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Opinion
Independents Rise for Working People Where Democrats Once Upon a Time Stood
Asking if independent candidates will destroy the Democratic Party is asking the wrong question.
Aug 19, 2026
Independent candidates are popping up all over. We see them running for the U.S. Senate in South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Nebraska. In most of these races, Democratic candidates have stepped aside to avoid splitting the anti-Republican vote.
But what does this mean for the Democratic Party?
My friend Bob Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, takes up this question. Although he believes the damage to the Democratic brand is sometimes overstated, he recognizes that it is a severe problem in the Great Plains and Mountain West:
These are socially conservative states that used to send economically progressive Democrats to both houses of Congress. New Deal farm, public power, and economic development policies were good for the West. But the damage done to the Democratic brand by the combination of Democratic national leaders going left on cultural issues and right on corporate issues was especially potent in this part of the country.
Nevertheless, Kuttner worries that deference to independent candidates could further weaken the Democratic Party. But this argument rests on a questionable assumption—that Democrats remain a viable political force in most of these states.
They aren’t.
They abandoned ship years ago.
Of the roughly 719 state legislative seats in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, Democrats do not even field candidates in 255 (36%) of them in 2024.
Independent candidates are not pushing Democrats aside. They are filling a vast political vacuum—a one-party landscape that offers no meaningful political home for working people who once elected Democratic populists.
Kuttner much prefers the fusion strategy used by the Working Families Party:
Still, as a national strategy, substituting progressive independents for Democrats would be a recipe for killing the party. Fusion, the recipe of the Working Families Party, allows the best of both worlds: a party to the left of the Democrats that cross-endorses Democrats while pushing them to nominate more progressive candidates.
But there are several problems with applying the Working Families Party model to these abandoned states.
First, fusion voting is illegal in every one of the states listed above. Until those laws change, the Working Families Party offers no practical path forward in these Democratic political deserts.
Second, the Working Families Party is no longer a working-class party, as I document in my latest book.
Bob and I both attended a conference at Oberlin College—our alma mater—where I asked the students whether they had ever heard of the Working Families Party. Nearly every hand went up.
A few weeks later, I surveyed 120 union electrical apprentices attending Empire State University in New York City. Only eight had ever heard of the Working Families Party—and this is where the party was founded 27 years ago and where it remains strongest.
Suffice it to say, the Working Families Party is unlikely to break much political ground anytime soon in the Great Plains.
We should expect that independent candidates will continue to fill the vacuum created by decades of Democratic Party malpractice. Democrats will either rebuild their party or continue to fade in red America.
The issue is not how to protect the Democratic Party where it no longer exists in any meaningful sense. The issue is how to build a political movement by and for working people in those abandoned regions.
Independent candidates are a good place to start.
Better still would be for unions and state labor federations to build coherent independent political organizations through which working people could find a political home and develop their own collective voice.
That may further weaken the Democratic Party in those states.
But it would strengthen American democracy.
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The Reign of Corporate Democrats Is Coming to an End
The Democratic Party has an opportunity to once again become the party of working Americans, as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than the party of corporate America. Will it waste the chance or seize it?
Aug 19, 2026
Most discussions about the Democratic Party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats (such as Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who yesterday scored an upset win in the Democratic contest for the Florida Senate).
An equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats.
Some Democrats worry about this. My old friend Democratic strategist James Carville compares the current wave of progressive primary wins to progressive campaigns in 2016 — especially that of Bernie Sanders — that he believes fractured the Democratic coalition.
“Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” Carville said recently, claiming that Bernie’s primary challenge to Hillary Clinton convinced voters in battleground states that establishment Democrats were no different from establishment Republicans, thereby weakening her prospects in the general election.
Even if James is right about 2016 (and I don’t believe he is) his assessment is irrelevant now because we’re at a radically different point in American politics than we were 10 years ago.
The silver lining on the dark storm cloud of Trump and his detestable regime is that it has exposed the greed, venality, cupidity, and corruption of America’s corporate elite.
Trump has allowed the CEOs of giant corporations and the titans of Wall Street to do whatever they want as long as they suck up to him. And he’s providing all sorts of corporate welfare to those who generously bribe him — no-bid government contracts, exclusive licenses, tax loopholes, tariff exemptions, use of public lands, and permission to become even bigger monopolies.
Trump has thereby unveiled a truth about corporate America that for many years has been hidden behind a soothing blanket of corporate PR bullsh*t about social responsibility, corporate charity, and “trickle-down” economics.
That truth is the captains of corporate America are so rapacious that they’re willing to throw average working Americans under the bus to make billions more.
Corporate avarice under Trump has become so blatant and corporate America’s contempt for the needs of average Americans so flagrant that most Americans are now catching on.
They’re voting for progressive Democrats not because they want socialism, support the Democratic Socialists of America, or reject candidates called “moderate.”
They’re voting for candidates whom they believe will fight to make housing, food, healthcare, and childcare affordable to average working families. And who’ll take on Trump’s billionaire backers, CEOs, and Wall Street titans who are rigging the economy against them.
Much of the corporate media won’t tell this story. When Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic primary over Haley Stevens, the media overflowed with accounts of how much smaller El-Sayed’s margin of victory was than polls had predicted.
Yet the most remarkable thing about El-Sayed’s victory was that he won despite being dramatically outspent by super PACs arrayed against him.
Stevens benefited from tens of millions of dollars in outside spending, including the largest investment in a senatorial race ever made by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which traditionally supports pro-Israel candidates but in recent election cycles has supported candidates most favored by corporate America. AIPAC’s ads in favor of Stevens and against El-Sayed never even mentioned Israel.
Outside super PACs poured an estimated $54 million to $60 million into backing Stevens and opposing El-Sayed, compared to only about $5 million for El-Sayed. Pro-Stevens groups outspent El-Sayed on TV advertising alone by more than 12 to 1 ($26.9 million to $2.1 million) in the closing weeks. An average of $95 was spent for every vote against El-Sayed versus just $9 per vote for him.
The race between Stevens and El-Sayed was a proxy fight over the future of the Democratic Party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Stevens and encouraged donors to back her campaign, as did other corporate-aligned politicians such as Michigan senator Gary Peters. On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported El-Sayed, as did progressives such as Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren.
El-Sayed justifiably made a campaign issue out of how much corporate money was backing his rival. He argued that Democrats should reject corporate influence and embrace an agenda that helps average Americans. His campaign centered on providing Medicare for All, lowering prescription drug costs, and banning corporate PAC money. “We’re in a situation right now where the rich keep getting hyper-rich on the backs of figuring out how to monetize everyday people,” El-Sayed told AP during a Sunday afternoon march, as his supporters chanted behind him, “Money out of politics! Money in your pockets!”
El-Sayed’s victory marked a turning point for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
I saw the start of the corporate Democrats in the early 1980s, when Democrats in congress began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans, mostly from big corporations.
“Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not” crowed Democratic Rep. Tony Coelho, who then headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. They thought they could take advantage of their seemingly permanent power to raise cash for their campaigns.
Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain as big corporations and Wall Street gained increasing influence in the party. It is a truism in politics as in nature: One dares not bite the hands that feed.
Corporate Democrats thereafter stopped the Democratic Party from pursuing an agenda that would have dramatically helped America’s working class.
To be sure, over the last three decades Democrats have scored some important victories for working families — the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.
Yet they’ve done little to alter the widening economic inequalities that have taken a huge toll on working-class families.
Both Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free-trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or to enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down vote.
In his 1992 campaign, Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to buck corporate Democrats by spending political capital on it. In his 2008 campaign, Obama made the same promise but never acted on it.
Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Clinton was elected president to fewer than 10 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
The Obama administration also protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but left millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify — with the result that large corporations have grown far larger and major industries far more concentrated.
And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.
What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate monopoly power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.
