturbing enough. Equally disturbing is the fact that executions here historically have often been quite public.

The US has a long legacy of lynching, whether carried out by a wartime firing squad or hanging people from a makeshift noose on a tree. During racist lynchings carried out from the Civil War era well into the 1960s, crowds of people—including well-dressed women, men with children on their shoulders to make sure the little ones could see, poor and rich but all white—gathered near the tree with picnic baskets and post cards for sale to commemorate the slaughter of Black men, women, and children.

Yet this isn’t only about our past. It’s about this administration’s effort to normalize a level of deliberate bloody slaughter being carried out today—whether in the Gaza genocide, the US bombing of school children in Iran, or Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) brutal treatment of immigrants and protesters. All based on the idea that some people simply have no right to live.

These decisions made here have international impacts.

The Israeli government is openly borrowing from the cruelties of the US prison system. Earlier this year, the Israeli parliament legalized capital punishment. From its founding in 1948, Israel had not allowed an execution—with only two exceptions, one of whom was Adolf Eichmann, the main organizer of the Holocaust.

But in March 2026, the Knesset passed a law requiring death by hanging for Palestinians convicted in military courts of any lethal action Israel deems terrorism. (Jewish Israelis, including illegal settlers in the West Bank, remain completely immune from the threat of capital punishment.)

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s extremist national security minister, made a video showing off the gallows under construction—gloating that the new site would have an open viewing area, “just like in the US.”

Still, it’s encouraging that Americans’ outrage forced Trump to back off from Hegseth’s brutal spectacle. And with the percentage of Americans opposing capital punishment climbing year after year—alongside public opposition to war, genocide, and ICE’s violence—perhaps one day the White House will similarly abandon those horrors as well.

Greetings from Michigan—I last wrote one of these dispatches on Sunday, from Kansas; since then I’ve been in Texas, where the remarkable James Talarico is apparently locked in a dead-heat race with the execrable Ken Paxton; now I’m headed to greater Lansing with my Third Act colleagues to try and boost the Senate fortunes of Abdul el-Sayed and the House race of Will Lawrence, once a founder of the Sunrise Movement. (If you want to join us, here’s the info). So you might say I’m taking this election seriously.

More seriously than I wish we had to. In democratic societies elections should always be important. But they shouldn’t, ideally, be the deciding factor between continued stability and whatever kind of creeping fascism we’re playing with. And they certainly shouldn’t be determining questions of planetary survival. But they are.

The chart above shows the rate of deforestation in the Amazon; it comes ahead of Sunday’s contest between the next Bolsonaro (think chainsaw) and the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (think standing tree). As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian Thursday morning:

Physically and politically, Flávio Bolsonaro is the spitting image of his father, the jailed coup-plotter, Jair. When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he appeared to see ecological destruction as a kind of a holy duty. The deforestation rate rose by 59% in his four years, and attacks on Indigenous people and other forest defenders, as well as invasions by illegal ranchers, loggers, and goldminers rocketed. The crudest forms of extractivism—regardless of their costs, or how they might hold back all kinds of progress—were a matter of policy.

The ideology of the far-right in Brazil has been described as “beef, Bible, and bullets”: violence against those who resist the seizure of their resources, an ultra-conservative evangelism, and the expansion of cattle ranching, which is both a potent symbol of far-right machismo and the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon.

If you combine this with the knowledge that we’re very very near a tipping point in the Amazon, you start to get worried. The Amazon rainforest is almost an organism itself—it in essence generates half its own rainfall, recycling rainwater five to six times as air moves east to west across it. As early as 2018, my old friend, the dearly missed Tom Lovejoy, and his collaborator Carlos Nobre had a paper in Science that concluded:

We believe that negative synergies between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire indicate a tipping point for the Amazon system to flip to non-forest ecosystems in eastern, southern, and central Amazonia at 20-25% deforestation.

The severity of the droughts of 2005, 2010, and 2015-16 could well represent the first flickers of this ecological tipping point. These events, together with the severe floods of 2009, 2012, (and 2014 over SW Amazonia), suggest that the whole system is oscillating. For the last two decades the dry season over the southern and eastern Amazon has been increasing. Large scale factors such as warmer sea surface temperatures over the tropical North Atlantic also seem to be associated with the changes on land.

Here’s what Nobre told the Times this week:

Legal deforestation, he said, put the Amazon at “total risk” and could sharply reduce rainfall throughout much of South America, threatening Brazilian agriculture and global food prices. Brazil is the world’s second-largest food exporter and could surpass the United States this year. “We are going to lose all of this,” Mr. Nobre said.

We may lose even more. It’s not at all clear that the Earth’s climate system can function if the Amazon begins to break down—along with the poles, it’s one of the planet’s handful of truly keystone physical systems. That its fate depends on an election is terrifying. Needless to say, the usual cast of characters like Elon Musk are allied with the chainsaw in this one. But of course Musk, fresh off his breathtaking betrayal of the Ukrainian people, is playing an even more critical role in America’s elections. As Laurent Belsie pointed out this week, the reason that Talarico may lose is largely down to this one man:

Mr. Musk’s biggest donation was $158 million to the GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund, which put that same amount into the Senate race in Texas—where Mr. Musk’s companies are based. On X, Mr. Musk has been urging people to vote for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying, “The fate of Texas and America is at stake.”

But more’s at stake even than that. Here’s this week’s United Nations Environment Programme report (titled, with more wit than usual for these things, The Point of Return) about just how far we’re overshooting the Paris climate accords. What it demonstrates is that the election of President Donald Trump plays an outsized role in keeping us from having a fighting chance. The venerable Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press headlined his story (a lesson for other headline writers) “US Is a Big Reason for the World Losing Ground in the Fight Against Climate Change, UN Report Says.”

In just a year, the projections for how much temperatures will rise even if governments keep their pledges has risen by two tenths of a degree Celsius—on a world where every tenth of a degree pushes another 140 million human souls into a dangerously hot zone. Here’s how Borenstein described it:

If all the countries do what they promise to reduce heat-trapping emissions, Earth will likely still warm another 2.2°F (1.2°C) above current temperatures, according to Wednesday’s update of climate calculations by the United Nations Environment Programme. That’s about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit (0.1°Ce) more than last year’s projections by the same science team.

“This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions,” the report said. The report also blames the United States for increased emissions last year, saying all the other top 20 major economies reduced their carbon pollution or at least slowed the growth in how much carbon dioxide was spewed from the burning of coal, oil, and gas.

“In terms of magnitude, the increase in the United States of America (133 megatons of CO2 equivalent) far exceeded that of all other countries and was driven by increased electricity demand and a rebound of coal power generation,” the report said. The 124 countries that increased emissions—not counting the 63 that decreased like most European nations—added 189 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2025, and 70% of that increase came from the US, according to the report.

Almost nobody who voted for Trump in 2024 thought (or, to be frank) cared that this would be the outcome. But that’s what happens on a world that is far too finely balanced. So we fight as hard as we can.

And we do it with some real champions in contention.

Brad Lander, for instance—Ayana Johnson just released the excellent conversation the two of us had with the soon-to-be New York representative, who will enter Congress as probably its most knowledgeable member about the connection between climate and finance. (Lander, to his immense credit, was detained by Israeli Defense Forces Wednesday for helping protect Palestinians who wanted to harvest their olives in the face of violence from West Bank settlers. He’s now safely out).

Or Justin Pearson. The Tennessee state rep, who led opposition to the Byhalia Pipeline and to Elon Musk’s Memphis AI pollution factory, seemed to have an inside track for a congressional seat until the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this summer—Tennessee immediately redistricted to try and turn its congressional delegation lily-white. But Pearson is putting up a creditable fight in his Trump +20 district. As Katherine Burgess reports, analysts say:

Pearson’s longstanding opposition to data centers and other industrial polluters gives him credibility as he challenges [Brent] Taylor, who was an early supporter of Colossus 1 and received $10,000 in campaign funding from a political action committee associated with SpaceXAI.

Or in New York’s Hudson Valley, where embattled GOP incumbent Mike Lawler has been trying to save his seat with an attack on New York City’s congestion pricing law. As Charles Komanoff points out, he’s not very good at math:

Since Trump launched his war on Iran, the 260,000 households in NY-17 have coughed up $102 million more for gasoline—$390 per household—than they would have paid in the absence of the war. That collective toll, if you will, exceeds by 75% the $58 million they’ve paid in New York congestion charges (including surcharges on cab rides) since congestion pricing commenced in early 2025 (again, see the methodology below).

