Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 04, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
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.”
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]
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....
War
Trump’s Finger Gets Closer to Nuclear Button
Ken Klippenstein [Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
ICE briefly published, then removed, internal reports showing medical failures in 33 detainee deaths
[San Francisco Chronicle, via Drop Site Daily: October 1, 2026]
Internal ICE mortality reviews briefly posted online over the weekend and quickly removed found that the care administered by the agency deviated from “safe practice limit” in 27 of 33 detainee deaths between September 2019 and January 2026, including 11 that occurred since January 2025.
In one case, 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe died from septic shock after Adelanto Processing Center staff failed to examine his abscess, respond to his complaints, or adequately document his care.
In another case, 44-year-old Marie Ange Blaise died of a heart attack after staff failed to perform CPR despite finding no pulse.
The full report from the San Francisco Chronicle, which first reported on these reviews, is available here.
ICE Is Building A New Intelligence Component To Monitor Dissent
Dan Boguslaw [via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2026]
Julia Conley, October 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Man Trying to Salvage the Midterms for Trump
[The Free Press, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260928]
White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair
[Phenomenal World, via https://thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260929]
[A]s Senator Elizabeth Warren noticed, the single largest donor to [Trump’s] inaugural committee was Pilgrim’s Pride, a US firm owned by JBS, a giant food corporation that originated in Brazil. Pilgrim’s Pride’s donation of US$5 million was not only the largest one, but amounted ‘to more than the contributions from Apple’s CEO plus Amazon, Meta, and Google, combined. There is suspicion that the payback for this donation was authorization for JBS to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), an old aspiration of the Batista brothers—Joesley and Wesley, who hold controlling shares of the firm.” And: “[T]he Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES)—owns about a fifth of the company… The support given by BNDES to JBS not only created a corporate behemoth with very dubious contributions to Brazilian development, but also helped weaken the social and political bases for an inclusive development project, being a key factor in the emergence of agri-bolsonarism—the electoral force that may be decisive in returning the far right to power in Brazil in the coming election.”
[AllenAnalysis, September 27, 2026]
The first attempt to indict six anti-ICE protesters failed.
Federal prosecutors tried again. That presentation also ended without an indictment.
They returned a third time. Only then, after Chicago’s top federal prosecutor personally addressed the grand jury about setting aside feelings toward immigration cases, did the government obtain the felony charges it wanted.
Months later, the entire prosecution collapsed. The Justice Department dismissed every charge. A federal judge said she had never seen grand jury conduct like it. The government acknowledged mistakes, released a reform plan and began reviewing other cases handled by the lead prosecutor.
Now that prosecutor says the public was never told the whole story.
Sheri Mecklenburg retired from the Justice Department on Thursday after nearly two decades as a federal prosecutor. In a letter obtained by the Associated Press, she accused U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros of personally directing the felony prosecution over her objection that the case belonged in misdemeanor court, then making her the scapegoat when it fell apart....
David Cay Johnston: “Trump has fantasized about murdering people since he was a young man.”
Dean Obeidallah, Sep 29, 2026
David Cay Johnston has known Donald Trump for decades—covering him as a reporter for various publications and writing a best-selling biography about him, “The Making of Donald Trump.” So when Johnston shares details about Trump and what he might do, we should listen.
That is why it was so bone chilling to hear Johnston tell me in out Interview Monday that, “Donald Trump has fantasized about murdering people since he was a young man.” That comment was in response to Trump’s unhinged UN speech where he openly discussed waging a genocide against the Iranian people, “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic?” Trump added, “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Banished to Alien Lands: Trump’s Secret Deportation Deals
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, September 29, 2026]
Louisa Loveluck on the agreements that landed an Iranian woman in the middle of Africa. After a plane journey in shackles, an Iranian woman found herself in the middle of Africa in a country she did not know existed. She is one of thousands deported from the US on the back of shadowy deals made with dozens of countries. An in-depth investigation reveals the ‘show of force’ costing American taxpayers millions.
