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Opinion
The Rotten Stench of Elon Musk's Political Money
The mega-billionaire's promise to spend somewhere between $100 and $120 million on congressional races this year shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It should be recognized as an opportunity.
Aug 03, 2026
Elon Musk will be spending $100 million to $120 million in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to The New York Times.
Musk’s spending is set to begin next month, targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, and potentially North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Musk will also spend in House races in states including California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
The money won’t be spent only on TV advertising. Musk’s “America PAC” is lining up firms that focus on knocking on voters’ doors. Fake grassroots.
But Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.
A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Recall that Musk spent millions of dollars on a pivotal election for Wisconsin’s highest court in April 2025. It pitted Musk’s candidate — Trump-endorsed former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel — against progressive Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. The winner would determine the supermajority of the court.
Schimel lost, largely due to Musk’s support — which backfired. The public was outraged that the richest person in the world was spending some of his massive wealth on the election. They also recoiled at the wreckage Musk wrought at DOGE. And his unbridled racism.
In Crawford’s victory speech, she acknowledged the significance of Musk’s money to the outcome of the race. “As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”
She described the election as a victory over an “unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” adding “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
Musk’s support will backfire again this year, in race after race — if voters know about it.
So let’s make it a kind of smell test for any Republican that Musk and his “America PAC” are supporting. A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Keep your nose to the ground. If you get a whiff of Musk, alert your family, friends, neighbors, and associates. If they’re even slightly uncertain about whom to support, the Musk test should convince them.
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How a Manufactured War Scare Could Produce a $50 Million Insider Windfall
Advance knowledge of both a military threat and its cancellation could allow politically connected traders to profit from the oil market twice—first from the panic, then from its disappearance.
Aug 03, 2026
Military threats move markets before they move armies. Announce a massive strike against Iranian oil, military, and infrastructure sites, and traders will immediately begin pricing in damaged production, regional retaliation, interrupted shipping, higher insurance costs, and possible disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. No missile needs to be launched. The announcement itself can add a substantial geopolitical premium to every barrel of oil.
Cancel the attack a few days later, however, and much of that premium may disappear just as quickly. Oil prices fall as traders conclude that the threatened supply disruption will not occur.
For ordinary investors, this is an exceptionally dangerous sequence. They must guess whether the threat is credible, whether an attack will happen, how much damage it might cause, whether Iran will retaliate, and how long any disruption will last. But for someone possessing advance knowledge of both the threat and its prearranged cancellation, the same sequence could provide an extraordinary opportunity to profit from a government-created price movement in both directions.
Consider a hypothetical political-corruption scheme.
Before the threat is announced, politically connected insiders go long 1,000 crude-oil futures contracts at $75 per barrel. A standard crude-oil futures contract represents 1,000 barrels, so 1,000 contracts provide exposure to one million barrels of oil. At $75 per barrel, the position has a notional value of $75 million.
This hypothetical identifies a corruption risk that should not be dismissed merely because it does not resemble the traditional envelope of cash passed beneath a table.
The traders do not necessarily put up the entire $75 million. Futures are leveraged instruments. Depending on prevailing exchange requirements, broker rules, and market volatility, a position of that size might require roughly $9 million in initial collateral, although a broker could demand considerably more for such a concentrated and conspicuous trade.
Then comes the public announcement: a massive military strike is imminent.
Television networks display maps of Iranian oil facilities. Analysts speculate about retaliation. Commentators warn that the Strait of Hormuz could be closed. Traders who had bet on lower oil prices rush to cover their short positions, while momentum buyers pile into the market out of fear that oil will soon become still more expensive.
Suppose the price rises from $75 to $100 per barrel.
The insiders close their 1,000 long contracts. A $25 increase across one million barrels produces a gross profit of $25 million.
But they are not finished.
Knowing the military threat is scheduled to be withdrawn, they immediately reverse direction and sell short 1,000 contracts at $100. To the public, the crisis appears to be intensifying. To the insiders, the ending is already known.
A few days later, the attack is canceled. With the immediate threat to oil production receding, the geopolitical premium collapses and oil falls from $100 back to $75. The insiders buy back the 1,000 contracts they previously sold short, earning another $25 million.
The two trades produce a combined gross profit of approximately $50 million. Measured against the roughly $9 million initially posted as collateral, that is about a 556% gross return. Not bad.
That figure should not be confused with a risk-free return on an ordinary $9 million investment. Technically, the traders would still control positions with notional values ranging from $75 million to $100 million. Futures margin requirements might rise. Prices could temporarily move against them. A broker might require additional collateral. A position of 1,000 contracts could attract regulatory scrutiny, although that possibility could be alleviated.
Inside information would not make those risks literally disappear. It would, however, radically reduce the central uncertainty facing everyone else: that is, which direction the market will move after each announcement. Knowing both turning points would make the enormous notional exposure far less worrisome than it would be to an ordinary trader.
Who pays for the insiders’ profits?
During the first phase, traders who had previously sold oil short may be forced to buy back their contracts as prices rise. Those purchases can accelerate the spike and provide liquidity for insiders closing profitable long positions near the top.
During the second phase, the losses fall on investors who buy after hearing the military threat. These late buyers are not necessarily irrational. They are reacting to public information supplied by government officials and to the genuine possibility of war, damaged infrastructure, and interrupted oil supplies. But they do not know that the threat is scripted to disappear.
When the attack is canceled and oil falls, those buyers are left holding the bag. Their losses become the economic counterpart of the insiders’ second profit.
What appears to the public as an unfolding geopolitical emergency therefore appears to the insider as a price chart whose two principal turning points have been conveniently set.
This hypothetical does not establish that any particular official, relative, donor, associate, or political ally has executed such trades. Suspicion is not proof. A serious allegation would require trading records, beneficial-ownership information, communications, financial disclosures, and evidence connecting traders to those controlling the announcements. Examining such records could be discouraged.
What appears to the public as an unfolding geopolitical emergency therefore appears to the insider as a price chart whose two principal turning points have been conveniently set.
This hypothetical identifies a corruption risk that should not be dismissed merely because it does not resemble the traditional envelope of cash passed beneath a table.
Government officials possess the power to create market-moving information. Military threats, sanctions, tariff announcements, regulatory decisions, and abrupt policy reversals can generate billions of dollars in gains and losses within hours. When advance notice of those actions is shared selectively—or when public policy is manipulated for private profit—the government itself becomes the instrument of market manipulation.