I’m hopeful Lawler’s opponent, Cait Conley, can beat him—she’s a West Point grad with three Bronze Stars.

Indeed I’m hopeful in lots of places—but I’m afraid to hope too. At this point our job is just to run through the tape, doing our level best wherever we are to win the last possible votes. (And then defend the election). If you have some money to spare, find a race to help. (The Environmental Voter Project is a good place to start). If you have some hours to spare, spend them phone banking. Work as if the planet depends on it, because sadly it does.

One of us previously wrote on the tax treatment of stock buybacks. Prior to a rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982, publicly traded corporations faced strict limits in the number of shares they could buy back. The 1982 rule change effectively gave corporations a choice: They could use their profits to buy shares on the open market, with no meaningful limit, or they could distribute their profits as dividends to their shareholders, taxable at the same rate as ordinary income.

The rule the Securities and Exchange Commission changed was related to insider trading; the SEC might not care about the tax consequences of share buybacks, but everyone else involved surely does. As noted in the post, the shareholders who don’t sell when a corporation buys back shares are the beneficiaries of the rule change:

To understand the impact of the SEC rule change, focus on the shareholders who don’t sell any shares in connection with a buyback. They’re the ones who reap the tax benefit. The selling shareholders were going to sell anyhow. We’re talking about publicly traded stock here. The decision to sell has nothing to do with the corporation’s decision to buy, and a selling shareholder has no idea who buys their publicly traded shares. The corporation doesn’t benefit either. It’s just shedding cash either way.

The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been.

But not all non-selling shareholders benefit from stock buybacks. If you own stock inside an IRA, the corporation’s decision whether to buy shares or issue dividends is not critical to you. You avoid an immediate income tax consequence either way. And if you don’t want a stock buyback to cause an increase in your ownership interest in the corporation, you can sell a few shares off, also without tax consequence, and create an economic result identical to that of a dividend.

The same applies to shares held by other retirement accounts, pension plans, university endowment funds, and other tax-exempt entities.

That leaves the ultra-rich—and especially the billionaires—as the main beneficiaries of stock buybacks. The benefits are enormous, and become ever larger as we move up the wealth scale.

The situation of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin exemplifies the wealth concentrating impact of the SEC rule change. Alphabet, which became the publicly traded parent of Google in a 2015 reorganization, has bought back a lot of shares over the past 11 years. Page and Brin, the third and fourth wealthiest Americans, respectively, have a combined wealth totaling over half a trillion dollars. As of October 16, the two held a combined total of 14,960,019,745 shares of Alphabet stock—778,102,320 for Page and 717,917,425 for Brin—which they’d held at least since Google’s IPO in 2004 (adjusted for stock splits over that period).

Brin is leading the opposition to California’s Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time wealth tax of 5% on all residents of California as of January 1, 2026 with personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. Brin claims to have changed his state of residence to Nevada prior to that date, although it’s not clear whether the steps he took to accomplish that change were sufficient to avoid California residence for purposes of Proposition 40. To date, Brin has contributed over $100 million to groups opposing Proposition or supporting Propositions 41 and 42, which effectively would nullify Proposition 40.

Page, similarly, has moved to Florida, although it’s not clear if he has avoided being a California resident as of January 1, 2026.

If Proposition 40 passed and if Brin’s attempt to avoid California residency were unsuccessful, his tax liability would be in the $12 billion to $14 billion range. His co-founder Page would face a slightly higher tax liability under Proposition 40. Their total liability would be around $28 billion, give or take a few billion.

I was curious how Page and Brin’s prospective Proposition 40 tax liability compares with the wealth they now hold that’s attributable to the 1982 SEC rule change. Would the one-time tax recoup the windfall bestowed on them by the SEC rule change?

To determine that windfall, we figured that without the rule change the profits used by Alphabet to buyback shares would instead have been distributed as dividends and that the dividends would have been taxable as ordinary income. Yes, the federal tax rate applicable to dividends was reduced in 2003 to equal the long-term capital gains rate, but analyzing the counterfactual of “if there were no SEC rule change” points to the assumption the tax rate applicable to dividends would not have been reduced. Because of the SEC rule change, there was not much point for anyone to oppose lowering the tax rate applicable to dividends in 2003. Corporations could protect their shareholders from the higher rate by buying back stock instead of issuing dividends.

Absent the SEC rule change, then, the revenue cost of a reduction in the tax rate applicable to dividends would have posed a much larger obstacle to enactment. Would the rate nonetheless have been reduced? We’ll never know. But since we’re exploring the potential windfall to Page and Brin attributable to the SEC rule change, the higher of the two possible tax rates on dividends was the logical choice.

To determine the savings to Brin and Page, we calculated the change in their percentage ownership of Alphabet that would have resulted from each stock buyback, beginning with the first stock buyback in 2015, had the amount used in the buyback instead been distributed as a dividend, followed by Page and Brin paying federal and state income tax on the dividend, then purchasing additional Alphabet shares with the after-tax proceeds of the dividend. For simplicity, we assumed a total 50% US and California rate for each year during the period. The actual annual rate during the period, factoring in the full federal deductibility of state income tax prior to 2018, would have been slightly higher.

Under this alternative scenario, Page and Brin would now hold 10.9% of the outstanding shares of Alphabet, some 1.3 percentage points less than the percentage they currently hold.

When you do the math, Page and Brin are $55 billion wealthier today than they would be had the limitation on stock buybacks that existed prior to 1982 not been modified and had dividends continued to be considered ordinary income for federal income tax purposes. [And if you assume the federal rate would have been reduced to the capital gains rate in 2003, they’re still $41 billion wealthier today by virtue of the 1982 SEC rule change.]

Put another way, about 10% of their obscene combined wealth of over half a trillion dollars has been derived from one tax giveaway. And—it’s important to note—that tax giveaway wasn’t even delivered by duly elected members of Congress. Rather, it was ordained by unelected regulators (or, really, anti-regulators) at the SEC.

If Proposition 40 passes and Page and Brin are required to pay the one-time tax, they’ll still be $25 billion ahead. Don’t feel too bad for them.

Page and Brin likely are the most extreme examples of how the 1982 SEC rule change conferred massive additional wealth on the wealthiest Americans. But they’re far from the only examples. Meta, Oracle, Nvidia, and Dell all have distributed tens of billions of dollars in buybacks. Apple has bought back nearly half its shares through stock buybacks over the past decade. In total, stock buybacks have been running in the $1 trillion per year range and may hit $1.5 trillion this year. Today’s billionaires undoubtedly are sitting on several hundred billion dollars of additional wealth courtesy of stock buybacks.

The concentration of American wealth—and the accompanying concentration of political power—now poses an existential threat to our democracy. Stock buybacks have made this situation measurably worse than it otherwise would have been. We can’t do much about the damage that’s already been done. But we could avoid further damage.

This piece was first published on Substack.

On July 4, 2025, catastrophic flooding swept through the Texas Hill Country, killing 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. Families who sent their children to summer camp would never see them alive again. The floods caused an estimated $22 billion in damage and economic losses.

Now, Texans face two US Senate candidates with dramatically different records on climate change.

Republican Ken Paxton earns just 21.25% on Vote Climate U.S. PAC's 2026 National Climate Change Voter's Guide. As Texas attorney general, Paxton repeatedly challenged climate regulations, fought efforts to make fossil fuel polluters pay for climate damages, and opposed federal fees on methane emissions.

The question this November is whether we will continue electing politicians who compound the climate crisis or choose leaders prepared to confront it.

His Democratic opponent, James Talarico, earns 71.25%. Talarico acknowledges climate change and supports investments in renewable energy and emerging technologies. However, he has moderated his climate positions, defended Texas's fossil fuel industry, and has no clear position on requiring carbon polluters to pay for their emissions.

Neither candidate earns a perfect score. But the difference is substantial—50 points.

North Carolina: $59.6 Billion in Devastation

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, killing at least 107 people and damaging or destroying more than 73,000 homes. The storm caused an estimated $59.6 billion in statewide damage, economic losses, and recovery needs.

In this year's US Senate race, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, compared with just 28.75% for Republican Michael Whatley.

