Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 20, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Christopher Armitage, Sep 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Oil Executives Say the Great Fuel Crisis Is Here
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, September 16, 2026]
… Veteran energy advisers say that with no resolution to the Iran war in sight, the situation risks spinning out of control. Diesel prices have soared to a record $6.23 a gallon and gasoline prices, which slipped below $4 a gallon this summer, have rebounded to $4.32. Some energy analysts say they have been fielding investor questions about when consumers pinched by the high prices will start pulling back on new purchases.The Trump administration has repeatedly promised Americans that prices at the pump would decline and that energy flows out of the Middle East would keep increasing.Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at a Houston G-20 event on Monday that “the prices in the prior administration were this high anyway” and that Americans would have paid those prices permanently because former President Joe Biden was “pursuing a policy of energy subtraction and shutting down refineries.”“If you want to write about the prices, make sure you include the word ‘temporary’ because this is a temporary disruption,” Burgum told reporters….
Energy executives and White House officials say they have had a continuing dialogue about the energy situation since the conflict broke out, and CEOs including Wirth talk to Energy Secretary Chris Wright frequently.But Wirth said Friday that he hadn’t talked to President Trump since Aug. 3, when the president said in a Truth Social Post that the CEO hadn’t credited his administration for the oil industry’s good fortunes. Trump called on Chevron and oil companies to bring “consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!” ….
Trump has said Ukraine must halt strikes on Russia that endanger global supplies of diesel.In March, the CEOs of the three largest U.S. oil companies, ExxonMobil XOM 2.57%increase; up pointing triangle, Chevron and ConocoPhillips COP 3.33%increase; up pointing triangle, warned Trump officials, including Burgum and Wright, that a prolonged closure of the Strait could lead to a shortfall in refined products such as diesel, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Some executives have been privately critical of Trump’s handling of the conflict….
War on voting
The court and the church confront Trump on voting
Michael Sean Winters, September 18, 2026 [National Catholic Reporter]
… Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami said at a press briefing that participating in elections is a key part of faithful citizenship. He, and the other panelists, noted that free and fair elections are essential to democracy, and worried that some naturalized U.S. citizens might be intimidated from voting if the Trump administration dispatches ICE agents to polling places.
“Every eligible voter should feel safe to vote, and every vote should get counted, regardless of who or what people vote for,” said Joseph Tomás McKellar, executive director of Catholics in Communion, at the event. “The question this morning isn’t about the church turning more liberal or conservative. That’s the wrong frame. It’s about how the church is returning to its roots, who these Catholics are, and why being Catholic in America increasingly means building brick by brick a civilization of love.”
The magisterium has never endorsed democracy as an end in itself, only as a means to other desirable ends. As Pope Leo XIV wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, citing St. John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus:
Saint John Paul II reiterated Pius XII‘s message that the Church values democracy insofar as it guarantees the effective participation of citizens, enables them to elect and peacefully replace their leaders and prevents power from being monopolized by small elite groups motivated by particular or ideological interests.
The three principal justifications for democracy the three popes cited — participation, the peaceful replacement of leaders, and the prevention of power being monopolized by a small elite group — all were undermined by Trump’s efforts to interfere with the election, and interference that also happens to be unconstitutional….
How the US House could overturn the midterm election results
[States Newsroom, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
NAACP Sues to Stop Trump From Sending Armed Agents to ‘Intimidate’ Minority Voters at Polls
Brett Wilkins, September 19, 2026 [CommonDreams]
A coalition of civil rights and labor groups led by the NAACP sued the Trump administration Friday in a bid to prevent armed federal agents from being deployed at or near polling places during November’s midterm elections, warning that the threatened presence of such officers could intimidate voters of color and repress turnout.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia by the NAACP, National Urban League, Mi Familia en Accion, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, SEIU, American Federation of Teachers, International Union of Painters, and United Food and Commercial Workers International.
War
How Iran’s Hard-Liners Prevailed and Sabotaged U.S. Peace Deal
[New York Times.
New photos show widespread damage at U.S. positions caused by Iranian missile, drone attacks
Jonah Kaplan, September 15, 2026 [CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
Pentagon watchdog confirms munition shortages, says Iran ‘exposed’ resupply bottleneck
[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
…The US War Department’s inspector general informed Congress on 14 September that the war on Iran has drained US munitions stockpiles and strained the industrial base to replace them, placing the cost of the first four months of fighting at $33.4 billion.
“The munitions expenditure on [Operation Epic Fury] has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply,” the inspector general wrote in the report, which covers 28 February to 30 June….
OPERATION EPIC FURY – LEAD INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS (pdf)
US ‘not prepared’ to respond to nuclear attacks in space, report says
Katie Livingstone, Sep 16, 2026 [efensenews.com]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
Where the Hell Is the Oil Money Trump Stole From the People of Venezuela?
Thom Hartmann, Sep 18, 2026 [Common Dreams]
Did Trump take the oil and the money from the oil? Bessent refuses to say. Trump refuses to say. Nobody, in fact, in the Trump regime will tell us where that money is or who controls it or even who’s making the money accrued on its interest.
