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The Power of the People Is Still the Most Important Power and Billionaires Know It
What kind of future can the people of Mexico, the US, and Canada build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
Sep 18, 2026
I have spent my life watching men in suits sign away things that were never theirs to sell. The North American Free Trade Agreement. Article 27 of Mexico’s Constitution. The land beneath the feet of the people who work it. Trade deals get written in rooms none of us are allowed into, then handed to us as done—take it, live with it, and don't ask who profited. That was the old playbook: theft dressed up as a benevolent "all boats rising" policy.
What's happening in 2026 is not quiet. Donald Trump is doing it all out loud, in broad daylight, on camera, daring anyone to stop him. And he's doing it right here in the USA.
Washington has long muted its professions of democratic faith whenever a compliant government was needed in Mexico or elsewhere around the world. Now, that corrosive indifference to core values is at work at home in the United States, with a terrifying array of targeted attacks on immigrant communities; judges stripped of the power to enforce basic civil procedure and defend what little protection people still have under this economic order; and the Orwellian vaporization of extensive scientific databases tracking climate change and other inconvenient truths.
The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become.
And that's before we even consider this administration's aggressive support for unchecked AI dominance with no regard for what it costs humanity, or the foolishly criminal forever war he started with Iran last February.
In the USA, the machinery of electoral democracy is itself under direct assault: career officials who once safeguarded elections purged and replaced with loyalists who deny elections happen fairly at all; Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned into something even The Washington Post now calls a paramilitary force; and a Pentagon chain of command purged of those considered most likely to obey their oath to the US Constitution at a time of shameless presidential power grab.
The shamelessness makes clear what used to be hidden. In Mexico, NAFTA was imposed with a rewritten constitutional article here, a side agreement there, with no teeth—so boring that no one ever looked into it too closely. Today’s openly hostile power grab made it impossible to keep pretending the arrangement could ever be fair..
What kind of future can we build together now that the neoliberal architecture of unfair trade that got us to this bitter crossroads is visibly cracking up?
It is precisely this vital conversation about our future—between people from Canada, USA, and Mexico—that the US administration is trying to shatter. We intend to have it anyway.
To create peace among our people we must work on removing the causes of conflict. We see the contradictions: inequality versus greed, misery versus excess, haves versus have nots. These are the contradictions democracy is supposed to be able to overcome by dictating that majorities rule policy and that there are constitutional protections for all. These principles have never worked as well as promised, but they have endured. Now they are under unprecedented attack.
For too long history has underlined the difference between our countries, and politicians have benefited from promoting rivalry and inequality. But today, it is clear that we are a cross-border majority suffering the consequences of a handful of billionaires.
Peace power requires a refreshed regional majority with new voices and decision-makers. A big tent where Black communities, Indigenous peoples, gun violence survivors, workers, and migrants from the three countries are treated as the pillars of democracy they already are. All represent communities who've never had the luxury of walking away from struggle, which is exactly why their vision and strength are vital to uniting our majority in the pursuit of peace and freedom.
The power of the people is still the most important power, and the billionaires know it. That's why they invested so much in turning news and information into a circus of conflict for a doomscrolling public. They need our attention even more than they need our votes. Let's give them neither. Every hour they capture is an hour we don't spend building the unity that can defeat them. Our power relies on our strength of community and thrives in places where people can put the phone down and just make common cause with their fellow humans.
That's why people across Minnesota, California, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York are organizing from the neighborhood to the state: to resist authoritarianism and reclaim power back to the people. And that’s why, this September, we're throwing up a big tent in two cities that share two countries and one river. El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The Trinational Peace Summit—The People Against Authoritarianism—it’s a regional gathering, but it isn't a rally. It's a rehearsal for the countries and regions we're trying to become: one where the future isn't handed down from a boardroom or negotiated in a room we're not allowed into, but built, plainly and stubbornly, by the people who actually have to live it. One where democratic dialogue and a radical democracy is protected as a sacred value.
The future is in our hands.
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Not Just AI and Climate—Inequality Also an 'Existential' Threat That Demands Global Cooperation: UN Chief
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on leaders to work together to solve the growing problem of global inequality at the UN General Assembly.
Sep 17, 2026
High-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly are set to begin next week, and they come at a time when the threats to humanity posed by the climate emergency and artificial intelligence have never been clearer.
Those crises demand that policymakers work together to prevent catastrophic, permanent planetary heating and the creation of "runaway" AI technology, suggested UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday, but he emphasized that another pernicious, destructive problem cannot be overlooked.
Guterres also named "the intolerable deepening of inequalities" as another "existential threat" that leaders must address at the upcoming meetings.
Earlier this year, the anti-poverty group Oxfam International released a report showing that combined billionaire wealth stood at $18.2 trillion in 2025, having risen from $3.6 trillion in 2009.
At the same time, the number of food-insecure people on Earth shot up to 2.2 billion in 2024, rising from 1.5 billion a decade earlier.
"Nearly half of the world lives in poverty while a select few continue to gain extreme wealth and power," said Oxfam at the time. "The amount of wealth owned by the poorest half of the world is less than the amount owned by just the 12 richest billionaires. This extreme concentration of wealth isn’t just making life less affordable for most of us, it’s creating harmful divisions. Billionaires, corporations, and politicians are taking away people’s basic ability to make choices about their futures and suppressing dissenting voices."
An analysis focused on wealth inequality in the US by the Center for American Progress (CAP) this week also showed that the gap between the ultrarich and the rest of the American public has gotten significantly wider in less than two years since President Donald Trump was reelected, with hundreds of billions of dollars in financial backing from billionaires including tech CEO Elon Musk.