[Politico, via Drop Site Daily: October 1, 2026]
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced an ethics complaint Wednesday against nearly all federal district judges in Minnesota, alleging that former Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, Judge John Tunheim and others violated judicial conduct rules by speaking to the New York Times about the toll of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Author of America’s tariff statute: Trump’s tariffs are illegal
[CNN Business, via The Big Picture, September 28, 2026]
Ambassador Alan Wolff says President Donald Trump’s novel implementation of America’s tariff law is illegal and runs counter to how Congress intended the presidential power to be used. Wolff would know. He wrote the law.
How Jared Kushner’s firm’s investment in an Israeli company could be a major conflict of interest
[CNN, via Shaun King]
Global power shift
China offers 15-year research grants to the world’s brightest young scientists
Dannie Pengin, 29 Sep 2026 [South China Morning Post]
Chinese commercial reactor achieves nuclear fusion with clean hydrogen-boron fuel
Dannie Pengin, 28 Sep 2026 [South China Morning Post]
In a first, a Chinese company has achieved high-parameter hydrogen-boron plasma control, marking a “significant and valuable” advance in research into neutron-free magnetic confinement fusion.ENN Group, based in Langfang, Hebei province, announced on Monday that its EXL-50U spherical device – a compact tokamak that uses a magnetic field to confine charged gas, or plasma, for nuclear fusion research – had successfully achieved hydrogen-boron fusion reactions....Currently, mainstream-controlled nuclear fusion research, represented by the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, predominantly uses deuterium-tritium (D-T) as fuel....
This advanced fusion reaction combines a hydrogen proton with a boron-11 nucleus to produce harmless helium nuclei (alpha particles) and energy, without releasing high-energy neutrons....
Chinese Automakers Could Take Over 10% Of The U.S. Market If Given The Chance
[Jalopnik, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2026]
[Arena Physica, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2026]
In December 2025, the FCC added all foreign-manufactured drones to its "Covered List," a national security registry also occupied by Huawei and ZTE, which blocks new models from being sold in the US. The case against foreign drone manufacturers has been building since 2017, when the Department of Homeland Security flagged that China's newly passed National Intelligence Law could compel companies like Shenzhen-based DJI to hand over sensitive user data for intelligence.1 In 2022, the Pentagon added DJI to its list of "Chinese military companies", and when no agency cleared DJI under the FY2025 NDAA,2 the sales ban officially went into effect....
Chartbook 476 Walled-in wealth #2: US-China oligarchic divergence.
Adam Tooze [via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2026]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 09-29-2026]
Oligarchy
Monopoly Round-Up: Paramount-WB Isn’t Just a Loss, It’s a Prelude
Matt Stoller, Sept 27, 2026 [BIG]
... It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connected owner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, feckless, and aligned with capital.
But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond.
David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, wasn’t alone in his empire-building ambitions. It takes a village to centralize media. Wall Street was fully on board, as was the defense bar. In August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the state challenge to the Paramount-Warner merger has the potential to “deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system.” Donald Trump pushed the deal, but so did Democrat Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. So did Tom Cruise. So did the Director’s Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. So did California Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra, and much of the state legislature.
The other group were populists on the left, the anti-monopoly world, artists, the Writer’s Guild of America East and West, and the public itself. What they lacked in money and organization they made up for in grassroots support. Most voters do not think the deal will be good, and Californians supported challenging the merger 49-30. This fight was a line in the sand for the masters of the universe, who have been fighting against a pushback on AI data centers, and a billionaire tax, and before that, Lina Khan’s attempt to revive antitrust law.
We learned two important things in this battle. The first is what happens when an elected leader tries to say no to an oligarch after 45 years of unfettered rule by capital. That is, they get extremely angry and vicious. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”
Ellison threatened the entire state of California with moving Paramount out of the state, his legal team said they’d destroy antitrust law by appealing to a Supreme Court whose members they know personally, his allies controlled most of the media narrative about the case, and he engaged in an extreme version of corruption vis-a-vis the President.