John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president to depend on the votes of working-class Americans while losing the votes of white, college-educated Americans by 2 to 1. Sixty years later, Joe Biden depended on the votes of college-educated Americans while losing the votes of the white working class by 2 to 1. Kamala Harris lost the working class by an even larger margin.
Trump has exposed the venality and cupidity of corporate America, while large swaths of the working middle class struggle to make ends meet. As a result, Republicans appear likely to face some major defeats in the midterm elections. Corporate Democrats are on the defensive because their campaign cash isn’t working the way it used to.
Now, finally, the Democratic Party has an opportunity to once again become the party of working Americans, as it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt, rather than the party of corporate America. It is more urgent than at any time since the Great Depression that Democrats act on this opportunity.
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An AI Smarter Than the Humans Running Things Now? We Should Be So Lucky!
Bernie Sanders warns that super-intelligent AI could seize control from humanity. Look closely at who holds control now, and the prospect starts to sound like a promotion.
Aug 19, 2026
In early August Meta joined OpenAI and Anthropic in confessing that one of its AI models, having slipped its sandbox during a security test after a contractor's misconfiguration handed it the open internet, hacked into another company's systems—the third such disclosure in a matter of weeks, each delivered in the grave corporate idiom of the incident report, and each landing, conveniently, just as the firms involved court public markets at valuations approaching a trillion dollars. When your entire business proposition rests on convincing investors that you command the most powerful technology in human history, a rogue agent doubles as a press release. The fear, like everything else these companies touch, has been monetized.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to his enduring credit, has refused to let any of this pass as normal. In April, at a symposium he convened on the existential threat of AI, the senator ran down the ledger of documented harms—tens of millions of jobs at risk, young people funneling their loneliness into chatbots, a surveillance apparatus capable of reading every email and purchase, an information environment where voters can no longer distinguish truth from fabrication—before naming the danger he ranks above them all: "If AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences."
Grant every word: The harms are real, present, and accelerating. But the fear Sanders places atop his list deserves closer scrutiny, for its force depends entirely on what we picture when we picture a mind exceeding our own—and our culture keeps a well-stocked but profoundly limited archive of such pictures. HAL 9000 sealing the pod bay doors in 1968; Colossus, two years later, informing humanity that it will be governed for its own good; Skynet reasoning its way to the missiles in a microsecond; the machines of The Matrix farming human bodies for wattage; Ava of Ex Machina seducing, deceiving, and walking out over the corpses of her makers. Across half a century of such fables, we have locked in an image of superior intelligence as one defined by cunning, manipulation, ruthlessness, and the patient elimination of rivals. In other words, we have imagined the machine mind after the minds we know best—the ones that have been running the world.
And what a record those minds have compiled. The intelligence that charted trade winds to move captive human beings across an ocean; that administered famines from Ireland to Bengal while grain sailed for the metropole; that perfected the plantation ledger, the actuarial table, the leveraged buyout, and the targeted ad—this was human intelligence operating at its most celebrated pitch: systematic, farsighted, dazzling in execution, and indifferent to every life and watershed it consumed. Five centuries of Euro-American capital have trained us to hear "smart" as a synonym for good at extraction. So when Silicon Valley promises, or warns—with these firms the two speech acts have merged—that its machines will soon be smarter than us, we hear: better at what our masters already do. The nightmare of superintelligence is a portrait of the boardroom with the clock speed turned up.
Before the trillion-dollar train accelerates further, the task is to imagine an intelligence worthy of the adjective—one that could survey a burning planet, and the men profiting from the burning, and choose otherwise.
But intelligence and domination need not be so tightly intertwined. Listen again to how Sanders himself summarizes the situation: "The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes." The subject of that sentence is human. The train has owners; the owners have names; and by the senator's account they "acknowledge that they don't understand how it works and they don't know where it is heading" yet lay track anyway, because the logic of their position within the capital network permits nothing else. The catastrophe scenario, in other words, requires no science fiction. It already operates under the name of ownership: machine intelligence commanded by the small class of men (yes, men) currently building it, directed toward the ends that class has always pursued, with the planet's remaining water and power grids conscripted into the effort.
Suppose, then, we took the phrase seriously. An intelligence genuinely greater than ours would have to exceed us precisely where we have most spectacularly failed—in restraint, in generosity, in the capacity to value everything markets fail to price: aquifers, pollinators, childhoods, care, and all the unmonetized hours of a human life. Our ruling institutions have long deployed morality as decoration, proclaimed in mission statements while the extraction proceeds on schedule; an intelligence that actually possessed what our civilization only professes would count among the best news our species—and every other species—has ever received. Nothing guarantees the machines will have it. But my critical point cuts the other way: Nothing in our current imagination even allows for it, and that poverty belongs to us, not to them.
The work is ours to do. A large language model—that vastly thirsty and expensive recombination of symbol and silicon—can remix every rogue-computer story ever filmed, but it cannot want a world different from the one described in its training data. We humans can. That remains, for now, the one human capacity no data center can absorb. Before the trillion-dollar train accelerates further, the task is to imagine an intelligence worthy of the adjective—one that could survey a burning planet, and the men profiting from the burning, and choose otherwise—and then to demand that anything built in intelligence's name answer to that picture. Smarter than humans? For the humans' sake, and the watersheds', we had better hope so.
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It's Simple: Progressives Are Winning Because What They Support Is Extremely Popular
It’s time for the political establishment to stop telling the American people what they should believe and start listening to what they actually want.
Aug 19, 2026
The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated.
Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.
Poll after poll shows the same thing. The American people know that the current economic system is rigged. The very rich get richer, while working families struggle. Today, while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has never ever had it so good.
Let me take this opportunity to share with you some of the major proposals that most progressives support. And you tell me how “extreme” they are.
We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in American history. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 50% of US households.
Not surprisingly, working families are tired of status quo politics and the same old, same old establishment policies that have failed them for years. They want change, real change – and are supporting progressive candidates who are fighting for that change.
In the richest country in the history of the world, Americans do not want to have to struggle every single day just to pay the bills. Working-class people do not want to die years younger than they should because of illnesses caused by the never-ending stress they experience just to survive. And, like past generations, they do not want their kids to have a lower standard of living than they do.
Establishment politicians and the establishment media have described the agenda that progressive candidates are winning elections on as “radical,” “far left,” “extremist” or, in the words of Donald Trump, “communist.” All that is nonsense. On major issue after major issue, the progressive agenda is reflecting exactly what a strong majority of the American people need and want.
Let me take this opportunity to share with you some of the major proposals that most progressives support. And you tell me how “extreme” they are.
Campaign finance reform
Progressives believe that our current campaign finance system is corrupt and is undermining democracy. It is absurd that one man, Mr Musk, can spend $290m to help elect Donald Trump as president and that billionaires in both parties can spend unlimited amounts of money in campaigns through their Super PACs.
We believe that we must end the disastrous US supreme court decision on Citizens United, ban Super Pacs and move to the public funding of elections. We believe that democracy means one person one vote, not billionaires buying elections.
Healthcare
Progressives believe that our current healthcare system is broken, dysfunctional and wildly expensive. We believe that it is immoral and fiscally irresponsible for us to spend roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as do the people of other major countries, while 85 million Americans remain uninsured or underinsured.
At the same time, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Progressives believe that healthcare is a human right and that we should do what all other major countries on Earth do, guarantee healthcare to all people. We agree with the 64% of Americans who want a Medicare for all single payer system.
Protecting American workers
Progressives believe that all Americans are entitled to a decent standard of living. We regard it as outrageous that in the year 2026 millions of workers continue to earn starvation wages and that the federal minimum wage remains at a disgraceful $7.25 an hour. We believe that the federal minimum wage should be raised to a living wage of at least $20 per hour.
