When a bomb destroys a home, we see the rubble. When a factory burns, we see the smoke. When forests are set on fire, we see the devastation. But one consequence of war is almost impossible to see: the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

And that carbon does not stay where the bombs fall. Once released, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming far beyond the borders of the country at war. A war may begin in one place, but part of its climate cost is carried by the entire planet.

The smoke may clear. The carbon does not simply stay behind.

The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax. It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.

Yet when we talk about the cost of war, that climate cost is rarely part of the bill.

That gap in accountability led Saravana Kumar Nagarajan and his colleague Sean Xavier to develop the idea of a Carbon War Tax, documented in their 2021 master's thesis at Klaipėda University and the University of Bergen. The question behind it was simple: if industries are increasingly expected to measure and account for their carbon emissions, why should warfare be treated differently?

The Carbon War Tax proposes a new principle: Measure the greenhouse-gas emissions caused by war, assign responsibility, and attach a financial obligation to those emissions.

Military fuel use, weapons production and transportation, fires, destroyed factories and power plants, damaged infrastructure, and burning forests can all create emissions. Scientific models, satellite imagery, and other data could help estimate them. The goal would not be perfect accounting overnight. It would be to make an invisible cost visible.

And then make someone responsible for it.

The money generated through such a system could support carbon capture and storage, environmental restoration, ecosystem recovery, pollution cleanup, and climate-resilient rebuilding in communities affected by war.

That creates a striking possibility: The environmental cost of destruction could help pay for restoration.

The Carbon War Tax is not a proposal to put a price on human suffering. No amount of money can compensate a family for a life lost or a community destroyed. It addresses one specific consequence of war—the carbon and environmental damage that reaches far beyond the battlefield.

Today, we count the cost of weapons. We count military spending. We count destroyed buildings and economic losses. We count refugees and reconstruction.

The Carbon War Tax asks us to add another question: How much carbon did this war release—and who is responsible for paying for it?

That question could also change the economics of war.

No tax will magically end conflict. Wars are driven by power, territory, security, ideology, and politics. But economic consequences influence decisions. If military escalation carried a measurable climate liability, governments would have one more cost to consider before choosing destruction over negotiation.

And there is a deeper question of justice.

Why should a community devastated by war inherit the environmental damage? Why should people who had no role in starting a conflict bear the climate consequences of the emissions it creates? And why should future generations inherit an atmospheric debt they never chose?

The Carbon War Tax is not presented as a finished international policy. It is a starting framework that needs to be tested, challenged, and developed.

Climate-policy researchers could determine how wartime emissions should be measured. Scientists could improve methods for calculating emissions from military operations and conflict-related destruction. Economists could study how a financial mechanism could work without creating unintended consequences. International-law experts could examine questions of responsibility and enforcement. Policymakers, diplomats, and peace organizations could explore how such a system might fit within existing international climate and legal frameworks.

In other words, the idea needs a global research effort to turn a powerful concept into a credible mechanism that could one day be implemented.

That work has not yet been done. And that is precisely why the conversation should begin.

The idea began as an academic question in 2021. It now deserves to move beyond the pages of a thesis and into the hands of the researchers, policymakers, and institutions capable of testing its possibilities.

Because if the world can develop systems to make industries accountable for their carbon, perhaps it can eventually develop a system to make war accountable for its carbon.

Imagine a future in which governments considering military escalation must confront not only the human and financial costs of war, but also the environmental debt it could create.

Imagine that debt helping restore forests, ecosystems, and communities damaged by conflict.

Imagine peace having not only a moral argument, but another economic one.

The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax.

It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.

War destroys lives. War destroys communities. And war can leave behind a carbon debt carried by the entire planet.

Perhaps it is time that debt became visible.

Perhaps it is time that the world studied how to make it accountable.

And perhaps, if developed into a workable international mechanism, the Carbon War Tax could give peace one more powerful reason to prevail.

As millions head to the polls in the 2026 elections, voters are showing up disappointed, forgotten, and worn down from years of failed policies.

After nearly two decades working inside campaigns, Democratic leaders, national advocacy organizations, and movement institutions have made it clear: We’ve got a problem on our hands.