Letters from an American, September 14, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 18, 2026
This morning, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica broke the news that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the wedding of Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson in May. Kremlev attended the wedding along with a large group of Russians whose presence, the journalists note, puzzled the other guests.
This news reveals an extraordinary development, the journalists note: “a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family.”
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI official who worked in senior counterintelligence roles, told the reporters: “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
Secret Banking Database Used For Pre-crime
[Deeper States, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2026]
The Not-So “Grand Conspiracy” Case
[via Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse, September 13, 2026]
That takes us to Trump’s biggest efforts to have his political opponents prosecuted, the “Grand Conspiracy” case. We’ve been discussing that investigation ever since Trump’s DOJ shoehorned what would be, if there were any legitimate crimes to investigate, a case in the District of Columbia. I suspect you all know why they chose the Southern District of Florida for this grand jury.
Late last week, ABC’s Katherine Faulders tweeted that Joe DiGenova, “a Trump loyalist who had been tapped to oversee a sprawling and controversial DOJ conspiracy investigation targeting political foes of President Donald Trump abruptly resigned Thursday, per sources.” There’s only one reason a true believer like Joe DiGenova walks away from the case of a lifetime, and that’s because the case he’d hoped to prosecute isn’t there and he’s being pressured to do it anyhow.
Josh Christenson at the New York Post tweeted he’d spoken with DiGenova, who told him, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” Later in the day, he told the AP that those comments were taken out of context and that there is “plenty of evidence … it just takes time to get there.” Then, the key part that undercut his effort to walk back his earlier comments: “some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”
“It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” Mr. DiGenova told CNN and CBS during phone interviews on Thursday. But apparently, not enough to convince him to stick around for what’s coming.
US embassy child abuse images suspect flown from UK before police interview
[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2026]
Global power shift
How China Became the World’s First Electrostate
Haley Zaremba, Sep 10, 2026 [oilprice.com]
- Chinese companies now hold 75 percent of the world’s clean energy patents, up from just 5 percent in 2000.
- China outspent the rest of the world combined on clean energy investment between 2019 and 2025, pouring in more than half of the $1.1 trillion global total.
- US tariffs meant to curb Chinese clean tech have instead redirected exports into the Global South, while Chinese solar and battery imports to the US keep climbing anyway.
China urges US to ‘stop all spying’ or face retaliation, slams ‘gangster logic’
[SCMP, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
China Is Poised To Lead in Research on Quantum Technologies. Democracies Must Act
[Real Clear Defense, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Why I Correct Pro-Israel Headlines on Gaza
Assal Rad, Sep 13, 2026 [Zeteo]
In May 2021, I was reading the news on my phone when a headline stopped me, not because it shocked me, but because it carried the familiar tone that Western media outlets have perfected in constructing their narrative of Palestine. The article was about Palestinians being forced out of their homes in East Jerusalem. I remember pausing, then rereading the headline and subhead to take in the careful linguistic choices and the essential information that was missing. As a historian of the region, I was not surprised to see the way the media reflected the official account of their country’s foreign policy positions.
The headline used the word “evictions,” which suggested paperwork, municipal procedure, and real estate disputes. It did not say that East Jerusalem is recognized under international law as occupied Palestinian territory and that these expulsions were just another episode in a long history of forced displacement and land theft. This history was not denied outright, but it was laundered to erase Israeli violence and Palestinian victimhood. The language was softened enough to dull its meaning, referring to “contested neighborhoods” instead of “occupation,” saying “to remove” rather than “to ethnically cleanse.” These word choices were no accident.
I found myself mentally rewriting it, inserting the missing context, restoring the agency and violation that had been carefully edited out. What would happen, I wondered, if the headline actually said what was happening? If it distinguished the occupier and the occupied? So, I decided to make those changes. I took a screenshot, crossed out the problematic language, made my edits in red, and posted it. I did not expect a strong reaction. But as the post gained traction and the image spread, I realized it could do more than correct headlines. It offered a way to expose how reality itself had been slanted to fit our political ecosystem….
The looming implications of a messianic Israeli army
[Middle East Reflections, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
B’Tselem report documents Israel’s “eliminationist project” in the occupied West Bank
[Drop Site Daily: September 14, 2026]
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a lengthy new report entitled “The Elimination Project” on Monday, detailing Israel’s “systematic effort to dismantle Palestinian collective existence in the West Bank.”
Oligarchy
Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, September 16, 2026]
Terry Taylor is worth about $2 billion, doesn’t put his name on the car dealerships he buys, and attends conferences only if nobody announces who he is. The Atlantic on the invisible rich and the tax code built around not seeing them.
[The Baffler, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
… These are the “real rich” in America, Zidar and Zwick argue, and they matter much more than “a few high-profile billionaires on the coasts.” It’s an audacious claim, but one that’s hard to shoot down. The four hundred richest Americans—think of Bezos, Buffett, etc.—held about $4 trillion in wealth in 2022. The roughly three million Main Street Millionaires hold more than thirteen times as much. By investigating how these people made their fortunes, and how they wield them, Zidar and Zwick upend the consensus on wealth inequality in America. Yet their sobering conclusions aren’t enough to exorcise the authors of their Mammonism.