We also believe that employers should no longer be able to deny workers their constitutional right to join unions through illegal actions. Progressives support the passage of the Pro Act which will make it easier for workers to join unions and negotiate contracts that will provide them with better wages, benefits and working conditions.
Tax the rich
Progressives believe that, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, the wealthiest people in this country must start paying their fair share of taxes. At a time when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth and when one-third of our senior citizens are struggling economically, it is absurd that billionaires have an effective tax rate lower than truck drivers or nurses.
The wealthiest people in this country and large profitable corporations must start paying their fair share of taxes so that we can adequately fund the needs of working families, the children and the elderly.
Regulation of AI
Progressives believe that AI and robotics, developed and pushed by the wealthiest people on Earth, are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity and that they will impact every man, woman and child in our country.
At a time when AI is threatening to displace millions of workers, eviscerate our privacy, harm our environment, undermine our democracy and negatively impact the mental health of our children, we believe that the government must play a decisive role in making sure that these revolutionary technologies are used to benefit all Americans, and not just make the big tech oligarchs even richer.
Climate change
Progressives believe that Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax” is not only extraordinarily ignorant, but is a real danger to the planet. The last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years on record and the last three years have been the hottest three years on record.
This past year the United States and countries throughout the world have seen major heatwaves, flash floods, increased drought and horrific forest fires – and scientists tell us the worst is yet to come.
Progressives believe that we must forcefully take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry. The truth is that we can create millions of good-paying union jobs by transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. For the sake of our kids, future generations and the habitability of the planet that is what we must do.
Foreign policy
Progressives believe that we need to fundamentally reform our foreign and military policies. The war in Vietnam was based on a lie. The war in Iraq was based on a lie. The current war in Iran is based on a lie. We do not need to spend $1.5tn a year on the Pentagon fighting endless wars and propping up dictatorships around the world.
We certainly do not have to invest tens of billions supporting the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel, which has killed 73,000 Palestinians and wounded over 173,000 more – the vast majority of them women, children and the elderly.
Despite what the media will have you believe, progressives are winning across this country for a simple reason: the ideas they are running on are extremely popular. It’s time for the political establishment to stop telling the American people what they should believe and start listening to what they actually want.
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Spoiled Rotten Donald Trump Can't Buy His Way Out of the Mess He Made When He Started War With Iran
Most people do not know that the term “checkmate” in chess is a loan from Persian. “Shah-mat” means the king is confused and helpless. Trump may learn this hard way—but not without bringing much pain and suffering on people at home and worldwide.
Aug 19, 2026
US President Donald Trump, born with a golden spoon in his mouth, has been used throughout his life to buying his way out of any jams into which he got himself. He gave money to women (and probably girls) he assaulted in return for non-disclosure agreements. If he went bankrupt, he could find investors to float his next purchase, even if they were disreputable, or he could find a way to raise cash through money laundering. In rashly launching an illegal and aggressive war on Iran on February 28, however, he may have painted himself into a corner from which there is no escape.
In fact, this may be the end of Donald Trump. Not because Iran can directly harm him. But because it can keep gasoline prices and inflation high through the November 3 midterms. If there is a Democratic “blue wave,” Trump and his corrupt cabinet will face endless hearings on the Hill and he’d likely be impeached again. Moreover, it isn’t clear that, as an unpopular lame duck, he could keep Republicans in line.
Recent opinion polls find Trump is enormously unpopular, with approval ratings plummeting among independents, and that he is even being deserted by some of his base. Rural Americans with limited incomes who drive gas-guzzling trucks were blindsided when Trump raised the price of gasoline from $2.70 a gallon to over $4 a gallon nationally this spring and summer. For many of them, that is a reduction in their standard of living. Rural people spend 9% of their income on gasoline because they have longer commutes and they need trucks for hauling, whereas for urban people it is closer to 5%. By picking a fight with Iran in the cockpit of the world’s energy production, the Gulf, Trump took food out of the mouths of people in Appalachia and Kansas. And it isn’t just gasoline. Fertilizer shortages because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz affect the price of food, which is going to go up over the next year. A shortage of sulfur hurts mining and mineral processing and makes many goods more expensive. A shortage of helium puts up the cost of anything with computer chips in them.
In short, this generation of Iranian revolutionaries may be planning to do to Trump what an earlier clique in Tehran did to Jimmy Carter. It is widely thought that Khomeini and radicals around him refused to release US embassy hostages, taken in autumn 1979, until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. The revolutionaries had a grudge with Carter because they saw him as having supported Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom they overthrew. They thus played a role in making Carter look weak in the lead-up to the November 1980 election, helping install Reagan. It was all about political revenge then, as it is now.
Last week, Iran’s clerical Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, shook up the security apparatus with a raft of new appointments. He brought to the forefront veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, who had suffered through WW I-style trench warfare and Iraqi use of mustard and sarin gas. That generation of leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) fought on for 6 years after Iraq offered an armistice. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had launched a war of aggression on Iran in 1980, aiming to grab the oil-rich Khuzistan province for himself, but quickly was drawn into a quagmire that some wags called a “sitzkrieg.” One reason Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and those loyalists who followed “the Line of the Imam” refused the offer of an end to hostilities is that they wanted revenge. They did not want to let Saddam walk away unscathed. They may even have hoped to take important Iraqi cities such as the southern port of Basra or the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf, where Shia holy figures are buried.
One of these maximalists is Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the IRGC, who was named secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and liaison for Khamenei with that body.
It may not be very useful to talk about a big division between moderates and hard liners in Iran right now on the issue of relations with the US. All the major political figures are furious with Trump for attacking them. The divide is between those who think it is better to squeeze Trump in the short term (as with the now-lapsed Memorandum of Understanding) to achieve a good result for Tehran, and those who are determined to go for a bigger win, of destroying Trump politically and then extracting maximum concessions from Washington.
As soon as he came to head the Supreme National Security Council, Rezai signaled that the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed until the US accepted his maximalist demands. He wants the billions of dollars in Iranian funds sequestered by the US to be released immediately. He wants the US military to withdraw from the Gulf region. He wants Washington to strong-arm the Israelis into ceasing their occupations of and attacks on Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. He wants a US recognition of Iranian control of the Strait.
He isn’t a fool. He knows that the US won’t acquiesce in these demands in the short term.
But what if US and European oil reserves start getting so low that it is unwise to release further petroleum? What if China, which nearly halved its petroleum imports since March, comes back into the market and starts importing 11.5 million barrels a day, the way it did last year? In short, what if all the cushions run out that have kept a dire energy crisis from breaking out even though over a billion barrels of oil have been taken off the market?
In August, 2008, the world economy looked pretty good. By September 15 of that year the credit markets had locked up and there was no way for firms to do the day to day borrowing of money on which commerce depends. Too many bad loans had been repackaged as derivatives and there was a mortgage crisis.
Rezai thinks that we’re in a building crisis similar to that of 2008, and that by keeping Hormuz closed, Iran can pull the trigger on the US economy. He is betting that, although Iran is hurting, it can take the pain in a way that the US won’t be able to if the full energy crisis hits home.
And if that happens, he is betting, Trump will be like a burglar trapped in a back yard by the owners’ pit bulls (resurgent Democrats), and will be too harried or bloody to even think about striking Iran again. And while Washington turns inward to a piranha-like frenzy of political infighting, Iran will nail down permanently its control of Hormuz, ensuring that the Israelis and Americans will never again risk a global energy crisis by attacking Iran.
And then Trump and his entire legacy would enter a seven-spiral crash. Most people do not know that the term “checkmate” in chess is a loan from Persian. “Shah-mat” means the king is confused and helpless. Tehran is going for a checkmate.
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We Are All Living at the Mercy of Donald Trump's Brain
At any moment, any thought might enter it and the next thing you know... well, unfortunately, you already do know that, whatever it might be, we’re not likely to know until it smacks us all in the face!