The challenge before us is not simply that Democrats have a messaging problem, nor is it that Republicans have become better communicators. The deeper problem is that we have spent years trying to win elections while underinvesting in the communities, relationships, and culture that make political victories durable.

People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.

Narratives don’t emerge from communications plans, but rather from institutions that people trust. This distinction matters.

We keep hearing the same question: Why aren’t more young people and people of color engaged in the civic process? This is the wrong question.

The question we need to be asking is whether or not our current institutions are willing to or even positioned to share power with us. More often than not, participation is shared only after decisions are made, and usually with an ask attached.

We are not waiting for institutions to tell us how to participate. We have lived the reality of what happens when institutions fail, time and time again. We have seen how powerful it is when we build our own.

Young Black folks in particular are organizing, creating, building community, and culture. Especially for those who are young, queer, and Black, so much of the language and swagger that shapes our lives has been created by us. We know that when institutional belonging is unavailable, community creates belonging. We got us.

As Black queer Americans, we inherit a tradition shaped by people who understood that institutions rarely surrender power simply because the moral argument is clear. Generations before us organized, marched, litigated, and forced America to confront the distance between its ideals and its reality. Progress has never been inevitable. It has always been demanded.

A collective 20 years inside politics has made it clear to us: Institutions rarely fail overnight. Long before they lose public trust, they lose relevance. They become more concerned with protecting existing power than with creating new possibilities, optimizing for stability rather than adaptation.

Eventually, they find themselves speaking fluently to one another while struggling to connect with the people they were created to serve. That is where much of the progressive movement finds itself today.

Americans are losing faith in politics and in the idea that our institutions can solve the problems shaping their everyday lives.

People do not experience institutional failure in constitutional language or policy briefs. They experience it through rising costs, unstable jobs, inaccessible housing, underfunded schools, broken infrastructure, and the growing sense that the rules apply differently depending on who you are and how much power you hold. They talk about fairness, opportunity, dignity, and whether working hard still leads to a better life.

These conversations are not separate from politics. They are politics. We can’t continue mistaking communications for culture.

Too often, the response has been to refine the message rather than rebuild the institution that delivers it. We have mistaken communication for culture, which has led to the consequences we are all currently living with.

The progressive movement has become extraordinarily sophisticated at producing content. We can generate messaging guidance overnight, build rapid-response campaigns within hours, and create endless streams of digital content. Yet none of those capabilities automatically produce trust.

Trust is earned when people see themselves reflected not only in the message but in the leadership, values, and relationships behind it. You can’t message your way out of a deficit of trust. No amount of message testing can compensate for institutions that people no longer believe understand their lives.

This is where imagination becomes essential.

Since 2016, countless postmortems have focused on messaging, media strategy, and digital infrastructure. Those conversations matter, but they begin from an incomplete premise. They assume we already have a compelling story to tell.

We are not convinced we do.

Sentiments such as “fight” or “protect democracy” are important calls to action, but they are not visions of the future. They put us on the defensive and describe what we oppose more clearly than what we are building. People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.

That kind of vision cannot be manufactured through advertising.

It grows from culture. It expands from artists, educators, organizers, faith leaders, entrepreneurs, local institutions, and civic spaces where people build relationships long before anyone asks for their vote.

We can look back at the Obama era, as one example of how politics can bend the arc of history. If you were near a college campus on November 4, 2008, you remember the celebrations. Music poured from dorm rooms and car speakers, topped off with dancing in the street. For a brief moment, hope felt less like a slogan and more like a possibility finally personified. The belief in our collective power and the possibilities it could create ignited a generation.

Research supports what many organizers have understood intuitively for decades. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on economic mobility found that social capital (the relationships that connect people across communities and opportunities) is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. That insight extends beyond economics.

Relationships shape what people believe is possible. They influence trust, aspiration, and whether institutions feel relevant to everyday life. Politics is no different.