That possibility demands safeguards: timely disclosure of officials’ financial interests, meaningful restrictions on trading by senior policymakers and their households, scrutiny of unusual commodity positions surrounding major announcements, preservation of relevant communications, and investigation of accounts whose beneficial owners may be concealed behind partnerships, trusts, or shell entities.
The central question is not whether a hypothetical insider could make money from a manufactured crisis. The arithmetic shows that the opportunity is obvious.
The question is whether anyone with access to the script could begin trading before the public learns how the drama will end.
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Who Will Govern Humanity's New Cognitive Infrastructure?
Because AI does not recognize national borders, its governance cannot remain confined within them.
Aug 02, 2026
Humanity faces no shortage of challenges. Wars continue to claim lives, climate change threatens the stability of our ecosystems, and growing economic inequality undermines social cohesion. Now another transformative force has entered the global stage: artificial intelligence.
Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI is not simply another tool. It has the potential to reshape economies, education, science, healthcare, communication, and political decision-making. Properly governed, it could become one of humanity’s greatest allies in addressing the crises we already face. Poorly governed, it could deepen inequality, intensify geopolitical rivalry, and create entirely new existential risks.
This is why governments, scientists, and international organizations are increasingly debating not only how AI should be developed, but who should govern it.
A remarkable convergence is emerging across very different parts of the world. Despite profound political and cultural differences, major international initiatives increasingly describe AI as a technology whose significance extends far beyond commercial innovation.
At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, participating nations adopted the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, calling for human-centered, inclusive, and accessible artificial intelligence guided by the principle of Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya—”Welfare for all, Happiness for all.”
Only months later, at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an international AI governance framework based on four principles: openness and shared benefit; security and meaningful human control; inclusion through learning among civilizations; and solidarity through multilateral governance. China increasingly presents AI not merely as an industry, but as foundational infrastructure capable of shaping civilization itself.
A third initiative emerged from a very different direction. On July 16, more than 200 Nobel laureates, scientists, diplomats, and global leaders signed the Rome Declaration, calling simultaneously for a coordinated slowdown in the development of frontier AI and the verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons. Their concern is that humanity is approaching two technological frontiers whose interaction could prove catastrophic.
That concern was captured during the Rome conference, organized by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the Global Nobel Assembly, and the Vatican. In an interview afterward, former IPPNW President Dr. Ira Helfand summarized the challenge in six words:”Don’t Let AI Get the Bomb.”
The slogan captures perhaps today’s most urgent AI governance challenge: preventing artificial intelligence from becoming integrated into nuclear command-and-control systems. Delegates warned that combining autonomous decision-making with nuclear weapons would dramatically increase the risk of accidental or unintended nuclear war.
The United States, meanwhile, has largely approached AI through three priorities: maintaining technological leadership, fostering commercial innovation, and strengthening national security. This strategy has fueled extraordinary investment and rapid technological progress, but it also raises an important question: Can competition among corporations and geopolitical rivals coexist with the international cooperation required to govern a technology that transcends national borders?
Taken together, these initiatives reveal something remarkable. India emphasizes human welfare, China stresses multilateral coordination, the Rome Declaration warns of existential risk, and the United States prioritizes innovation and strategic leadership. Although they differ substantially in emphasis, each recognizes that artificial intelligence has become too consequential to be treated as merely another commercial technology.
Yet none fully answers the central political question. If AI is becoming a global cognitive infrastructure, who should legitimately determine the rules under which it develops? Should they be negotiated primarily among governments? Set by technology companies? Driven by military priorities? Or should the people whose lives will be transformed by these systems have a meaningful voice in shaping them?
The economic trajectory of AI also remains uncertain. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into chips, data centers, and computing infrastructure, while predictions of rapid, large-scale job displacement remain largely speculative. Similar forecasts accompanied earlier technological revolutions—from the internet to autonomous vehicles—yet history suggests that technological transformation often unfolds more gradually, and in less predictable ways, than initial expectations.
History also reminds us that foundational technologies rarely develop along a single path. During the early internet era, proprietary systems appeared poised to dominate. Yet open-source software, especially Linux, ultimately became the backbone of much of the world’s digital infrastructure. AI may evolve similarly, with proprietary and open-source models coexisting and competing for influence.
The central question, therefore, is not simply who will build the most powerful AI, but who will establish the principles governing humanity’s emerging cognitive infrastructure.
Roads shape how people move. Electrical grids shape how societies generate and distribute energy. The internet transformed how humanity exchanges information. Artificial intelligence may become the infrastructure through which humanity increasingly learns, creates, communicates, and even makes collective decisions. If that is the case, the challenge before us is no longer merely technological. It is ethical, political, and civilizational.
Every major infrastructure eventually required public institutions, shared rules, and democratic accountability because its effects extended far beyond its original creators. A global cognitive infrastructure should be no different. Because AI does not recognize national borders, its governance cannot remain confined within them.
This may become humanity’s first truly global democratic challenge. Will the rules be written primarily by governments, military establishments, and technology corporations? Or will they emerge through meaningful participation by scientists, educators, workers, artists, civil society organizations, and citizens across every continent?
Just as previous generations fought to establish human rights, democratic institutions, and international law, ours may be called upon to establish the principles that govern intelligence itself. Those principles should rest on human dignity, transparency, shared knowledge, international cooperation, and a commitment to the well-being of all humanity.
The question is no longer simply how we regulate artificial intelligence. It is who will govern the cognitive infrastructure through which humanity increasingly exercises its collective intelligence. The answer will shape not only the future of AI, but the future of civilization itself.
This article was first published on Pressenza and is also available in Spanish.
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A FIFA World Cup and a Village's Stolen Dream
While the world celebrated football at its highest level during the World Cup, one small village has been left without the field that connected generations to the game.
Aug 02, 2026
In the middle of the global celebration of football, when stadiums are full, screens are glowing, and millions are watching the World Cup, a small Palestinian village near Bethlehem experienced something very different.
Battir lost its only football field.
For most of the world, football is entertainment. In Battir, it is something else entirely—it is space, identity, and a rare place where young people can breathe beyond the pressures of daily life.
The field was not a stadium. It had no grandstands, no giant screens, and no professional facilities. It was a simple community pitch. Yet for generations of children and young people in Battir, it meant everything. It was where they played after school, where friendships were built, where confidence grew, and where dreams quietly took shape.
Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.
The field itself was not new. It had existed since the early 1980s and had served the village for more than four decades.
I grew up playing there.
One of my earliest memories is returning home covered in mud after a rainy afternoon match, exhausted but happy. Like many children around the world, I fell in love with football while watching my first FIFA World Cup in 1982, when Spain hosted the tournament. The game became part of my childhood, and the field became part of my life.