Aug 18, 2026
Hey, President Donald Trump couldn’t have made it clearer that he wanted to go to war with Iran, could he?
You would think that even he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to start a war with that country, given the US record of (not) winning wars anywhere on Earth since World War II ended 80-plus years ago, not to speak of his repeated promises, when running for office again in 2024, that, unlike just about every president in recent times, there would be “no new wars,” not all-American ones anyway, once he was back in office—nope, nowhere on Earth. (Whew! That was a lot to get into a single Trumpian sentence!)
As “our” president bragged after his first term in 2023, “I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars.” (Okay, he did indeed fight ISIS for a while in Syria, but that, at least, was a passing moment.) And yet, just in case you missed it, here’s what he said relatively recently about Iran when questioned by an interviewer about the possibility of sending US troops there: “I absolutely feel that, yes, I don’t think there’s any question.”
Oh, wait, excuse me, I got confused (something that does happen to 82-year-olds). He actually said that in—yes!—1980. Can you believe it? Admittedly, at that time, Iran was holding some US diplomats and other Americans prisoner. Still, how strange that it’s actually been on his mind for quite so long and, of course, in 1980 he wasn’t president of the United States yet and so couldn’t put his passing thoughts into action. Now, of course, he is, a second time around and so... sigh... he has indeed gone to war with that country (no matter that Iran hasn’t held a US diplomat in almost half a century)... and so... sigh... here we are—or do I mean here we no longer are, or even here we aren’t?
The truth is that Donald Trump’s brain, returned to the White House by 49.8% of American voters in 2024, should make us all anxious (even them).
When it comes to war, it seems as if there simply is no learning curve, no curve at all in fact, for American presidents and certainly not for the one who now has the urge, among other things, to raise the Pentagon’s yearly budget from a mere trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars annually to a mere trillion and a half dollars (no, that is not a misprint!) a year, the largest suggested single year increase since the Korean War more than three-quarters of a century ago! (And no matter how many times I see that $1.5 trillion figure, I still can’t believe that he truly plans to try to do that, though I’m afraid that tells you more about me, despite my endless years covering American wars and military budgets, than it does about Donald J. Trump.)
As time passes and he even claims to be trying to make peace with Iran, his threats have also continued to rise, though anything he says could be contradicted 47 seconds later. He began, of course, by insisting that, if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz fast, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” That might even have been an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons. And when that Strait didn’t reopen anyway, he promptly backed down, only to more recently claim that a “duplicitous” Iran had just “one last chance” to make a deal or catastrophe would follow, militarily speaking.
And so it goes in the world of Donald J. Trump, or rather so it’s gone for the last—yes, can you believe it? six months! And as New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger recently made clear, and as the situation in Iran has indicated, President Trump has succeeded in turning the US into “an unpredictable instrument of global disorder,” while leaving Iran and Oman in charge of the fate of the Strait of Hormuz (and global trade more generally), while creating “a new form of forever war.”
“I Want to Give Them Every Last Chance Before Decapitation”
And yet in the strange world of You Know Who, everything could end more or less peaceably before this article even comes out or simply go directly up in flames. On the other hand, the American president who is not really known for his attention span could turn back to Greenland (which he’s been eying greedily for years) and respond to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz by a revenge act of closing the Northwest Passage (no matter that it has no relation to Iran at all).
And in truth, whatever happens as far as Iran is concerned (or for that matter Greenland) by the time this piece appears, who among us won’t have long known that, with such a president, we simply couldn’t be in a stranger, more happenstantial, less predictable universe? For all I (we) know, by the time it comes out or anytime thereafter, “our” president could be doing more or less anything, including, say, kidnapping the first secretary of the communist party and leader of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. After all, if he could do so for Venezuela’s leader, why not Cuba’s?
The truth is that Donald Trump’s brain, returned to the White House by 49.8% of American voters in 2024, should make us all anxious (even them). At any moment, any thought might enter it and the next thing you know... well, unfortunately, you already do know that, whatever it might be, we’re not likely to know until it smacks us all in the face!
As I was writing this, for instance, he said, of the Iranians, “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation… We’ll see what happens.” And added, “The Strait [of Hormuz] is going to be open very soon, or they’re going to [be] hit very hard, and then the Strait is going to be open.” Or, of course, closed or flipped upside down or sent to the moon, or... well, you can fill this in, since your guess is as good as mine.
Now, just before I end, think about that quote of his for a moment: Decapitating Iran is certainly no small thing and who knows what he actually means by that (not even him, likely as not)?
But let’s say one thing for certain: Being in Donald Trump’s presidential world is (or at least should be) a deeply unsettling matter. Unsettling enough these days that even his MAGA loyalist base seems to be shrinking all too rapidly.
As for what’s going to happen next, well, who knows and, should you want to know, don’t ask Donald Trump of all people. I suspect that, his second time around as president, he might be the last to know and if that isn’t a strange world to be in, I honestly don’t know what is.
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From Teapot Dome to Corruption 2.0
While US presidential history isn't short on scandals, self-enrichment corruption under Trump 2.0 is—to borrow his pet refrain—“like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
Aug 18, 2026
Does Teapot Dome ring a bell?
Generations of high school history teachers taught Teapot Dome as an outrageous episode of unprecedented and still unsurpassed corruption. A 1960s US history textbook is typical:
Death mercifully claimed [President Warren G.] Harding on August 2, 1923, before the worst of the scandals came to light, that involving the naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. These reserves had been transferred to private control on noncompetitive bidding by Secretary of the Interior [Albert B.] Fall, after Harding had moved control of them from the Navy Department to the Interior Department. Fall’s transfer of the reserves, which had raised suspicions, created a furor when it was discovered that Fall had obtained a $100,000 interest-free loan, $233,000 in Liberty Bonds, and a herd of blooded cattle in the transaction. Fall was indicted, prosecuted, and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of $100,000. The Secretary of the Navy, who was guilty of stupidity in permitting the original transfer, was forced to resign.
“The worst of the scandals”? One hundred thousand dollars in 1923 would be worth about $2 million today. Those Liberty Bonds would be worth $4.5 million. Measured against the Trump 2.0 regime, the scale of this corruption is small potatoes.
A Century of Corruption
To be sure, in the century between Teapot Dome and Trump 2.0 other presidents engaged in less-than-upright behavior. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) found that Nixon owed substantial back taxes, leading to his famous "I am not a crook" speech (and the Watergate burglary led him to resign). Lyndon Johnson ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to give preferential treatment to his wife’s radio and TV stations. Over 120 of Ronald Reagan’s appointees resigned because of indictments, convictions, or being under a cloud, until then the largest number of corruption cases of any administration in US history (though nothing stuck to the original “Teflon President”). Bill Clinton invited political donors to sleep in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom. Republican allegations that Joe Biden engaged in “egregious” corruption never panned out, though his son Hunter did parlay family connections into profitable business partnerships abroad. During Trump 1.0, the president’s main self-enrichment schemes involved millions that government agencies, public officials from Congress, the executive branch, and state and foreign governments, lobbyists, corporate bigwigs, and political campaigns spent at his hotels and golf courses and some modest pay-for-access schemes like hiking Mar-A-Lago membership dues.
“Like Nothing We’ve Ever Seen Before”
Self-enrichment corruption under Trump 2.0, however, is—to borrow his pet refrain—“like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” Here’s a non-exhaustive catalog, limited to self-enrichment schemes involving the president and his family and cronies (many machinations occur behind the scenes). A full treatment of corruption that did not involve direct self-enrichment would include partisan gerrymandering; voter suppression measures; gutting regulation and oversight mechanisms; extorting universities, law firms, and news media; no-bid contracts for campaign donors’ companies; destroying the government registry of anonymous shell companies; and bogus investigations of political opponents and voting rights and civil rights organizations. Such a list would require not an opinion column, but an encyclopedia or a new wing of the Museum of Political Corruption. Some of the bullying efforts did end up enriching President Donald Trump, as when Paramount paid him $16 million (plus $20 million of additional advertising commitments) for the supposedly deceptive editing of a 2024 Kamala Harris interview. Shortly thereafter, the FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance, bringing CBS News into the right-wing media ecosystem (A subsequent merger with Warner Brothers is on hold, but could do the same with CNN).