"Since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1%) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution," said CAP. "To provide an example of the extremity and exponential nature of wealth inequality in the United States, the 10 wealthiest Americans alone saw their real fortunes grow by a combined $259 billion over the same period, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—about $26 billion per person, or 22 million times more than the bottom half’s $1,200 per household."
Economic experts have found that the growing inequality crisis is entirely solvable. As Common Dreams reported last year, research from the European Union Tax Observatory found that a global 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth "would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals," raising about $50 billion in Europe alone.
In 2024, finance ministers at a meeting of the Group of 20 in Rio de Janeiro agreed on the need to tax the richest people in the world at a higher rate to address persistent and worsening economic inequality.
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, a study published in The Lancet found that the global inequality that's been worsened by Trump's foreign aid cuts could be addressed by a 3% wealth tax—raising a small amount of money compared to the total wealth of the world's richest people, but enough to save 29.5 million lives over the next four years.
Climate campaigners in Africa, who have demanded an end to French company Total Energies' East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), agreed with Guterres' point that "climate, inequality, and international cooperation are inseparable."
"People living along EACOP's path," said the group Stop EACOP, "are the first to bear the environmental and economic costs of decisions made far from their communities."
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It's Time for the Democrats to Run Against the AI Apocalypse
Someone has the chance for a kind of career-defining stance, one that builds on the growing sense of unease with the overheating world and the rise of AI.
Sep 16, 2026
Obviously the story of the moment is the sudden, coordinated bout of cold feet in the AI industry, whose leaders expressed support over the weekend for some kind of effort to slow down the pace of their R&D. This is something that’s never happened in the 40 years of the climate fight, and so it shouldn’t be dismissed; in fact, it could conceivably provide an opening for common sense across the entire apocalypse front. So let’s try to game out how responsible political leaders—which means, I tremble to say, Democrats—might try to talk about it.
First, credit where due. The fact there’s an opening at all is owed to the remarkable citizen resistance to data centers that has sprung up in the last year, and also to the courage of a few kids in the AI industry. At Third Act-GrayPAC we’ve been a part of that resistance in place after place—if you want some insight on its roots and future, join us Wednesday night for a conversation with old friend Justin Pearson, the Tennessee state rep who helped kick it off with the fight against Elon Musk’s super-polluting Memphis facility.
Water wastage, noise, land use—the data center fight has often been routed in deeply local concerns. But it has two other dimensions. The first is about energy, both its costs and its pollution. As I’ve noted, one way to understand a data center is that it’s a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop. The degree to which this is becoming a climate disaster can hardly be overstated. Here’s the latest, from Bloomberg on Monday:
Natural gas consumption for electricity generation at data centers is forecast to increase by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the decade ending in 2035, even when accounting for planned projects that may never be completed. This volume exceeds the current gas consumption of all nations except China, Russia, Iran, and the United States, based on data from the US Energy Information Administration. The projection is more than double BloombergNEF's December forecast of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.
In essence, American data centers are about to become a giant new fossil-fuel burning country, just when we need it least. And if you wonder whether the oil boys have figured this out, don’t. When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—long a big backer of AI—proposed some limits last week, the reaction went like this:
“We were disappointed in the announcement in that it sends the wrong message to these incredible economic opportunities that are presented for Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania’s economy,” said James D. Welty, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition…
Marcellus producers are almost solely dependent on demand growth within their own producing region. Artificial intelligence data centers powered by gas-fired electricity are seen by Marcellus gas producers as a key source of that so-called in-basin demand.
But that data center resistance was driven by something else too, that’s been largely ignored—it was a chance to stand up to the oligarchs and this technology they’ve staked their future on. A few years ago Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest had a mixed reputation, admired by some and distrusted by others; now the loathing is much more universal, especially since they’ve allied themselves with the most unpopular president in recent history. They marketed their AI tech on the promise that it would destroy jobs; it’s also proven useful for making naked pictures of anyone you could imagine. They stole books to train it; now it produces a commodity universally reviled as slop.
Oh, and it might kill us all, which brings us back to those kids. Jacob Coxon is a 27-year-old former silver medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad who worked first at Open AI and then Anthropic, and who resigned last week, kicking off this current storm with his tweeted fear that things were getting out of control. A top scientist at the company backed him up, tweeting: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
Which seems like kind of a big deal. Perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was on to something when, many months ago, he called for a moratorium on this kind of work, a call he’s repeated in recent days. But no one takes Bernie seriously (except the American people, for whom he remains the most popular active politician). So it’s a good sign that there seem to be some starting to follow suit. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has been nimblest, and not for the first time—he got a start on the messaging by saying
On day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the engineering of bioweapons. Meanwhile, Don Jr's 1789 Capital bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs... President Trump is compromised.
And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another 2028 possibility:
It’s becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington.
But as Greg Sargent points out in a prescient piece today, the Dems are mostly playing small ball here, nibbling around the edges instead of biting. I think someone has the chance for a kind of career-defining stance here, one that builds on the growing sense of unease with the overheating world (an unease which is already quite broad and is going to deepen as the budding El Niño takes us ever deeper into the climate future). As we start to look forward to 2028, even Barack Obama—a cautious man—has called for Democrats to be more aggressive. Here’s a stab at what that might look like:
Elections usually turn on immediate, pocketbook issues—that makes sense, because we all need to eat, and right now the price of groceries is too high, the price of gas is too high, the rent is too high. We know why—tariffs, stupid wars, corruption. We’ve got lots to work on.