Football accompanied me through school, university, and adulthood. Between 2009 and 2016, while serving as secretary of Battir Sports Club, I helped organize annual Ramadan football tournaments on the same field. These competitions brought together local teams and became cherished community events. The field also welcomed visitors from abroad and served as a meeting point where sport connected people across cultures and backgrounds.
For many years, residents hoped to improve the field. In 2022, Battir Sports Club, Battir Municipality, and members of the local community launched a project to rehabilitate the existing facility. The goal was not to build a completely new football ground, but to upgrade a long-standing community space with artificial turf, lighting, changing rooms, and basic infrastructure. The vision was simple: to provide a safe and dignified place where both boys and girls could participate in sport.
For a village that had waited decades to improve its only football field, the project represented hope.
That hope came to an abrupt end on June 30, 2026, when Israeli authorities demolished the field following orders that halted rehabilitation works. What disappeared that day was not merely a construction project. It was a community space that had shaped the lives of generations.
Battir Football Field is demolished. (Photo by Mahmoud Al-Butmeh)
The demolition did not make international headlines. There were no cameras, no commentary panels, and no countdown clocks. But for the children and young people who used the field, the loss was immediate and deeply felt. A place once filled with movement, laughter, and possibility became empty ground.
In a place like Battir, there are few alternatives. There are no nearby facilities waiting to replace what was lost. When one space disappears, it is not easily replaced. It simply vanishes from everyday life.
The timing is difficult to ignore. While the world celebrated football at its highest level during the World Cup, one small village has been left without the field that connected generations to the game.
Football, in its global form, is about glory, competition, and spectacle. But in places like Battir, it is about something more basic: the right to play, the right to gather, and the right to feel normal for a moment.
What remains now is not only an empty field, but also a question that lingers in the community: Where do the children go next?
This is not just a story about a football field. It is a story about how everyday spaces shape childhood, how communities invest hope in shared places, and how quickly those places can disappear.
And it is a reminder that while the World Cup shows us football at its peak, there are places where the game survives only in memory—and in the hope that one day it might return.
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De-ICE Citizens Bank: A Model of a Successful Civil Resistance Campaign
The grassroots effort was a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies; by chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
Aug 02, 2026
Just as a great loaf of bread requires the right ingredients to rise, a winning civil resistance campaign needs three essentials to rise up: a compelling vision, broad community engagement, and a spark for action.
The De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign had all these ingredients, which is why it succeeded in forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group, operating dozens of detention centers for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Rhode Island bank severed its ties in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the country.
Hundreds of rallies, faith-led actions, shareholder demands, billboard and flyover campaigns, and withering financial pressure—withdrawals totaling $380 million, with more still happening—created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.
It is a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies. By chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
“No, Citizens Bank won’t credit you at all for its decision, but it is what it is,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, during a 10-minute segment on the campaign win in late July. “Actions have consequences, including when you work hard, when you organize, and when you decide to just never give up.
"And then the day does come when you win.”
It Started With One Person
This civil resistance story began with a single person, a woman in Texas, taking a stand. She didn’t carry a protest sign or march alone. She built a website.
Horrified by ICE’s mass incarceration campaign early last year, research-nerd activist Laura Berlin, a mother of two teenagers, built a website, boycottcitizens.org, to expose Citizens Bank’s role.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
Drawing on Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other documents, the website showed Citizen’s duplicity, loan-by-loan, year-by-year. Still, the website didn’t get much attention when it was launched 13 months ago, only a dozen or so views a day in the first few months.
That all changed in January when ICE’s aggressive crackdown sparked and exploded. Just as a dozen Northeast activists were organizing their first coordinated protest day against Citizens Ban—an effort of the new De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition—mother and poet Renee Good was gunned down January 7 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Campaign interest and traffic on Berlin’s website took off. When Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed 17 days later in the same city, momentum skyrocketed.
And It Kept Growing
On January 24, the campaign held three-dozen rallies in six states. By March, there were 70 protests in a dozen states. Three months later, 140 protests were organized nationwide, drawing in thousands of regular people angry about an immigration crackdown that has booked and detained more than 600,000 people, 66,000 of whom have been deported.
As protests swelled, coalition members brought new partners into the campaign. One brought in a key union group and activist students at Brown University. Others brought in faith groups. Dozens of local Indivisible groups also joined, including a Rightful Resistance group in New York City that specialized in billboard campaigns.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a powerful faith group with deep historic ties to Citizens Bank, was an especially important partner.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
In the early 2000s, GBIO teamed up with Citizens to offer a financial literacy program for its immigrant members around Boston. The bank also lowered fees for immigrants sending remittances to their families. “We were proud to bank with Citizens, and I was proud to be a member of the bank’s board of directors at that time,” wrote Rev. Ray Hammond, a key GBIO leader, in a recent column.
By winter 2026, the good vibes were over.
In early March, GBIO sent a letter to the bank requesting it cut financial ties with the prison companies. In April, Hammond and other shareholders confronted Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun at the bank’s annual meeting in Providence. As Van Saun answered questions about reputation and legal risks, hundreds of protesters, young and old, sang and chanted loudly outside. They also pledged to withdraw their deposits if changes were not made.
The financial pressure campaign, "Not with Our Money, Citizens," came at a key moment. While rallies and billboards boosted awareness and sullied the bank’s reputation, the campaign now had a lever to harm the bank financially.
Within a few weeks, GBIO and the coalition had mobilized $20 million in withdrawal pledges by churches, synagogues, nonprofits, and individual customers angered by the bank’s role in bankrolling prisons. By May, GBIO had pulled $2 million of its deposits, while a similar faith organization in Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Congregations, was threatening to do the same.
Millions of withdrawals may sound like a lot, but it’s relatively small for a bank like Citizens, with $233 billion in assets. At weekly meetings, coalition members brainstormed how it could increase the financial bleeding—to turn those millions into hundreds of millions.
New Jersey Takes a Stand
The answer came in June and the spark came from New Jersey. After weeks of hunger strikes and protests at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall ICE prison in Newark, municipalities started fighting back. The first blow was Jersey City’s June 7 vote to close its accounts with Citizens and pull all $276 million of its deposits.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
One month later, Montclair, New Jersey did the same—another $91 million in deposits out the door. And other communities, including Bloomfield and Hoboken, were looking to follow suit.
Three days after Montclair’s vote, Citizens Bank called it quits. With no public fanfare, it released a statement to a Boston Globe reporter saying, “Citizens has determined that it is now appropriate to exit the credit facilities for these clients.”