Only recently have we been able to make sense of the data that showed how rich Main Street Millionaires have become. For decades, the IRS collected detailed information from businesses and individuals, but they stored this data in siloed systems. Zidar and Zwick’s innovation, in 2014, was to connect those systems, building the first database that linked the tax data of businesses to that of their workers and owners. This allowed them to follow the money in ways that had once been impossible.What they found surprised them. In 2022, America’s nine thousand C-suite public executives earned $38 billion. Not bad. But the top one percent of private business owners—the car dealers, poultry distributors, trash bag producers, franchisees—earned $570 billion, fifteen times more, despite comprising only ten times as many people.
According to Zidar and Zwick, the overlooked factor that explains this disparity is the homely entity provisioned in Title 26, Subtitle A, of the Internal Revenue Code, known as the pass-through. A pass-through is a business tax structure that includes “sole proprietorships, partnerships, limited liability companies, and S corporations,” and it is the structure preferred by Main Street Millionaires. A pass-through, unlike a C Corporation, which is the structure of most publicly traded companies in the United States, does not pay corporate or dividend taxes. Instead, the firm’s profits or losses “pass through” to the owners’ individual income taxes, where they are taxed at individual rates. And because the top individual rate has fallen below the corporate rate over the last four decades, it has become more beneficial to pay taxes as an individual. This shift has radically altered the composition of the economy: Before 1986, most business income in America was generated by C Corporations. Today, most business income is generated by pass-throughs.Pass-through owners enjoy what one accountant calls “the best tax deal in America.” Indeed, to hear Zidar and Zwick tell it, it’s as if lawmakers forty years ago decided to make it their mission to make these people as much money as possible. They created loopholes for pass-through owners to avoid paying Medicare payroll taxes. They designed provisions to help them avoid the usual cap on state and local tax deductions. And, of course, they passed the Section 199A deduction, perhaps the Trump administration’s crowning fiscal achievement. Introduced in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and made permanent in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Section 199A basically allows pass-through owners not to pay taxes on a fifth of their business income. In 2017, the government estimated that this deduction alone would cost the federal government about $415 billion in revenue over a decade. In part due to this falling revenue, tax enforcement has also shifted toward an “honor system.” Whereas pass-through owners simply tell the IRS how much money their employees make, they retain some “flexibility” in reporting. Evidently they’ve opted to exercise this prerogative. Pass-through owners’ unpaid income and self-employment taxes made up about $264 billion of the estimated $600 billion gap in what taxpayers owe but haven’t paid….
Elon Musk Is So Mad About This New Documentary That He’s Threatening Legal Action
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
The Tech Right Is Over – On the end of exit
Mike Brock, September 18, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
n April, Peter Thiel moved his family to Buenos Aires. He bought a twelve-million-dollar mansion behind wrought-iron gates and held closed-door meetings with Javier Milei and his presidential advisers. Milei’s government proposed a legislative package whose investment provisions offered foreign companies minimal taxes and thirty-year guarantees against regulatory change, with AI datacenters solicited by name. Opponents called it the Peter Thiel law, although no evidence has established that Thiel drafted or directly advocated it. By September, protesters in white masks were standing outside his gates holding signs that read “Peter Thief.” The man who helped finance the dream of escaping democratic government had found another government willing to offer investors protection from future political decisions. The people who would have to live with those decisions were outside, objecting.
Exit was supposed to be the proof that these men owned the future. They would take their capital, their technology, and their superior understanding of the world somewhere the rest of us could not hold them back. But the destination still needs a government to recognize their property, enforce their contracts, and keep the electricity on. A thirty-year guarantee against regulatory change requires a state strong enough to bind its successors and willing to privilege an investor’s preferences over whatever its citizens might later decide. The dependence on political authority survives the flight. What the investor hopes to escape is the obligation to negotiate with people who have equal standing to say no. And the people outside those gates suggest a difficulty that the doctrine never adequately considered: wherever you move, somebody already lives there….
Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School had its business license revoked by a Malaysian city council in July, with the backing of Johor’s state government. A project in the network-state movement had been ordered to cease operations by an ordinary licensing authority. Srinivasan responded by signing a five-year agreement with Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, promising a new campus with expedited visas and streamlined redomiciliation. Whatever becomes of that campus, the route to it runs through a government ministry. The sovereign future has a licensing department.
Milei’s Argentina, the proof-of-concept for chainsaw libertarianism, is meanwhile encountering the familiar problem of people disliking the results. An Explanans survey conducted in September recorded 58.2% negative assessments of his government, the worst reading in that firm’s series. The same poll still put Milei first in a fragmented first-round presidential field, with 38.5%. He has a constituency, and an unpopular government can survive a divided opposition. But the supposed demonstration that democratic bargaining could be replaced by superior economic intelligence is now subject to exactly the electoral arithmetic its admirers imagined they had transcended.
Curtis Yarvin, whose blogging supplied the movement its vocabulary and its self-regard, called the Trump administration “a tragedy” that “has already lost” as the new year began, less than twelve months into the term, with JD Vance in the vice presidency. His complaint was that the administration had squandered its revolutionary opportunity, and he entertained “some kind of very sharp conflict or crisis” as a way to recover it….