But there are also moments when need to think about larger questions, and this is clearly one. AI is not something any of us asked for—just about no one wants a data center in their neighborhood, and no one put up their hand to sacrifice their job to some computer bot. It’s been forced on us by some of the richest people on Earth, and it was obnoxious even before it started going on the attack—now, as even its creators say, it’s out of control and offers a very real risk to our health and safety, and maybe even our existence as a species.
So we need to rein it in, with serious government regulation that dramatically slows the pace of development until we can can understand and control it. And that includes making the companies that produce this, and the hedge funds who invest in them, liable for the havoc they create.
But we need to go beyond that. We need to step back and say: What are we doing here, people? Why are we running risks like this? Our civilization, especially in rich countries like this one, is capable of producing the things we need: We’ve never lived longer or better. If we didn’t concentrate wealth in a few hands, if we spread it our more widely, we could provide healthcare and housing for everyone. Natural human intelligence has produced plenty; the natural human sense of justice can help us figure out how to share it in ways that work for all. Things could be… okay.
So why would we run enormous risks—the ones that come with artificial super intelligence, and the ones that come with rapidly warming the planet? These are the dangers that could attack and impoverish us; no rational society would treat them as casually as the Trump administration has done. Instead we should be hard at work insuring against those risks—by, say, building out cheap and clean renewable energy. And by upgrading the education and the skills of our kids, instead of handing them screens and turning them over to AI teachers.
In some cases this would mean “slowing down progress”; in every case it would mean attacking concentrated wealth and power. But is it really progress? Is there any real reason we need to rush pell-mell into this chaotic and dystopian future? We’re told that medical advances await—but we’ve been making steady progress on this front for decades, with lifespans expanding and more and more diseases becoming manageable. (Or at least we were making progress till this administration decided to upend our scientific research institutions). We’re told that if we don’t rush ahead China will—but that seems more like an argument for negotiating with China about cooperative controls, just as we once negotiated with Russia about the control of nuclear weapons. It’s never easy, it’s always messy, and so far it’s been successful.
If this willingness to stick with the world as we’ve known it—a world where human intelligence prevails, and where we keep some ice near the poles—sounds “conservative” then so be it. There are moments when humans need to say, "Enough," and this is one. We are fools to endanger all that our ancestors have built in search of some new thing that will enrich a few. I know that the Trump administration wants to rush forward, that he has called AI fears a “hoax,” the exact same word he’s used about the climate crisis. But Trump and his colleagues are greed-seeking missiles, always looking for some way to grift, whether its from AI and crypto or from oil companies and Middle East princelings.
We are told that our destiny is constantly to rush forward—to head for Mars. But actually, one unique human gift is the ability to decide not to do things we’re capable of doing—to say Mars isn’t as important as getting things right on Earth. In fact, we’ve never had a better chance of getting things right. All of a sudden solar panels are the cheapest way to make power, for instance. It wasn’t AI that did that—it was smart people, at work in universities and companies around the world. They’ve given us a real gift, even if it’s going to cost Exxon some profits.
Humans don’t get many chances to make momentous decisions like this. Usually they get made for us. But across the country people have stood up to the data centers, and that’s given us the possibility for real change. Let’s take it.
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In Germany as in the US, Fascism Rises When the Rich Rewrite the Rules
History tells us that when ordinary people are forced to watch the rich buy their government and that government then fails to sustain them, they lose faith in democracy long before they realize it was actually unregulated capitalism that screwed them.
Sep 08, 2026
While Americans were celebrating this Labor Day weekend, in Magdenburg, Germany a 35-year-old neofascist, Ulrich Siegmund, told a cheering crowd that his right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party was “taking our country back.” They’d just pulled 44% of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, double what it’d been just five years ago.
Their platform was simple: Expel brown-skinned immigrants; dump the EU and NATO to instead build an alliance with Russia; and tear up the tech, climate, and energy rules so the fossil fuel and tech billionaires could take over Germany’s government like they are America’s under President Donald Trump.
It was a stunning victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and Trump, who all went online (Putin through spokesman Kirill Dmitriev) and immediately congratulated the heirs to Hitler’s party on their showing in the election.
That same weekend, Fareed Zakaria aired a conversation with Chrystia Freeland, Francis Fukuyama, and David French about why liberal democracy is in retreat, and Freeland argued that China’s so-far-successful model of state-directed capitalism is the biggest threat to democracy around the world.
If you let the winners of capitalism write the rules of capitalism, they’ll first destroy the competition and then come for the government that hosts them.
And there’s a lot of truth in that, since China’s success proves that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to flourish and, in fact, may do even better in an authoritarian state like modern China and 1930s Germany.
But the most serious threat to American democracy isn’t coming from Beijing; it’s coming out of Wichita, Silicon Valley, Mar-a-Lago, and from Republicans in black robes who’ve been taking gifts from billionaires for years. Here’s why.
At the end of the day, capitalism is just a game we play, which is why pro football is such a good analogy. Football is a phenomenal engine for producing it’s goal—entertainment—and it works because there are rules, referees who enforce them, and a league that ruthlessly punishes cheaters.
But imagine a Trump-run NFL announcing that whichever team wrote the biggest check to the league’s head guy could put 14 men on the field, pull face masks, and throw kidney punches with no flags. The richest team would win every game, the entertainment value would ultimately collapse, and within a few seasons the game itself would be dead.
Capitalism is exactly that kind of engine. Since Deng Xiaoping opened China to markets in 1978, according to the World Bank, growth of the Chinese economy has averaged over 9% a year, lifting nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, the largest reduction of human misery in recorded history.
