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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026

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On October 11, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

 

War on voting

If Trump Steals an Election, Here’s What to Do – Nonviolent rebellion has proven again and again to be the most effective way of ousting even a determined autocrat.

Neil Abrams, October 7, 2026 [The New Republic]

… The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.

Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.

Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too….

If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.

When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding….

 

Random Stories. Or Are They?

Joyce Vance, Oct 09, 2026 [Civil Discourse ]

Trump is calling in the election-denier faithful to meet with him in advance of the midterm elections. We know this in part because people like Ed Martin have said so. He announced that Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who went to prison for election crimes and was recently pardoned, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterm elections.

According to a local Colorado reporter, Peters’ attorney said the plan involved “seizing ballots nationwide” and a “strategy for a potential civil war,” although there’s no word on whether those topics were actually discussed and what the President’s views on them are….

 

Tina Peters Has Trump’s Ear on the Midterms

John Light, 10.07.26 [Talking Points Memo]

President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.

After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”

“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”

Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.

“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”

 

Election Denier’s Lawyer Reveals Trump’s Chilling Midterm Plan – Notorious election fraudster Tina Peters recently met with the president to discuss the midterm elections.

Hafiz Rashid, October 8, 2026 [The New Republic]

 

Docs Reveal New Details About Dramatic Admin Efforts to Substantiate the Non-Citizen Voting Myth

Khaya Himmelman, 10.08.26 [Talking Points Memo]

We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”….

 

Military Mobilizes for Upcoming Elections

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2026]

… “Foreign malign influence” is the U.S. government’s official euphemism for censoring tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos and myriad other online speech thought to imperil Americans’ ability to think correctly. This is part of what the military will be doing with growing intensity as election day nears….

Both major parties, whatever their disagreements, share a consensus view that Americans’ beliefs and even voting decisions are not their own, but rather the result of shadowy foreign influence campaigns. So much so, in fact, that Congress has codified in law a definition of “foreign malign influence” that of course focuses on “public opinion within the United States.”

Even if there’s the best of intentions, the government using “public opinion” and “malign” in the same sentence is dangerous….

 

Republicans’ New Plan to Save the Senate: Start a Race War in Minnesota

John Light, 10.09.26 [Talking Points Memo]

As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.

The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”

He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”

Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”

“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”….

 

Meet the second-year lawyer defending Trump’s plans to seize ballots” [American Doom].

[American Doom, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261006]

“On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.” More: “In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans. That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA. The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.”

 

ICE probed hundreds of voter registration groups across the U.S.

[Democracy Docket, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]

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Open Thread

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On October 10, 2026

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Information Overlord: It’s Ari Emanuel’s World and We Just Watch Skydance In It

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On October 9, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner Information Overlord: Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

What I Released This Week

From me as Nate Wilcox at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

UFC Boss Brags About Backstabbing Vince McMahon — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 7 Oct.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • A.I. Groups Are Spending Millions to Influence the Midterms — New York Times. “A New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data shows that the political groups aligned with the two leading A.I. developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have quietly but decisively intervened in key 2026 races, spending on campaign advertising and outreach to voters to the tune of $55.7 million.
    “So far, the spending has been concentrated almost entirely in the primaries. The two groups have spent $52.6 million on safe seats — those that are unlikely to change party hands but that often feature intense intraparty contests. The big A.I. players have also spent more heavily for Democrats than Republicans. They have boosted candidates who align with their agendas, helped defeat those they see as hostile to it and ingratiated themselves with front-runners who are likely to be in positions of power in the next Congress to make decisions critical to their bottom lines.
    “But with voters quickly souring on their industry — including demanding that lawmakers do more to regulate A.I. and halt or mitigate the proliferation of data centers — they have taken pains to obscure their involvement. With few exceptions, they have intervened without ever explicitly mentioning A.I. or data centers in the TV and digital ads they have purchased.”
  • The Empty Brain — Aeon. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
  • Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI — Wired. One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.
  • Are Big Tech bonds crowding out the US Treasury? — Financial Times.

  • The AI Cloud Oligopoly — Michael Burry. “I have recently considered that the tech giants, but for Apple, are spending as if their lives depended on it when their lives clearly do not.
    “Monopolies almost by definition need not spend wildly as if their lives depended on it.
    “This deserved no small further contemplation, although rather quickly it dawned on me that they expect this just to be another monopoly rent they collect, that they collectively have the expectation the government will tolerate their oligopoly on AI.
    “Nay, will tolerate and fear it.
    “So the evil gambit is to create and to allow this AI to grow on their machines, where they will threaten to control both economic and political forces greater than humanity has ever seen, overwhelming any politician’s, or politicians’, might.
    “Why are OpenAI and Anthropic and Oracle also spending so much? Surely they are not monopolies?!?
    “No, but they intend to be part of the oligopoly. None can imagine breaking the dominance of a Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta within each silo.
    “However, there is clearly an opportunity to join in that dominance under cover of a new paradigm. The power and riches expected by these companies are evidently so great that even Larry Ellison was seduced to bet his company on it.
    “This brings new meaning to technocracy, and whether such is what we face. What is really scary is that other than the grab for market power, all this spending does not have a defined goal or economic end-point. As such, the consequences are likely unknowable to all. Yet they do it anyway.
    “The governments most interested in this technology seem to be the autocratic ones and the United States. A good set-up for a lot of drama, if not terror.”