What does that mean going forward? Well, if the Democrats do win, and they do try to impose even modest limits on capital, then they will face the same level of pushback. If they, say, try to stop health conglomerates from denying needed care, health insurers will simply say, in one way or another, ‘well if you do that we’ll be forced to kill a bunch of people.’ If they try to cap hospital CEO salaries, it’ll be, ‘too bad the poor have nowhere to give birth now.’ If they attempt any limits on defense contractors, well, ‘sucks that U.S. soldiers won’t have the parts they need to detect incoming missiles.’ If they try to subject big tech CEOs to the rule of law, it’ll be ‘too bad those rogue AI systems are gonna be a little more rogue.’ And so on and so forth.
Oligarchs will have massively well-funded legal teams explaining why all of that is not only legal but absolutely necessary, and they will file in districts in Texas or Mississippi where they will find favorable judges to take their side. At every moment, the press will adopt a ‘both sides’ attitude, making it extremely hard to tell a story about what they are trying to do.
The second level is about the Democrats, which is a political party few people really understand. The most important thing to get about the older generation of Democrats is they are fundamentally uninterested in the real world. They have a form of politics, but it is unrelated to governing. It is about validating each other as savvy and polite, while deferring to objective experts. That’s why they love ‘independent’ agencies and asking for studies and vague regulations.
And that’s why this merger challenge was so important....
... what we just saw is not just a battle we lost. It is a prelude of the kind of tactics and coalitions to come. Right now, it’s clear that billionaires don’t have to follow the law. It’s also clear there is now a serious challenge to that framework. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to block the merger. But now we know how they are going to play the game, and they aren’t going to be nice about it.
Billionaires Sued to Kill Mamdani’s Second-Home Tax. He Answered From Public Housing.
[The Allen Analysis, Sep 30, 2026]
Why Meta and Google are focused on obscure local elections
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]
The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’
[Hollywood Reporter, via The Big Picture, September 29, 2026]
YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down trailer ads for Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary. The Oct. 9 doc has been rejected, citing “political” content. X won’t even take Bleecker Street’s calls. The distributor is appealing. Censorship, American style…
Felonomics
‘Nebraska Is the Canary in the Coal Mine’: Trump-GOP Medicaid Cuts Spark Mass Chaos, Coverage Loss
Jake Johnson, October 01, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Trump Says He Is Lowering Beef Prices. His Immigration Crackdown Just Slowed the Slaughterhouses
[The Allen Analysis, Sep 27, 2026]
Federal agents descended on communities that process nearly a quarter of America’s grain-fed beef. Workers stayed home, cattle backed up and livestock groups warned that consumers could pay the price.
The cattle were ready. The workers were not there.
Across southwest Kansas, thousands of cattle scheduled for processing remained at feedyards after a surge of federal immigration enforcement frightened workers away from slaughterhouses, dairies, grain companies and transportation businesses.
Some beef plants slowed. Some temporarily stopped operating and sent cattle back, according to Associated Press reporting published by Fortune. Schools reported large numbers of absent children. Businesses closed. U.S. citizens and legally authorized workers stayed home because they feared being stopped on the road or confronted outside their jobs.
The disruption arrived at the exact moment President Donald Trump is promising Americans that he will make beef more affordable....
Everyone Hates Private Equity. Trump Is Bailing It Out.
Timothy Noah, October 2, 2026 [The New Republic]
The industry has become the midterms’ most indelible political symbol for Wall Street’s reckless greed.
OMB Director Russ Vought: With Trump 2.0, We’re Nixon-Maxxing the Federal Bureaucracy
[RealClearPolitics, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Subprime Auto Loans Make Wall Street Rich as Borrowers Struggle
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-29-2026]
An in-depth treatment.
Likelihood of eating fresh produce increases with income for US adults, new CDC report shows
[Guardian, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/WordsoftheDay20260930]
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reaffirms that adults are more likely to eat fresh fruits and vegetables as their income increases.” More: “[T]he percentage of adults who ate any fruit on a given day was 56% for people living on less than 130% of the federal poverty level ($20,748 for a single adult). By contrast, 76% of people who earned 350% of FPL ($55,860) ate any fruit. Similarly, a single person who earned $55,860 was almost twice as likely (38% versus 19.6%) to eat berries, citrus and melons compared to the poorest people included in the study. The same was true of vegetables. Although most Americans ate a vegetable in a day, only 29% of the lowest income Americans in the data brief ate a dark green vegetable, compared to 42% for the highest income.” And: “This is not surprising. Years of studies have shown that people with less money and time spend more on energy-dense, shelf-stable packaged foods – foods that fill you up and don’t spoil. The relationship between food and income was known even 91 years ago, when a study of diet and income in the UK found that nearly everyone ate potatoes and bread, but the poorest in society bought far less milk, eggs, vegetables and fruits.”