I spent the month of November, 1986 in Beijing studying acupuncture; the city was poor, the air choked with coal smoke, and capitalism was just getting off the block with experimental “special economic zones” like Shenzhen. Nobody voted for it; China was then and is now essentially a totalitarian state, proving that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to be successful.
As the Chinese figured out in the 1970s when they rejected President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism and instead embraced state-run capitalism (I wrote about this at length in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America), in order to work well and produce general prosperity, capitalism just requires rules that prevent the most successful capitalists from rising up and taking over the state (as is happening here).
For example, when China’s richest man (Jack Ma) started complaining in 2020 that government regulators were holding his companies back from maximum profitability, the Chinese government killed off Ma’s Ant Group’s IPO and fined his Alibaba $2.8 billion for the monopolistic behavior of forcing merchants into exclusive contracts. Ma himself vanished from public view for a few months while he was “rehabilitated.”
I’m no admirer of a one-party state, and I’d never want to live under one. But the Chinese Communist Party figured out more than 50 years ago—from watching the failures in our example—that if you let the winners of capitalism write the rules of capitalism, they’ll first destroy the competition and then come for the government that hosts them.
They instead regulated their billionaires and their companies, in other words, because they knew what unregulated billionaires typically do to whoever’s in charge.
We Americans once understood that, and had a president who spoke about it in simple, straightforward terms.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office in 1933 to clean up the GOP’s mess of the Republican Great Depression; he fought back against his generation’s oligarchs, declaring in 1936:
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things…
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.
FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”
The crowd roared, delighted that he’d put millions to work while stripping that day’s oligarchs of their power. And he raised the top tax rate on the morbidly rich back up to 90%, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn our government fascist:
“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Four months later at Madison Square Garden FDR named the forces of “monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking,” said they were “unanimous in their hate” for him, and told the crowd he welcomed their hatred.
He wasn’t trying to abolish capitalism. He was putting it back under control of the people’s rule book: Glass-Steagall, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act, antitrust enforcement, a minimum wage, and a top tax rate of 90%.
Republicans fought it all, calling it “socialism” in increasingly hysterical tones, but it worked and FDR put America back together and built the world’s first middle class that was more than half of a nation’s people.
The American oligarchs of that era, in response, pulled out of politics and went back to just doing business and getting rich, until President Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process—from the bench—of turning America into a full-blown oligarchy.
During FDR’s era, fascism had risen out of the ashes of the Republican Great Depression, sweeping in a few short years across Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.
History tells us that when ordinary people are forced to watch the rich buy their government and that government then fails to sustain them, they lose faith in democracy long before they realize it was actually unregulated capitalism that screwed them.
Invariably, that’s when a strongman shows up promising to “take their country back,” and they cheer.
Roosevelt’s answer was to make democracy deliver for the working people, and to make the morbidly rich pay for it. And it worked: Over the next 40 years America built the largest middle class the world had ever seen.
I’ve spent most of my adult life inside capitalism; over the past 55 years Louise and I have started and run five small businesses. Not once in all those years did we go to a politician with a wad of cash and ask him to change the rules so we could get richer. We were working under FDR’s rules.
Then along came the fossil fuel billionaires funding Reagan, and it all changed in a single generation. The Powell Memo laid out the plan in 1971, and Fred Koch’s sons, along with Coors, Scaife, Olin, Murdoch, and Bradley built the think tanks, the media, and captured the university chairs to indoctrinate the next generation.
What Reagan added was a new sales pitch Americans hadn’t heard before: Government is the problem, the rules are the enemy, and your real opponent is the Black family down the street or the woman you think took your promotion.
Regulation is capitalism’s immune system and works for an economy the same way the NFL’s rules work for that game.
In one fell swoop, the richest men in America dismantled four decades of FDR’s restraints and taxes while working people argued with each other about whether Reagan’s reviled “union bosses,” immigrants, “welfare queens,” or queer people were responsible for their troubles.
Then in 2010 the five corrupt Republican appointees on the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United and told the billionaires they could buy American democracy’s referees openly. Several of those justices, we later learned from ProPublica, had spent years accepting undisclosed yacht cruises, private jets, and luxury vacations from billionaire donors with business before the court while John Robert’s wife took millions from the same law firms that argued in front of her husband.
The result of this “football game” being corrupted by America’s capitalists is measurable. In the 2024 election, just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion on federal races, 1 of every 6 dollars spent by anyone, and roughly 160 times what billionaires spent before Citizens United.
Virtually all of that money went to support Republican candidates who are back to Reagan’s old trick of blaming the middle class’ ills on the poorest and least powerful among us while jacking trillions into the money bins of Zuck, Musk, Trump, and Bezos.
Musk alone put up $278 million, then got handed the keys to the federal government so he could shut down investigations into himself and his businesses. And the man who moved JD Vance from obscure writer to vice president, Peter Thiel, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible, a perspective both Putin and Xi Jinping heartily endorse.
These men aren’t confused about how they’re trying to transform America: they’ve watched Chinese state-run capitalism produce vast wealth without elections and concluded, correctly, that the elections were the unnecessary part, if only the people can be sufficiently intimidated or brainwashed.
Europe’s been running this same neoliberal experiment since the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and Saxony-Anhalt is its poster child. Decades of privatization, austerity, and deregulation left eastern Germans feeling that the government in Berlin had forgotten about them.
Into that void came a party whose leading figures have been under investigation for taking money from a Kremlin-linked influence network and whose richest cheerleader lives in Texas and controls the social media outlet that was arguably largely responsible for AfD’s success.