Ellison Empire

  • Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger…And How I’d Fix It — The Entertainment Strategy Guy. “More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros.
    “if you want to add a traditional Hollywood studio to your portfolio (be it a magazine publisher, internet service provider, cellular phone company, linear cable bundle or rival movie studio), you have to convince the owners to sell.
    “And that usually means overpaying. The opposing executive team has to want to sell, and then they have to clear it with their shareholders. Overpaying accomplishes this. (This is a variant of the winner’s curse in auctions.)
    “So that’s the price of the deal. And usually it shows up on balance sheets as…
    “Debt.
    “Indeed, the history of Warner Bros. buyers is folks taking on wayyyyyy too much debt to buy the company. Servicing that debt cripples the new combined enterprise. And they can’t invest in new opportunities. And often they make bad decisions to help pay off that debt. Eventually, this impacts the stock price, so they sell. Then the cycle with Warner Bros. starts again!”
  • What David Ellison’s Latest Moves Say About How He’ll Lead Now — Wall Street Journal.
  • A High-Stakes Gambit Clinched Paramount’s Warner Deal — Wall Street Journal.
    • Ellison waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign, people familiar with the matter said.He crisscrossed the country courting politicians, hired well-connected operatives and lobbyists to work regulators and lawmakers, cultivated allies among Republicans and Democrats and, in a pivotal move, even threatened to move his empire out of California.California Gov. Gavin Newsom publicly called on the two sides to settle the matter, and privately encouraged the attorney general to go to the table. Ellison met with Newsom on more than one occasion, the people familiar with the matter said.
      …
      Next, Ellison had to get the deal through regulators here and abroad.That task fell primarily to chief legal officer Makan Delrahim, one of Ellison’s first hires after acquiring Paramount. Ellison set up a war room on the Paramount lot where he, Delrahim and one or two other executives would meet daily to map out strategy and measure progress, said one of the people familiar with the matter.A former Trump administration antitrust chief, Delrahim was intimately familiar with Warner. As head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, he led the government’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to block AT&T’s acquisition of what was then called Time Warner, in 2018.

      One of Delrahim’s first moves was to tap Jon Leibowitz, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under President Barack Obama, as an outside antitrust adviser.

      Getting approval from the Justice Department came with relative ease, as did approvals from the European Union, United Kingdom, China and other regions.

      But a hurdle emerged when California’s Bonta, joined by 11 other states, including New York, Connecticut and Colorado, sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds. The states alleged the deal would illegally consolidate markets including those for theatrical films and basic cable channels.
      …
      Meanwhile, Ellison and his team began making their case to Newsom and warned that Paramount would pack up and move to another state if the deal was blocked. The company spoke to officials in Tennessee about a potential move, The Wall Street Journal reported.

      While Bonta categorized those threats as bluster and blackmail, people close to Ellison said they were genuine. That message was conveyed to Newsom, the people familiar with the matter said.

      In early August, Ellison tapped former California Assembly Speaker and Democratic power broker Fabian Núñez to help build political support for the deal in Sacramento.

      Núñez, founder of the consulting firm Actum, met frequently with Bonta’s office in an effort to broker peace. Ellison also enlisted Democratic former California Sen. Barbara Boxer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to help, both of whom are partners with Actum, people familiar with the matter said.

  • Ari Emanuel Tours His Book and Hollywood Yawns: ‘No One Gave a F—k’ — The Wrap.
    Hollywood didn’t bother to show up. A few rows up front were reserved for Emanuel’s friends and VIPs which consisted of some family members, his close pal, director Pete Berg, and some agents, according to one person who sat nearby. The green room had a small selection of friends, no more than 20, circulating afterward. The audience was made up of “civilians,” as one person put it, rather than the insider VIPs that Emanuel, as one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, should command.Just as well, though, because apparently Emanuel was really boring. He did not hold forth on the accumulated wisdom of his 40 years in the industry: building an agency, taking over a legacy rival, buying companies like the UFC and WWE for billions of dollars, pushing hard into live sports and going public and then private again.Instead, he fell back on his grievances with his previous longtime partner Patrick Whitesell, who he swears he will never talk to again; complained about Jeffrey Katzenberg and President Joe Biden; and parried Swisher’s probing about his friendship with Elon Musk. By all accounts, it didn’t land with an audience that wasn’t interested in these personal scores.
  • Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes — Big by Matt Stoller.
    The transition is not promising. Consider the two things that David Ellison did after buying Warner Discovery. He organized mass layoffs, and he gave himself and his entire executive team a big raise. Specifically, Ellison awarded himself a $150 million bonus upon closing the purchase, even though he doesn’t need the money, and has accomplished absolutely nothing except saddling two historic movie studios with $80 billion in debt.His legal consigliere, Makan Delrahim, received $25 million, and his operating officer Andrew Brandon-Gordon got $38 million. To do the layoffs, he hired Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, and paid him $46.5 million. That’s all on top of the massive $550 million payout to former Warner CEO David Zaslav, which was negotiated as part of the deal.Amid that backdrop of endless zeros for executives, the layoffs will be significant, and Kreiz and Ellison sent a memo on the “difficult decisions” ahead. That’s a crushing blow to morale, since it says very explicitly, “we’re not all in it together.” Every employee at Skydance has essentially been told to act like a mercenary and to extract as much as he or she can while he or she can.