Cooper has made climate action a governing priority, advocating climate resilience, opposing offshore drilling, and protecting North Carolina's air and water.

Whatley criticized President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, accusing the administration of siding with "climate alarmists." He has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus that climate change is human caused.

Michigan: Tornadoes and a Stark Political Divide

On May 7, 2024, a tornado packing 135-mile-per-hour winds tore through Portage, Michigan, causing approximately $50 million in damage. It was part of a multistate outbreak producing more than 165 tornadoes, killing three people, and causing approximately $6.6 billion in damage.

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, while Republican Mike Rogers receives just 21.25%.

El-Sayed calls climate change an immediate crisis and advocates a pathway to 100% renewable energy through investments in solar, wind, battery storage, and modernization of the electric grid.

Rogers has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. He has attacked Democratic energy policies and voted for a congressional measure declaring that a carbon tax would harm the US economy.

Georgia: Hurricane Helene's Deadly Toll

When Hurricane Helene struck Georgia in September 2024, it killed 37 people and caused an estimated $6.46 billion in agricultural and forestry losses alone.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms earns a 92.5% Climate Calculation, compared with 28.75% for Republican Rick Jackson.

As Atlanta's mayor, Lance Bottoms testified before Congress about climate threats, including flooding, extreme heat, and tree canopy loss. Her administration also worked to reduce fuel consumption and pollution.

Jackson has not clearly acknowledged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. His energy proposals emphasize lowering gasoline and utility costs rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Florida: A $109.5 Billion Hurricane and a Climate Zero Candidate

On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated southwest Florida, killing 150 people in Florida and causing an estimated $109.5 billion in damage. In Fort Myers Beach alone, 900 structures were destroyed.

Yet Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds earns an extraordinary 0% Climate Calculation.

Donalds has questioned the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and co-sponsored a congressional resolution opposing a carbon tax.

His Democratic opponent, David Jolly, earns 92.5%.

Jolly acknowledges climate science and advocates expanding renewable energy, strengthening rooftop solar policies, and investing in climate resilience to protect Florida's vulnerable coastlines.

In a state facing rising seas, coastal flooding, and increasingly costly hurricanes, the contrast could scarcely be more consequential.

Climate Change Is on the Ballot

These comparisons come from Vote Climate US PAC's 2026 National Climate Change Voter's Guide, which evaluates incumbents and challengers for the US House, US Senate, and governorships.

Unlike traditional congressional scorecards, our guide evaluates incumbents and challengers, candidates without congressional voting records. Our Climate Calculations examine incumbents' positions, votes, and leadership where applicable, and support for requiring carbon polluters to pay for their emissions. Scores range from Climate Hero to Climate Zero. Detailed research and sources are available by clicking the green plus button beside each candidate's name.

The guide also identifies candidates' positions on Roe v. Wade. In all five races examined here, the Democratic candidates support Roe, while their Republican opponents oppose it.

No single hurricane, flood, or tornado can be attributed solely to climate change. But scientists have established that human-caused warming intensifies many forms of extreme weather, particularly heavy rainfall, extreme heat, and coastal flooding associated with rising seas.

Americans are already paying an enormous price for climate disasters. They deserve to know which candidates are prepared to confront the crisis and which continue to obstruct meaningful action.

Visit VoteClimatePAC.com to examine candidates' Climate Calculations and the research behind them.

The question this November is whether we will continue electing politicians who compound the climate crisis or choose leaders prepared to confront it.

The climate crisis will not wait for political convenience. Neither should public accountability.

The Trump administration’s health care policy has a clear pattern: Distract attention from massive, permanent cuts to health coverage and care by handing a small sliver back to a fraction of the people harmed with a letter, a press release, and the president’s name attached. American families are struggling every day and every month to pay their health care bills. Whether they get coverage through Medicaid, Medicare, or the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, Americans are demanding more than one-time checks that don’t cover the massive increases they’ve been experiencing.

Premiums Jumped by Over $1,000. One in 20 Enrollees Got a One-Time $500 Back.

People who buy coverage through marketplaces like Healthcare.gov saw their premiums more than double, an increase of over $1,000 in 2026. That was a direct result of the deliberate decisions of this Republican Congress and the Trump administration to let the enhanced tax credits that help Americans afford coverage expire. Even people who never received that help saw premiums jump 24% on average this year, and will see another 17% in 2027, often adding up to thousands of dollars. These jumps were the direct results of policy decisions, after years of stability, when annual increases stayed in the single digits for the previous five years.

Now, one month before the election, the administration has mailed one-time $500 checks, paired with what amounts to a campaign letter, to about 1 million of the nearly 20 million people in the marketplaces. That’s one in 20. For the fraction who got the check, $500 doesn’t cover this year’s higher premiums, which are now baked in for years to come, let alone the increases in future years. The other 19 million people just got a higher bill. And some 3-4 million people couldn’t afford a higher bill and didn’t enroll at all for 2026. Many of these individuals are now likely uninsured.

To be clear, this rebate was money available in part from the sudden defunding of navigator assistance that helps consumers get on and stay on coverage. In previous years under past administrations, extra dollars like these would have lowered next year’s fees. Instead, they paid for an election-season mailer. For more on the administration’s actions to make marketplace coverage more expensive, and harder to get and keep, see this recent blog posting, One Battle After Another Heading into Marketplace Open Enrollment for 2027.

The Biggest Cuts in Medicaid History, and a One-Time Fund with Strings Attached

Millions of people are losing Medicaid coverage and services because of the budget cuts made by the current Congress and Trump Administration. The biggest cut to Medicaid in history, over $900 billion dollars, is projected to leave over 10 million more Americans uninsured, and strip key health care services and providers from communities, including over $130 billion in cuts in rural areas.

In contrast to those permanent cuts, the same law created a one-time $50 billion rural health fund—with strings that bar those dollars from backfilling the cuts. The Trump administration has rolled out a steady stream of press releases and announcements distributing these funds before the election, while many of the much bigger, permanent cuts are set to hit right after it. Rural communities face very real health care challenges, but this program was never designed to solve them. And no amount of spin can make $50 billion fill a $900 billion dollar hole. To learn more about how states are navigating these massive cuts and implementing rural health fund dollars, please read, Don’t be Fooled by the Rural Health Transformation Grants.

$90 for Some Seniors with Medicare While Other Costs Spike

This month, about 20 million people with traditional Medicare began receiving a $90 “premium rebate” from Social Security, announced by the White House on October 2, just one month before Election Day.

That’s less than half of a single month’s standard Part B premium, which is about $202 this year. The money comes from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress created to strengthen Medicare, not to bankroll a one-time payment timed to an election. And many seniors are left out entirely. Everyone in the Medicare Advantage program is excluded, a group with higher shares of Black, Hispanic, and Asian enrollees compared to traditional Medicare. So are the lowest income seniors who get help paying their premiums through Medicaid, the same program facing more than $900 trillion in cuts. The seniors most likely to need help with health care costs are the least likely to see a check.

The Bait and Switch Context — Cuts to Care and Coverage for All, Smaller Checks for a Few

Consumer and patient advocates support funding for rural health care, and financial help for families. Every dollar helps. But a one-time check doesn’t undo a permanent cut, and a press release doesn’t replace lost coverage. These payouts are designed to paper over much bigger cuts to exactly the same people hurt by this administration’s policies. We expect most Americans will see them for what they are: a small check meant to distract from a much bigger bill.

Democrats are poised to win the midterms. But it’s only because voters want to send a message: they’re angry at the Republicans for not using their majority to improve their quality of life. Democrats are just as likely to ignore the anger of the voters—and face their wrath in the not-too-distant future.

The post I Support You, I Don’t Like You appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

One of few silver linings of these dark Trump times is that much of what had been hidden has now been exposed.

I’m referring specifically to where the power lies in our system—power to decide how most Americans live and work. This exposure is having a huge effect on American attitudes. It may even lead to a fundamental political realignment along with major reforms.

To summarize: America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech.

Let me start with some historic context, then discuss how this affects the most pressing issues in the 2026 campaign, and finally suggest some likely outcomes.

I. The First Gilded Age’s Robber Barons and the Second Gilded Age’s Billionaire Barons of Big Tech

The first Gilded Age, which stretched from the late 1870s to around 1900, featured “robber barons” who lived like kings while corrupting the federal and state governments with bribes to get whatever they wanted from pliant legislators.