When Putin took over the new, fragile Russian democracy at the beginning of this millennium, his first job was to get control of the oligarchs who largely owned the economy. He killed some, imprisoned others, and made those who’d swear total loyalty and fealty to him richer than Midas.
Trump appears to be following that same plan, which is why America’s oligarchs are beating a path to his door, bearing gifts.
Democracy not only isn’t necessary in the minds of these “new Republicans”; it’s there to be bought-and-sold, bent to their will with billions spent on elections and propaganda, and ultimately turned against itself to create an authoritarian surveillance state of, by, and for the wealthiest capitalists.
Regulation is capitalism’s immune system and works for an economy the same way the NFL’s rules work for that game. Antitrust laws, campaign finance limits, financial transparency rules, and progressive taxation keep the richest teams from “buying the league” and corrupting the entire system.
Roosevelt understood that the “privileged princes” would always reach for control over government, and that the only defense was a government strong enough to say no. We had that for 40 years, from the 1930s to the 1980s.
We can have it again, but only if the people who benefit from an honest game outvote the followers of the billionaires like Trump and Musk who’ve been paying to rig it.
We need a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United like I detail in Who Killed the American Dream?, real antitrust enforcement, free or low-cost healthcare and college for the middle class, more widespread unionization, rational immigration reform, and a return to high taxes on the morbidly rich: all programs the billionaires and their lickspittle elected Republicans oppose.
Check your registration at vote.org and find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, because the rule book gets rewritten in statehouses too.
And if you found this useful, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report, because independent media that isn’t owned by a billionaire is also a major part of democracy’s immune system.
Tag, we’re it.
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This Labor Day, Ask Yourself: Whose Side Are You On?
Standing together is how we take on billionaires and anti-worker politicians. It is how we protect our jobs, our freedoms, and the spirit of Labor Day itself.
Sep 04, 2026
Working people are fed up. Job uncertainty is the new normal. Chaos and corruption are constantly spilling out of Washington. But for the people grinding out a living every day, the crisis hits much closer to home. Burnout is rampant among essential workers, especially among caregivers, first responders, and social workers. And even as working people put in longer hours, their paychecks cover less and less as prices on seemingly everything continue to rise month after month. This Labor Day, that anger needs somewhere to go.
In 2026, even a simple backyard barbecue with friends and family can feel out of reach. These days, you are paying more for the burgers and crossing your fingers, hoping the lettuce will not make you sick.
The essential workers clocking in this Labor Day to keep our communities safe, healthy, and running should be able to count on one job paying enough to live on. Instead, too many worry about how they will make ends meet—or are picking up a second or even a third job. On a day meant to celebrate working people, that is a damn shame.
And it is not just groceries stretching family budgets. It’s healthcare and prescription drugs. Gas and electric bills. Rent and childcare. Nearly every necessity costs more, and every paycheck has to stretch further.
This November, working people must vote like our jobs, our freedoms, and our families’ futures depend on it, because they do.
This affordability crisis is not an accident. It is the result of choices. It is what happens when politicians pick a side. Whenever the Trump administration had a chance to lighten the burden on working families, it chose to make that burden heavier. Its so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” gutted the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, putting groceries further out of reach for millions of families. It slashed Medicaid, threatening coverage and shifting more healthcare costs onto working people.
The administration has made its choice clear: It is on the side of billionaires. Their wealth has surged by trillions since last Labor Day. The president’s own wealth has grown by $2.2 billion—all while working people and retirees struggle to afford the basics.
AFSCME has made its choice clear, too. Our union stands with working people—with the 1.4 million public service workers and retirees who make our communities stronger every day.
We side with Chearice Vaughn, a US Department of Agriculture worker and president of AFSCME Local 3870, whose team connects rural schools, hospitals, and families to high-speed internet. Despite her 32 years of dedicated public service, the administration tried to fire her.
We stand with Sabrina Bishop, a San Diego homecare provider and a member of UDW/AFSCME Local 3930, who cares for veterans, people with disabilities, and older Americans. The administration has gone after overtime protections that ensure caregivers like Sabrina are paid for every hour they work.
And we stand with Everett Johnson, a preventive maintenance technician for Baltimore City Public Schools and a member of AFSCME Council 3. Everett keeps school buildings safe, but a lack of resources forced him to buy his own tools to do the job.
These workers are not powerless. They have a union.
AFSCME went to court and stopped the administration from forcing Chearice out. Sabrina and her union siblings mobilized at the California State Capitol and won protections for overtime pay. Everett has a seat at the table to negotiate for better pay, better equipment, and the resources to do his job.
That is what union power looks like. When working people come under attack, we organize. We fight back. And we win.
More working people are recognizing that power every day. That is why public support for unions is at an historic high and why AFSCME continues to grow despite the constant attacks.
Standing together is how we take on billionaires and anti-worker politicians. It is how we protect our jobs, our freedoms, and the spirit of Labor Day itself.
But our power does not stop at the workplace. It extends to the ballot box.
This November, working people must vote like our jobs, our freedoms, and our families’ futures depend on it, because they do. We must elect candidates who will lower costs, protect public services, and stand up for working people, not billionaires.
This Labor Day, ask yourself: Whose side are you on?
And this November, vote for the people who are on your side.
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Trump's Economic Nationalism Won't Rescue the US Working Class
Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system as ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations.
Sep 04, 2026
The falling US share of the world economy—40% in 1960 versus 25% in 2026—is a driving force of economic nationalism stateside. Its rhetoric under President Donald Trump is America First, with abundant use of sanctions, tariffs, and war—directly with Iran and by proxy in Israel and Ukraine. On the note of warfare, the president has used military operations abroad as did Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden since the fall of the former Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, heralding a big change in the world order.