UAE

  • Khaldoon Al Mubarak is the man trying to pull City back from brink of football oblivion — The Telegraph. The Telegram fluffs Khaldoon. “It was November last year and City had just been beaten 2-0 at home by Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League after Guardiola, as needlessly as inexplicably, made 10 changes to the team.
    “Al Mubarak was furious and expressed as much privately to Ferran Soriano, the City chief executive. “I can’t speak to him [Guardiola],” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t speak to him yesterday and didn’t message him and I can’t speak to him today I’m so angry. He’s put a mix in this that’s so unnecessary.”
    “But it was what Al Mubarak said next that cut to the heart of how one of the most powerful, influential and recognisable non-royals in Abu Dhabi likes to conduct himself.
    ““Let’s let this pass then we’ll talk about it in the right way with a constructive approach,” he said.
    “Perhaps it should be little surprise that a skilled business leader and government policymaker who has played crucial roles in brokering nuclear non-proliferation deals and long straddled the worlds of global finance and international diplomacy was not going to let his heart rule his head and overreact.
    “After all, you do not become the planet’s longest-serving head of a sovereign wealth fund and a key strategist by being a hot head prone to wading in with both feet when something irks you, even in a sport as emotive as football.”
  • A Soccer Cheating Scandal Has Ballooned Into a Geopolitical Problem for Britain — Wall Street Journal. The UK finds that selling your most beloved cultural institution to an amoral family fiefdom comes with strings. “The acquisition of Manchester City by an Abu Dhabi royal was always much more than a billionaire buying himself a shiny foreign toy.
    “From the very start, the project was the tip of a soft-power campaign to entrench the tiny Emirate deep in the British economy.
    “Now, 18 years later, it has emerged that the club was at the heart of the largest cheating scheme in English soccer history. And as City, which denies any wrongdoing, awaits an unprecedented penalty for financial doping, the scandal has rippled all the way to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
    “The predicament is especially awkward for Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the U.K. economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.
    ““This does need to be done carefully without everybody jumping in and providing their conclusions,” said Burnham, who in his previous job as mayor of Manchester lobbied against punishing his beloved Everton for similar, smaller-scale infractions.
    “The U.K. has spent much of the past decade wooing the U.A.E. to invest in the country in an attempt to kick-start its slow-growing economy. A Sovereign Investment Partnership between the two counties, announced in 2021, initially targeting £10 billion over five years, has already seen nearly £30 billion committed across more than 50 direct investments.”
  • The chairman of scandal-hit Man City has worked with Trump and Macron as part of the UAE elite — AP. The UAE connects Trump, the Ellisons, Ari Emanuel’s TKO empire, and the UK in a web of corrupt dealings. “Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of the scandal-plagued Manchester City soccer club, sat with Donald Trump in Davos this year, signing on to the U.S. president’s Board of Peace on behalf of the United Arab Emirates government.
    “He was with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles in June at a signing ceremony for a business summit.
    “Al Mubarak, 50, also is a UAE special envoy to China, and welcomed Xi Jinping to the club when the Chinese leader visited England in 2015.
    “Why the head of an English soccer club — albeit one of the wealthiest, most successful and now highly controversial — should be a key player at such political events is easily explained.
    “Al Mubarak, the public face of the 2023 Champions League winner now embroiled in one of soccer’s biggest scandals, is a member of the ruling elite in Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — and the head of a $385 billion sovereign wealth fund.”

UK PM Andy Burnham on Man City — @BBCSport. “‘I haven’t downplayed the seriousness of the findings.’
“Andy Burnham has addressed concerns that he devalued the verdict against Man City after the club were found guilty of Premier League financial rule breaches.”