Today’s second Gilded Age is led by the billionaire barons of Big Tech, who are similarly living like kings while corrupting our democracy.

Just three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, an all-time record.

One of them—Elon Musk—sank more than a quarter of a billion dollars into getting Trump elected in 2024 and is sinking even more into the 2026 midterms.

In return, Trump has allowed Musk to extend his monopoly on satellite communications, financed largely by taxpayers—even giving him the power to disable Ukraine intelligence. Trump also allowed Musk’s DOGE to rampage through federal databases and gather information on every American.

Larry Ellison and his son, David, defanged CBS News and its flagship “60 Minutes” and kicked Trump critic and satirist Stephen Colbert off the air. In return, Trump has greenlit the Ellisons’ acquisition of a media empire stretching from Paramount to CNN, CBS and CBS News, TBS, TNT, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Discovery, HBO, and TikTok.

Jeff Bezos gave Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee for a puff documentary about her (with about $28 million going directly to her) and another $35 million for marketing the movie dud. Bezos also destroyed the integrity of the editorial page of The Washington Post by barring it from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and from writing anything negative about capitalism under Trump.

In return, Trump has given Bezos and his Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retailing along with federal contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fundraising campaign, and he gave Trump personally a custom engraved glass and 24-karat gold base plaque. In return, Trump has given Cook and Apple critical exemptions from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing them to import electronic components from China.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, also helped finance Trump’s inauguration and his ballroom, gave Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him from its platforms after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, rolled back content moderation and fact-checking on his platforms, and brought Trump loyalists into Meta’s leadership.

In return, Trump went along with Zuckerberg and Meta’s wish not to have a federal AI regulator but to rely on “self-policing” and to pressure European and other countries not to impose taxes on digital services.

II. The Billionaire Barons and AI

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are now investing more than $1 trillion of other people’s money and debt—along with taxpayer-financed subsidies—into AI. (Last year’s giant Trump-Republican tax cut featured major tax breaks for Big Tech, helping drive a big decrease in corporate tax payments even as AI spending soars.)

The billionaire barons are thereby exposing the US economy to the largest gamble since Wall Street’s wanton betting led to the 2008 financial crisis—threatening tens of millions of jobs, putting energy-guzzling data centers all around the nation, and posing a non-negligible threat to the survival of the human species.

The barons are also hastening climate change through the data centers’ exponential energy and water demands, along with the expansion and resurrection of fossil fuel infrastructure to power AI.

Tech giants’ self-reported greenhouse gas emissions have surged. Meta’s emissions jumped over 60 percent, Google’s rose nearly 50 percent, Amazon’s increased by 33 percent, and Microsoft’s by more than 23 percent—almost entirely driven by building and expanding data centers.

The billionaire barons of Big Tech are also among the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s war in Iran, through their ownership of advanced AI.

Peter Theil’s Palantir is powering the US military's targeting and data operations through its Maven Smart System platform, which processes massive streams of satellite, drone, and intelligence data.

Billionaires Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, and Trae Stephens are behind Anduril, which provides major counter-drone defense systems used to intercept Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. Billionaires Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google—along with billionaire Sam Altman’s OpenAI and billionaires Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic—are providing advance AI models and technology for military planning, intelligence, and counter-drone operations.

III. Will History Rhyme?

By the first decade of the 20th century, Americans had had enough of the brazen inequalities and corruption that characterized the first Gilded Age. A wave of reforms—antitrust laws, progressive taxation, pure food and drug regulation, bans on corporate political activities—blocked much of what the robber barons had been doing.

Then, after the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the nation ensured that the barons could no longer wreak havoc on America. Labor laws, securities laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and additional taxes on high incomes were enacted, laying the basis for the prosperity of the post-World War II era.

Are we on the precipice of another age of reform?

Perhaps. A new Politico poll shows that Americans are fed up with the billionaire robber barons of Big Tech—and Republicans are likely to take most of the political blame on Election Day.

The top tax priorities for voters, according to the poll, are hiking taxes on billionaires and curbing tax breaks for big companies.

Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, more than double the 21 percent who said the same for Democrats. Voters are also far more likely to want candidates who propose stripping away tax incentives for the data centers needed to fuel the AI boom.

About a fifth of respondents said that ending those tax breaks would be among their most important tax issues in the midterms (only 1 in 10 wanted to offer new preferences for data centers).

A majority of respondents thought that tech chief executives have been secretive about the potential risks of AI, while a plurality of Americans believe both that the risks of artificial intelligence development outweigh the benefits and that the government should strictly regulate AI.

It’s impossible to know whether the upcoming midterms elections will reflect these sentiments or, even if they do, whether these sentiments will find their way into subsequent legislation.

But—given the polls, and also what I’m hearing informally from around the nation—it seems likely to me that high on the nation’s emerging progressive agenda will be busting up Big Tech monopolies, getting big money out of our politics, enacting a wealth tax, putting guardrails around AI, seeking to reverse climate change, and preventing billionaires from creating and owning media empires.

I can’t say precisely when we’ll see these enacted, but I’m confident we will see them. America hates the billionaire barons of Big Tech, with good reason.

In South Padre Island, sea turtle experts deemed this summer a record-breaking hatchling season with nearly 150 nests. I left Texas in 2015, but each year, the annual sea turtle hatchling releases call to my Texan heart and draw me back to my roots.

Those roots are disappearing.

Last month, the Trump administration formally cut back protections for endangered species. For 50 years, it has been illegal under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to degrade or destroy the habitat of an endangered species. Now, a new rule removes protection for habitat that these species need to breed, feed, or shelter.

We are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico.

The motive is clear: The Trump administration recently held its third oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, opening up deeper and riskier Gulf waters to habitat destruction and degradation from offshore drilling.

The administration is choosing profit over the planet.

This spring, federal officials convened a special panel and granted an extremely rare exemption allowing industry to ignore longstanding rules that protect sea turtles, the endangered Rice’s whale, manatees, and other marine life in the Gulf. The administration asserted that protecting our species is less important than feeding the wallets of the oil and gas executives. Meanwhile, while the administration blames our precious wildlife for jeopardizing national security, using defunct logic and irrational argument, it continues its war of choice in Iran. The hypocrisy is intentional, and even more importantly, fatal.

My family gathered on South Padre Island when I was a child, and the highlight of our visits was learning how local conservationists helped the sea turtle hatchlings. The turtles would come ashore to lay nests, and experts would monitor the nests and move them off the beach to keep them secure. Sometimes, if the babies hadn’t hatched yet, we would stay an extra day just to watch.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make a kid a lifelong conservationist, someone dedicated to caring for our planet. And that couldn’t be more important these days. Sea turtles and other endangered species in the Gulf can be easily killed by oil and gas exploration and other fossil fuel industry activity. And even when not deadly, vessel strikes can cause a condition in sea turtles that makes it hard for them to swim. That’s why the Endangered Species Act was created to ensure that industry would take reasonable measures to mitigate harm, including using quieter technologies, lower vessel speeds, and more.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that in the next four or more decades, the oil and gas industry will kill more than 38,000 endangered and threatened sea turtles in the Gulf. And that doesn’t even account for harm from expanding offshore leasing—something the administration signed into law and has continued to push for in its proposed offshore leasing plan.

We are faced with diminishing populations of some of our ocean’s most important species, but in the last few years, some of these species have been spotted in unexpected places, giving us hope for growth. In the last few years alone, Rice’s whales have been spotted on the Texas side of the Gulf, and manatees showed up in Houston. This would normally be cause to redouble conservation efforts and take pride in the work Texas is doing to save wildlife and protect our ocean.

Instead, we are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico. A bipartisan group of former administration officials recently called for the Trump administration to repeal these harmful actions and restore habitat protections for endangered species.

Now more than ever, it is time for other policymakers across the Gulf to join this chorus and oppose the Trump administration’s attempts to circumvent the protections of the Endangered Species Act. The reward for our actions will be nothing insignificant—a healthy ocean and thriving species for generations to come, in Texas and across the globe.

As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours.

Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit.

Then on Tuesday morning, Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News.

What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite.

Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.

(The good folks at Indivisible have a shocking list of egregious political insertions and manipulations by Facebook over the years that you can read here.)