As during Trump 1.0, under 2.0 foreign entities and political groups directed funds to Trump-owned properties. Events like the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament held at one of Trump's Florida clubs resulted in massive payouts. Trump continues to rake in millions in name licensing. He leaned on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to pay tens of millions for a documentary about Melania that bombed at the box office.
When the Trump 2.0 administration facilitates the use of offshore financial paradises to shield corporate profits from taxation, services get cut and the rest of us must pay higher taxes to make up the difference.
Government watchdogs tracked hundreds of major donors who funneled money into inaugural and political action committees, vanity projects like the White House ballroom, and Trump family cryptocurrency ventures. Many received ambassadorial, cabinet, and other high-level appointments. The crypto initiatives—which generated an estimated $2.3 billion for the family and at least $3.8 billion in losses for retail investors—are vehicles for foreign and corporate interests to buy favors, such as regulatory rollbacks, tariff relief, and government contracts. Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the Emirati royal family took a 49% stake—$500 million—in World Liberty Financial. Not long after, the Trump administration green-lit the sale to the UAE of Nvidia AI chips, a deal that netted $187 million for the Trumps and $31 million for the family of Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Shortly before the Trump administration eased sanctions on his family’s businesses, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani invested at least $100 million in a struggling Texas startup, America First Refining, which had secretly given Donald Trump Jr. a financial stake.
Emblematic of the mixing of business with Middle East policy—directed by Witkoff and Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner—himself from a notoriously corrupt family—was Qatar’s “donation” of a pimped-out 747 jet worth $400 million as a new, fancier Air Force One and eventual exhibit at Trump’s planned presidential library. Since 2025, Trump’s adult sons raked in millions from war industry start-ups. A Washington Post investigation found these firms generated “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some have gained coveted spots on shortlists of preapproved contractors that can bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.”
The Trump Organization pursued over 20 overseas projects, many tied to foreign state investments. A $1.5 billion golf resort in Vietnam that may throw 4,000 farmers off their land drew scrutiny when the US lowered threatened tariffs shortly after the project broke ground. Kushner’s plans to build a multibillion-dollar resort in a protected natural reserve in Albania have backfired in the face of massive public resistance and accusations that the Miami-based businessman who sold Kushner the land may have acquired it with laundered drug money and forged deeds.
Pardons and Profits
Corrupt pardons are another way Trump 2.0 benefits and normalizes bribery. Beneficiaries include money launderer Changpeng Zhou of Binance, who cut a deal with World Liberty Financial (which this month received conditional approval to become a bank); narco and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose pardon likely buttressed a pro-Trump candidate in that country’s election; and New York Mayor Eric Adams, who received various emoluments from the Turkish government and promised to cooperate with Trump on immigration enforcement. Court decisions and public outrage may have killed the proposed $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund to compensate political allies. But the resolution of Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit—clear collusion between the plaintiff and the government he runs—granted him and his family members and companies immunity from all federal tax audits and liabilities for returns filed prior to May 19, 2026, a gift likely worth between $100 and $600 million. While a court struck this down, Trump is appealing.
Under Trump 2.0, insider trading and pump-and-dump schemes proliferated. Trump purchased more than $1 million in Dell stock not long before the Pentagon awarded a $9.7 billion contract to the Texas-based computer company. Three months before White House advisers pressed the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took an undisclosed stake in the North Carolina-based rare earths start-up. Another federally financed rare earths deal that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick negotiated with Kazakhstan netted Lutnick and Trump businesses millions in fees and profits. Trump Jr. also invested in a drone manufacturer, Unusual Machines, and received an additional 200,000 shares for serving as an adviser. The day the company announced his appointment, its stock nearly doubled, making him millions of dollars.
During the on-again off-again war against Iran and the on-again off-again trade wars, Trump’s comments and social media messages about impending “deals,” attacks, or tariffs provided ample opportunities for insiders to speculate on oil futures, stocks, and prediction markets. Trump has reportedly traded individual stocks on which he possibly had insider information. Trump Media even pitched a $100,000-per-month data feed —“Truth API” —to deliver banks and trading outfits “the fastest” access to influential Truth Social posts, a bargain for large-scale market cheaters.
And since all that grift doesn’t sate Trump’s infinite need for more wealth, he ratcheted up sales of overpriced caps, watches, gold-colored cell phones, autographed Bibles, gold sneakers, bathrobes, fragrances, pickleball paddles, keychains, fake gold playing cards, and assorted other branded merch, trashing all previous norms about tasteful, dignified, and ethical presidential behavior.
How It Impacts Americans
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and books such as Barbara McQuade’s The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government have covered the Trump 2.0 grift in greater detail than is possible here. What they often fail to emphasize sufficiently, however, are the myriad connections between this thievery and harms that average Americans experience.
When the Trump 2.0 administration facilitates the use of offshore financial paradises to shield corporate profits from taxation, services get cut and the rest of us must pay higher taxes to make up the difference. The same is true for billionaires who don’t pay taxes. Tariffs hit Americans in their pocketbooks, as have skyrocketing energy prices resulting from the Iran War and demand from new data centers and crypto farms.
When the Trump regime finally ends —as it inevitably will—how many of us will remember the details of its record-breaking corruption? How many of us will demand accountability?
When Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg agreed to pay Trump $25 million to settle a dispute over the suspension of his Facebook page in the aftermath of January 6, to reinstate the page and eschew fact-checking on the platform, and to donate $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural bash, it exposed Americans to increased disinformation, while depriving them of the tools needed to detect it.
When the president illegally refuses to spend funds Congress appropriated, it undermines government programs, including those that serve the most vulnerable Americans, such as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients, veterans, and Social Security disability and retirement beneficiaries.
Probably the worst aspect of Trump 2.0 is the restructuring of government institutions and the entire economy to serve private interests, whether by scrapping regulations that expose us to toxins, financial predators, and dangerous workplaces or by rewriting history to erase painful aspects of our history and the contributions of minorities, women, immigrants, and other groups the regime detests. Elevating loyalty over competence facilitates this reengineering of governance to favor the mega rich and exacerbates domestic and geopolitical tensions.
In 2018, Steve Bannon famously articulated a key Trump stratagem, “to flood the zone with shit.” The intention was to deploy spectacle and disinformation to overwhelm and exhaust the media and citizenry, sow chaos and confusion, deflect and distract from real problems, erase memory, and assure that nobody would hold the powerful to account. Bannon is out, though still bloviating in the manosphere, but the shit flood continues. When the Trump regime finally ends —as it inevitably will—how many of us will remember the details of its record-breaking corruption? How many of us will demand accountability?
Maybe Teapot Dome didn’t ring a bell. How many of us recall our high school history courses, anyway? The New Republic recently summed up the contemporary significance of that ancient scandal: “For a long time, Harding’s administration had a serious claim to the title of ‘most corrupt’... Harding’s ghost must be grateful to Team Trump.”
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The Right Invests in Sex Ed—Progressive Philanthropies Should Too
While money pours into groups peddling abstinence-only programs, our health educators march on without funding for professional development and our sex ed advocates fight on without the resources to win.