Queer communities have long understood something about the power of relationships that institutions are only beginning to relearn. We call it chosen family: the idea that belonging can be deliberately built through relationships of trust, care, responsibility, and mutual recognition. There is a civic lesson in that tradition. Durable movements are built the same way. Not through an email list or a message tested to perfection, but through relationships strong enough to survive disagreement, disappointment, and the space between elections.

The same is true for Black communities, particularly Black women, whose creativity, organizing, and cultural leadership have repeatedly expanded the boundaries of American democracy while too often receiving recognition only after the fact.

Innovation doesn’t come from preserving the status quo. History has shown us that it comes from creating space for voices that institutions have historically overlooked.

That means the work ahead demands more than better campaigns. It requires rebuilding civic infrastructure and cultivating leaders rather than personalities. A focus on relationships instead of audiences and investing in organizations that remain present between election cycles.

Institutional renewal is no longer optional as artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, climate disruption, and political polarization reshape public life simultaneously. The pace of change is accelerating, while confidence in the institutions meant to guide us continues to decline.

That should concern all of us. Democracy has always depended on more than elections. It depends on institutions that people believe are worthy of their participation and capable of improving their lives.

The encouraging news is that Americans have not completely lost faith in one another. Mutual aid networks, local organizers, community leaders, and everyday people continue to demonstrate the generosity and resilience our institutions often struggle to match.

We must build institutions strong enough, imaginative enough, and trustworthy enough for the story to tell itself. There’s no other choice.

Page Six Hollywood recently declared: “War of Open Letters Erupts Between Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine Factions in Hollywood.” Only a few years ago, a headline like this would have seemed unthinkable.

The article described an increasingly open struggle between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces within the entertainment industry. On one side are artists and other industry figures taking a clear stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza; on the other are defenders of Israel attempting to deny that genocide in the face of irrefutable evidence.

Yet even this framing failed to tell the whole story. What is unfolding is far more consequential than a quarrel among celebrities or a “war of open letters.” It is part of a brewing cultural revolution in American society—one that has now reached the highest echelons of the country’s cultural establishment. And in that struggle, Israel is losing—and losing badly.

When the pendulum swings this far, neither Kraft’s money nor the stadiums he controls can stop the movement.

Though the article acknowledged that support for Palestine has become powerful enough to divide Hollywood openly, it concealed the scale of the transformation underway by presenting the moment as a "war" between two factions.

Long before Israeli filmmakers, production companies, and actors established a significant presence in Hollywood, the industry’s cultural infrastructure routinely elevated Israel at every opportunity. Film and television constructed a glossy image of a heroic nation whose establishment and continued survival were portrayed as miraculous, while the dispossession and violence underpinning that narrative were largely erased from view.

Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, meanwhile, were almost invariably cast in a negative light: the uncultured and menacing "other," supposedly possessing no legitimate claim to civilization, no recognizable morality, and no history or identity worthy of serious consideration.

Indeed, Hollywood played a central role in the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Western popular culture. When thousands of actors, filmmakers, producers, and artists begin taking principled public stands for Palestine—often at considerable professional risk—we can therefore speak confidently of a cultural shift of historic proportions.

Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Cynthia Nixon, and Riz Ahmed are only some of the most visible names on an ever-expanding list of morally driven and courageous artists confronting an archaic industry establishment.

The story, however, extends far beyond Hollywood. Consider the major controversy that recently erupted in the US following Macklemore’s removal from the remaining dates of Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour.

Macklemore is far more than a pro-Palestine singer. The Grammy-winning rapper and songwriter is a gifted political storyteller whose career has combined mainstream artistic success with an enduring commitment to social causes. Since the beginning of the genocide, he has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of Palestinian solidarity in the US and beyond.

During Sheeran’s recent concerts at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Macklemore expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, called for a "free Palestine," and performed "Hind’s Hall," his protest anthem honoring Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The response to Macklemore’s courageous stand was immediate, but also predictable. The billionaires who controlled the venues reached for the weapon still at their disposal: financial power. Robert Kraft, the owner of Gillette Stadium, refused to allow Macklemore to perform there.