Down in Brazil, Facebook deactivated one of lefty Lula’s Facebook pages just before the election, leading a top judge in that country to rule that Meta can’t throttle political content, restrict searches, or remove posts in ways that create a political imbalance. Meta denies bias, but the AP notes they never explained why Lula’s channels were getting beat down on Facebook’s algorithm.

Here at home, after Trump worked out a TikTok deal with an investor group led by Larry Ellison, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it had “independently confirmed instances” of suppressed content there critical of Trump.

TikTok says it’s a glitch, but a study published in Nature in May found TikTok’s algorithm had systematically favored Republican content in three swing states during 2024 when the Chinese—who Trump is courting—still largely owned the platform. Another Nature study this year found X’s feed measurably pushes users to the right so quickly that it just takes a few weeks of exposure to happen.

And this is nothing new. Back in 2017, Google rolled out a change to the news and opinion websites they were pointing people to that caused AlterNet, then one of the biggest progressive sites in the country, to lose 40 percent of its search traffic almost overnight, about 1.2 million readers a month, along with progressive sites Common Dreams, Truthout, and a dozen others.

No announcement, no hearing, no appeal.

After throttling comes self-censorship, which I watched Sunday night on CNN as a host gave a warm, friendly interview to a Republican congressman who told several easily debunked naked lies and she never called him on a single one. No memo from Ellison was necessary; Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience.”

I’ve lived through this movie before. In late 2006, as Mitt Romney was leaving the Massachusetts governorship to run for president, his company, Bain Capital co-led a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout of Clear Channel, the radio network that carried Air America programming to around 90% of American households.

I helped start the network, wrote its first business plan, and was on its air, regularly beating Limbaugh in the ratings, and we helped get Obama into the White House. But when Bain took it over they started dropping us off their stations until, in 2010, we couldn’t sell enough advertising to stay in business. I can’t prove this was a sneaky trick by Romney or Bain, but that’s the point; we have virtually no rules or regulations to require disclosure to protect our public square.

Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.

Lewis Powell laid it out for the Chamber of Commerce in his 1971 memo, telling corporate America that television “plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” that business had better take it over.

It took them fifty years, Project 2025, and the internet to finish the job, but here we are.

— Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million for having suspended his account after the January 6th attempt to end our democracy. Then when Trump came into office again Zuck scrapped fact-checking, and has been a regular visitor to the White House ever since. Common Dreams reports the Justice Department, just by coincidence of course, has since halted a federal probe of Zuck’s company.

— ABC paid Trump $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million over a 60 Minutes edit, and in June Trump approved the Ellisons’ $110 billion merger without demanding a single change. Even Gavin Newsom caved on that one, presumably for fear of offending the billionaires.

— Meanwhile Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has openly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage of Trump scandals that he calls “news distortions.”

This is not only wrong, it’s ahistoric. From the founding of America, we’ve treated information systems as a public trust. George Washington’s administration, via the Postal Service Act of 1792, subsidized American newspapers with a special one-cent charge to deliver anywhere in the country while a letter could cost a quarter.

Washington and Madison understood that a republic can’t survive an ignorant or misinformed citizenry.

The result of that act was that between 1783 and 1820 we went from 73 newspapers in America to over 620.

Telegraph lines, also privately owned, were made “common carriers” by legislation that required them to carry everybody’s messages at the same rate.

Radio and television broadcasters got their licenses in exchange for serving what the Fairness Doctrine called “the public interest, convenience and necessity” which was generally enforced as requiring honest news reporting hourly on radio and during primetime on TV. Reagan killed that in 1987 and fast-tracked Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, paving the way for Fox “News.”

But then the neoliberals got into their deregulation act. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which erased the national cap of 40 radio stations per company.

Clear Channel exploded from 40 stations to nearly 1,200. In 2017 Trump’s first FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, repealed the rule that kept one company from owning the newspaper and the TV station in the same town, by coincidence the same year Google buried AlterNet.

And Section 230 of that law made it so that while newspaper publishers can still be held responsible for the content of their publications, owners of social media can’t be. At the time, Nigel Peacock and I were making a good living moderating content for CompuServe; all that went away when they no longer needed to care if there were drug sales or human trafficking on their sites.

What’s truly astonishing is that the internet itself was built by our government (DARPA and the National Science Foundation) with our tax dollars; these oligarchs who lord over our content today didn’t build this public square, they simply appropriated it and now insist it’s their private property.

The internet, in fact, is the first vehicle for the widespread dissemination of information since George Washington’s day that hasn’t been subject to any meaningful form of regulation or blocking of monopolies.

John Sherman, when he wrote the antitrust law that bears his name in 1890, put it in words that could have been found on a No Kings sign this past weekend:

“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream, Robert Bork and the Reagan Justice Department rewrote that law into meaninglessness.

While pre-Reagan we had enormous diversity in media ownership and every downtown and mall was filled with small local businesses, forty-five years later there’s not a single significant industry in America that’s not dominated by a small handful of companies that typically behave like cartels, our media is in a half-dozen hands, and our downtowns and malls are nothing but big national chains.

Sherman’s law being gutted by Reagan and subsequent neoliberals is the only reason the Ellisons, Zuck, Musk, and Alphabet can own so much of our nation’s information system and exercise such extraordinary power over public opinion and elections.

There are some quick and easy solutions:

• Break up the empires with reinvigorated anti-trust laws.
• End Section 230 so social media owners have responsibility for what’s on their platforms.
• Restore the statutory cap on how many news outlets a single company or family can own.
• Require algorithms that manipulate our feeds to be publicly disclosed, and that people can get a non-algorithmically modified feed if they want.

And then there are some truly transformational bigger solutions that America could consider:

• Create a 21st century Digital Postal Services Act that establishes a publicly-owned, publicly financed, independently governed national social network, with no advertising, no billionaire owners, no political manipulation of feeds, and no selling personal information. Call it the United States Digital Postal Social Service, with constitutional protections against government censorship and surveillance.
• Establish a “right to digital exit” where you own all the information about you that the social media sites have collected (followers, contacts, photographs, posts, and social connections), with the power to edit, remove, or take them to a different site. You can change phone companies and still call your friends; why not the same with social media?
• Prohibit advertising based on sensitive personal information and cross-site behavioral surveillance, while still allowing contextual advertising and subscriptions. This could restrict political microtargeting and secret tailoring of messages to different voters.
• Codify a democratic right to reach your own followers, so your messages (other than spam, fraud, threats, harassment, and illegal material) aren’t limited, shadow-banned, or otherwise manipulated by the social media site’s ownership.
• Outlaw government contractors from owning social media sites that they can use to promote their own interests that are, essentially, being funded by our tax dollars.

We don’t let Elon Musk own the Interstate Highway System, or Mark Zuckerberg own the Postal Service, or Larry Ellison own the streets and sidewalks where Americans gather to protest.

Why, then, do we let them have such extraordinary control over the “digital streets and sidewalks” where Americans increasingly gather, organize, debate, and learn about the world?

Washington Post reporter Heidi Levine traveled to the occupied West Bank to document Palestinians harvesting olives. On Friday, Israeli settlers brutally attacked her, leaving her traumatized and hospitalized.

Despite carrying gear visibly identifying her as a photographer and wearing a protective vest clearly marked “PRESS,” she was surrounded by settlers who shoved her to the ground and relentlessly assaulted her.

According to reports, she suffered four broken vertebrae, a broken rib, severe lacerations across her body, and a finger that was severely split open.

Heidi Levine deserves justice, victims of settler violence deserve accountability, and the evidence warrants action.

In her words: “Luckily I had my flak jacket and helmet, otherwise I probably wouldn’t even be here, because they just kept kicking me and kicking me.”

This assault deserves an investigation and swift prosecution of those responsible.

It also calls on Americans to examine the deeper story she was covering.

If attackers are violently assaulting a photojournalist working for a globally influential publication, what protection can Palestinian farmers expect—especially when the cameras leave?

That question connects olive groves in the occupied West Bank to legislation in the US Senate led by Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen along with Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Senate Resolution 852 would require the State Department to provide information and assessments concerning investigations into the killings of Americans by Israeli forces or violent settlers, as well as other human rights abuses in the occupied West Bank.

Last month, although a historic 47 senators voted, largely along party lines, to move the measure forward, the Senate ultimately failed to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

The assault on Levine is a wake-up call for the senate to reconsider.

This type of targeted violence extends beyond farmers gathering the harvest.

On October 12, at the beginning of this year’s harvest, Israeli forces uprooted and bulldozed 400 olive trees in Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, to make way for a new settlement outpost.