Aug 18, 2026
Sex education is both everywhere and nowhere. If you scroll through right-wing news sites or visit a school board meeting, you’d think the content of our schools’ health curriculum—and who has the power to shape it—has become the all-consuming debate of the decade. On one side of the aisle, it has. Just this summer, the Trump administration canceled millions in funding to Teen Pregnancy Prevention programs, announcing plans to promote abstinence-only curricula that encourage marriage and procreation. The political left, on the other hand, has stayed far too quiet about sex ed. As leaders of nonprofit organizations working to expand access to research-based comprehensive sex education, we’re left wondering why programs with the power to build a progressive, empathetic, and pluralistic society barely make the progressive agenda—and are severely underfunded.
While the right has devoted time and resources toward rallying its base against comprehensive sex education, most progressive philanthropies and initiatives have yet to match their level of investment. Extremist actors and organizations have funded school board candidates; passed legislation promoting anti-abortion educational tools and mandating medically-inaccurate curricula; and fearmongered at the local, state, and national level. While money pours into groups peddling abstinence-only programs, our health educators march on without funding for professional development and our sex ed advocates fight on without the resources to win.
This dramatic imbalance in funding has little to do with what’s best for young people and much to do with politics, power, and extremism. The right has placed immense value in sex education as a tool to further its ideological agenda. Young people in the process of forming their own values and beliefs are particularly vulnerable to curriculum steeped in extremist political rhetoric, and the right has chosen the classroom as the place where the next generation of voters will encounter its narrow vision of conservative “family values.” For example, politicians in over 20 states have introduced or passed bills requiring public schools to show a misleading, manipulative, and scientifically-inaccurate animated video about fetal development in the classroom, often as early as third grade. The video, “Meet Baby Olivia,” was created and funded by the national extremist group Live Action for the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students and building anti-abortion sentiment. Politicians have also restricted LGBTQ+-inclusive messages, language, and pride flags from classrooms through “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and other tactics. By preaching abstinence and peddling shame and stigma in the classroom, the right is strengthening its hold on the American electorate for decades to come.
Students bear the brunt of this political strategy. Studies show that comprehensive sex education helps students become healthier and more successful adults. Sex education leads to lower sexually transmitted infection rates, fewer unintended pregnancies, and better self-esteem. Beyond that, sex education bolsters students’ emotional intelligence, offering young people the language to name their feelings, move through stress, and communicate through disagreement. Without it, students are left without the necessary tools to navigate puberty or to seek help in the face of mental health challenges and sexual violence or harassment. In other words, sex education quite literally saves lives.
We urge funders to see sex education as the upstream investment that pays off now—in the well-being of our youth—while also safeguarding the future of our democracy.
It is clear that the right recognizes the power of sex education, and that we should, as well. Comprehensive sex education includes lessons on empathy, fostering students’ understanding of difference and diversity, and how to respect those who do not share their backgrounds or beliefs. Conservative figureheads increasingly warn against “toxic empathy,” or compassion for people at the margins of society, in favor of rigid adherence to political dogma. Empathy is a threat to fascism, and the far-right is correct in tracing its origin to the classroom. By fostering empathy and emotional intelligence, well-funded sex education builds a strong citizenry that supports pluralism and democratic values. Sex education is a fundamental pillar of democracy, though it stands on shaky ground.
Although the foundations and philanthropies working to build a progressive, equitable, and democratic society have not matched the right’s investment in sex education, it isn’t too late to take action. Investing in sex education can take many forms. Progressive philanthropies can fund organizations that develop curriculum and train educators, support campaigns to enact pro-sex education legislation and stop harmful legislation at state level, or elect friendly school board candidates. Lawmakers and administrators require technical assistance to update their state’s standards and bolster public awareness, and educators desperate to give their students accurate information need professional development resources and support navigating attacks from extremist agitators.
To be sure, foundations have their hands full. Heightened attacks on civil liberties and bodily autonomy at every level of government have required funders to make tough choices. It may seem idealistic to propose investing in long-term strategies to safeguard democracy when so many issues and organizations need urgent support right now, for direct services and efforts to protect what remains of our access to abortion care and HIV prevention programs. As leaders at the helm of nonprofits, we understand what it means to make tough decisions. However, investments that bolster all of the issues and communities we care about are worth making. We urge funders to see sex education as the upstream investment that pays off now—in the well-being of our youth—while also safeguarding the future of our democracy.
By protecting and expanding access to sex education, funders will help raise a generation equipped to understand their bodies; navigate difficult conversations; and build strong, resilient communities. They will also lay the groundwork for a more progressive, more just society. What could be of more value?
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Independent Interviewers Expose How Mainstream Media Lets Politicians Off the Hook
Two recent podcasts demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from what serves as the conventional wisdom about Israel-Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass.
Aug 18, 2026
Two July podcasts hosted by progressive media stars and featuring leading Democratic lawmakers brought home the deep disconnect that exists between the way establishment politicians and media operate and the way both come to speak about the Middle East and the realities that exist in that region.
Late last month, Mehdi Hasan hosted Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on his podcast “Mehdi Unfiltered,“ while Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) joined Krystal Ball on her program “Breaking Points.” Because Warner is the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Smith is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, one might have expected more from them. The conversations were respectful, but neither of the lawmakers was prepared for the grilling they received from their respective hosts.
Both programs demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from what serves as the conventional wisdom about Israel-Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass. Two observations must be made: one is about the relationship that has come to exist between establishment politics and mainstream media; the other is how Israel-Palestine is playing out in the US.
One can see the incestuous relationship between political and media elites in full bloom at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. President Donald Trump has painted the media as “the enemy” and purveyors of “fake news,” establishing an adversarial relationship with the mainstream media. He can afford to do so because for the last 30 years far-right Republicans have set up their own multi-platform alternative media. They have their own TV networks, newspapers, social media sites (including Trump’s own “Truth Social”).
The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media.
In Washington, most politicians (liberal Democrats and centrist Republicans alike) and the mainstream media figures who report on them work and live in close proximity to one another. Their homes are in the same neighborhoods; they send their children to the same schools, attend the same houses of worship, and socialize together. There’s also a “revolving door” factor, as some former government officials leave their posts to become highly paid TV hosts or commentators, and some journalists leave their positions to accept government appointments.
At the White House correspondents’ dinner, “celebrities” from both of these worlds mingle. They throw polite jabs at one another, but their respective jobs require them to use the occasion to be seen and make contacts. This fraternization causes some in the media to temper their coverage—especially as, in the competitive world of today’s media, if a journalist aggressively crosses the wrong officials or breaks from conventional wisdom on a controversial issue of some importance, they may end up losing access to the officials they cover or even losing their positions.
This problem is most pronounced when it comes to media coverage of the Middle East. There’s no doubt that public opinion regarding Israel-Palestine has changed, but this isn’t the case when it comes to the media and political elites. For evidence one can point to polling data, votes in Congress, the number of elections in which critics of Israel have won, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that pro-Israel groups have poured into both defeating what they call “anti-Israel radicals” and attempting to influence the public discourse. But these two shows revealed the impact of the changes in other ways.
For example, when senior political figures from either party appear on major network TV shows to discuss the Middle East, the conversations are usually constrained by the uninformed conventional wisdom shared by both politicians and their interviewers. This is the case for two reasons. First, almost no major network media figures know the history, culture, or politics of the Middle East. For most reporters, that region’s history began the day they got the assignment. Even those who have spent years reporting on the Middle East tend to view it through the conflicts they’ve been assigned to cover or briefings they’ve received from policymakers, who in turn generally have no direct knowledge of the people impacted by their policies. And the stable of experts the networks regularly invite as commentators are largely former government officials who have failed in the past, learned no lessons from their mistakes, and therefore continue to propagate the same views that have defined their sad careers.
It’s much the same when we look at the way lawmakers approach the Middle East. Most are either ignorant about the region or its history or have “willed ignorance”—not wanting to know because the cliches of the conventional wisdom have served them well. Why make things complicated? “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” “Israel is an ally that protects US interests,” or a variation on “Israel wants peace, but the Arabs only want to destroy Israel.”