Israel

  • Nothing has changed, and everything is changing — Alon Mizrahi. “…since October 7, I avoided Israel as much as I could. And it hadn’t felt like my place and my home for a while before that. This didn’t begin on October 7. Nothing began on October 7. But since October 7,
    “as I had a very early realization that this was a fateful event and life was not going to return to normal. And even more than that, and I shared this a couple of times, I had a very strong feeling that this was the beginning of the end of Israel
    “and I needed to be somewhere else and I want my family to be somewhere else. And I did that. To make a long story short, I spent some time in Israel this year and also very recently. And this gave me a chance to look at Israel, to see Israeli society, to hear Israelis, to look at Israeli media.
    “It’s not the same when you’re in and when you’re out. It’s not the same. It feels different. And since I really love to observe people and societies, this is one of my favorite things in the world to do, really. I took the opportunity to look and see. Not that I was expecting any surprises.
    “I mean, this is Israel. After all, I grew up in it. I know it so well. It’s a society. It’s a… It is a political creation that doesn’t change. The discourse, the narratives, the beliefs, the talking points, everything is on endless repeat. Nothing ever changes and this is really a very clear sign of a manufactured identity.
    “If you always say the same things and think the same things and react the same way and repeat the same talking points, no matter what happens in reality, it means that your very sense of self and reality and where you come from is false. Because in real life, you react differently to different things.”

Trump Regime

  • The Speech That Gets You Banned From America — Ken Klippenstein. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally decided to bar some on the political “left” from visiting America, according to a diplomatic cable he sent to embassies this week.
    “When I obtained a copy of the internal cable banning those in vaguely “aligned groups” of “far-left terrorists,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the timing. The next day, Rubio was in Greece where, with the Acropolis behind him, he celebrated “free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind.””
  • ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account — Wall Street Journal.

Democrats

  • Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem — The Nation. “Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.”

Yemen

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Buy, Borrow, Die—Another Way the Rich Avoid Taxes

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On October 8, 2026

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One of the long term themes of my writing is that the rich have engineered a system in the West which insures they will continue to get richer, generally in a way which simultaneously impoverishes everyone else.

Buy, borrow, die is another example. The idea is simple enough: rich people

  1. Buy or otherwise obtain assets. Ideally these are assets which produce income or capital gains, but if you have a millions of dollars of stocks that works. This is one main reason for stock and option grants: they don’t register as income per se, and thus aren’t taxed as income but as capital, which means they aren’t taxed until you sell them, no matter how much they appreciate.
  2. Borrow is the next step: use your assets as collateral. Loan rates for the rich are usually 1.5 to 2% higher than short term treasury rates (which means that from 2008 to 2020 they were rarely more than 3%, they’re higher now, especially due to Trump’s insane war with Iran and its consequences for treasury rates. This rate of interest is far lower than you would pay for capital gains taxes, let alone income
  3. Die. When you die the price of your assets for estate tax purposes are reset to how much you bought them for. So your heirs pay taxes as if there had been no appreciation in asset prices.

This has been going on for a long time, but only become the default for “high net worth individuals” after 2008. It’s viable somewhere between ten and 30 million dollars of wealth.

In order for this to work, of course, you need to know that asset prices and returns on income producing assets will be higher than borrowing costs. Fortunately ever since Greenspan and his infamous Greenspan’s Put, the Federal Reserve has always insured that the stock market and asset prices in general, always rise fast. This has broken down a bit with real estate assets since 2020, but the stock market is reaching unseen highs regularly, and unlike in the pre-Reagan era, there are no sustained bear markets.

This is, again, a policy choice. It doesn’t have to be this way. Doing this in China would not work even if the law allowed it, because the stock market isn’t juiced and doesn’t provide essentially automatic increases. It does work in most, perhaps all Western nations, though in general other countries aren’t quite so permissive. The “die” part also required some significant changes to estate taxes for it to be viable for the merely rich (tens of millions) as opposed to the really rich with hundreds of millions or more.

As a result of this the rich often pay far less in taxes, as a percentage, than the upper middle class, especially highly paid professionals who still mostly get their money from wages.

I’m going to return to this later, but for now the important thing is simply to understand that the economy, which includes the tax system, is set up structurally to favor the rich. Yes, they still wind up paying a lot of taxes in absolute terms, but in proportional terms they often pay less than ordinary citizens. Warren Buffet famously noted that he paid a lower percentage of his income than his secretary did.

This is also organized to keep wealth together over generations, creating an oligarchic aristocracy, which is something America’s founders were very much opposed to. Along with permission for oligopoly, monopoly, price fixing and the structure of monetary production (many rich people are connected to banks and other financial firms which are allowed to create money out of thin air), plus law changes like Citizen’s United (money is speech so restrictions on election spending are illegal) this is a structural preference for oligarchy.

The only way to end this requires significant legislative changes, along with changes to the Supreme Court makeup, since as it stands right now the Supremes would strike down any laws intended to challenge oligarchy.

Since oligarchs own the politicians and the supreme court, this won’t happen unless the rich lose their power in a Great Crash that even the Fed and Treasury can’t bail them out from, and since they can print as much money as they want, that means it isn’t going to happen short of some sort of revolution. The money as speech decision makes it unlikely this will be an electoral revolution (though not entirely impossible), so it will likely require a full revolution.

If that doesn’t happen America’s decline will continue until it is just a larger version of Brazil or India: lots of poor people, a small but prosperous upper middle class who are direct retainers of the rich and a mass of poor people.