Another landmark change in the global order is China's share of the world economy (3.5-4% in 1960 versus 19-205 in 2026). Currently, China is a manufacturing world power. The nation is also blessed with a bevy of natural resources such as rare earth minerals like erbium and yttrium. Advanced electronics and artificial intelligence, prominent industries stateside in 2026, rely upon these two heavy elements.
Accordingly, given the history of US militarism and racism against Asians, the contradictions of economic nationalism, the America First rhetoric, are plentiful. President Trump refers to America's interest as "ours" and "we" when he speaks of other nations cheating the US. This is a bid to unite the class interests of elites (billionaires and corporations, key donors to Democrats and Republicans) with workers. Thus the economic rise of China is a big target of distortion.
China's prominent trading partners help to form the grouping of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations. There is a BRICS summit in New Delhi, India set for September 12-13.
An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg.
Speaking of military operations, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced increased economic warfare against Iran plus any countries doing business with that Persian nation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) met in Kyrgyzstan. Nations’ heads of state attending this gathering ranged from China, Russia, India, Iran, and Pakistan to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO also addressed measures to counter Uncle Sam’s deeds worldwide, including the US war against Iran and Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
In the SCO’s Bishkek declaration, the members also pledged to “support and strengthen an open, transparent, fair, inclusive, and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system based on generally accepted international principles and rules that promotes global economic development, ensures fair market access, and ensures special and differential treatment for developing countries.” Uncle Sam is looking at challenges to it alone calling the shots of a world order that gets its marching orders from Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the US is pursuing attempts to dominate other nations to boost the bottom line of America's elites.
Think of Uncle Sam’s taking of Venezuelan oil reserves, the details of which are emerging, glacially. Then there’s the talk from Washington of the US using tactical nuclear weapons to subdue Iran. The president has been threatening to take Greenland. He has also launched a trade war against Canada, a major US trading partner, claiming the neighbor to the north has been unfairly treating America.
Recall the president’s premise for his America First approach to jobs and economic gains? US global trade partners had been ripping off America. He was going to solve that problem, draining the swamp of Washington insider corruption, and so on. Wait. What?
For starters, US industry made the call to move abroad. To be clear, the deindustrialization of the Midwest and Northeast was a bipartisan priority that the political establishment facilitated, based on decisions made in corporate boardrooms. Democrats and Republicans supported corporate America moving production abroad to pursue higher returns on investment and weaker environmental policies.
Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system. Ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations.
The contradictions of economic nationalism and the world order are growing. An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The worsening climate crisis that profits billionaires and corporations in the short-term as the political duopoly facilitates this ecocide is a wake-up call for movement politics.
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What the Flock? Exposing Big Tech’s Surveillance State
As spying becomes big business, more people are mobilizing to resist mass surveillance.
Sep 03, 2026
For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.
On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.
Initially a gated garden enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.
Fenced in by Surveillance Technology
Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.
The cameras include automatic license-plate recognition technology, which captures data on every car that passes the square down Broadway or across busy 14th Street.
Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.
Such setups are so ubiquitous to cities and major intersections that they’re easy to dismiss as normal features of a busy streetscape. But that’s changing.
The company that produces many of these surveillance cameras—Flock Group Inc.—has become a focus of concern among activists, advocates, and people of every political stripe who don’t want law enforcement documenting and archiving their every activity.
Spying on the Haystack
But Flock is not alone. Surveilling everyday Americans is now a multibillion-dollar business that’s growing fast.
Flock has struck license-plate reading camera contracts with 7,000 law-enforcement agencies, accounting for 40% of all such departments nationwide. There are more than 130,000 of these cameras deployed across 49 states, likely at a busy intersection or gathering point near you.
Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.
The philosophy behind such mass surveillance is that authorities need to capture data on everyone’s movements to identify those few who step out of line. It’s as though you need to know the habits of every blade of grass in the haystack to cull out the one wayward needle.
If that’s not disturbing enough, there have also been extensive reports of abuse, including local police officers deploying department surveillance technology to stalk romantic interests—including strangers—while innocent people have been thrown in jail based on a misread license plate or an inaccurate biometric scan.
“The constant and ongoing surveillance of people in public places raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Jenna Ruddock, Free Press’ advocacy director. “Even decisions about where to install these cameras map onto well-established practices of racist policing, aside from the fact that facial-detection technology has an alarming track record when attempting to identify people of color.”
Mass Surveillance Is Big Business
Still, more major tech companies are getting in on the expanding surveillance business. Powerful artificial intelligence companies are marketing AI-enabled video analytics with facial-recognition capacities for real-time threat detection (think Minority Report).
And while Meta doesn’t directly market its Ray-Ban smart glasses to law enforcement, local police departments and immigration agencies have been buying them in bulk via Amazon.
For its part, Amazon is chasing multimillion-dollar contracts to provide law enforcement with cloud infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and biometric systems, including more than $250 million from the Department of Homeland Security to host many of the databases and systems used to track, monitor, and deport immigrants.
Though he once promised that he wouldn’t allow anyone to use company technology to harm people, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now seeking to profit from mass surveillance. The company is already doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while vying with Amazon and other tech giants for government cloud-computing contracts. Google is also under contract to provide the tech at the center of federal projects to upgrade the “virtual wall” that surveils US borders.
Lost to the Surveillance State
As more cameras sprout up in more locations, the movement to oppose such government spying is spreading. Dozens of cities across the country have cut ties with Flock over their residents’ data-privacy concerns. People have flocked to public hearings and city council meetings to pressure local elected officials to turn the cameras off. Some have taken matters into their own hands, covering nearby Flock and other surveillance cameras with trash bags—or even cutting down camera-attached light poles with electric saws.