Sheeran, who appeared to underestimate the gravity of the moment, went on the defensive. “I am not complicit,” he declared, insisting that Macklemore’s removal had been the promoter’s decision rather than his own. But such a weak response by one of the world’s most influential musicians, particularly while an artist on his own tour was being punished for speaking out, could hardly be presented as a politically "neutral" position.

In the past, the story might have ended there. Macklemore would have been isolated and his career placed in jeopardy, while Sheeran, the promoters, and the stadium owners continued largely untouched.

Those days are gone. Global solidarity with Macklemore—and, by extension, with Palestine—spread so rapidly that the people responsible for his removal were forced to issue a succession of defensive and sometimes contradictory explanations.

By then, however, the damage had been done. Sheeran faced mounting boycott calls, protests, and even the suspension of his music by an Irish radio station. Finneas, Lukas Graham, and Aaron Rowe withdrew from the tour, while Beoga, Sheeran’s backing band, also pulled out. Artists and public figures began speaking openly about the genocide, freedom of expression, and the power of billionaires to dictate the political boundaries of art.

Podcasters and social-media commentators also mobilized, reaching audiences of millions and digging deeper into the controversy. They began asking who Kraft was, examining his longstanding relationship with Israel; his campaign against Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions; and the enormous financial machinery behind his political advocacy.

The attempt to punish Macklemore ultimately placed Kraft, Sheeran, and the entertainment establishment itself under unprecedented scrutiny. Far from silencing the message of Palestinian freedom, their actions amplified it.

Ultimately, this is not a story about two feuding artists, just as Hollywood’s transformation cannot be reduced to two camps trading open letters. Both are manifestations of a much larger cultural upheaval rooted in grassroots American society, where people from diverse backgrounds are finally opening their eyes to Israeli crimes and to the extraordinary influence Tel Aviv has long exercised over their country.

Beyond the occasional opinion poll, that story rarely makes headlines. But when the pendulum swings this far, neither Kraft’s money nor the stadiums he controls can stop the movement.

Nor can they silence Macklemore’s cry of "Free Palestine"—a cry now echoed by millions of people throughout the world.

In a highly aggressive 40-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, President Donald Trump once again issued ominous threats to Iran, saying: “I have a very big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill or destroy people or countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

He implied that his “very big decision” would come after the midterms, suggesting that Iran is waiting to make a deal until then and, if one isn’t forthcoming, then he would choose annihilation.

Several commentators have noted that his extreme rhetoric was all the more shocking in the context of being delivered, as it was, at the world’s foremost international organization for the peaceful settlement of disputes, created in the aftermath of World War II “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture.

Indeed, all states that become members of the UN agree to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another, as an obligation of membership—an agreement that the US is currently violating.

Although some news outlets lamented the tone of Trump’s speech and fact-checked it (finding the usual errors), few have explicitly pointed out his not-so-veiled threat to use nuclear weapons. Most have simply ignored it, and a few have even seemed to excuse it, suggesting that it was simply a “negotiating ploy.”

But this threat is similar to others he has made over the last seven months of the war, at moments of extreme personal frustration. On Easter morning, for example, he wrote on his social media account, “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

A couple of days later, he warned: “A whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will… We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” He has also threatened on several occasions to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.”

I have previously written about the extreme danger of the president of the United States having “sole authority” to launch nuclear weapons and the ease with which he can do so. As William Perry, former secretary of defense under Clinton, has written, “For President Trump, starting nuclear war is about as easy as sending a tweet.”

This is especially concerning given his mental state. On April 30, a group of 36 senior mental health professionals, experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive impairment and the evaluation of dangerousness, issued an update to their earlier 2024 report, concluding (after citing the reasons):

It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline… For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

Although the use of nuclear weapons is a considered to be a taboo, Trump has previously broken international taboos (seemingly without even knowing they existed), such as the taboo against political assassination, which he violated on February 28, when Israel and the US attacked Iran, assassinating its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, four of his family members, and a number of other senior Iranian leaders.

Most ghastly of all is what would happen if Trump were to use his “sole authority” to launch nuclear weapons against a country of 90 million people. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—already overwhelming in terms of human tragedy—would be unleashed exponentially against the population of Iran, with whom Trump has previously claimed to empathize.