The bank called it a ‘business decision,” while repeatedly downplaying the role of activists.
We know better.
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How Living in a 'Digital First' World Has Made Our Lives Smaller
We are stuck in info-bureaucracies—just like real-life bureaucracies, only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal.
Aug 02, 2026
Drowning in my usual sea of online media saturation, I recently spotted an article in The Boston Globe that validated a long but increasingly less lonely quest against the perils of technocracy. It focused on a security safeguard we all know and love: two factor authentication and how it’s driving most of us bonkers:
How hard can it be to grab your phone, retrieve a six-digit code, and type it in—seemingly the simplest task in the world—to avoid, oh, having your bank account emptied, your identity stolen, or yourself rendered a kind of stateless person, adrift without access to your own life? Don’t get Thomas Lee, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician, started. “Two-factor authentication is sapping my will to live,” he said. Or litigator Kara Thorvaldsen. “It’s the bane of my existence,” she said. “Every time my husband tries to log into NESN, it somehow requires me to get a code and unlock something with Face ID, etc., etc., ad nauseam.” Or Kim Smith, a playwright, an actor, and an empty nester. “Sometimes the only reason I hear from my [youngest] daughter is when she needs the code that’s been sent to my phone,” she said. As porch pirate thefts mount, residents feel besieged. As two-factor—or, even worse, multifactor—authentication becomes inescapable, it’s safe to say that somewhere in America, a spouse is shouting from another room, “Did you get my code?” An employee can’t get into his work platform because he left his phone at the gym, or thinks he did. And an adult child is trying to help her cognitively faltering parents pay a bill, but can’t, for lack of that darn code.
Not a pretty picture but one that we all know all too well. For some reason, it got me thinking about T.S Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," a masterwork. In one of the more memorable lines, a disillusioned elderly man complains to himself muttering: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” He was basically lamenting that he has let himself be lulled into a diminutive humdrum existence—characterized by small and inconsequential actions making his own narrow life feel smaller and smaller.
This line keeps surfacing in my ruminations about our culture’s slow steady march into some kind of technocratic dystopia—a digital panopticon where we all peck our way through life… where every action, gesture, word, deed, or genetic footprint is recorded and—a more alarming trend of late—presumably watched. In a curious inversion, this humdrum and plodding digital existence has turned out to be the precise opposite of the “machines of loving grace” meme introduced decades ago by another poet, Richard Brautigan—one often quoted by the techno-utopians who are now in charge of… well… almost everything it seems. Then I came across a similar lament from Alex Ross writing in The New Yorker:
You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your email is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing… Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. AI systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant 10-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.
Living our collective cultural experience by “measuring our life in coffee spoons” seems to resonate perfectly. We seem to be in some kind of number punching purgatory like the four sad corporate drones struggling to reclaim their humanity in the popular TV series Severance. We click away and are hypnotized by our screens. We overdose on mandatory cuteness courtesy of goofy cartoonish emojis and robot figures that some programmer seems to think is going to brighten our day.
Red Lights and Info-bureaucracies
As a thought experiment, I started musing about how much of my own time is frittered away on digital trivia. Elaborate verification processes just to use basic services. Endlessly punching numbers and codes into phones and computers and often reaching a dead end. The constant use of codes just to access our own stuff as if in some kind of military intelligence operation. Forcing us to constantly look over our shoulder about being hacked. (Is my life savings still there today?) Frequent visits to customer service hell which are only going to get worse as more and more AI chatbots get added to the mix by clueless companies. (Why is it that many popular companies can’t seem to figure out that customer service is the heart of their business?) Waiting on infinite hold because we might refuse to talk to some cartoon-like chatbot that’s clueless about dealing with anything with the slightest bit of complexity. (Wasn’t AI supposed to be “smart”? Or do companies just like to use “dumb AI” when it suits their purpose?)
I call the framework for these experiential trips to digital purgatory info-bureaucracies. They’re like real-life bureaucracies—only much more effective at giving us the runaround, wasting time, and conditioning us to accept the absurd as normal like the poor souls in Terry Gilliam’s strange but prescient movie Brazil. So here we are frittering away our already scarce and valuable time on these mindless digital chores when we could be doing things that enrich and sustain our lives.
Now that we’re rapidly moving to an “AI first” world, we won’t even be able to navigate these info-bureaucracies ourselves. Unfortunately, this will probably get worse before it gets better. Tech-enamored companies are increasingly using AI agents for customer service and the results are horrendous. Being able to speak to a human agent means mastering different workarounds for every 800 number you might have to call. And we can easily spend hours of our day on hold listening to someone else’s mind-numbing idea of snazzy music.
I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices.
Years ago, studies were done to determine how much time Americans spent waiting for red lights. According to some researchers, people in the US spend about 300 hours a year driving, a significant portion of which is spent waiting for traffic lights. One research organization calculated that this “comes up to a whopping four months of your life if you drive seven days a week for 50 years.”
Of course, arguably, this is simply one of the inconveniences we tolerate as expected time wasted in the complicated business of contemporary living. But I couldn’t help but think how much of our valuable quality time we now waste on the continual care and feeding of our Lilliputian-like digital lives. And how much already scarce quality time is also being spent on meaningless tasks plodding through digital labyrinths designed to increase corporate profit; unburden huge corporations from the anguish of having to hire more customer-service staff; and save them time while, of course, wasting ours.
More often than not, the AI agents we encounter turn out to be quite stupid by any human metric. I can assure you from years of working in high tech that companies unquestionably have the technical ability to provide much more user-friendly systems. But this isolation from human agents is intentional and serves their own interests. Many customers just give up trying to fix order problems and take a financial hit out of frustration. And these are vital systems of daily life. We’re talking about essential services such as banking, credit card transactions, paying taxes, and other functions. And once you’re in the tech soup, you’re forced to stay there if the matter is important enough.
Henry David Thoreau admonished us to “simplify, simplify.” But how can we accomplish this as the digital maze envelops us? I believe that—right now—we’re at a unique crossroads in history where we have a window of opportunity to shape the future and our quality of life. But this may involve some hard choices. I believe that Americans are intuiting this, and the AI data center pushback is a healthy and hopeful expression of this.
Another great American poet, Wendell Berry, captured it well. In “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” Berry said: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” It seems clear that this is the unavoidable existential choice we now face. We have to decide what kind of world we want to live in and then summon all the agency we can muster to bring it about.