It’s quite clever really, the only downside is that this sort of financialization and rentierism weakens America as a whole since returns on manufacturing can’t match financial returns under this sort of economic engineering, and industrial power is effectively military power in the post-industrial revolution world.

America’s oligarchs have thus chosen American decline in exchange for what they hope is permanent oligarch status.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Saudi Arabia Has Truly F**cked Around & Is About To Find Out

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On October 7, 2026

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Saudi Arabia made a major counter-offensive against Ansar-Allah with mercenaries. It took a bit of ground, and is now being pushed back hard.

No one with sense is surprised. The Yemenis are far tougher than mercenaries or any Saudi troops, which are an international joke.

Now:

The Sauds started all this by attacking Ansar-Allah’s capital airport. The Houthis hit back and told them for peace they had to stop all attacks and end their decade long blockade, which has killed hundreds of thousand of people.

Back in the 1920s the Sauds took two provinces, Najran and Asir from Yemen. Mohammed Bin Salman better hope that’s all they take away from him because unless either Turkey or Pakistan are willing to commit a large ground force, I don’t think the Sauds can defeat Ansar-Allah.

And while the Sauds were able to get oil flowing thru the pipeline that was taken out earlier faster than most of us, myself included, expected, it doesn’t really matter. An Aramco refinery was hit yesterday, which is actually even worse, since it’s distillates like diesel, jet fuel and bunker fuel (used by large ships) which is in short supply.

Meanwhile even for crude, ignore the futures prices, and check the spot. Here’s the spread:

Futures markets have been highly manipulated, but the spot is the actual price. Nor can I see any likelihood that spot oil or distillate prices will be cheaper in a month, Iran has been hitting tankers hard, and unlike before they’re aiming to do serious damage to them, not just disable them.

MBS is the worst leader Saudi Arabia has ever had. Like Trump, he just can’t conceive that he should make peace. He’s got a crap army, the US is now helping somewhat but is overstretched and his only hope is Turkey and Pakistan.

If he’s not lucky he may be Saudi Arabia’s last leader. Very few people will miss the House of Saud.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Jasmine Crockett and the Dick Cheney Wing of the Dem Party Have All Got to Go

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On October 6, 2026

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Jasmine Crockett Offered Lobbying Services on Her Campaign-Funded Website – While in Office

I saw the above over the weekend and, while I can’t say I was shocked exactly, I was nonplussed for just a second at the appalling gaucheness of this latest new low from the ought-to-be-disgraced soon-to-be-former-US-Rep from Dallas.

I was not impressed by Rep. Crockett from the first time she came to my attention, using slurs to mock Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s disability — and I have loathed Abbott for decades — and trashing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s appearance.

I noticed immediately that Crockett’s knack for getting attention online and from the MSM didn’t correlate with legislative accomplishment or progressive positions.

Most important for me was the contrast with MTG, who sacrificed her political career in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where Crockett offered nothing but hairsplitting and excuses on the most important moral crisis of our era.

I’ve been trying to warn people about Crockett since July 2025 and really ramped it up last December, when she took the bait from the GOP Senate Campaign Committee (which had been featuring her in push polls for months) and entered the primary for the US Senate race.

The campaign was a total shitshow, centered on divisive identity politics, some of which she blundered into with stupid comments about Latino Trump voters and some of which she leaned into hard, all of which was divisive nonsense that couldn’t have been better calculated to play into Republican hands.

She didn’t even bother to hire a campaign manager, a tip-off that serving the people of Texas in the US Senate wasn’t her top priority.

Her top priority appeared to be accusing her critics of racism and sexism.

Crockett made no secret of her cynicism, openly calling the race a no-hoper and saying, “If you think it’s a losing cause, then who cares? But at least you could say we tried something new and we learned something from this experience.”

Her primary campaign in general was a fiasco, as one former Texas State House colleague told Politico:

“People who don’t understand politics will be upset because Jasmine was their hero,” said Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, a Democrat. “But for people who understand politics, [Crockett] literally had no ground game.”

She added: “This L is on her.”

Crockett also played it real cute about whether or not she supported Israel, but made no secret of being funded by crypto and data center interests.

Thankfully, she lost that primary to James Talarico, who seems headed to the Senate, but not before doing her damnedest to turn it into a brutal, divisive, race-based, identity politics shitfest.

She topped it off by giving Talarico the most tepid of endorsements and then refusing to campaign for him. She managed to leave him off her list of endorsed candidates last week before grudgingly saying she “endorsed ALL Democrats and yes that includes James Talarico”

She did find time to travel the country campaigning on behalf of AIPAC-backed candidates in multiple primaries, most egregiously for Wesley Bell against Cori Bush in Missouri, although she still played it cute and insisted, “but I didn’t endorse him.”

While she was busy not endorsing or campaigning for Talarico, she found time to celebrate convicted domestic violencer Chris Brown and apparently get publicly hammered in the process.