This is far from an isolated incident. So far this year alone, Israeli forces and settlers have uprooted and destroyed around 50,000 olive trees.

For a Palestinian family, olive groves equal years of labor. A family tending its trees is earning income and maintaining its connection to land. Destroying the trees or stealing the crop makes life untenable.

In April, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that at least 45 Palestinian communities had been completely displaced since January 2023 because of settler attacks and related restrictions.

Those figures describe a process often camouflaged behind abstract language.

Journalists documenting the harvest are simultaneously documenting the devastating toll of settler violence on Palestinian lives.

Attacking members of the press threatens individual livelihoods and lives, but also the public’s ability to stay informed and understand what is happening.

Our response must protect the people in the photographs, too. A farmer’s right to safety cannot depend on whether a foreign correspondent is nearby.

Washington has a practical place to begin.

Senate Resolution 852 requests information on Israel’s human rights practices under Section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act.

The September 29 Senate vote denied American families and victims of settler violence an opportunity to demand accountability for conduct that should inform Congress’ decisions about American security assistance.

The reporting requirement in the resolution is consequential, providing the State Department 30 days to respond.

Lawmakers who believe such a requirement could disrupt an important security relationship must explain why that relationship shouldn’t withstand scrutiny.

Congress should use the findings to pursue credible investigations, examine failures to protect civilians, and enforce applicable human rights conditions.

Levine’s assault has brought renewed focus to the dangerous circumstances Palestinians face daily while tending to their land.
Whether that attention matters will depend on whether a response leads to consequences for perpetrators.

Heidi Levine deserves justice, victims of settler violence deserve accountability, and the evidence warrants action.

The US Senate can begin demanding answers by reviving Senate Resolution 852 and unanimously passing this measure.

Appearing on NBC’s "Meet the Press" on August 16, 2026, Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted that he has abandoned the principle that has guided the Justice Department since Watergate.

Asked if he would pledge to act independently of the White House, he said: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should make that pledge.”

He is tragically wrong. Blanche has forgotten that he works for all Americans, not the single man he refers to as “the boss.”

Blanche might consider this: Trump is a fickle friend who can quickly become a fierce foe.

In the near term, he’s angling to thwart the midterm elections in which Republicans are poised to lose President Donald Trump’s death grip on Congress. In the long run, the nation will bear the consequences of his weaponization of the Justice Department for years to come.

Blanche’s Pursuit of Trump’s Retribution Agenda

Attorney General Pam Bondi failed in her valiant efforts to satisfy Trump’s obsession to punish all of his perceived enemies. Her most visible failures involved former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Career prosecutors at the Department of Justice (DOJ) found the evidence insufficient to indict Comey for posting a photograph of seashells forming “86 47” on a North Carolina beach. US Attorney Eric Siebert—whom Trump had nominated—recommended against charging him.

Career prosecutors likewise informed Siebert that the evidence was insufficient to indict James, who had won a civil fraud case against Trump and his organization.

Trump didn’t care that experienced prosecutors found the claims against his targets wanting. In a social media post that he intended as a private message to then-Attorney General Bondi, Trump told her to get moving against Comey and James. Trump urged Bondi to give the job to Lindsay Halligan, an unqualified White House staff attorney whose prior experience consisted primarily of defending insurance companies against homeowners and corporate plaintiffs.

Bondi obeyed, and Halligan used dubious tactics to obtain indictments of Comey and James. But a federal court dismissed the indictments, ruling that Halligan’s appointment had been illegal from the outset.

Two weeks after dismissal of James’ indictment, the Justice Department tried again. In a remarkable rebuke, the grand jury refused.

On April 1, 2026, Trump fired Bondi.

With Bondi’s departure, then-Deputy Attorney General Blanche—Trump’s personal defense counsel between his two presidential terms—became acting AG. Before the month ended, Blanche had secured Comey’s re-indictment.

Five weeks later, Trump said that he would nominate Blanche as Bondi’s permanent replacement. On August 8, 2026, he was confirmed on a 50-49 Senate vote.

Long before his confirmation, Blanche had moved quickly to please “his boss.” Here’s a sample:

• In July 2025, Blanche was involved with senior White House staff in the Situation Room to develop strategies minimizing the ongoing damage to Trump personally from the Epstein files.
• In March 2026, he boasted that the Justice Department had rid itself of more than 200 career prosecutors and FBI agents—anyone “who had anything to do with prosecuting Trump.”
• In May 2026, he alone signed the document that—contrary to federal law—gave Trump and his family immunity from Internal Revenue Service investigations in return for settling Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS that a federal judge found to be a sham. Apparently, Blanche ignored his prior pledge to recuse himself from Trump-related matters.

Blanche’s Pursuit of Trump’s Attack on Democracy

Since his August confirmation, Blanche has promoted Trump’s assault on the democratic process:

• Despite the uniform rejection of the DOJ’s position by 26 federal courts—including Trump-appointed judges—he has continued to pursue lawsuits seeking state voter rolls as part of Trump’s effort to subvert the upcoming midterms.
• In September, he asserted without evidence that “common sense” proved what is demonstrably false—that mail-in voting presents a greater risk of fraud than in-person voting with identification. That specious argument is another element of Trump’s crusade to undermine public confidence in the democratic process.
• In October, he relaxed longstanding DOJ rules limiting presidential appointees in the Justice Department from participation in political gatherings. By then, he had already hit the campaign trail for Republicans and spoken at the party’s midterm convention.

And most recently, Blanche has taken the preemptive effort to discredit the results of the upcoming midterms to new levels:

In violation of the Justice Department’s 60-day rule against actions that could affect the outcome of an approaching election, the Justice Department executed a search of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)’s home only 22 days before the election in which she is on the ballot.

In violation of federal and state law (and probably a prior court order), DOJ sued California after demanding that it use the federal government’s unreliable database to purge 20,000 voters from the state’s rolls. But as California’s secretary of state explained in rejecting DOJ’s pre-suit, 48-hour ultimatum:

To give just one example, in a similar incident in the State of Nevada, DHS initially alleged that Nevada’s voter roll included nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens. However, after working with the State of Nevada, DHS officials failed to establish that a single non-citizen was on the voter rolls.

Blanche’s lawsuit is another Trumpian effort to promote public doubt about the integrity of the midterm elections and lay the groundwork for baseless post-election challenges.

Blanche’s Reckoning Has Only Begun

Blanche’s actions are already costing him:

• He has been the subject of ethics complaints relating to his work at DOJ.
• US District Court Judge Kathleen Williams made a direct judicial referral of Blanche to the New York bar—where he is licensed—based on his “troubling testimony” and the questionable legality of the Trump-IRS immunity agreement that he alone signed.
• Federal courts across the country have blasted Blanche’s Department of Justice as no longer worthy of the “presumption of regularity.” Federal judges no longer trust DOJ attorneys to tell them the truth.

None of this fazes Blanche. Perhaps his ambition was to be Trump’s latest “Roy Cohn”—Trump’s infamous early mentor who rose to notoriety as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-Wis.) chief legal counsel during the 1950s “Red Scare.” If so, he has succeeded.

But Blanche might consider this: Trump is a fickle friend who can quickly become a fierce foe. And eventually, Cohn was disbarred.

MAGA is an insidious political “movement” that is the inevitable conclusion of the project started with the infamous Powell Memorandum in 1972. Formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Powell Memo is a call to arms for the oligarchy in the US to push for a set of policies that benefit the wealthy while waging a narrative battle designed to get the working class to support these policies to their own detriment. The Powell Memo is not hypothetical: it is the blueprint that the modern conservative movement has followed, and the result some 50 years later is MAGA.

The central narrative of MAGA is essentially this: Some other group of people is preventing you (typically white, Christian, straight, cisgender men) from having the basic things in life that you deserve. This outside group of oppressors can be whoever the Dear Leader Donald Trump says it is, although it can never be the wealthy elites and Republican lawmakers who are actually leading the oppression of the working class of the country, because the purpose of the narrative is to distract working and poor people away from the true source of their problems by keeping them fixated on a fictional boogeyman.