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USDA Agribusiness Integration With Israel Subsidizes Settler Expansionism
While Congress advances the US-Israeli military integration plan, Israel and the US attempt to expand their “soft power” through agritechnology development across the region.
Aug 02, 2026
Congress’ proposed National Defense Authorization Act’s Section 219 ‘US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative’ would require the countries to expand intelligence sharing and grow joint weapons research and production, including artificial intelligence surveillance, lethal drones, arms, tanks, and munitions. This comes as Israel’s military decimation of Gaza, apartheid rule over the West Bank, and occupation of southern Lebanon have triggered opposition across the world. Meanwhile, a more subtle, parallel violence grows in the form of US-funded Israeli agricultural occupation of Palestinian lands. This partnership expands Israel’s regional control spatially and financially, with US backing, but with little public knowledge.
Three years into the deliberate starvation of Gaza, the US and Israel have expanded and entrenched their longstanding agricultural cooperation through the US-Israeli Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD-ISUS). Despite global allegations of genocide against Palestine, weaponizing hunger and even of food aid itself, BARD-ISUS just approved $13.2M US for research and development of Israeli agritech on Palestinian lands.
Established in 1978 by the US and Israeli governments, BARD-ISUS has granted a total of nearly $430 million USD (as of 2024) to over 1,700 projects. In the US, the USDA Agricultural Research Service is on 19% of projects and top universities include University of California Davis (11% of projects); Cornell University (7%); and University of Florida (5%). Universities or public agencies in 48 US states (all except Alaska and North Dakota) have hosted hundreds of BARD-ISUS grants over decades. Nearly $84 million USD has gone to research grants partnering with California land grant institutions alone. The US Farm Bill has allocated additional funds to BARD-ISUS to go directly to agritech research, but also to fund Israeli postdoctoral fellows to be placed at US universities and Israeli graduate students to conduct research with US teams.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives version of the Farm Bill (HR 7567—Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026), tucks in a proposed expansion of BARD to signatories of the Abraham Accords—a 2020 mechanism by which the Trump regime pressures regional countries to normalize relations with Israel, in this case with additional promises for hundreds of millions of dollars of agritech transfer. The House passed another bipartisan amendment (H.R.7587 United States-Israel Agriculture Cooperation Improvement and Expansion Act) reiterating the expansion of BARD to Abraham Accord signatories, which also fast tracks commercialization of ag tech research in and with Israeli institutions and companies, while expanding the overall budget of BARD to $12M each year until 2030. The US Senate Committee on Agriculture has approved the extension of BARD-ISUS funding until 2031, with an allocation of $20 million per year ($80 million overall), atop the lucrative annual proceedings BARD receives from its $110 million endowment. Tellingly, as of 2020, BARD funding can now go to Israeli agricultural research projects in the West Bank’s Area C and the occupied Golan Heights.
The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty.
While BARD research appears at first glance to be apolitical “basic science” efforts to “improve crop productivity and resilience,” their website contains no mention of Palestine, or even euphemistic mentions of conflicts over land in the region. The well-funded BARD-ISUS has “generated a multitude of agricultural innovations, practices, and patents, impacting economies, industries, academia, and human health in both countries and beyond, with a high return on investment”—a claim that erases Palestinian land and agriculture, and distracts from the violence of settler occupation and genocide.
This year’s BARD grants were the “the highest funding amount awarded in the last 20 years,” indicating an entrenchment of US and Israeli academia and agrobiotech industries. The domestic relevance for this BARD expansion becomes acute amid the Farm Bill’s deference to the 2025 HR 1’s $187 Billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Even atop the ongoing deprivations in Gaza, BARD expansion comes as millions of people in the US in need are being kicked off SNAP, USDA employees are facing mass layoffs, and US farmers are reeling from the impacts that US and Israel’s attacks on Iran have had on fertilizers and fuel prices. Increasing funding for Israeli ag tech redirects resources away from urgent domestic agrifood needs.
The BARD-ISUS expansion also comes at a time when Israel and the US rapidly expand their targeting and destruction of not just Palestinian food systems and agricultural production, but rural and agrarian communities across Southwest Asia, in what Paul Kohlbry has termed “agrarian annihilation.” Israel continues to target Palestinian and Lebanese farmers and food systems, from the deliberate starvation of Gaza documented by international law and global civil society to the destruction of farms and waterways in the Occupied West Bank and now southern Lebanon. Israeli forces, funded by the US, continue to attack Palestinian villages, destroy agricultural lands, capture waterways, and kill farmers and pastoralists throughout the West Bank—with settler attacks hitting an “all-time high” in July 2026 according to the United Nations. The West Bank’s Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills have long endured Israeli settlements and violence—all of which have proliferated in recent years and especially in recent months. In the Jordan Valley, where an estimated 65,000 Palestinians farm some of the most fertile land in the West Bank, B’Tselem has recorded repeated demolitions of Palestinian water cisterns—structures that families build to collect rainwater because they are legally barred from connecting to piped water networks.
The expansion of USDA-funded agritechnologies—and BARD pressure for corporate commercialization—undermines the viability of Palestinian and Lebanese food security and food sovereignty; unchecked, it jeopardizes the long-term stability and viability of rural communities in the region who are increasingly displaced with these US-subsidized high-tech ag research projects. Rather than establish accountability for Israeli forces’ years of deliberate famine in Gaza, such funding subsidizes more land dispossession and obscures the well-documented starvation of Palestine with claims of agribiotechnology research for Global Food Security. BARD-ISUS just launched a new Food Security Technology Accelerator to “support collaborative R&D projects between Israeli and American agritech researchers and corporations, so as to “foster innovation in food security.” How can the countries responsible for massive food insecurity and famine across the region claim to be able to “foster food security”?
While Congress advances the US-Israeli military integration plan, Israel and the US attempt to expand their “soft power” through agritechnology development across the region. The funding increase to BARD-ISUS and expansion of eligibility to Abraham Accords nations indicate a coercion of regional powers to normalize relations with Israel at a time of mass popular support for Palestinian sovereignty. This would deploy more USDA funds to agritech development in countries willing to support an Israeli regime perpetrating genocide in Palestine, invading Lebanon, and initiating a war with Iran. In short, this USDA multimillion dollar agribusiness integration with Israel subsidizes expansionism and impunity—further undermining any authentic peace in the region.
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Grief Is a Haunted House
The following column, called “Haunted House,” was written in November 1999, about a year after my wife died of pancreatic cancer.