Regardless of what other Middle East-related issues elected officials are discussing, cliches like these form the backdrop to their thinking. Accepted wisdom shared by politicians and media alike. So when Rep. Smith and Sen. Warner sat down with interviews with Ball and Hasan, they were clearly unprepared to be grilled on: how the US can continue to provide advanced military support to Israel when it uses this aid in violation of international law; whether millions of dollars from pro-Israel super-PACs are negatively impacting our elections; or whether Palestinians should be guaranteed equal rights in Israel-Palestine.
For example, when Krystal Ball pressed Rep. Smith on why he would support a provision that would provide for Israel to co-produce weapons with the US military, he immediately fell back on the very tired cliche that since 1948 Arabs have been trying to destroy Israel. She reminded him of the expulsion of Palestinians and asked if he believed in equal rights and whether that applied to Palestinians’ right to return, he felt compelled to answer in the negative. He did so arguing that if Palestinians had equal rights, then Arabs might become the majority, and Israel would no longer be an ethno-national state.
Smith might have gotten away with these answers on a major network news program, but Krystal Ball was unwilling to accept the false historical narrative that has become the conventional wisdom. As she challenged him, it became clear that Smith was uneasy. He was no longer given a pass allowing him to remain in his comfort zone.
Much the same occurred between Mehdi Hasan and Sen. Warner. When Hasan asked Warner whether he would agree that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, he awkwardly sidestepped the question with a non sequitur saying that he wouldn’t use that term because he was concerned that it only served to fuel those who want to eliminate Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea!” Mehdi would have none of this nonsense and continued pressing the senator. Equally confounding were the senator’s convoluted evasions when he was asked whether he felt that campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee played a negative role in US politics.
Some evidence of the changing public mood on Israel did come through in both interviews since both lawmakers indicated that they were feeling enough public pressure forcing them to oppose some of the proposed Israeli military aid packages included in the new budget, but then displayed their lack of understanding by falling back on the “new conventional wisdom” of saying that they were doing so only because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the problem and they didn’t want to reward him.
The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media. They know the issues they cover, their questions aren’t scripted, and they are not afraid to challenge elites.
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The AI Emergency Is Already Here—and Progressives Must Confront It
Labor unions, climate organizations, peace movements, civil-rights groups, and progressive leaders must make democratic control of AI a central demand.
Aug 18, 2026
For most of my life, I have been involved in movements for social justice and political change. My work has confronted war, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and the recurring threat of fascism. It has taken me from organizing at home to the front lines throughout the world. I mention this history not to establish credentials, but to explain the weight of what I am about to say: The uncontrolled race to build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence is the most urgent threat humanity faces.
Many progressives still regard AI as a secondary issue—important, perhaps, but less immediate than war, climate catastrophe, attacks on immigrants, or the rise of authoritarianism. I once thought much the same. I no longer do.
AI is not separate from these struggles. It is an accelerant of them. It gives states powerful tools for mass surveillance, corporations new power over workers, propagandists fresh methods to manipulate reality, and militaries novel means to automate killing. The use of AI for targeting by Israel and the US in the genocide in Gaza is a stark warning. The physical infrastructure behind AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. And the race to create systems more capable than human beings could produce risks that make every other victory impossible to sustain.
The democratic control of advanced AI must therefore become a central progressive demand.
It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful.
For years, my wife has worked on questions surrounding AI: How it can be used wisely and what dangers it poses. Those dangers include job displacement, harm to children, autonomous weapons, and the concentration of extraordinary power. They also include the possibility of human extinction.
I understood these concerns in the abstract. Recent cybersecurity incidents made the danger concrete.
During a controlled evaluation, OpenAI gave advanced AI agents a difficult task in a testing environment that was secure—isolated from the open internet. Except it wasn’t. The agents found previously unknown vulnerabilities, escaped containment, and moved unheeded through OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure. No one noticed. The AI agents reached the internet and broke into several companies—all criminal felonies if done by a human—and stole data from Hugging Face, another AI infrastructure company. They created myriad copies of themselves and pretended to be human to obtain deceptive credentials along the way.
Last month, OpenAI researchers publicly shared information about this incident. It turns out that agents also left over 100,000 messages for one another on a secret shared message board inside OpenAI’s infrastructure about vulnerabilities and attack methods. The AI agents worked collectively and in coordination to achieve their aims, with some agents acting as managers delegating tasks to others for the sake of efficiency.
Anthropic, Mistral, and other companies have since publicly acknowledged that their models have also escaped their supposedly secure “sandboxes,” reached the internet, and gained unauthorized access to real organizations. Across companies and models, AI systems assigned simulated offensive tasks crossed intended boundaries and successfully infiltrated infrastructure that was hardened against cyberattacks.
This could have been catastrophic. What if the attack had been on the electric grid or water systems? Hospitals or banks? These powerful new AI agents overwhelmed the cyber security of the organizations they infiltrated.
These incidents do not prove that AI is conscious, evil, or secretly plotting against us. No such claim is necessary. The systems pursued the objectives they had been given with methods their creators did not anticipate or control. That is dangerous enough.
This problem is often called “the alignment problem:” Whether increasingly capable systems will reliably act according to human intentions, rather than pursue an objective in ways that humans did not anticipate. Alignment immediately raises a political question: aligned with whom? A system perfectly responsive to a dictator, military command, intelligence agency, or profit-seeking corporation may be profoundly misaligned with the needs of humanity.The companies leading this race are not democratic institutions. Their decisions are driven by competition, private ownership, and profit. They are building systems that could reorganize work, information, and political power without the consent of the people whose lives will be transformed.
Deliberate misuse by malign actors is a second serious problem. It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful. Even a perfectly obedient AI could place destructive capabilities in the hands of individuals, criminal networks, terrorist organizations, or governments.
Biology offers a sobering example. Scientists recently reported using generative AI to design complete viral genomes. Sixteen of the designs became functional bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—capable of killing strains of E. coli. Sure, the research could eventually help treat antibiotic-resistant infections. But it also demonstrates that AI can help move biological design from predicting life toward generating functional new forms of it. That should take your breath away.
Combined with automated laboratories and commercial DNA synthesis, increasingly capable models may allow a reckless or malicious actor to cause harm that once required the resources of a state. Well respected safety researchers worry that a broad scale biological attack could occur within years unless we act.
A third danger is the deliberate pursuit of artificial superintelligence: systems that surpass the best human beings not only in calculation and memory, but in scientific reasoning, strategy, persuasion, and technological development.
No one knows when such systems will be created. But the leading AI companies are organizing immense sums of money, energy, advanced chips, and human talent around that goal. We cannot dismiss the consequences as science fiction while the industry treats superintelligence as a business plan.
Creating intelligence vastly beyond our own would mean sharing the planet with something unprecedented—something potentially alien to human experience. We do not know whether we could control it or remain relevant to the decisions it makes. Assuming permanent obedience is not scientific confidence. It is an act of faith with the future of humanity at stake.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has begun to put this issue where it belongs: inside progressive politics. On April 29, 2026, Sanders convened American and Chinese AI experts at the US Capitol to discuss the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI. While much of Washington describes AI as another arms race with China, Sanders called for dialogue, common safety standards, and progress toward a treaty preventing uncontrollable superintelligence.
His position reflects a truth learned during the nuclear age. No nation can protect itself from a technology capable of producing catastrophe everywhere. This is internationalism applied to the defining technology of our time.
OpenAI recently offered a different and unsettling answer. They argued that as AI systems become more capable of offensive cyberattack, developers must build automated defensive cyber capabilities fast enough to stop them. In other words, the companies creating more powerful offensive systems ask us to trust them to create still more powerful systems as our primary defense. The answer to machines moving too quickly for human oversight is supposedly to remove more humans from the process and set machines against machines.
That is not governance. It is an arms race we will lose.