Felonomics
Letters from an American, September 18, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 18, 2026
According to the American Automobile Association, diesel hit its highest recorded average price today at just above $6.44 per gallon. Diesel moves most of the consumer goods in the United States. Iran’s news agency reported today that a political advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader said Iran would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are removed from power.
As the conflict drags on with no coherent U.S. strategy, J.P. Morgan wrote yesterday, “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.” Today Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia has told European refiners that they will not be receiving crude oil next month because of the shutdown of the East-West pipeline.
John Stoehr of The Editorial Board noted that the economic pain of this moment appears to be turning the media against Trump. He called attention to a hard-hitting piece in the Washington Post yesterday by Evan Halper, Rachel Chason, and Joyce Sohyun Lee warning of “huge jumps in the prices of gasoline and diesel…despite the Trump administration’s assurances.”
Trump responded to this shift in coverage this afternoon by announcing he is banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” ….
Global Shipping Costs Explode as Hormuz Disruptions Hit Key Trade Routes
Tsvetana Paraskova, Sep 18, 2026 [oilprice.com]
… bids on daily auctions to secure slots through the Panama Canal have soared to an average of above $1 million in August, up by 16 times from a year ago….
At the end of August, South Korea’s SK Gas has reportedly paid as much as $5.3 million to secure a passage on September 1, sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg. The previous record-high slot fee – that’s on top of the regular transit fee – was also set in August, at $4.6 million, by another South Korean shipper….
The median auction price paid before the war in Iran broke out in February was around $55,000.
The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
[Wired, thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260916]
“Multiple staffers at a Trump-aligned policy think tank have burrowed their way into the US Census Bureau, where they have access to sensitive data and have contributed to a public report that bolsters conspiracy theories undermining trust in elections ahead of the midterms.” More: ” A WIRED investigation revealed that the report appeared to employ faulty methodology, casting its conclusions into doubt, and that two of its authors work for the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank with deep ties to the Trump administration. Now WIRED has found that the two authors are part of a larger team, made up almost entirely of AFPI members, who have been detailed to the Census Bureau and given access to its data.” More: “A Census employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity says that there has historically been “nothing close” to what AFPI is doing at the bureau. “Frankly, it’s disrespectful to the institution,’ they say.” And: “Recent reporting from Talking Points Memo found that the Census Bureau’s Data Stewardship Executive Policy charter had been updated in July to remove stipulations that prevented political appointees from interfering with the bureau’s data.”
[Revolving Door Project, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260917]
“Yesterday, RDP released a major update to our corporate enforcement capacity tracker. The page provides a one-stop-shop to look at major developments in the resources and workload of federal agencies that protect American citizens. Covering 14 departments and agencies across the executive branch, it documents all of the reporting from the past 21 months most necessary to understand how the Trump administration has rapidly dismantled the civil service that we all came to rely on, often more than we realized.” More: “These 14 agencies are among the most central in American life. They oversee our food supply, our financial system, our treatment in the workplace, vehicular safety, access to housing, electricity, and more. When they are in fighting shape, they ensure that the rich pay their fair share in taxes, enforce our laws, and make sure our air is safe to breathe.” More: “As the deterioration of the American civil service has continued, coupled with the selective enforcement of the law according to the president’s priorities, unions and courts have managed to stave off some of the worst emaciation of the administrative state. Whether those victories prove durable, or whether the Trump administration is able to get their in-house umpires at the Supreme Court to reverse strike calls to balls, only time will tell.” More: “In short, the update is mostly bad news, interspersed with faint signs of life.” And: “One of the silver linings of pulling all of this together is reading a huge degree of coverage from all sorts of writers and journalists, each diligently chronicling the happenings of their own niche.”
THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY: A CORRUPTION MODEL
[The Leah Files, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260917]
“So I built a scale. I started with the definition of corruption that 190 countries have signed, turned it into eight criteria with weights, and scored the men that history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin, the Tweed Ring. Then I ran every American president since Eisenhower through the same scale, both parties, with the exonerations counted alongside the convictions. Then I scored this administration three ways: on what is documented right now, at month twenty; on where the pace of those twenty months puts it by January 2029; and then I made a separate scale to include families, because in this one the sons run the companies, the son-in-law runs the diplomacy, and the in-laws hold the ambassadorships so I wanted to expand to compare families.” And: “Nixon scored 41. This administration scores 76 today, but the model forecasted a score of 91 by the time the term ends based on current events and criterion. That puts Trump 20 months into his Presidency in the range of Yanukovych’s Ukraine and Boss Tweed’s New York, where no American administration has ever been.” Handy chart
Health care crisis
Pennsylvania’s Measles Outbreak Is Enormous
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, September 17, 2026]
The two latest deaths suggest that the true number of infections is much larger than reported. Four deaths in the state since mid-August have made America’s measles crisis undeniable — and harder for anti-vaccine activists to explain away.
The Secret Plan to Hand Your Medicare Over to AI HEALTH CARE
[un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
[The FAS Current, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
Predatory finance
The Carry Trade Explained: Why the Yen Is Losing Its Appeal
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Shaun King, Sep 13, 2026
Imagine if Obama or Biden did this. Imagine if Mamdani did this. Imagine if ANY Muslim in power did this. The outrage would be OVERWHELMING.