Aug 02, 2026
Let’s go back a quarter century or so. Join me as I open up aa piece of the past, which I keep stored in containers on my computer, also known as old columns. I became curious about these oldies after I survived a vicious storm and temporary power outage the other day, and only missed the tornado that hit northeastern Wisconsin by a few miles.
Turns out I take electricity for granted! It was out in my retirement community apartment for about eight hours. I also take my personal safety for granted. As I browsed through some of my earliest columns, I also started thinking—up close—about life itself. The following column, called “Haunted House,” was written in November 1999, about a year after my wife died of pancreatic cancer. Here it is.
Haunted House
When my wife died, I spent my first month of mourning disentangling the house from its ghosts and clutter.
I was suddenly appalled at what a wreck the place was. Even under ordinary circumstances, we had fought a losing battle against miscellany. We shoved stuff into corners; chaos bestrewed itself with an easy shrug across every available surface of our lives. After a year of cancer—with such urgent matters as pain management, constipation relief, and a quest for miracles claiming every moment of our attention—all order in the house was shattered.
Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was.
I set to the task of cleaning and reorganizing more out of numb instinct than reawakened guilt. I needed a challenge, and this one was Herculean. But even more than that, I sensed that putting myself back together was somehow connected to putting the house back together.
I was at Barbara’s bedside when she died. I held her hand and watched her suffering dissolve in the last hour of her life; her ragged breathing grew calm and the pain furrows on her face loosened. A sudden cloudburst out the window caused me to glance up. When I looked back, her breathing had stopped. That was it. Death came as a gift of peace.
Despite its reputation, death, it turns out, is kind.
It helps to know this. It helps to know the only suffering, after the fact, is yours, the survivor’s; the only sharp edges are around the hole in your own life. But this can be endured, even welcomed. If there had been no great love, the ache would be small. So to me, grief in its intensity, the broken tear ducts—the downpour that came, for instance, when my daughter placed Mother’s Day presents, bubble bath, talcum powder, in Barbara’s still arms—is love all at once, love no longer paid out slowly, over the life of a marriage, but here now with the force of gravity. After death, love is a falling into her absence, not her presence. And that’s what grief is.
And cleaning the house my wife no longer lived in was a continuation of this, a falling in love all over again—a falling in love with the worn and familiar. As I began disturbing the settled dust, crawling around in three stories and 15 years of married life, I soon realized that everything I touched—this tumble of old letters and frayed linen, castaway toys and defunct appliances—was charged with Barbara’s absence. I wasn’t merely restoring order to a house, I was freeing the past, setting its genies scampering.
Basement storage: Cardboard box crammed with travel brochures and misfolded maps, the moldy remnants of trips spanning two decades. Out tumble Missouri and the Berkshires and Urquhart Castle and Kettle Moraine State Park.
Kitchen: That overflowing bookcase by the basement stairs. Spillage of old Weight Watchers pamphlets, never-used cookbooks, unwanted small appliances (gift Cuisinart that mysteriously alarmed Barbara, still secured in its Styrofoam packaging).
Upstairs linen closet: Baby blanket. Light blues and pinks, worn through in spots, numerous stains, the batting lumped in one corner.
Oh, the shards and accumulated scraps of a marriage, stashed and forgotten, compressed into layers. Now it’s all luminous, each thing as it is surprised loose from hiding bearing witness to what once was. In the language of life, these are metaphors, compressions of meaning almost too large for the heart to bear.
And my daughter’s tattered blankie is the most powerful of all, as I hold it against my face and know too much about loneliness. I fold it and remember what it was like to surrender everything for love.
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It's Long Past Time to Reclaim Labor Day for the Working Class
Labor Day can be converted from just a symbolic holiday into a day of mass action, democratic deliberation, and binding commitments.
Aug 01, 2026
Unfortunately, Labor Day has become a long weekend for mattress sales and political platitudes when it should be the annual day when working people present the case for taking control of our country back from the corporatists who shape our political economy. The first Monday in September is a massive, unused civic asset, a legally recognized national holiday that could function as a recurring general assembly of America’s workers—if we choose to reclaim it.
Instead of being about the power of labor over capital, Labor Day has been domesticated into barbecues and ballgames while giant corporations tighten their grip on our economy, our governments, and the daily lives of all Americans, regardless of political labels.
Tens of millions of workers are still paid wages that cannot support a decent life, forced into permanent economic insecurity by part‑time jobs, gig “contracts,” and union‑busting consultants. Workplace democracy doesn’t exist: You are more likely to be punished for organizing a union than to be protected for exercising your basic rights. Corporate crime—tax evasions, wage theft, unsafe conditions, and violations of environmental and consumer protections—goes largely unprosecuted. At most, corporations are punished with wrist‑slap fines that CEOs quietly treat as a cost of doing business. In the richest country on Earth, we still lack universal healthcare, universal childcare, paid family leave, and a fair progressive tax system to provide needed revenues. Worker productivity rises, and the wealth of the top 1% reaches obscene levels. It is time for unions to take on the corporate predators who are wrecking our economy and democracy.
Meanwhile, politicians of both major parties take to Labor Day podiums, praise “the hardworking men and women of this country,” and then return to Washington and state capitols to do the bidding of campaign donors. They vote for trade deals that outsource jobs, deregulation that strips away workplace protections, and budgets that starve labor law enforcement. Public‑sector workers are vilified as “special interests” for wanting a decent pension.
Reclaiming Labor Day requires workers, unions, and allied organizations to decide that enough is enough and that this one annual holiday is theirs, with the media taking notice.
It does not have to be this way. Labor Day can be converted from just a symbolic holiday into a day of mass action, democratic deliberation, and binding commitments. Imagine Labor Day not as a backdrop for store sales, but as a day when a pro-worker agenda is presented. In cities and towns across the country, Labor Day could be an occasion for workers to convene meetings—at union halls, school auditoriums, public parks, and town squares—to deliver their demands to elected officials and the public.
At the center of this reclaimed Labor Day should be a Worker Compact for America—a concise, concrete program of rights, protections, and public investments that elected officials pledge, in writing, to support (see my column: "Long-Overdue Domestic Compact for America"). The Compact could include a living wage pegged to the real cost of housing, food, and healthcare; card‑check recognition and real penalties for employers who retaliate against organizing; universal healthcare as a right; paid family and medical leave; universal, publicly supported childcare; and serious criminal and civil sanctions for corporate abuses such as wage and pension theft and workplace safety violations.