DeFlock, an anti-surveillance activist group, has been mapping locations of Flock and other cameras nationwide. (This author used this tool to identify the many non-Flock surveillance cameras surrounding Union Square).
In August, privacy advocates organized the DeFlock National Week of Action, which featured a series of protests, town halls, and informational events to oppose automated license-plate readers and other mass surveillance technology.
The pushback against local surveillance cameras is occurring alongside the fast-spreading movement to stop the unchecked construction of data centers. There’s a common culprit in both popular uprisings: the unholy alliances struck between Big Tech and government. Others are rightfully suspicious of the billionaire class pushing the rapid, reckless development of advanced AI and surveillance tools without first seeking the consent of surrounding communities.
In Union Square on a recent Monday, I asked local busker Lawrence Kidwell whether he knew what all of the nearby police cameras were about. “The NYPD just wants to listen to my music,” he said.
Perhaps. But the cameras are also in place to discourage other forms of expression and muzzle voices of dissent. Something that Union Square has long welcomed may become lost to the new deprivations of the surveillance state.
This piece was originally published at Pressing Issues.
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'Embarrassing': Google Maps Renames 'Lake Ontario' as 'Lake America' in US
The name change followed President Donald Trump's executive order and "served as a reminder that billionaires will always side with authoritarians, because authoritarians will always protect billionaires at the expense of democracy and the working class."
Aug 30, 2026
Tech giant Google faced widespread criticism over the weekend for becoming the first major online map provider to change the name of "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" for its US users, after President Donald Trump ordered the name change in an executive order on Thursday.
Google presented the decision as a procedural one in its statement on Saturday:
The US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the US, people using Maps in the US will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.
However, advocates, lawmakers, and commenters saw the shift as another example of Big Tech in general, and Google in particular, caving to Trump's whims. Notably, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, attended Trump's inauguration with a host of other Silicon Valley moguls.
"This is so embarrassing for @Google and served as a reminder that billionaires will always side with authoritarians, because authoritarians will always protect billionaires at the expense of democracy and the working class," Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media.
Zero integrity over at @Google.
Resign, @sundarpichai.
Fuck you, @googlemaps. pic.twitter.com/ERxPc5sZ88
— Killed by Google (@killedbygoogle) August 30, 2026
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) threatened the company with congressional questioning for its capitulation, writing on social media: "Hey @Google, how about an option for thinking people vs. cultish sheep? I don’t wanna have to see your brown lips from Trump. How about calling it what it is? Don’t forget, when the Majority changes in the House and Senate, you might have some answering to do. Correction. WILL."
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), in response to another social media post about the change, wrote sarcastically, "That's definitely going to make food more affordable."
Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, asked, "Is Google really so terrified of Trump that it has to play along with his childishness?"
Is Google really so terrified of Trump that it has to play along with his childishness? pic.twitter.com/tHOrwJoiCy
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) August 30, 2026
Trump biographer Seth Abramson chastised the company, writing, "Thing #1 that you *do not do* for a psychopath: appease them."
While Google was the first digital map provider to make the change, it will not be the last, according to Wired, which reported that Apple and Bing are expected to follow suit. All three companies changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America following Trump's redesignation at the start of his second term.
Trump did receive pushback from other quarters at the time, with The Associated Press losing access to presidential events because it refused to change its style guide to prefer "Gulf of America."
This new name change, which Trump issued as part of an ongoing trade war with Canada, has also met with resistance both within and beyond the US.
On the day of Trump's order, MapQuest announced simply, "We're not changing it."
We’re not changing it. pic.twitter.com/NdeE9v2BNO
— MapQuest (@MapQuest) August 27, 2026
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the name change in a social media post on Thursday, pointing to the Indigenous origins of the name Ontario.
"The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means 'the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.' The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America," he wrote. "We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario—then, now, and always."
The upstate New York-based Seneca Nation on Friday asked Trump to rescind the order, saying it violated an over 225-year-old treaty signed by President George Washington and the Haudenosaunee confederacy, of which the Seneca are a member.
Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca said the name change showed "blatant disrespect" to Indigenous groups, adding, "The President cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action."
On Saturday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a billboard on the lake's edge that reads, "Lake Ontario, now and always" in English and French.
It’s Lake Ontario, now and always. pic.twitter.com/KNahtPAMeJ
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) August 29, 2026
"President Trump can call it whatever he wants, but I can tell you the rest of the world will always call it Lake Ontario," Ford said.
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Billionaire-Backed Groups Launch Ad Blitz Against California Wealth Tax
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel are among the billionaires bankrolling ads against a proposed one-time tax on the wealthiest Californians.
Aug 25, 2026
Organizations backed by mega-billionaires, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin and notorious venture capitalist Peter Thiel, have launched an advertising blitz aimed at convincing California voters to oppose a one-time, 5% wealth tax targeting the very richest people in the state.
The two most prominent groups fighting the tax, which will appear on California's November ballot as Proposition 40, are Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes. The former group, funded in large part by Brin, debuted its first television ad on Tuesday, just the start of what's expected to be a massive propaganda push against the proposed tax.
The New York Times reported that the first ad from Building a Better California "emphasizes that unions representing teachers and firefighters oppose the tax, along with the state’s top politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat."
"The ad makes no mention of the billionaires who vigorously oppose the tax," the Times added.