No group has been more frequently smeared and shoehorned into this narrative role by MAGA than immigrants. Donald Trump has famously said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the US; that Mexico is sending drugs, crime, and rapists into the US; and spread so many vile lies about Haitian immigrants (who were in the US legally through Temporary Protected Status) that Justice Elena Kagan insightfully pointed out that the conservative majority in Mullin v. Doe (the case that paved the way for the administration to end TPS for Haitians and other groups) couldn’t even stomach putting Trump’s racist statements into their opinion when she wrote, “The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially infected that the majority declines to put them in print.”

If the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.

Immigration is therefore the core of the MAGA mythology. MAGA primarily exists under the narrative bargain of protecting white Americans from (Black and brown) immigrants, and in exchange, the base gives Trump power and condones his authoritarianism. It’s important to remember that even though some people are happy to support fascism no matter what, fascism does not get broad support unless people think that they have to support it because it is necessary to prevent some worse or existential harm from happening to them. If the choice is voting for a dictator or allowing the country to be destroyed by whatever the outside threat is, more people will choose the former than they would have otherwise, which can be enough to tip the scales and usher in a fascist regime.

Immigration served as one of the main selling points for Trump in 2024. The allure of this “You need me to protect you from marauding immigrants.” narrative was so powerful, that it even managed to sway members of the Latino community, who have subsequently turned away from him. When the rhetoric of good guys stopping bad guys to make the country better turns into your friends, family, and neighbors being menaced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while living under an even worse economic reality where nothing is affordable, the fascism bargain suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing. To be clear, I am not blaming the Latino community for the rise of Trump, as Trump is a creature of the overwhelmingly white male constituency that supports him. I merely point to Trump’s support with Latinos as evidence of the appeal that fascism can have for people and how people will vote against their own interest if they feel like they have to.

Despite the fact that immigration is the rhetorical center of MAGA, the Democrats have consistently failed to come up with a narrative and set of policies to counter it. In her presidential debate with Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris infamously touted her “tough on border enforcement” credentials, effectively ceding the ground to Trump and adopting his framework that immigrants are dangerous and that immigration is a bad thing. In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu wrote, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” He also wrote, “Sow the seeds of success in fertile ground.” If you are playing by the enemy’s rules and trying to win under their terms, you are destined to lose, which is exactly what happened. If you are telling the public that immigrants are dangerous, then how can you be surprised when the candidate with the most hard-line approach on immigration gets the most support? It is truly political malpractice that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) spent untold millions of dollars on corporate consultants, but they still could not figure out this basic concept.

Even though Trump is now a historically unpopular president, the Democrats continue to largely coast on the issue of immigration. Instead of offering their own narrative framework and policy agenda, they are content to sit back and decry Trump’s immigration policies. This strategy fits perfectly into the DNC’s preferred tactic of having it both ways. They can label Trump’s policies as extreme (which they are), but when they get pressed on immigration issues, they can tack back to the center and try to say that they are actually the real immigration enforcers. It didn’t work for Kamala Harris in 2024, and even though Trump’s time will inevitably come to an end, if the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.

The Democrats’ strategy of saying no and doing nothing is like trying to chop down a tree by picking off the leaves. As Bruce Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do: “We shall find the truth when we examine the problem. The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer—understanding the problem dissolves the problem.” The only way to get rid of the poisonous MAGA tree is to chop down its trunk and uproot it. Once you understand that the immigration lie is the core of MAGA’s support, the answer becomes clear: We need Democrats to adopt a new rhetorical and policy framework on immigration. The guiding principles for the pro-immigration rhetorical framework should be:

1. Immigration is a good thing, not a bad thing. The benefits of immigration for our country are substantial, and reducing immigration is counterproductive and harmful to the interests of Americans.
2. Immigrants (both documented and undocumented) commit crime at a lower rate than native born US citizens, and immigrants do not suppress the wages of American workers. Instead, crime and low wages are caused by right-wing policies such as unlimited guns on the streets, the war on drugs, austerity in the social safety net, failure to raise the minimum wage, union prevention and busting laws, failure to tax wealth, etc.
3. Our immigration policy should be to increase the avenues of legal immigration instead of criminalizing and shutting down pathways for immigration. In fact, illegal immigration is largely caused by right-wing policies that: A) make it hard for people to come to the US and stay legally; and B) create disruption and chaos in Latin America and the Caribbean, which leads to people fleeing desperate situations and needing a place to seek refuge.
4. Militarized immigration enforcement inevitably boomerangs back on US citizens and will become a tool used to strip people of their rights and oppress them.

Supporting progressive immigration policies is important, and I will outline a few progressive immigration reforms below, but I think getting the rhetorical framework right first is important for two reasons. First, the “immigrants are dangerous” lie has been pummeled into the minds of Americans for decades, and it absolutely needs to be countered. If people think immigrants are an existential threat, they will continue to be primed to support right-wing policies, even though those policies will make their lives worse. We have been subconsciously duped for generations into thinking that immigrants are dangerous and that taking them into the US is an act of charity. If we continue to think of immigration as a form of charity that requires sacrifice, we will always have right-wing politicians pushing regressive policies under the justification that Democrats are selling out the American population to foreigners, when the reality is that immigration is good for Americans. Immigration is therefore not an act of charity, but it is in our own best interest, and right-wing immigration policies are therefore harmful to America.

Second, immigration law is complex, and the problems with our immigration system are numerous. There is no easy, single policy fix for our immigration system in the same way that Medicare For All would be a single policy that would have a huge, positive impact on healthcare in America. Even though there is inherent complexity to the immigration system, Democrats need to push for progressive immigration policies such as:

1. Abolish ICE and end militarized immigration enforcement. ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies in the Department of Homeland Security have become the personal brown shirt army of Donald Trump, as seen most recently in their raid of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) home and attempt to denaturalize her.
2. Create a humane and fully legal system for people to claim asylum at the border, instead of the quasi-legal kangaroo court system we have now.
3. Codify Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals into law through an act of Congress and give Dreamers a way to become Lawful Permanent Residents (green card holders).
4. Create more visa categories and programs to allow people to come and stay legally more easily.
5. Radically reform and properly fund US Citizenship and Immigration Services in order to make it a properly functioning agency and reduce processing times, which have become even worse under Trump, resulting in family separation, suffering, and depressed economic activity.
6. Create more pathways for people who have status issues to rectify their status without having to leave or go through detention and removal proceedings (Immigration Court).
7. End the outdated country quota system for green cards and greatly expand the number of green cards that can be issued each year.
8. Strip the president of his authority to suspend visa issuance, entry, and TPS arbitrarily.
9. Create a legal pathway for the largely Indian and Chinese H-1B workforce to get green cards without having to wait for decades in H-1B status where they can be exploited by employers and often have to watch their kids “age out” and become ineligible to stay permanently.

Congress has immense power under the Constitution to set immigration laws into place. We need Democratic candidates for Congress to adopt a pro-immigration, progressive narrative, or else we will continue to have MAGA and right-wing candidates win elections and implement regressive, oppressive, and counterproductive immigration policies, that ultimately harm both the American and foreign-born population.

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• France’s “Doom Loop”: Populist protests explode across France as investors dump bonds and borrowing costs surge. President Emmanuel Macron faces a brutal trap: spend to calm the streets and risk market panic, or do nothing and fuel political chaos ahead of next year’s election.⁠ America carries heavy debt too, but its reserve-currency power and AI-driven growth help it sidestep immediate danger—for now.

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we also discuss:

• Ohio Governor’s Race: Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar over childhood abuse claims backfires hard. Prediction markets send Acton’s odds of winning the Ohio governorship to all-time highs amid widespread backlash.

• Kohen Wiley Video: New video surfaces in the Mississippi police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley outside a Walmart. The attorney general calls the officer’s force “justified” after the car allegedly threatened officers, but provides no details, while the family demands full footage release.⁠ Is it time to ban cops shooting into cars?

• Russia Releases American: Russia frees 74-year-old American Stephen Hubbard, detained as a mercenary for Ukraine since 2022, as Trump envoy Steve Witkoff meets Putin in St. Petersburg. The release gives Trump a win while he presses Ukraine toward a deal.⁠

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With midterms fast approaching, it seems that all eyes are turned toward what will happen pre- and post-election. There is nonstop coverage of how much money is being spent on local, state, and federal races, as well as the ongoing threats to our democracy.

The political moment is stressful, particularly for working women and nonbinary people of color. Prices are rising, wages are stagnant, and it seems harder than ever to get ahead. Despite the stress of the political moment, there is reason for hope, and we can find those reasons at the polls.