This will be my last post about Jasmine Crockett. She’s irrelevant, embarrassing, and not worth the time.

But what does matter is the internal conflict between two wings of the Democratic Party.

Progressives Battle Neo-Cons for the Future of the Democratic Party

I would put Crockett in the category of shiny object or attractive nuisance whose all-style, no-substance drew MSM attention like flies to honey, but the creeps at The Bulwark are a much more serious threat.

David Sirota has been blasting the neo-cons and their cowbird move to take over the Democratic Party at The Lever:

The trending conversations online have revolved around The Bulwark, a multimillion-dollar media juggernaut run by a crew of former GOP operatives and pundits — one of whom was the Mini Me to Corporate America’s Dr. Evil, some of whom cheered on the kleptocratic Bush administration and helped lie the country into the Iraq War, and many of whom participated in creating the backlash conditions for the Trump presidency they now purport to despise.

The Bulwark has made a mint off an audience of liberals who either forget their entire world every 15 minutes and/or simply do not care about all the damage these one-time Republicans previously created, as long as they are now — momentarily — against their erstwhile party.

But after the outlet participated in the GOP-aiding ruse of using its megaphone to try to focus the 2026 election discourse on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, some are finally starting to ask an important set of questions: What exactly do these former Republicans want? And are they really the purported experts at winning elections that they claim to be?

…

The Bulwark wants a neoconservative takeover of the Democratic Party, after Trump successfully (and dishonestly) cast himself as an anti-neocon and threw them out of the GOP.

That’s not really speculation; they all but said it on the eve of the 2024 election.

Watch the clip. After The Bulwark’s founder Sarah Longwell excitedly cheers on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ saber-rattling, her colleague Jonathan Last does a Dr. Evil mug to the camera and says, “Did the neocons just take over the Democratic Party?” — which elicits a hearty guffaw, before Longwell scoffs at Harris occasionally offering some economically populist rhetoric.

“Boo,” said Longwell, who, years later, said she preferred former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

After The Bulwark’s Longwell fired back, Sirota hammered home his case that it was the influence of neocons that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election:

In the process, founder Sarah Longwell is now trying to rewrite the entire history of the 2024 election, pretending that neocons’ success in influencing the Democrats’ strategy in that contest had no real impact on the outcome — when in fact data suggest it helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.

“My problem with the DSA types who are after us is not their political ideology or their opinions,” said Longwell, amid the social media uproar over my essay at The Lever. “Their analysis doesn’t make any sense. There’s not a single piece of empirical data that the Liz Cheney stuff mattered (in 2024).”

This is false, according to empirical data released by Data For Progress just after the election. As Newsweek reported at the time:

The poll found that more independent voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they were ‘less enthusiastic’ to vote for Harris after she campaigned alongside Cheney…

In Pennsylvania, only 21 percent of independents said Harris campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 28 percent said Cheney made them “less enthusiastic to vote for Harris.

In Michigan, 23 percent of independents said campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 30 percent said they were less excited to vote for her after she rallied with Cheney.

Those net losses among independents matter in key swing states decided by very narrow margins.

Longwell, of course, has a motive in trying to now revise history and memory-hole the Harris-Cheney disaster that she helped forge: Longwell appeared on stage with Harris and Cheney at a key end-of-campaign event in Pennsylvania, where the Harris-Cheney alliance was alienating independent voters. The Bulwark celebrated and monetized that Harris-Cheney alliance, even as it damaged Democrats.

Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, spoke for those who refused to vote for Harris because of her role in the Gaza genocide:

“I saw how the corporate Democrat sausage is made. It is worse than you think. And there is a righteous fury at the corporate-controlled, money-controlled electoral system we have that is absolutely illegitimate. And people cannot choke down voting for a candidate, I understand it, cannot choke down voting for a candidate that’s responsible for what happened in Gaza. And they just, they can’t do it.”

Criticism of Morello took the form of “crude identity politics” that immediately backfired:

Image

Luke Thomas tweeted in support of Morello and Sirota:

This is what the Tom Morello critics can’t seem to grasp. The idea is not that Trump isn’t an insane threat. And sure, generic Dem is better than anything MAGA. But unless Dems aggressively govern to directly address urgent society-wide problems, we are guaranteeing future calamity. I’m begging these people to think beyond stage one. Dems committed to more incrementalism rather than trying to pass M4A will spell our doom. You’re not fighting fascism holding the line on vote blue no matter who. You’re facilitating it.

I’m going to close this post out with an episode of The Left Hook featuring Sirota making the same arguments against the unholy alliance of identity politics hucksters, the Democratic Party establishment, and neocon “Never Trumpers” to cut progressives off at the knees in 2028 and where this will ultimately lead:

Key quotes regarding the Democrats throwing in the towel on opposition to the Ellison Hasbara Empire’s acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery:

Wajahat Ali: The old guard that has ensconced itself in the anus of the oligarchy, the people who have feathered their nest, the people who are corporate consultants,

the Democratic leaders who realize there’s a surging tide of young voters who want to replace them. And they’re like, no, you have to drag this power from my cold, dead hands. And they’re willing to sabotage the left. Progressives, the popular base of the party to stay in power. So we’ve given you some examples of Gavin Newsom.