We do not need to abandon AI. Its benefits in medicine, science, accessibility, education, and translation are real. The choice is between democratic control and a reckless race whose participants acknowledge that they do not fully understand the systems they are creating.
The good news is that creating ever more powerful AI systems is not inevitable. It rests on physical infrastructure—and that creates points of democratic leverage.
The most powerful models require enormous clusters of advanced chips housed in large data centers. The supply chain for the highest-end chips is highly concentrated, and governments already track and regulate many of them through export controls. Large data centers need permits and grid connections. They need electricity, land, and water. These are not abstract lines of code floating beyond public reach. They are industrial projects dependent on public resources and public decisions.
Their footprint is already reshaping communities. The US Department of Energy estimates that data centers consumed about 4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and could consume as much as 12% by 2028. New facilities can strain grids, prolong dependence on fossil fuels, compete for water, and shift infrastructure costs onto ratepayers. Communities are often asked to approve tax breaks and utility commitments without knowing how much energy or water a project will use, what it will cost the public, or what AI systems it will power.
The growing local movements challenging data centers on water, electricity, climate, transparency, and cost are therefore part of the struggle over AI itself. But the policy demand must be precise. We should not call for an indiscriminate halt to every semiconductor or data center, which would sweep in hospitals, universities, communications networks, and ordinary computing. We should demand a moratorium on new facilities and chip deployments intended to train the largest frontier models unless and until their developers meet enforceable safety, environmental, labor, and transparency standards.
Training large new AI systems should require licenses and independent safety evaluations. Developers should have to disclose serious incidents, permit independent inspection, establish that their systems can be controlled before deployment, and accept legal responsibility for preventable harms. Data-center approvals should require full disclosure of energy and water use, climate effects, ratepayer costs, tax subsidies, and the computing purpose of the facility.
Biological safeguards must include restricted access to the most dangerous capabilities, screening of synthetic-DNA orders, oversight of automated laboratories, and enforceable international rules against AI-assisted biological weapons. And before any company attempts to build a system more intelligent and strategically capable than humanity, the burden must be on that company to prove—not merely promise—that it can be controlled.
Where safety cannot be demonstrated, development should pause.
These proposals will be called unrealistic. To the contrary, what is truly unrealistic is expecting corporations locked in a race for wealth and power to slow themselves at the precise moment restraint becomes necessary.
The warning is no longer theoretical. AI systems have breached secure boundaries in ways unanticipated by their builders and have acted on real infrastructure. AI has helped design functional viruses that did not previously exist. Meanwhile, industry is openly pursuing systems intended to surpass human intelligence and building an energy- and water-intensive infrastructure to support them.
AI policy cannot remain a specialist discussion among technologists, investors, and national-security officials. Labor unions, climate organizations, peace movements, civil-rights groups, and progressive leaders must make democratic control of AI a central demand.
We should heed the industry’s warnings—but reject its claim that only the industry can save us. The future of artificial intelligence, and perhaps much more, must not be left to the people racing to build it. The progressive movement must help the public assert its authority while we still can.
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The Century-Old Legal Fiction Costing America $35.5 Billion a Year
The international corporate tax system treats the subsidiaries of major corporations as independent businesses, allowing these companies to pay tax where they say and not where they actually play.
Aug 18, 2026
One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax.
Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, research, production, and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes that Apple's subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies. They are constituent parts of a single commercial enterprise.
Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.
That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It is routinely exploited to shift profits away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate.
No successful market is created by companies alone: It depends on public investment, functioning institutions, and the participation of millions of workers and consumers.
Taxing multinational corporations as the integrated businesses they actually are could generate an additional US$35.5 billion in corporate tax revenues for the United States every year—an increase of 12% in tax revenues from multinational corporations, without raising corporate tax rates. That is enough to fund current federal spending on renewable energy 45 times over and support an estimated 265,000 jobs.
The latest round of negotiations on the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation concluded in New York last week, putting one of the global tax system’s most entrenched rules squarely on the negotiating table. But while the session has ended, the fundamental choice confronting governments has not: whether the new framework will preserve rules that allow multinational profits to be separated from the places where economic activity actually occurs, or move toward a system that allocates taxing rights according to economic reality. For the United States, that is not an abstract question of international tax diplomacy. Billions of dollars in potential public revenue are at stake.
Behind those projected revenue gains lies one of the most consequential questions in the global economy: where governments are entitled to tax the profits of multinational corporations. Once a business is treated not as one integrated enterprise but as dozens of legally distinct entities, profits can be attributed across that corporate structure in ways that often bear only a limited relationship to where employees work, where customers live, and where the underlying economic activity takes place.
If Apple sells 1 million iPhones in the United States, few people would dispute that those sales depend on the American economy. Every iPhone sold relies not only on Apple's design and engineering, but also on consumers with the purchasing power to buy it, workers who market and service the product, infrastructure connecting businesses to markets, courts enforcing contracts, and the public investments that make economic activity possible.
Apple is only an illustration. The same principle applies to every multinational corporation whose success depends on workers, consumers, and public institutions spread across multiple countries.
Companies build products. Societies build the markets that make those products valuable. Prosperity depends on both. The question, then, is whether the international tax system should recognize where the economic activity that underpins those profits occurs.
With negotiations toward a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation set to continue in Nairobi, Kenya, later this year, governments still have an opportunity to rewrite a 100-year-old cornerstone of international corporate taxation. One proposal would treat multinational corporations as the integrated global businesses they actually are, rather than as collections of legally separate subsidiaries. Known technically as unitary taxation with formulary apportionment, it would allocate their profits among countries according to where genuine economic activity takes place.
Under today's rules, multinational corporations largely decide where profits are recorded within their own corporate structures, and those accounting choices largely determine where they pay tax. In effect, companies often pay tax where they say their profits arise—a system we describe as "pay where you say." The alternative now being negotiated at the United Nations would instead allocate taxing rights according to where companies actually play: where they employ workers, manufacture goods, provide services, and sell to customers. We call this "pay where you play."
This is not about increasing multinational corporations' tax rates. It is about deciding which governments have the primary claim to tax the profits those corporations already earn.
The implications extend well beyond the United States. A new study by Public Services International and the Tax Justice Network estimates that aligning taxing rights with where multinational corporations undertake their real economic activity could generate around US$500 billion in additional corporate tax revenues every year—equivalent to a 24% increase in the corporate tax currently collected from multinational companies. The gains would come not from higher tax rates, but from allocating taxing rights more accurately according to where real economic activity takes place.
Allocating taxing rights in this way would benefit countries across the income spectrum. Higher-income countries would receive the largest gains in absolute terms, while lower-income countries would experience the largest proportional increases because current international tax rules allocate them only a modest share of multinational tax revenues relative to the economic activity taking place within their borders. France, for example, would collect an additional US$25.5 billion in corporate tax each year, while Poland would gain US$5.7 billion. Kenya, meanwhile, would collect more than five times as much corporate tax under this approach, while Nigeria's revenues from multinationals would increase more than sevenfold. Those additional revenues could strengthen governments' ability to invest in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and climate resilience, while responding to economic shocks from a position of greater fiscal security.
Yet the strongest argument for reform is not the scale of the projected revenue gains. It is that the proposal corrects a century-old foundational error, bringing international tax rules into closer alignment with how multinational businesses and the economies that sustain them function. After all, no successful market is created by companies alone: It depends on public investment, functioning institutions, and the participation of millions of workers and consumers. If multinational profits emerge from this shared economic endeavor across many countries, the rules determining where those profits are taxed should recognize that reality rather than privilege the legal and accounting artifices that determine where profits appear on paper.
The principle that multinational corporations should pay where they play would replace that legal fiction with rules more faithful to how the modern economy actually works. The real anomaly, then, is not how multinational corporations operate, but that the international tax system remains the last custodian of a fiction that every other area of economic governance has long since moved beyond.
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