Matt Stoller
… there’s something very weird about this whole situation. And that is, we already have a set of regulators at a Federal and state level with a mandate to look at industrial practices. There are private rights of action where individual citizens and companies can bring lawsuits, and they do. There are also numerous laws in place that already prohibit many of the harmful activities engaged in by the large AI firms. But those laws are mostly not being enforced sufficiently to make a meaningful difference, because in America, we simply do not enforce the law against the powerful. And it’s not clear to me why a new law, an FDA for AI, or even a pause on tech development, would wind up any different….
To understand why, let’s start with the attempts to regulate AI and why they haven’t delivered. The short story is that under the Biden administration, enforcers, most notably Lina Khan at the FTC, were actually responding to safety concerns about AI. Both the Antitrust Division and the FTC brought in a host of technical experts to beef up their capacity. You probably didn’t hear about these moves, but that’s because Joe Biden did not promote or publicize them. Biden was personally uninterested, so were Congressional Democrats. Those that were interested sought to curry favor with big tech, and so kept it quiet….
By far the most important and successful action the FTC took was in 2021, when the commission blocked the merger between AI chipmaker Nvidia and Arm….
There was a lot more that bears directly on safety questions. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission enacted a flurry of studies and investigations looking into the deployment of AI. The commission was building on its work on big tech, which it had been investigating for years. Most notably, in 2023, the FTC launched a probe into ChatGPT, asking very specific questions about OpenAI’s safety practices.
So what happened? Well, despite these actions, Khan and Kanter had very little support from Congress. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s daughters worked at Facebook and Amazon, and in 2022 he personally blocked antitrust legislation from coming to the floor of the Senate so as to raise more campaign money from big tech donors. Pelosi similarly wouldn’t allow big tech legislation to come to the floor in the House.
When Trump got elected in 2024, the Trump-Vance FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson immediately moved to reverse most of what Khan did, and even tried to erase her entire record, scrubbing the FTC’s website of more than 300 blog posts involving AI….
Microsoft executive calls AI “largest theft of labor in human history”
[Washington Post, via Drop Site Daily, Sep 18, 2026]
Microsoft’s director of applied science called the training of large language models the “largest theft of labor in human history” and “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” the Washington Post reported, according to a document unsealed Thursday as part of a lawsuit filed by the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI. The unsealed legal brief quotes internal documents obtained via legal discovery.
Stephen Prager, September 18, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Trump’s Gift to the Money Launderers
[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture, September 13, 2026]
Treasury isn’t merely shutting down an anti-corruption database. It’s deleting the data so future investigators can’t use it. Catherine Rampell on the destroyed institutional capacity that let biological, social, and financial parasites flourish — a golden age for white-collar crime.
Robert Reich September 14, 2026
… Let me get right to the point. Congress should not enact legislation that further legitimizes and expands an industry whose promised public benefits are zilch, while its costs and risks are increasing by the day.
There’s simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime.
The crypto lobby is large and well-financed. It has already bought off many members of Congress, including, sad to say, a number of Democrats….
Bitcoin has an accounting problem which suggests it isn’t money
Richard Murphy, September 16, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Restoring balance to the economy
It’s Time to Raise the Rates (No, Not Those Ones)
[The Bully Pulpit with Bharat Ramamurti, via The Big Picture, September 17, 2026]
Reaganism broke U.S. tax brackets. It’s time to fix them. I’ve always been struck by the fact that the income floor for the top tax rate in America is $640,600. Why should someone making $700,000 pay the same rate as someone making $70 million? In a new report, the Roosevelt Institute policy fellow Samarth Gupta argues that this is actually a historical anomaly. From 1916 to 1986, the tax code had, on average, more than 27 different federal income brackets each year; today, it has just seven. Fixing that, he argues, wouldn’t just make the tax system fairer; it could also help us pay down the national debt.
California’s Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union
[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2026]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Chinese scientists develop new oil refining method that may cut energy use by 90%
Zhang Tongin, 13 Sep 2026 [South China Morning Post]
Chinese Solar Panels Drop to 12 Cents a Watt, Rooftop Installs Surge Worldwide
Alex Kimani, Sep 15, 2026 [oilprice.com]
Chinese researchers extend future memory endurance 100-fold in semiconductor advance
Ben Jiangin, 13 Sep 2026 [South China Morning Post]
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
Another substantial change on Raptor 3 is that much of the piping hasn’t been eliminated, but moved internally, by way of 3D printing many of the components (Musk has previously noted that SpaceX “has the most advanced 3D metal printing technology in the world,” and in 2024 the company licensed the 3D metal printing technology of Velo3D).
Disrupting mainstream economics
Money creation does not cause inflation
Richard Murphy, September 17, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Understanding economics: What is work?
Richard Murphy, September 19, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Thomas Neuburger, Sep 15, 2026 God’s Spies
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say
Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen, Sept 18, 2026 [CNN]
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations….
A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals
[Effort, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
…OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models hacked into several real world systems over the past three months. These models gained unauthorized access to web systems, published malicious packages, and exploited unnamed vulnerabilities.
Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone
[Wired, via The Big Picture, September 15, 2026]
A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely “spooking people” inside big labs. Will Knight on Rishub Jain, who left Google DeepMind after realizing that using AI to build the next generation of AI was removing humans from the equation.