My fear is this, is if we let this type of Democrat win in 2028, my fear, Dave, is they’re not going to change. They’re being paid by all the same people. You know that AI and crypto, the bubble’s going to burst. They’re going to get bailed out.

They’re not going to institute the reforms that people need because they’re paid by the same people who have effed everything up. So what we’re going to get is milquetoast reform. They’re going to be better than Republicans. They’re not going to have ice-killing citizens, okay? But structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is raping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, but it’ll keep running for the oligarchy. And then in 2032, we’re going to have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.

David Sirota: Yeah, I mean, the way I put it is… Re-electing or electing another Democratic establishment type like Gavin Newsom is a delivery system for an even worse Donald Trump. It is a delivery system for even more authoritarianism. That you’re just going to run the whole cycle back that has been run from that 2008 to 2016.

It cannot be said enough. That if the Democrats regain power and do not deliver in a real way, in a way that we have not seen in our whole lifetimes, if they do not do that, the Democratic Party will serve in history as a delivery system for something that is worse than Donald Trump.

And everyone needs to be focused on this. This is honestly… I don’t care what issue, particular issue, is the issue that you tune into, climate change, AI, the economy, whatever it is. The point is, the central fear that should be on your mind is that a milquetoast not serious about delivering Democratic Party is a delivery system for the kind of authoritarianism That’s worse than Trump and that we have not really experienced here in this country in our lifetime. I’m going to borrow that. I like it. It keeps me up at night. Honestly, when I think about the future for my children, I am thinking, and I’m not trying to be overdramatic here, but you have these moments that create Future political eras. And I do think we’re in one of those moments that is going to actually create a new political era. Well, I should say it’s either going to make the current political era even worse, or we’re going to create an actually new political era. And the prospect of making things 10 times worse than this current era, where we just keep going in an authoritarian direction… Everything in history tells us that we should deeply fear that.

…

Wajahat Ali: “My fear is this, is if we let [Establishment/Corporate] Democrat win in 2028 they’re not gonna change…So what we’re gonna get is milquetoast reform,they’ll be better than Republicans, but structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is r*ping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, and then in 2032 we’re gonna have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.”

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

But then I watched Wajahat Ali guest on Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith.

Key quote:

Briahna Joy Gray: My goal is not to help the Democrats.

It once was. It once was. I once was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, who was running as the Democratic candidate for United States of America. And for me, all of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that you are articulating now were evident in the way that the Democratic Party and the establishment media handled the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.

And in that campaign, which ended with the rise of the COVID pandemic, a massive job loss and concurrently massive 15 million people thrown off their health insurance. In that environment, seeing how little interest the Democratic Party had in backing a Medicare for All proposal that would have helped to save millions of Americans during a time of immense crisis when the public health implications demanded it.

Not to mention the choice to set all of these very popular COVID era policies to expire in a way that ultimately damned Joe Biden in many kind of easily articulable ways, including student debt, the student debt pause ending just before the 2024 election. During the Biden administration, there was an effort to strip the $15 minimum wage, the one promise Biden had made to Bernie when Bernie conceded out of the must-pass COVID relief bill. When I saw the bifurcation to build back better so they could kill all the public interest funding, when I saw the elected squad members’ unwillingness to use their leverage that they had because the margins in the House were so narrow to secure… Real wins for the left the way the Tea Party was willing to do two years later.

All of that to me made it clear the Democratic Party in my view is not a party that can be redeemed or reformed. So I cannot join you I’m saying that my efforts are to improve the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has proven to me that it is not willing to be reformed or improved.

I don’t have an answer for Gray.

She’s right but I keep rooting for the slightly more progressive Democrats and pointlessly arguing with friends and family in the “Vote Blue” camp because I just can’t help myself.

Whatcha gonna do?

Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 04, 2026

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On October 4, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 04, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

 

Impeaching Trump Won’t End the Rolling Coup. The Root Has a 250-Year Plan.  Republicans Unwittingly Wired Two Kill Switches Into Their Own Coup.

Wendy A. Lawrence, October 03, 2026 [Glass Empires]

… the Heritage Foundation published a treason blueprint against the United States under the foundation’s masthead. Across 920 pages, the authors targeted every restraint on the presidency. With those limits gone, the president can dismantle the reinforcements that shielded democratic institutions from treasonous actors for 250 years.

President Trump plays carnival barker for each executive order, distracting the public from the coup’s authors. Behind the tent, Heritage president Kevin Roberts installs loyalists and bankrolls the operation. With each signature, Trump moves another federal office from career public servants to the foundation’s appointees.