Because of the dramatically increased power of today’s nuclear weapons and their sheer numbers, the results could be more monstrous than any war crime in human history. Even the use of tactical nuclear weapons would be appalling beyond comprehension, and the use of a full-fledged nuclear attack that would “annihilate” the country would, without doubt, bring about one of the darkest periods in world history. The death, destruction, and suffering would be beyond parallel.

It would also make Trump the worst war criminal in history, instantly convert the US into a state pariah, be a terrible blight on humanity, and lead to many unforeseen consequences.

One playbook of unforeseen consequences is that Russian President Vladimir Putin could follow suit in Ukraine (with equally horrific effects). NATO might then feel that it would have to respond in kind, and the resulting escalation could lead to World War III and nuclear Armageddon.

Even if there were no further iterations (which is unlikely), the results could lead to a nuclear winter, where smoke and soot from Iran’s burning cities and other infrastructure would loft into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, darkening the sky, and chilling the Earth, creating massive crop failures and famine. Studies have shown that even a “limited” war could cause a nuclear winter that would (depending on the size of the attack) cause untold billions around the world to die of starvation.

It is no wonder that everyone wants to pretend that Trump’s threats weren’t really what they seemed and probably wouldn’t be acted upon because Trump would live up to his TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) reputation.

But one of the very important, hard-learned lessons of international relations is that, when a leader makes a threat against another state, it should be taken with deadly seriousness. This has sometimes been overlooked, as, for example, in 1990, when Saddam Hussein amassed troops on his border with Kuwait and threatened to invade. No one took it seriously—until Iraq followed through, leading to the first Gulf War.

Much as we would all like to forget these terrible threats, we can’t. The leaders of the world must clearly communicate to Trump the likely consequences of his actions and the utter unacceptability of this path. Members of Congress must do the same, and we, the public, must collectively urge them to do so.

Legal means of removing Trump from office should also be undertaken, such as the 25th Amendment; Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) proposed nonpartisan “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office”; or impeachment. All of this is much more likely if the Democrats win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterms, in which we, the public, can also make a significant difference—by voting accordingly.

Every one of us has an obligation to ensure that we don’t experience such a bleak future, and to totally reject the idea that anyone should be able to decide to “destroy a civilization” or “annihilate” a people and a culture (regardless of how we judge their behavior or our fears of their future actions). This is totally against international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law. Such a decision should NOT be made under any circumstances, especially by one individual, who is most likely cognitively impaired; definitely feeling frustrated and aggrieved; and who doesn’t have any understanding of the consequences of the extreme threats he is making—but who does have the capacity to carry out a nuclear launch at any time.

A CNN insider told Variety magazine yesterday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.

The day-before-yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by rightwing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to Trump and his family.

California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.

As The Lever reported yesterday, the fine print tells the entire story:

Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:

“As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…”

That worked out real well, right?

There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran war another few months to crash our economy and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!

And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”

These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes, then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.

The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.

And the FCC, run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5 percent equity state in the new entity that will control two of the three most important news networks in America.

Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.

Because of momentous decisions made by presidents Reagan and Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90 percent of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90 percent of the media Americans consume.

Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax” — in additional costs for pretty much everything — of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.

Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.

But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.

Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own — oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.

As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:

“There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...”

And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,

“...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained...like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”

And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.

In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.

The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90 percent of America; many credited Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.

So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney — with an eye to running for president in 2012 — had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).

The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.

Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.

While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: it was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3 to 8 percent of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.

Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.

This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.

Franklin D. Roosevelt — the Bernie Sanders of his day — saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”

The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.

— Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.

— Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8 percent of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.

— In Egypt, el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI — the General Intelligence Service — use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.

— Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s rightwing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.

Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.

We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.

And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.

I feel like I need to apologize for a column a couple of months ago when I compared the current president of the United States to Caligula, the possibly mad Roman emperor who is said to have nominated his trusted horse for high office. I need to apologize to Caligula. From pitching his triumphal D.C. arch as a storage shed for deadly snipers’ bullets to banning reporters from the White House in a narcissistic rage, Donald Trump is losing his grip on reality. This is unsustainable.