When we vote, we show up for ourselves, our futures, and for collective power. When we show up to the polls, we increase our chances of winning the gains needed for working people to take care of ourselves and our families. That’s what this election is all about.

If collective power was truly meaningless, we wouldn’t see so many attempts to limit it.

We know there are policies that will improve the lives of our communities, and we know they are achievable. We have seen what advancements in equal pay and workplace protections are possible when women organize and policymakers listen.

The power of organizing is why we at 9to5 recently held a fundraiser and rallying point, “Built By Us, For All of Us.” When we raise our own money and move it on our own terms, we can speak truth to power and fight for our communities without compromise. Real power comes from neighbors organizing and showing up for each other, not billionaires and corporate interests spending to divide us and keep money at the top.

If collective power was truly meaningless, we wouldn’t see so many attempts to limit it. If we couldn’t win, we wouldn’t see racial gerrymandering in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais, threats of armed federal agents outside of polls, or the looming specter of legislation like the SAVE Act (which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, adding even more roadblocks to the process for women, LGBTQ+ folks, and people of color).

We have too much to gain to let efforts aimed at limiting our collective power stop us from being heard. Instead, they further compel us to respond with action. We need elected officials in office who will fight for policies that allow for safe and affordable living and working conditions. It is high time for policies that expand workplace harassment protections, close the gender pay gap for women, and pursue climate and utility justice.

We are long overdue for a national paid leave policy in the US that would expand paid family and medical leave policies at the state and federal level. It is proven that paid family and medical leave improves employee well-being and workplace productivity. Expanding paid family and medical leave policies at the state and federal level could change workers’ lives. They would no longer have to choose between getting paid or taking time to care for themselves and their loved ones.

Childcare affordability is a serious concern for voters across political ideologies, and parents can’t work without childcare. Investing in affordable, accessible, quality childcare supports small businesses and state infrastructure as well as parents, children, and communities. Lawmakers can push through false narratives to give the necessary resources to the workforce behind the workforce.

Housing justice and affordability is another issue at the top of minds; the cost of housing tied for the second most pressing issue for Americans in a recent Gallup poll. Everyone needs a warm, safe, and stable place to live; policies prioritizing safe housing and renters' rights can bring this into reach for families across the country.

These are all issues that can be advanced if we elect leaders who will fight for our interests in office.

Every single voice counts, especially in this political moment. When we come together, speak out, and vote for officials who care about and answer to their constituents, we invite the possibility of true change.

In the highlands of Pernambuco, Brazil, the Xukuru do Ororubá Indigenous people are bringing a damaged landscape back to life.

After generations of colonization, land occupation, deforestation, and intensive agriculture, their ancestral territory had suffered profound ecological damage. Forests had diminished, wildlife had disappeared, and springs had been compromised.

Through the Jupago Kreká Sacred Agriculture Collective, the community is combining ancestral knowledge, traditional agriculture, and forest restoration to regenerate its territory. According to the community, approximately 360 hectares are undergoing restoration, 14 springs are recovering, and wildlife is returning to previously degraded areas. Their work includes recovering ancestral seeds, cultivating medicinal plants, and passing traditional ecological knowledge to younger generations. For the Xukuru, protecting biodiversity is inseparable from protecting culture, livelihoods, and territorial rights.

Communities are already protecting and restoring biodiversity through their traditional knowledge and management practices, yet their contributions are not always formally recognized in conservation policies.

As governments gather in Yerevan, Armenia, from October 19-30 for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17), their experience offers a reminder that biodiversity depends on the rights of the people who have protected and restored it for generations.

Yet there are growing concerns that hard-won protections for Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities could be weakened during negotiations. Rather than recognizing and strengthening the conservation work these communities are already leading, as demonstrated by the Xukuru's restoration efforts, governments risk undermining the territorial rights and community governance that make these efforts possible.

Conservation Cannot Come at the Expense of Communities

Governments will undertake their first collective review of progress toward implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022. The framework includes conserving at least 30% of the world's land and waters by 2030. But achieving this target is not simply a matter of expanding protected areas. It also requires addressing who has the authority to govern the lands and ecosystems on which biodiversity depends.

For too long, conservation policies have treated Indigenous peoples and local communities as obstacles rather than rights holders and essential partners. This approach has too often resulted in exclusion, displacement, and restrictions on traditional ways of life.

The Xukuru people's restoration efforts demonstrate why recognizing Indigenous-led conservation matters. Communities are already protecting and restoring biodiversity through their traditional knowledge and management practices, yet their contributions are not always formally recognized in conservation policies. Governments must ensure that Indigenous and Traditional Territories are recognized as conservation areas in their own right, rather than treated as secondary to conventional protected areas.

Hard-Won Rights Are Not Negotiating Chips

The Global Biodiversity Framework includes commitments to respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities, achieved through years of advocacy by Indigenous leaders, community organizations, and allies.

Yet these protections could be diluted through negotiating language on the voluntary guidelines to achieve the Goal 2 and 3 of the Global Kunming Framework. Replacing a commitment that governments should act with language saying they may act weakens accountability. Treating Indigenous and Traditional Territories as merely complementary to conventional protected areas risks marginalizing community governance. Diluting references to free, prior, and informed consent threatens communities' ability to make decisions about their lands.

That is why the Rights and Resources Initiative and its partners have issued an open letter to CBD negotiators calling on governments to stop the rollback of hard-won rights protections at CBD COP17. Through the #StopTheRollbacks campaign, the coalition has outlined 10 demands, including stronger recognition of Indigenous and Traditional Territories; protection of free, prior, and informed consent; direct access to biodiversity finance; and meaningful recognition and participation of Afro-descendant peoples.

CBD COP17 is an opportunity to move beyond conservation models that separate nature from people.

Furthermore, digital sequence information (DSI) draws on vast amounts of genetic information derived from forests and other ecosystems that have long been protected, managed, and conserved by Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities. Yet the growing use of DSI risks disconnecting genetic information from the traditional knowledge, practices, and stewardship systems that have enabled communities to sustainably use, manage, and conserve these genetic resources.

The fact that the Cali Fund, a fund designed to share the benefits from the use of genetic data, is not yet fully operational, combined with inadequate mechanisms to ensure the traceability of genetic resource data, puts at risk the principles of fairness, equity, and justice that should guide the global use of genetic information. Ultimately, this raises a fundamental question: Will genetic information be governed primarily for profit, or for life?

CBD COP17 must advance the financing arrangements necessary to make the Cali Fund fully operational, while strengthening community governance over data related to genetic resources and respecting collective rights. Governments must also ensure that Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities receive a fair and equitable share of the benefits generated from the use of genetic information derived from biodiversity. The Cali Fund, as a global mechanism for benefit sharing, should recognize and uphold their rights and provide meaningful opportunities for communities to access funding directly.

CBD COP17 must build on commitments to recognize Afro-descendant peoples in global biodiversity governance. Through #StopTheRollbacks, RRI and its partners are calling on governments to uphold CBD Decision 16/6, which recognizes the contributions of people of African descent to biodiversity conservation, and ensure that recognition translates into meaningful participation in decisions affecting their territories and livelihoods.

Governments must also advance the CBD's Gender Plan of Action, ensuring women can participate in biodiversity decision-making and access resources. Women in the Xukuru community play a central role in preserving traditional medicinal knowledge and passing ancestral practices to future generations.

CBD COP17 Must Move Forward, Not Backward

As an environmental lawyer who has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of conservation, public policy, and Indigenous rights, I have seen how easily ambitious environmental commitments lose their meaning when governments fail to translate them into enforceable protections.

Millions of communities are still waiting for their daily efforts to protect ecosystems, water sources, and genetic resources to be fully recognized and respected. In many cases, their stewardship has proven highly effective in conserving biodiversity, including in comparison with nationally designated protected areas managed by governments, with some areas managed by communities proving six times lower deforestation than national protected areas. The lack of recognition impacts lives of communities because of restrictions on the use of natural resources, by generating conflicts for land use, and by reducing the possibility to access to financing.

CBD COP17 is an opportunity to move beyond conservation models that separate nature from people. Governments must defend rights already recognized in international agreements, strengthen community-led governance, and ensure biodiversity finance reaches those doing the work.

There can be no lasting victory for nature if it comes at the expense of the rights of the people who protect it.