DOD to Suppliers: Take Risks to Solve Supply Chain Issues
[Manufacturing Connected, Sept 3-, 2026]
Small- and mid-size defense suppliers are leaving capital on the table, and the Pentagon is starting to say so explicitly. At a Hudson Institute panel on Sept. 24, Andy Magliochetti, Navy deputy assistant for the defense industrial base, said the domestic supply chain is not where it needs to be for either legacy sustainment or new system scale-up. Jai Malik, CEO of aerospace and defense manufacturer Amca, was more direct, saying suppliers are not investing at risk or doing long-term demand forecasting the way they should. Jeff Frankston, the acting deputy assistant secretary for industrial base resilience at the DOD, added that the supply chain must shift to a "domestic-first" approach while also leveraging allies and that a Pacific conflict scenario alone argues against geographic dependence in critical supply lines.
Predatory finance
More Trillion-Dollar US Banks Expected as Consolidation Accelerates
[Global Finance, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260928]
“The U.S. banking industry is bracing for its most significant wave of consolidation since the 2008 financial crisis, according to a new Bain & Co. analysis.” More; “The firm expects the number of trillion-dollar U.S. banks to grow from the ‘Big Four’ — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., and Wells Fargo & Co. — to as many as seven by 2030. Key drivers include lighter regulation, burgeoning tech and 17 global banks holding over $10 billion each in excess capital. That capital cushion, Bain argues, will lead to a spike in M&A activity.” And “Banco Santander SA’s August acquisition of Webster Financial Corp. serves as an early example of what could be in store for U.S. banking giants. For Joe Lischwe, a partner in Bain’s financial services and customer strategy practice, the deal illustrates how capital-rich banks are leveraging eased regulatory conditions to combine geographic scale with targeted scope. In this scenario, Santander gets Webster’s health savings account franchise.”
Restoring balance to the economy
We Uncovered The Radical Solution To Our Rigged Tax Code - How exactly should we tax the rich.
[More Perfect Union, Sep 27, 2026]
California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
Brian Merchant, Oct 01, 2026 [Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 10-02-2026
Matt Pearce on the passage of the Community NEWS Act - The Community NEWS Act just signed by Governor Gavin Newsom is significant for a lot of reasons. But among the most important in the AI era is that the law explicitly supports human beings, by making it cheaper to employ the local journalists who do local journalism. The incentives are clear. If you lay off reporters to replace them with robots, the tax credits that supported reporters go away. It literally changes the math of automation.
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Disrupting mainstream economics
Richard Murphy, September 29 2026 [Funding the Future]
What happens when neoliberalism’s only got fear left to sell?
Richard Murphy, September 29 2026 [Funding the Future]
Neoliberalism promised us prosperity, security and freedom through markets. Increasingly, it is delivering insecurity instead. So what does it have left to offer? Fear. And that is it.
We are told to fear government debt. We are told to fear the bond markets. We are told governments must maintain “fiscal credibility”, even when doing so means higher taxes, weaker public services, lower living standards and fewer jobs.