Labor Day should also be the moment when workers formally summon their representatives to account. Every senator, every representative, every governor, every mayor, and every state legislator whose constituents work for a living should receive a written summons well in advance of Labor Day: “You are Summoned and morally obligated to engage with a workers’ assembly in your district on this date, at this time, to answer questions and respond to demands of the Worker Compact.” Those who appear would be questioned, on the record, about their votes and their pledges to support the Worker Compact.
Those who refuse to appear would be named from the podium and in the local media as having chosen their corporate patrons over the workers who elect them.
Unions must be at the forefront of this transformation, but they cannot do it alone. The AFL‑CIO and national unions should provide muscle, resources, and experienced organizers. Local unions, especially those that have led recent organizing drives, should be the anchors in their communities. But civic groups, faith communities, student organizations, tenant unions, consumer advocates, and environmental justice campaigns—all of them have a direct stake in a stronger labor movement and should be invited to help expose the carnage caused by unchecked Corporate Power (see the AFL-CIO’s Worker Foundation of Trump’s Second-Term Agenda).
Much of the infrastructure already exists; it is the public reshaping of Labor Day that needs to change. Parades, where they still occur, should shift from generic celebration to worker agenda‑driven demonstrations. Floats should not just carry politicians waving; they should carry workers demanding specific changes: warehouse workers calling for safe staffing, nurses calling for safe patient ratios, and transit workers calling for investment in public transportation. Marching bands can be joined by marching delegations of workers—each with their banners and demands. Voter registration tables, ballot measure petitions, and sign‑up sheets for organizing committees should line the parade routes.
Because of the election calendar, Labor Day signals the final stretch of every general election. Candidate forums convened by workers on Labor Day should not end at sundown; they should kick off sustained, workplace-based, and neighborhood‑based organizing that runs through Election Day and beyond. Every candidate who signs the Worker Compact on Labor Day should be evaluated: Did they co‑sponsor the bills they promised to support, vote the way they pledged, and stand with workers in strikes and organizing drives? The next Labor Day, those records should again be publicized.
Reclaiming Labor Day requires workers, unions, and allied organizations to decide that enough is enough and that this one annual holiday is theirs, with the media taking notice.
The question posed every first Monday in September is the old union question: Which side are you on? If we are on the side of workers, then we must act like it—organizing, summoning, demanding, and voting for candidates who stand with the workers, not the vastly under-taxed corporate predators and plutocrats.
If you are interested in organizing events in your community, contact us at LaborDay@nader.org
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The Cockroach Movement Is Reinvigorating Democracy in India
The protests have yet to produce lasting institutional change, yet they have already demonstrated the capacity of young people to organize and exercise self-determination over their own political future.
Aug 01, 2026
Through a meme and a movement, Indian students have once again mobilized, this time in response to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s comparison of unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” attacking the system. This remark led to the creation of the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a mass-scale satirical movement with a mission to amplify the “voice of the lazy & unemployed.”
The political movement was fueled by compounding grievances. The precipitating factor was the leak of a medical entrance exam paper and irregularities in the government’s on-screen marking system forced millions of students to retake exams. But discontent has been building up for some time because of surging unemployment rates and a deepening disillusionment with the government. Student suicides associated with increasing academic pressure have reached as many as 13,000 a year.
Matters escalated further when hunger-striking activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly removed from a student protest site in Delhi and hospitalized by authorities. Tear gas and baton charges on student protesters catalyzed a countrywide youth uprising that would culminate in the resignation last week of the Modi government’s education minister.
Apart from material grievance, the student movement was ignited by what philosopher Axel Honneth argues is a form of moral indignation. Widespread feelings of injustice have changed the nature of emancipatory struggles from rational economic interests to ones that are personal and emotional. Framing students as parasites through dehumanizing language, rather than as citizens facing systemic and institutional barriers, strips them of political dignity and represents them as inferior and shameful in addition to diverting attention from the state’s own policy failures.
Region-Wide Discontent
Across South Asia, contemporaneous youth-led, digitally organized uprisings have taken place in quick succession. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protest in 2022 forced the resignation of both the president and the prime minister. Bangladesh’s student-led movement in 2024 against a quota system in government jobs, compounded by rising authoritarianism, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years in power. And in Nepal, a country where nearly 56% of the population is under 30, a generation disproportionately affected by economic precarity and a housing crisis, a Gen Z protest in 2025 toppled Prime Minister K.P Sharma Oli within days of a government ban on social media.
These cases mark different points on the spectrum of outcomes. Protesters in Sri Lanka and Nepal converted disruption into institutional turnover, resulting in the installation of new elected governments following the uprisings. Young people in Bangladesh toppled a government but have struggled to translate that disruption into a stable institutional order. In India, CJP called off its protest after the government met its three immediate demands—the education minister’s resignation, withdrawal of criminal investigations against protesters, and compensation for the families of students who died by suicide following the leak. However, the settlement remains contentious, as CJP raised concerns that the government was not honoring its commitments, with a spokesperson warning that the protest would resume if punitive action against student protesters continued.
Youth uprisings matter, then, not simply as sudden, spectacular action but as a means of amplifying the voice of a demographic majority and reshaping the terms of legitimacy and accountability between citizens and the state.
The movement’s broader charter—a new Public Examinations Act, reform of national examination bodies, a students’ rights charter, a national aspirant welfare fund, and permanent parliamentary oversight of examination authorities—is due to be taken up in a further round of talks with the government. The protests have yet to produce lasting institutional change, yet they have already demonstrated the capacity of young people to organize and exercise self-determination over their own political future.
Generation Gap
The United Nations estimates that the world is home to 1.3 billion young people, more than half of them living in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Almost half of South Asia’s 1.8 billion people are under the age of 24, giving the region the world’s largest youth labor force until 2040.
Yet political power across South Asia remains generationally divided with the average age of Indian parliamentary representatives at 56. In Sri Lanka, only 4 of 212 MPs are under 30, while in Pakistan it’s just 7 of 311.
These figures expose a widening generational gap between aging political elites who have long monopolized legislative power and a younger generation that has grown up in the digital age expecting greater accountability but experiencing political marginalization. A related tension is a growing disconnect between economic liberalization and meaningful employment opportunities and social mobility for a generation of youth pursuing higher education.
In India, a democracy of 1.4 billion people, youth representation in the country’s legislative politics remains strikingly narrow along lines of age, gender, and caste. Over the past few decades, the share of young MPs aged 25-40 in the lower house of India’s parliament has fallen from 30% to just 10%.
Youth uprisings matter, then, not simply as sudden, spectacular action but as a means of amplifying the voice of a demographic majority and reshaping the terms of legitimacy and accountability between citizens and the state. These movements have galvanized global solidarity around regional struggles. They have been made increasingly possible by digitally mediated technology and decentralized, leaderless organizing.