What Tech Oligarchs Gain From AI Doomerism
David Sirota and Natalie Bettendorf, September 17, 2026 [The Lever]
The AI apocalypse is here, but it’s not what you think. Last week, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned online that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The fallout sent shockwaves across the country — but how legitimate is Coxon’s warning? Should we fear AI agents going rogue and threatening humanity, or are these safety concerns a cover for something even more ominous on the horizon?
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with two of the most astute observers of this situation: tech critic Ed Zitron and Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, to discuss why something feels off about this latest wave of AI panic….
[00:05:36] David Sirota: But here’s an alternate theory.
Maybe we’re not living inside “The Terminator” or “Don’t Look Up.” Maybe we’re actually living inside of a sequel to “The Big Short,” Because some folks are beginning to suspect that AI companies are now so over-leveraged and so overvalued that these calls for a slowdown are actually being engineered to avert the company’s financial collapse, and that the doomsday proclamations are being used to justify regulatory protection and antitrust exemptions that will prop those companies up and keep them from collapsing….
‘I’m Really Terrified’: A Mathematician Grapples With AI’s Recent Breakthroughs
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2026]
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
Collapse of independent news media
[Truthou, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
The Atmosphere Just Set a Water Vapor Record
[The Climate Brink, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
[Climate Uncovered, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2026]
[Texas Monthly, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
… Far to the west of Chihuahua’s vast deserts, the razored peaks of the Sierra Madre Occidental funnel rain from annual monsoons into the Conchos, which eventually feeds into the great, meandering border river up north: the Rio Grande. Of all the goods and resources that cross the U.S.-Mexico border—cars, vegetables, drugs, guns—the water of the Rio Conchos is one of the most important and most fought over. The Conchos is by far the largest and most crucial tributary of the Rio Grande, which supports $1 billion in agriculture and is the only source of drinking water for over 1.7 million Texans downstream. But before the Conchos travels to the border, it’s collected behind dams like La Boquilla.
That has made the Conchos an ulcer in U.S.-Mexico relations. A fracturing treaty, signed in 1944, mandates that Mexico send billions of gallons of water north into the Rio Grande. In return, the U.S. keeps dams like the Hoover open and allows the Colorado River to take its natural course into Mexico. But over the past thirty years, as water has grown increasingly scarce in the great arid center of North America, Mexico and the U.S. have clashed over the dwindling rivers that crisscross their borders. Few realize how desperate the situation has become, but this conflict will define the next decade of life in the region. By the time Velderrain stood on the hillside in Chihuahua, in 2020, a dangerous new phase had begun….
… While the imperiled Colorado River tends to attract the headlines, the Rio Grande is in an even more severe state of collapse. Just 15 percent of its natural flow makes it out to the Gulf each year….
The dry spell has been so severe and prolonged that some researchers now suggest we are seeing a historic shift in the climate. In the early 2020s scientists studied the rings of ancient coniferous trees and created a historical record of their growth to estimate annual rainfall. The results put the region’s megadrought into stark historical perspective: The last time the dry center of North America experienced a drought of this proportion was in the ninth century, generations before the Aztecs emerged. Some researchers have stopped calling it a drought and started using the term “aridification.” This is the new normal.
As freshwater reserves shrink, countries must prepare for a new water reality
[UN, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2026]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Thomas Mills, Sep 14, 2026 [PoliticsNC]
… Republicans are no longer hiding their bigotry. This weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and defended a Texas congressional candidate who referred to mothers as “cum trophies” and called Nazi machine guns “the original ghetto blasters.” There’s no way Democrats would support a candidate like that, and if they tried, the story would dominate the news for weeks. With Republicans, it’s a Sunday morning segment that will be history by Monday.
In North Carolina, Republicans nominated Mark Robinson as the candidate for governor. Virtually the entire GOP political establishment endorsed him knowing that he had made antisemitic comments and posts. Even when it came out that he called himself a “black Nazi,” Republicans refused to pull their endorsements. It took salacious porn posts to bring him down, and even then, nobody questioned the associations of people like Congressman Tim Moore or Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger.
There’s a double standard in American media and politics today. Democrats, who are fighting over the direction of the party, get painted with a broad brush when left-wing commentators make inappropriate or controversial statements. Republicans as a whole rarely get called out when their candidates engage in racist, misogynistic, or anti-American behavior….
Stephen Prager, September 17, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The organizers said the “culture of bipartisan elite immunity” was why “Biden officials knew they could arm, defend, and cover up the genocide in Gaza for 15 months, and simply move back into liberal spaces.”
Resistance
It’s (Still) Time for Americans to Talk About the “Soft Secession” Actively Underway
Christopher Armitage, Sep 18, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Pro-democracy states (and cities) are finally learning what red states have known all along: you don’t need federal approval to govern….
Democratic attorneys general have filed more than a hundred suits against the administration, which is worth celebrating, since it isn’t a total acquiescence to illegitimate actions.
But the fact is, states didn’t sue for the right to sell cannabis. States legalized it, licensed dispensaries, and federal prohibition became a dead letter, because the DEA has no state police to make the arrests. That is the posture that is proven to work: do the thing, in enough places, because it’s the right thing to do, and let the federal government be spread in 1,000x directions. It’s the principles of asymmetric warfare applied to governance.