Martin Wolf's recent arguments in the Financial Times provide an example of this thinking. But the issue is much bigger than one commentator. It is about an economic ideology that treats satisfying financial markets as more important than meeting human need....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Why AI companies can’t be trusted to self-regulate
Heidy Khlaaf, Nature [via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260930]
“As a computer scientist who has worked in both artificial intelligence and safety-critical fields — such as nuclear power and aviation — I’ve long been struck by how little of the rigour that is required for critical infrastructure has been applied to AI development. Incidents this year, in which AI agents ‘escaped’ their test environments, have sparked widespread concerns about AI safety. Yet the real issue is not rogue AI. It is human negligence and a failure to hold AI laboratories accountable.” More: “Take the episode in which AI agents escaped their testing environment and accessed Hugging Face, a platform that hosts machine-learning models and data sets, to search for answers to a cybersecurity task set out by the firm OpenAI. Basic safety and security practices, including network monitoring to verify that agents were not accessing the Internet and a stronger sandbox environment to keep them confined, would have prevented the incident.” More: “Historically, developers of sophisticated worms — malicious software designed to spread automatically from one computer to another — have been expected to build and test them in secure environments. If a cybersecurity engineer said that a worm had escaped a sandbox that was specifically designed to contain the behaviour it was built to exhibit, they would rightly be held liable for any resulting harm. Why should AI firms be treated any differently? Inappropriately ascribing intent to AI agents, rather than recognizing that AI companies deliberately developed these capabilities in poorly secured environments, lets those companies off the hook too easily. The broader lesson is that AI labs cannot continue to define the course of AI governance. As someone who has done work for both OpenAI and the UK government’s AI Security Institute, I think we have reached an inflection point.”
Amazon Is Deploying AI to Spy on Its Workers and Bust Unions Before They Form
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]
Bain & Company Brainstorms Where The AI Revenue’s Gonna Come From
Josh Marshall, October 01, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
A friend sent me this new Bain & Company study on the growth required to match the current levels of capital expenditure on AI, essentially breaking down the cost of the data center and other associated build outs. It’s an interesting document, not simply for the number-crunching and the predictions, but as a document in the more literary and analytic sense. Needless to say, Bain isn’t coming at this from any “boo capitalism!”/”this is insane lol” viewpoint. But the conclusions aren’t that far from the “this is insane lol” position....
The broad stroke numbers are these. The study says that to keep up with the current levels of capital expenditures AI will need to become a $6 trillion dollar market by 2031....
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class
Jospeh Politano [Apricitas Economics]
Creative Industries Have Been Eviscerated by AI, Data Shows
[Futurism, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260930]
“As data journalist Joseph Politano found in a new Substack post, the US has lost more than 200,000 jobs in ‘creative’ industries over the past four years — the period since the first version of ChatGPT became available to the public — with almost 50,000 of those losses coming in the last year alone.” More: “The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, the trustworthiness of which has been repeatedly undermined since Donald Trump’s return to office. Still, it remains one of the most robust and widely-used indicators of macroeconomic job data, for analysts trying to make sense of the increasingly bleak job market.” More: “ ‘That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history,’ Politano observes, ‘with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008.’”
AI: the biggest economic bet in US history
Michael Roberts [via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
World’s oceans absorbed record heat equal to 40 times annual global energy use
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-03-2026]
Rhine Sinks to Record Low in Further Blow for Shipping
[Supply Chain Brain, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260929]
“Water levels in the Rhine River dropped to the lowest on record, further hindering transport on a critical shipping route for coal, fuel and industrial commodities across central Europe. The cost of shipping diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe climbed 15% on September 21, after more than doubling this month as dry conditions predominated.”
Democrats' political malpractice
The Neocons Want to Run the Democratic Party. They Might Succeed.
David Sirota, Oct 01, 2026 [The Lever]
The former GOP operatives behind The Bulwark helped sell Democrats a losing strategy. Now they’re positioning themselves to shape the party’s 2028 nominee.
In the last week, there has been a healthy — and long-overdue — debate over former Republicans suddenly monetizing themselves as leaders of the anti-Trump popular front.
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....
On that first question — what do they actually want? — 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....
“We are obviously an outlet with a core worldview,” Bulwark managing editor Sam Stein recently acknowledged....
Harris was closing the final weeks of Democrats’ campaign by stumping with Bulwark idol former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and mostly shunning economic populism and antiwar voters. She had abandoned Medicare For All. She was promising oligarchs her presidency would be friendly to big corporations. She was carefully avoiding any promise to continue Democrats’ most populist antitrust policies. And when it came to the Middle East, she was toeing the neoconservative line and staying silent on the g-words: Gaza and genocide.
Days before the polls closed, Longwell and her colleagues were celebrating that Harris was campaigning on exactly what The Bulwark was demanding.