The coalition spearheading the wealth tax campaign is led by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW). The tax proposal has won endorsements from the California Federation of Labor Unions, the California Nurses Association, and the California Democratic Party, along with high-profile progressive lawmakers including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, told the Times that supporters of the tax are "not going to try to compete at all with the billionaires on broadcast television." Brin's group is reportedly set to spend more than $90 million on ballot initiatives this year.
Instead, the Times reported, "the union plans to spread its message through text messages, social media, door-knocking and slate mailers, making the most of the powerful endorsements it recently won from the California Democratic Party and the California Federation of Labor Unions."
Last week, the Thiel-backed group Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes launched an online ad that falsely characterized the proposed billionaire levy as "an everyone tax" and a "Trojan horse."
The ad features a menacing, AI-generated caricature of Sanders and other supporters of the tax, who are shown forcibly seizing residents' property, including a boat, a kid's scooter, and an elderly woman's television set.
1. The billionaires fighting a billionaire tax in California have created an AI-slop ad that shows the tax’s supporters assaulting kids and stealing their stuff. pic.twitter.com/L6PgmfUFAM
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) August 25, 2026
Journalist Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter, noted that the "fundamental premise of the ad is false."
"It claims that the initiative’s drafters included a provision that allows them to 'turn the tax on you,'" Legum wrote. "The initiative says that the tax can only be amended by the Legislature through a two-thirds vote of both houses. Even then, any changes must be 'consistent with and further... the purposes of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act.'"
"The ad claims that 'every Californian will have to report all their assets to the state tax board,'" Legum observed. "Under the initiative, Californians just have to certify that they do not have $1 billion or more in assets by checking a box. This will be an easy calculation for nearly all Californians."
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As Americans Struggled to Buy Basics, These 6 Companies Got $83 Billion in Tax Breaks Last Year
"This is an extraordinary concentration of tax benefits among some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world," said an ITEP senior fellow.
Aug 17, 2026
As with the GOP's 2017 tax legislation, experts warned that big businesses and ultrarich individuals would benefit from President Donald Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, while everyday Americans would suffer, and a Monday analysis identifies some of the companies now paying billions of dollars less in taxes.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) "has tracked $204 billion in federal tax breaks disclosed by publicly traded US companies so far for 2025," the report says. "But those benefits were not spread evenly across the corporate sector: Six companies alone accounted for $83 billion of them."
The publication points out that "the stunning size of the federal income tax breaks corporations claimed this year dwarfs past corporate tax breaks, themselves sizeable. Microsoft received $18.7 billion in federal income tax breaks, a record high for single-year federal tax breaks for one publicly traded company. Alphabet claimed a staggering $18.4 billion, and Amazon walked away with $17.4 billion in tax breaks. Meta received $13.7 billion, JPMorgan Chase received $8.3 billion, and Nvidia received $6.8 billion."
To put that $83 billion into context, the report highlights that it "represents nearly 18%, or almost $1 out of ever $5, of total federal corporation tax collections according to the Congressional Budget Office." It also "exceeds the entire annual discretionary budget of the US Department of Education," which Trump is notably aiming to eliminate as part of a broader mission to gut the federal government in his second term.
"This is an extraordinary concentration of tax benefits among some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world," report co-author and ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner said in a statement. "When six companies can collect tax breaks equal to nearly one-fifth of what the federal government raises from the corporate income tax altogether, policymakers should be asking whether these provisions are serving the public interest or simply rewarding companies that are already enormously profitable and politically influential."
Gardner and his co-author, ITEP intern Sarah Buttikofer, emphasized that the top four firms featured in their analysis are tech giants: "Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta collectively received $68 billion in federal income tax breaks—which represents roughly 33% of the overall total."
"These figures show what Americans intuitively know: Corporate profits and economic power are increasingly concentrated among a relatively small number of extremely large companies," the pair wrote. "The presence of half a dozen tech CEOs at Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration was a stark reminder that the economic leverage these companies are gaining is being translated into political power as well. That makes the tax treatment of these companies especially important."
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the Big Tech executives with prime seating at the inauguration. There was also the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who went on to help Trump rip apart the federal workforce as the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
To put these enormous tax breaks in context, the largest single-year tax break we've documented for any corporation before 2025 was J.P. Morgan’s $5.2 billion haul in 2024.itep.org/six-companie...
[image or embed]
— ITEP (@itep.org) August 14, 2026 at 12:18 PM
Musk leads various businesses, including Tesla, which was among 88 companies that paid no federal income tax last year, despite making almost $5.7 billion, according to an April analysis from ITEP. The others range from airlines and banks to energy, entertainment, and tech companies, such as Citigroup, Edison International, Palantir, United, and Walt Disney.
Meanwhile, near the end of last year, as Trump dismissed affordability concerns, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that only 31% of voters approved of Trump's handling of the economy, the survey's lowest figure for his two terms.
Then, a January analysis by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee revealed that the average American family paid $1,625 in higher costs last year as his policies drove up prices.
That was followed by a February warning from the Economic Policy Institute that Trump's economic agenda "will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future." EPI's chief economist, Josh Bivens, pointed to the president's anti-labor policies, cuts to federal spending and jobs, mass deportation efforts, and tariffs—as well as the OBBBA, which gave tax breaks to the rich while stripping healthcare and food assistance from Americans in need.
With the US now enduring the consequences of Trump's war of choice on Iran, inflation remains high. Americans are struggling with the cost of gasoline, groceries, healthcare, housing, and more. After the latest figures were released last week, Alex Jacquez, a former Obama administration official who is now senior vice president of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, said that "prices started climbing again in July, and Trump's catastrophic mismanagement of our economy means more spikes in the months ahead."
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