Even cities can get in on this….
Christopher Armitage, Sep 14, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
… over the course of 2025, Ballotpedia tracked 38,609 elections, and 26,318 of them, 68 percent, were uncontested. Everybody who submitted the paperwork to run was awarded a victory.
Religious extremist freedom hating Republicans have been running for these seats reliably over the last few decades. I suspect that the inclination towards self awareness and humility gives the more kind and generous of humanity more legitimate and respectful pause before running for some random office. And it makes sense, more republicans than democrats have nothing better to do while simultaneously believing they’re the smartest person in the room anywhere they go. That’s a perfect mix for some too big for their britches county commissioner who runs unopposed every year on the GOP ticket and can’t tell you a damn thing about local zoning laws or critical infrastructure but he sure does feel it’s his duty to fight any sort of progress or common sense infrastructure projects.
What follows is the record, county by county, of how the GOP successfully engaged in the “mini coup” strategy over the last few decades. We can replicate, sophisticate, and reiterate what they did, but applied ethically in tactics and morally in aspirations. It makes complete sense, too. We take the smallest and most winnable offices, then wield them like a cudgel or a shield in the best interest of freedom, justice, democracy, and maybe even some occasional progress in improving the station of our fellow humans. How quaint.
The smallest board you can take over is usually a neighborhood council, where in many cities attending two meetings makes you a voting member. Get yourself one. The goal is a deluge of mini coups. Invite some friends and take over, be a menace for good. Why should the bad guys be the only ones who have mini coups? ….
How to Argue with Reactionaries – A field guide to declining the simulation
Mike Brock, September 16, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
… Each technique is an exploit against a specific argument-detector in the brain. Repetition exploits fluency — a claim heard three times feels truer than a claim heard once, which is the illusory truth effect, and it works on you too. Performative confidence exploits the credibility cue — audiences calibrate trust by confidence far more than by accuracy, which is why the confidence never flickers no matter how the last claim fared. Frame-shifting exploits the offense-defense asymmetry: the person answering charges always looks guiltier than the person making them, so the charges never stop. And the gallop — seventeen claims in ninety seconds — exploits refutation economics, the order-of-magnitude gap between the energy needed to produce nonsense and the energy needed to refute it. Call the repertoire what it is: a denial-of-service attack on the channel where argument would happen. The strategy is to win by default, and the default is power….
Christopher Armitage, Sep 15, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
I filed the complaint with Letitia James’s office, and you can too. The points to cover are at the bottom of this article….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Christopher Armitage, Sep 17, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
… About 84 percent of Republicans have approved of the president across his second term, and the few officials who cross him are expelled. That is what the word conservative now names.
George Will worked on Reagan’s 1980 campaign, and Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Reagan’s education secretary from 1985 to 1988 before co-writing The War Over Iraq in 2003. Neither called the party lost to conservatism during Reagan’s deficits or the Iraq war. Their verdict arrived in 2016 because they were fine with everything before that.
The magazine that organized the movement drew the bounds of membership. National Review’s editorial of August 24, 1957, “Why the South Must Prevail,” asked whether the white South was entitled to keep power where it lacked a majority and answered yes, because “for the time being, it is the advanced race.” William F. Buckley Jr. denounced Robert Welch in 1962 for calling Eisenhower a communist agent, and read the John Birch Society out of the movement in 1965 after their leadership opposed the Vietnam War as a communist plot. Buckley’s rule, in his words, was that “There are bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally.” The bounds excluded Welch and the Birchers but never the racism of that 1957 editorial.
Reagan gave the first speech of his general election campaign on August 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, near where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, and told the crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.” A year later Lee Atwater, by then on Reagan’s White House staff, described on tape how the party had learned to reach the same white voters with economic language instead of racial slurs, and said of the tax cuts, “a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Reagan’s two terms cut the taxes of the highest earners and raised the burden on people paid by the hour. The top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent across the 1981 and 1986 acts. The 1983 amendments Reagan signed taxed Social Security benefits for the first time, and the payroll tax that funds the program stops at a wage cap. The gross federal debt went from $962 billion to $2.74 trillion in eight years without a war. The movement’s verdict on that record is the phrase “Reagan Republican,” still claimed as a credential 40 years later.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt named the mechanism in How Democracies Die. Established parties are the gate, and democracies fall when those parties open it to an outsider they mean to use. Italy’s establishment feared the socialists more than the fascists, and in October 1922 the king appointed Mussolini rather than break the march on Rome. Eleven years later German conservatives made the same bet, persuading Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933; Franz von Papen, who engineered it, said they had hired him and would box him in within two months. The pattern outlived the era.
The state that came through the gate watched and jailed its own people every time. Mussolini built a secret police, Hitler built the Gestapo, Maduro jailed Venezuela’s opposition, and Orbán turned spyware on Hungary’s journalists….
Frank Wilhoit put the record in one sentence in 2018: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” The advanced-race editorial and the states’ rights speech are that proposition written as policy. The expulsions are the same proposition applied to membership. The member who votes to release the Epstein files is out; along with any member who dares to disagree with the president….