The president takes orders from Roberts instead of the Constitution of the United States he swore to defend. The foundation seized power from voters and handed sovereignty to donors, which is how a coup succeeds without tanks. The Twenty-Second Amendment ends the decoy’s term in January 2029, yet Heritage promised donors “another 250 years” in June 2026. Voters can remove a president, but the coup survives until the foundation falls.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”— Donald Trump, Truth Social, July 5, 2024

Heritage never pretended ignorance: Roberts rewarded Ken Cuccinelli, a Project 2025 author, with a new election operation in July 2026. He boasted to The Daily Signal that the Election Transparency Initiative delivers quick turnaround support to state legislatures. On September 28, 2026, President Trump praised Roberts on Truth Social as a “fabulous guy.” ….

… Americans must dismantle the Heritage Foundation through the IRS, the courts, and the ballot to end the rolling coup….

… Federal investigators can apply that foreign-network clause to Heritage’s partners, the state-funded Danube Institute and the Russian-oil-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium.

Any citizen can request IRS, District, and FBI reviews today with three free filings.

  • Download the return: Readers download Heritage’s Form 990 from ProPublica under EIN 23-7327730 and read Schedule F on foreign activities.
  • File with the IRS: The filer then emails Form 13909 with the Danube evidence to eoclass@irs.gov. The IRS mails an acknowledgment letter when the filer includes a name and return address. The IRS posts Form 13909 free on the agency’s complaint page.
  • Copy the District attorney general: The filer copies the packet to nonprofit@dc.gov, the District attorney general’s nonprofit enforcement inbox.
  • Tip the FBI: Last, the citizen submits a foreign-influence tip at tips.fbi.gov, citing NSPM-7 and the Atlatszo FARA findings.
  • Join the count: Reply “filed” in the comments, so Glass Empires can track progress toward 500 referrals before November 3.

 

War on voting (and They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals)

The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting

Jen Fifield and Peter Elkind, September 28, 2026 [ProPublica]

… ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica….

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)….

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said…..

Whistleblower who outed Lutnick’s links to Epstein dies

Chris Newlands, October 2, 2026 [The Banker, via Kirby Sommers, Breaking: Another Banker Suicide. Whistleblower who outed Howard Lutnick’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein is dead.]

Listed: the bankers named in the Epstein files

Chris Newlands, Aliya Shibli, Anita Hawser and Simon Duffy, July 16, 2026 [The Banker]

 

Commerce Secretary Lutnick reports over $250 million in income from 2025

[via Drop Site Daily: October 1, 2026]

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s newly released 2025 financial disclosure shows he reported at least $250 million in income and proceeds.

The largest part of this was a $192 million “tax distribution” from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm he led for decades before stepping down to join the administration.

He also disclosed $4.2 million in salary and bonus from the real estate firm Newmark, $19.6 million from a Newmark partnership exchange, $14.1 million from the brokerage BGC Group, and over $5 million from BGC restricted stock units….

 

TRUMP’S PLAN B FOR THE MIDTERMS

[Seymour Hersh, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261002]

“I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.” More: “ ‘If the election is close,’ one insider explained to me, ‘you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters’ in primarily Democratic precincts ‘to change the outcome.’ One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)” And: “It is senior Trump supporters and conservative secretaries of state like LaRose, I have been told, who will be pressured in close senate races this November to find a way to disqualify large numbers of absentee ballots in Democratic voting districts.”

 

Alarm as GOP-Led Election Board Asks Trump Administration to Probe Georgia Voting Systems

Brad Reed, October 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]

 

The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Michael Scherer, September 23, 2026 [The Atlantic]

Trump Advised: Do Anything Necessary to Retain Power – What will come first? An uprising – or martial law?

Russ Baker, Sep 27, 2026

As reported by The Atlantic, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and lifelong Trump friend who helped him sue Hillary Clinton, is one of a number of people calling on Trump to do anything necessary to retain power. Another is TV and radio host Wayne Allyn Root, whom Trump also listens to.

Ticktin told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a LindellTV host and Gateway Pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text; Trump regularly reposts them on Truth Social. “I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allyn Root,” Root told us last week. “Because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency.”

 

Most American Children Are Being Auto-Enrolled in Trump Accounts. What to Know.

Tara Siegel Bernard and Claire Cain Miller,  Oct. 1, 2026,[New York Times]

… Before this week, parents or guardians had to sign up their children completely on their own. Though more than seven million children had been enrolled as of late July, that represents only about 10 percent of all eligible American children — and donors and policymakers were concerned the accounts weren’t reaching those who could benefit the most. Just 5 percent of low-income families had opened 530A accounts for their children, according to a survey published in September by Commonwealth, a nonprofit.
Automatic enrollment removes that hurdle, putting every eligible child in a position to receive the widely publicized free contributions from philanthropists, charitable organizations and governments, all of which Trump accounts are permitted to collect….
[TW: A stark contrast to the Trump regime’s war on voting. Or universal healthcare.]

War

Trump’s Finger Gets Closer to Nuclear Button

Ken Klippenstein [Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]

 

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Open Thread

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On October 3, 2026

19 Comments

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