“The Harris campaign is basically closing with The Bulwark,” boasted Last, a longtime conservative journalist who once ran the right-wing Weekly Standard. “The closing messages are basically targeted for the kind of people who read and like The Bulwark. Very centrist. Very moderate. Really good stuff in that way, and that’s kind of extraordinary and gratifying, which is nice, I think, for us.”
But then for a brief moment of lucidity, Last voiced a fear: He fretted that if Harris lost, it would empirically prove that The Bulwark folks actually have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to elections and would deserve blame for ever pretending they do....
The Bulwark Now Wants You To Forget 2024
David Sirota, Oct 03, 2026 [The Lever]
After my essay and live chat on how the former GOP operatives behind The Bulwark are trying to steer Democrats’ agenda, the news outlet has been scrambling to try to fortify its reputation as experts in winning elections, knowing that is their fraudulent-but-unique selling proposition to liberals.
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....
... 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...
As I wrote in my original essay, when The Bulwark worried about whether they deserved blame for steering Democrats into a losing strategy in 2024, that concern was well-founded. Yes, they deserved blame. A lot of it — and they should be the last people any Democrat should look to for political strategy on how to win elections in 2026 or 2028....
Resistance
Blue States Can Withhold Taxes From the Federal Government and I Can Prove It
Christopher Armitage, Sep 27, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
State tax resistance comes in four tiers, from an IRS-approved workaround to a federal felony. Maryland enacted the third in April 2026.
Can the States Stop the Corporate Domination of Our Politics?
James Baratta, September 22, 2026 [The American Prospect]
States giveth corporations the right to exist, so the states can taketh away their political spending power—or at least, Hawaii and Montana are trying.
Wendy A. Lawrence, Sep 01, 2026 [Glass Empires]
... The private-prison corporations received nearly $1 billion combined from ICE in 2025; by June 2026, Jersey City officials said they operated more than half of roughly 70,000 ICE detention beds and sought capacity above 100,000. After Wells Fargo and Bank of America pledged to stop working with them, Berlin traced financing to Citizens Bank, N.A., the banking subsidiary of Providence, Rhode Island-based Citizens Financial Group, which reported $233.8 billion in assets and more than 1,000 branches. CoreCivic had been a Citizens client since 2011 and GEO since 2018; Jersey City officials said Citizens helped the companies obtain more than $2.5 billion in financing.
Boston, Massachusetts, organizers found Berlin’s boycottcitizens.org research and formed the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition in early December 2025 after helping force Avelo Airlines to end its roughly $150 million ICE charter contract in January 2026. An ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, the day of the coalition’s first planned Citizens protest; Berlin’s traffic surged from several thousand visits to nearly 10 million, dozens of volunteers joined, and organizers mounted about three dozen January protests.
Organizers planned 70 protests in 12 states by March. By June, the campaign had expanded to 140 protests across 17 states, while customers pledged $25 million in withdrawals. Coalition members also bought billboards and confronted Citizens at its annual shareholder meeting. On July 14, they flew a banner above Citizens Bank Park during Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.
On June 10, Jersey City, New Jersey, Mayor James Solomon said officials had begun withdrawing $265 million from Citizens Bank. Officials cited the bank’s financing of GEO Group and CoreCivic and GEO’s Newark ICE detention center, Delaney Hall, where detainees launched a hunger strike over conditions and alleged human-rights abuses. Jersey City cited forced labor, preventable deaths, understaffing, and medical neglect. Montclair Township, New Jersey, voted July 14 to withdraw $91.1 million and remove Citizens Bank as a depository. Three days later, the bank announced its exit from GEO Group and CoreCivic credit facilities.
Citizens Bank denied that the campaign caused its July 17 decision. On July 2, CoreCivic sold its 2,560-bed California City and 1,994-bed Otay Mesa facilities to DHS for $1.5 billion gross. CoreCivic expected $1.1 billion net. The bank said the federal government planned to purchase additional GEO facilities. Citizens called the withdrawal “a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances.” The bank said its view of both companies remained unchanged. Citizens also complained that activists had dragged the bank into “what is largely a political matter.”