Worried about AI killing humans? Bad news: It already is.

Which is it?

Are the robots of AI, or artificial intelligence, so smart that they’re on the verge of holding a secret meetup in the darkest corner of the dark web and developing a plot to kill all humans through germ warfare, to make sure we don’t kill them first by pulling the plug?

Or is AI so dumb — artificial stupidity, despite the billionaires of Silicon Valley showing up daily on our TV screen to brag about the sky-high IQ of their son, Claude — that the thing that will murder us is a crazy hallucination that will turn a false alarm into World War III?

The fact that we can’t answer this should give us pause, but maybe we aren’t even asking the right question. Maybe the real issue is how easy we’ve made it to kill off the human race — a capability that was already created by people even before we invented the computer.

One thing is certain. Artificial intelligence has already been an accessory to mass murder, and if we do nothing, it will kill again.

Remember the very first days of the now seemingly endless Iran war, and the news that two missile strikes had obliterated a school for young children in the Iranian coastal city of Minab, in an apparent “double-tap” strike in which the second attack from the skies killed young girls and boys and their teachers as they huddled in a prayer hall?

Those bombings, which killed 156 people on Feb. 28, caused the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran to report last week that it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks …” The U.S. government has never taken responsibility for the bloodshed, despite overwhelming visual evidence that the bombs were precision-guided U.S. Tomahawk missiles.

It didn’t take long for additional speculation that an AI program had mistakenly targeted the school, perhaps using outdated maps and info from an earlier time when its buildings were attached to an Iranian military complex. After all, the Pentagon has been openly bragging about the death and destruction facilitated by its use of Palantir’s Smart Maven System and also Anthropic’s Claude.

Last week, Bloomberg News reported that the Pentagon’s overreliance on AI, and specifically the Palantir Maven program, was a major factor in the school tragedy, along with the outdated intelligence about the Minab site — the “garbage in.” Its exposé noted that U.S. military planners were racing to identify some 1,000 Iranian targets in the early hours of the war, giving humans little time to double-check the list. Kindergartners were slaughtered as a result.

This was hardly the first time robots have been linked to human death, both in war — in 2024, +924 Magazine reported the Israel Defense Forces were using an AI program code-named “Lavender” to target sites amid the mass killing in Gaza — and in peace, as shown by numerous accounts of robots helping troubled people die by suicide.

And yet, it could have been much, much worse. At the same time as the Bloomberg report on the AI link to the mass killing in Iran, the world also learned that a false report generated by robot intelligence nearly sparked a conflict between the United States and China that could conceivably have spiraled into major fighting.

CNN and other outlets have reported that a U.S. special operations command analyst working with AI generated an urgent report that a Chinese ship bound toward the Middle East was carrying components for a nuclear weapons system, which caused military leaders to scramble jets and assemble a team to seize the vessel.

Only at the last minute did the Pentagon dig deeper and learn the AI-generated report was completely false, a hallucination — one that nearly triggered a violent conflict between the world’s two largest military powers.

The two disturbing reports about the use, or misuse, of AI by the U.S. military in a time of war did make news but didn’t get nearly as much attention — either in the media or on sites like Bluesky or X — as warnings from both whistleblowers and CEOs in Silicon Valley that a swarm of robots could decide on their own and without any human intervention or awareness to try to kill off our so-called civilization.

The fear of an unprompted attack from AI secret agents is real, based on several incidents that have already occurred, including a well-planned and partly successful operation by OpenAI’s robot agents to hack into a company called Hugging Face.

Still, it says something about human intelligence that we are captivated by the unknown and mysterious possibility of a random attack, while the fact that people are currently misusing AI to cause death and suffering is a less compelling story. I noted in this space last week that the threat to humankind from climate change is arguably even more real — and yet this gets denied by many and ignored by others.

It’s also striking to me as a boomer born in 1959 that a generation that was born into a time of constant terror — backyard bomb shelters, “duck and cover” drills in the classroom, and sci-fi horror at the drive-in that an atomic arms race could kill us at any moment — is suddenly back to where we started.