Digital Pluses and Minuses
Central to the profound historical shifts in social movements is the emergence of the internet as a space for dissent. Sociologist Manuel Castells frames the internet as a “hybrid space of autonomy” where cyberspace and physical urban space merge into a new kind of social location for political actions. These networked movements, Castells argues, are characterized by spontaneity, virality, decentralization, and ad hoc collaborative deliberation with no single leader.
As the CJP movement tweeted, filmed, and Instagrammed in real time, its networked visibility diversified participation and displaced the state and the traditional media’s monopoly over the narratives of its violence and police brutality. However, Zeynep Tufekci cautions against the fragility of networked movements, which mobilize with extraordinary speed but often lack the internal capacities, leadership structures, negotiating experience, and resilience that older movements built over years of slower political organization.
Their activism reflects a wider shift toward collective action that is increasingly contentious, globalized, and proactive.
Although digital movements enable horizontal mobilization and egalitarian participation in emancipatory struggles, post-uprising outcomes often remain uncertain. Social movement scholars have noted a recurring pattern. Movements built on decentralized coordination excel at forcing concessions or toppling governments, but they struggle to convert that same horizontal structure into hierarchical institutional governance. This leaves established political actors better positioned to reassert control during the transition, making it harder for movements to transcend regime change and translate initial disruption into long-term democratic transformation that the participants demanded. Nevertheless, these movements have expanded democratic possibilities by opening up new locations of collective belonging, political self-expression, and altruism.
In the end, the collective benefits of a social movement can outweigh the success or failure of a challenger’s program because social movements have many influences, both tangible and intangible, that go beyond the explicitly stated goals. In CJP’s case, these benefits include the representation of youth voices and the democratic rights of the country’s largest demographic group. Their activism reflects a wider shift toward collective action that is increasingly contentious, globalized, and proactive. In a larger sense, this contributes to a more participatory polity where Indian citizens exercise political rights and shape political outcomes directly.
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Big AI is Blitzing Washington; It's Time for Democratic Leadership to Choose a Side
Despite what Altman may have told legislators in Washington this week, days after OpenAI’s unprecedented cyberattack, the war for the future of AI policy is not over—but it will be, quickly, if Democrats refuse to fight and continue to play both sides.
Aug 01, 2026
Just days after OpenAI's new model went rogue in an unprecedented cyberattack on another company, where did we find CEO Sam Altman? In closed door meetings on Capitol Hill and in the White House, shaking hands across Washington.
With a looming deadline to finalize the details of the White House's AI executive order, Altman and other Big AI executives are working overtime to make sure they get their way on the most consequential AI policy in history. And they're not alone: Big AI's agenda is being shepherded by Democratic and Republican operatives alike, backed by record levels of lobbying money and super PAC spending.
Democrats now face a choice. They can stay quiet while a handful of billionaires write the rules for the most consequential technology of our time—or they can own this issue and stand up to the lobbying blitz.
The stakes could not be higher. What's on the line is nothing less than the free and open debate our democracy depends on. And rarely has doing the right thing been such good politics—voters across party lines overwhelmingly want guardrails on AI. But make no mistake, the Big Tech AI goliaths we are up against will not give up without a fight.
Voters are not waiting to be convinced that Big AI has too much power; they are waiting for a party willing to say it with them.
Washington is crawling with Big AI lobbyists, whispering in the ears and stuffing the pockets of elected officials. In the first half of this year, OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying to a record $2.22 million. Anthropic almost tripled theirs, topping their competitor's spending at $3.53 million. In May, OpenAI established its first lobbying office in DC called the Workshop, just blocks from the White House. In the last six months, tech companies including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic have retained 234 lobbyists for AI policy specifically—that's about 1 lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress. According to a watchdog analysis, 25% of the 13,000 federal lobbyists in DC are involved in AI issues—a marked jump from 2023.
Behind the scenes, Democratic and Republican operatives alike, with deep ties in Washington, are helping to enable Big AI’s agenda. Chris Lehane, famously nicknamed a "Master of Disaster" during his time in the Clinton White House, was involved in establishing Leading the Future and plays a chief role in OpenAI's political strategy as chief global affairs officer. Also on the OpenAI side is Ann O'Leary, a longtime aide to both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Senate, the White House, and on the campaign trail, who became Gov. Gavin Newsom's chief of staff in 2018. Today she operates as OpenAI's vice oresident of global policy.
Their efforts toward controlling influence extends beyond Washington to this cycle’s consequential midterm elections. Leading the Future—an anti-regulation corporate super PAC funded by Trump-aligned billionaire executives at OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz—has so far raised $140 million toward its effort to influence the 2026 midterm elections. The goal of this lobbying is to push through OpenAI's self-interested AI narrative at the expense of a broader conversation around the future of technology in this country and the world.
The danger here is grave, and the potential impact of the success of this strategy will be lasting. Our political system depends on the free and open debate of ideas in the public sphere. If Big AI proves that they can repress that debate by crushing public servants, our democracy will crumble.
To head up Leading the Future, Lehane reportedly tapped Zac Moffatt and Josh Vlasto, a powerful pair with experience on both sides of the aisle. Vlasto is a Democratic strategist who formerly served as press secretary to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and chief of staff to disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Moffatt is a leading Republican strategist who also serves as the CEO of Targeted Victory. With decades of experience as political operatives, they are laser focused on defeating candidates who support AI regulation. Unfortunately, their approach may be working: New York Assemblymember Alex Bores (D-73) lost his congressional primary campaign, and they've recently seen victories for their supported candidates in Arizona.
However well-funded these groups are, they are on the wrong side of what American voters want—and Democrats should say so, loudly. In a recent Johns Hopkins poll, a broad majority of Americans—even those who trust the technology—support AI regulation. And in a recent Gallup poll, confidence in Big Tech sits at an all-time low. Voters are not waiting to be convinced that Big AI has too much power; they are waiting for a party willing to say it with them.
That’s why Democrats cannot treat AI as a niche tech debate, or quietly accept the industry's money while its super PACs pick off their colleagues one primary at a time. Some campaign veterans, including our team at Guardrails, are already standing up to push back against the autocratic takeover of the Trump administration and the tech industry. The party should put its money, its message, and its midterm strategy behind them. Bores' defeat should be a rallying cry, not a cautionary tale.
Despite what Altman may have told legislators this week in Washington, the war for the future of AI policy is not over—but it will be, quickly, if Democrats refuse to fight.
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