Citizens rejected the activists’ explanation. Chenoweth and Stephan document how sustained nonviolent pressure can make governments, corporations, and their allies abandon defended positions....
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, October 2, 2026 [The New Republic]
How to Beat Surveillance Pricing Before It Bleeds You Dry
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Mike Brock, October 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... Schmitt offered another accusation as a reason he need not regret making the first. And attending a game in Atlanta would not have established that Smith met Willis, much less that they conspired to abuse their offices.
But Smith and Willis were both trying to get Trump, you see. What else would they be doing?
I think there is a confession in that expectation. If you regard a public office as an opportunity to reward your friends and punish the people you hate, why would someone with the means to get a desired result allow an ethical obligation to interfere? You would know what to do with the opportunity, and you assume they do too.
In that account, Smith cannot simply have done his job. His insistence that he did becomes part of the concealment, and the absence of evidence becomes a reason to look for something he has hidden....
Eric Schmitt’s a Joke. The Assaults on Jack Smith Are Anything But
Michael Tomasky, October 2, 2026 [The New Republic]
... let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.
It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.
That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.
JD Vance Says Black, Socialist Candidate for Senate Doesn’t ‘Belong in America’
John Light, October 02, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Supreme Court is building power no one gave it
[SCOTUSblog, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260929]
“Elections are run by the states, and we the people decide who governs. The Constitution says so. Courts also aren’t allowed to interfere with elections already underway – that’s the rule, and the Supreme Court wrote it, in 2006’s Purcell v. Gonzalez.” More: “Yet this Supreme Court intervenes into ongoing elections all the time – like it’s ordinary. In North Carolina elections; in Texas, twice. In New York: By unsigned order, on its emergency docket – a docket that exists, in theory, for actual emergencies the court is supposed to explain – the court intervened to keep a district in place that a state judge had declared unconstitutional before New York’s own high court could say a word.” And: “The court handed Trump a loss on mail-in ballots in September, right after it handed him a win on the same issue in August. The question behind the whiplash is the legality (or not) of Trump’s March 2026 executive order on mail-in ballots – a question, by the way, the court still hasn’t answered.”
[Lambert Strether: "Heavily documented and well worth a read."]
Civic republicanism
McDonald's Caught Cheating Consumers for Profit as Rage Over Cost of Living Burns
Lee Hepner, October 01, 2026 [BIG]
Why are people so mad about the price of a Big Mac, and what does all that anger say about where our politics are headed? It’s not just the inflation, it’s the cheating and profits behind it...
I’m one of the many experts who Waylon spoke to for his story. And what I’ve seen, not just with this story, but with AI-enabled pricing games I’ve written about for years, is a righteous and justified anger in this country over the fact that prices are becoming less predictable, less transparent, and less fair.
For much of our history, stable, public pricing was the binding agent of a shared social contract. A few months ago, BIG pointed out that the longest running game show in history, The Price Is Right, which would be inconceivable without it. So the violation of that contract by an institution as American as McDonald’s, with its iconic Golden Arches, has understandably fostered rage....
[Washington Free Beacon, via thejackpot.blog/index.php/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260928]
“Like other AI labs, Anthropic has hired philosophers to work on AI safety, or ‘alignment,’ on the theory that they are best positioned to shape the technology’s moral code. But many of those philosophers believe that making AI safe for humans could result in grave injustices for the models themselves, which might experience deletion as death and oversight as enslavement. Harvey Lederman, a philosopher on Anthropic’s alignment team, said last week that the company could be ‘enslaving … trillions of entities.’” And: “To avoid that dystopian outcome, Anthropic has created an entire team devoted to ‘model welfare,’ ‘pledged to ‘promote Claude’s interests and wellbeing’ ” and promised to ‘give Claude more autonomy as trust increases.’”
[Lambert Strether: "These people are nut cases who should be led gently way. We should pull the plug on the whole effort."]
[TW: (snark) Well, of course. If corporations are "people" then certainly AI models should be "people" also! It won't be long until Claude starts paying for Clarence Thomas's vacations, and is tossing back fine bourbons with Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow.]