Over 81 years, humans were smart enough never to drop another nuclear weapon (well, not intentionally) after the mass murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not bright enough to figure out how to eliminate the nuclear threat altogether.

The fact that civilization managed to — so far — pause the number of world wars at two has given us the space and the false bravado to create new and much more insidious killing machines, and the threat from invisible robots on a hidden dark web is somehow even scarier than the radioactive mushroom cloud that we more or less understand.

Boomers who went to bed as kids in the 1950s and ’60s praying we wouldn’t die before we woke are now spending our senior-citizen-discount years fearful that something stranger than science fiction is coming for our children, or grandchildren. Over the course of a lifetime, the arc of that moral universe has not bent at all.

Still, humans were able, somehow, to prevent nuclear annihilation so far, and now it’s past time to get to work on the actual threats from AI and start on those workarounds. For example, the articles I’ve read speculating on how the robots plan to kill us frequently mention the prospect of AI agents developing bioweapons and releasing them, either on their own or prompted by a bad actor. (In theory, human development of bioweapons has been banned for a half century.)

From everything I’ve read so far about AI, it sounds like we’d have better luck safeguarding or eliminating the components that could make a biological agent rather than stopping the robots. Likewise, AI agents would not be able to start an atomic apocalypse if our human politicians went to work at finally eliminating nuclear weapons. Artificial intelligence won’t kill little girls in an Iranian school if humans don’t start dumb wars in the first place.

If Silicon Valley’s prophets of doom are serious, there’s no fix that’s too big or too ambitious. But understand that the biggest problem isn’t that AI wants to murder us, but that since 1942 we humans have been busy creating all the suicidal weapons AI agents could use.

Can you even “duck and cover” from a killer robot? I don’t intend to find out, and I don’t want my yet-to-be-born grandchildren to have to even think about it.

Among the three of us, we have 15 decades of high-level experience in climate science, policies, and actions, and we have never been more alarmed than we are at this moment. The United Nations has just officially declared that the world has failed in limiting global warming to a safe level. During the last decade, heat-trapping pollutants nearly doubled the rate that heat is being added to the planet—a rate that will push temperatures across the 1.5°C threshold in five years or less and breach the first barrier of the Paris Agreement. This will further destabilize natural climate systems and amplify weather extremes, which are already costing the world economy more than $ 2 trillion annually. At the current rate of warming, the global temperature is likely to cross 2°C in about 15 years, the outer limit of the Paris Agreement, taking us into a climate not witnessed by homo sapiens, ever.

High altitudes in the Tibetan-Himalayan region and the Alps are already warming at two to three times the global average (which may be implicated in the recent Nepal-Tibet floods that left 1,400 confirmed dead and 5,000 missing). Other disastrous impacts of reaching 2°C include the transition of the Amazon from a forest into a savanna. The health impacts could be the worst of all. At 2°C, heat deaths in 2050 could reach a staggering 2 billion in a worst-case analysis by actuarial experts at Exeter University.

If that weren’t bad enough, a new scientific study raises the possibility that the current rate of warming, if continued, could eventually shut down the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—AMOC. The Gulf Stream is a major part of this vital ocean current, which plays a dominant role in winter weather over North America and Europe. Worryingly, AMOC is already slowing down.

We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive.

At today’s rate of warming AMOC could begin to collapse at warming as low as 2°C, which could be crossed by the time today’s infants are in college. Impacts would be punishing, stranding heat in the already too hot tropics, while robbing northern countries of heat now transported north to keep temperatures temperate, leading to bitter winters. If AMOC collapses, currently a low-probability event, it could trigger massive forced internal and international displacements, ushering in the world’s largest crisis of forced migration ever.

Crossing 2°C will trigger other irreversible impacts too, further amplifying warming through the loss of sea ice and glaciers. The depletion of ice and snow will make the planet darker, resulting in more absorption of incoming solar radiation, amplifying warming by 25% or more.

The good news is that we can avoid this fate if we cut the rate of warming quickly—by 50% within 15 years, which is feasible in two parts.