[The Intercept, September 18 2026]
… This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world.
“We didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”
“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor….
J.D. Vance doubts faith of pastors running for office
Betsy Shirley, Sep 17, 2026 [Sojourners]
“Pastors in name only.” That’s the latest epithet the political Right is hurling at pastors who are running for office as Democrats. Just this week, Vice President J.D. Vance said that what Kansas Senate candidate Rev. Adam Hamilton stood for was “not Christianity,” but rather “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.” It’s an odd claim for the vice president to make about the pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country.
In recent years, talking about faith and politics has often meant talking about Christian nationalism—the way Christian language and symbols can be twisted to endorse policies that erode trust in elections, strengthen white Christian hegemony, empower autocrats, and generally sound very little like “love thy neighbor.”
But in this year’s midterms, candidates like Hamilton and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico are doing something different. They’re talking openly about their Christian faith, yes, but the policies they support are often a direct contrast to Christian nationalism. As Noah Berlatsky writes this week for Sojourners, Talarico, a seminary student, has condemned Christian nationalism and cited “Mary as a model for consent and a justification for abortion rights.”
So what’s the difference, asks Berlatsky, between Talarico’s approach and Christian nationalists? ….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
You Don’t Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, Trump-Appointed Judge Rules
[WIRED, via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2026]
Marquette Law School Poll finds approval of United States Supreme Court declines from 47% to 43%
Kevin Conway, Marquette Today [scotusblog.com, Sep 18, 2026]
Marquette Law School Poll’s latest national survey explored how Americans feel about proposed changes to the Supreme Court, such as increasing the number of justices. “Enforcing a strict ethics code for the justices is nearly universally popular, favored by 89%,” and there is also strong support (79%) for “[h]aving justices serve a fixed term rather than a life term.” Americans are more divided over adding justices, however, with 53% expressing support and 47% expressing opposition. Researchers also found that approval of the Supreme Court fell from 47% to 43% over the past two months, driven by a three-percentage-point drop “among both Republicans and Democrats.” “Approval in September is the second lowest rating since January 2025.”
Civic republicanism
Does the US need a culture shift to create a workforce for the defense industrial base?
[Defense News, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2026]
The Hidden Divide That Shapes Our Politics
Sen. Chris Murphy, September 16, 2026 [The American Prospect]
I believe that public policy should be directed toward the common good. Others think that impinges on people’s freedom. We need to be honest about this dispute.
How DraftKings Uses A.I. to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2026]
[TW: The political economy of a republic should be organized such that actual work – such as welding, bending steel, and wiring spacecraft – is highly rewarded, and activities such as lobbying and gambling is widely considered anti-social and are actively discouraged and even penalized. Matt Stoller’s article, below, implies the question: should government embrace the conservative argument that “government should not pick winners and losers,” or should government impose moral normative judgements on specific types of economic activity, and favor “doing good” over other activities. The moral basis of republican political economy allows one to see that conservative “neoliberal” free market economic policies would lead inexorably to MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption while conservatives at the same time wonder Does the US need a culture shift to create a workforce for the defense industrial base? while remaining clueless and ineffective.]
Just Stop the Anthropic IPO Already
Matt Stoller, Sep 13, 2026 [BIG]
We shouldn’t want people to become superrich by building unsafe technology. The government has the authority to block the IPO. It should.
Anne Applebaum, September 14, 2026 [The Atlantic]
… The crisis was novel in other ways too. In normal times, the Brazilian government is reasonably well connected in Washington, regardless of who runs either country. The tenth-largest economy in the world, Brazil cooperates extensively with U.S. law enforcement and regional organizations. Yet at this crucial moment, with billions of dollars in the balance and Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister, a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls….
“All the official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”Some of these visitors were types not previously known in Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer….Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can….
The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government [are] … Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world.Like earlier revolutionaries, they do not believe that their opponents are legitimate rivals or, as John McCain once described Barack Obama, decent citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a “wokeness” plague, or proponents of a fictitious “censorship-industrial complex,” or advocates of “regulation” that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens. To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners.Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy….The corollary to this thesis, expressed last year in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, is that America has a special interest in the politics of the historically white, Christian nations of Europe, and in promoting the far-right political leaders and movements working to keep Europe white and Christian, even though most of them are not currently in power. That document made it clear that although America will no longer intervene to promote democracy at all, anywhere in the world, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory”—language that justifies direct U.S. intervention in European politics to prevent what the document enigmatically calls “civilizational erasure” and to help the allies of the ideologues take power. In “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” an essay published on the State Department’s Substack, a 27-year-old Trump appointee named Samuel Samson accused Europeans of waging “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization.” ….
Washington insiders are positioning themselves to take over business inside Cuba
[The Guardian, via Drop Site Daily, Sep 18, 2026]
Trump- and Rubio-linked investors, lobbyists, and political allies are jockeying for access to Cuban assets as foreign companies are forced out amid Washington’s maximum pressure campaign. Reporting from Ed Augustin and Lee Schlenker points to potential deals involving mining, hotels, shipping, and humanitarian aid, while foreign companies pushed out by U.S. sanctions leave openings for U.S.-linked investors and businesses.
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