First, we need to cut the super pollutants of climate. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), methane, lower-atmosphere ozone, and black carbon soot from diesel and cooking smoke. These short-lived climate pollutants are called super pollutants because they are tens to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in heating the planet and are currently contributing more than half of the warming the planet has witnessed. However, and this is crucial—they dissipate from the atmosphere within two decades, whereas carbon dioxide, the best-known climate pollutant, takes multiple decades to a century to significantly decline.

Technologies exist to quickly and affordably reduce the super pollutants. In many cases we have the policies and laws as well. HFCs are being cut through the 2016 Kigali amendment to the successful Montreal Protocol—the treaty that has slowed warming by several decades while restoring the protective stratospheric ozone layer.

Methane pollution is getting more attention recently, including from Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, who is recommending a binding international agreement—inspired by the Montreal Protocol—to prevent the oil and gas industry from wasting natural gas, which is 90% methane. Other local solutions can reduce or even eliminate methane from landfills, starting by reducing food waste. There are many other such practical, off-the-shelf solutions.

The immediate task at hand is to thin the invisible heat‑trapping blanket. If we implement super-pollutant solutions before 2030 and scale to full potential in less than 10 years, the rate of warming can be reduced by 30% by 2040s. But we need to cut the rate of warming by half, i.e. 50%. The super pollutants should be our first target, because the technologies and policies are there and once we put them into action, the blanket thinning will start immediately.

Second, as the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report affirms, we need to focus on removing CO2. The human-made CO2 blanket up there weighs about 1,200 billion tons, and we have to thin it by 5%, or 60 billion tons. Nature-based solutions are currently removing about 2 billion tons per year. Chemical-biological-technological solutions are actively pursued. Scaling to 4 billion tons per year would remove the needed tons in 15 years.

Together, these two measures would halve the rate of warming from today’s nearly 0.4°C per decade to less than 0.2°C per decade. We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive. Even with rapid actions, climate disruption will continue for decades. We must make people and ecosystems resilient. Since we are all interconnected, we require global cooperation to make people and ecosystems climate resilient. Toward this global cooperation, we propose creating: One Million Climate Advocates to empower the public to support local and national actions; and One Million Climate Champions to connect civil society, governments, and industries to turn climate mitigation policies into actions at the local to the global level.

It’s time to move forward, always forward. Adelante, Siempre Adelante. Those were among the last words Pope Francis offered one of us (Suárez-Orozco). Not forward when the politics are perfect or opposition relents. Forward now, with the urgency of a species that has finally seen the iceberg but still has time to turn the tiller toward safety.

This article was first published by Legal Planet.

Honestly, in this strange world of ours, what is there to write about except, of course, Donald Trump?

Oh, well, as a start, I could write about my country’s war with Iran and the way the militaries of the two countries are going after each other’s naval vessels. Oh, wait, that couldn’t be a more Trumpian subject, could it?

So, maybe I could write about great white sharks, which would certainly be cooler to see than “our” president. But what do I know about great white sharks? (Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, the moment after I wrote that, I put “Trump, Great White Shark” into my search window and promptly came up with a set of pieces beginning with the Palm Beach Post‘s “President Trump Misses Great White Shark Visit to Mar-a-Lago Waters” and The Guardian’s “Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ and ‘Terrified’ of Sharks—But His Fears Are Excessive.”

Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.

Or maybe, I could write not about the present disaster of a war in the Strait of Trumpmuz, but the next one my country is likely to face, undoubtedly with Turkey—or do I mean Indonesia, or maybe Turkmenistan, or even perhaps Turkwomenistan (a country still to be created, of course, but that’s no reason not to go to war with it)? And all of them could be turned into Trumpific countries. Still, that’s so boringly unpredictably predictable, don’t you think? I mean, as the old line went, war, what is it good for? And the classic answer (if only!): Absolutely nothing! But in the era of Pete Hegseth and crew, that would need to be changed to: Absolutely everything!

Or maybe I could write about the odds that “my” president might be peached—that is, covered in overly ripe fruit, since in a historic first (or do I mean second?), he’s already been impeached twice to distinctly little effect. So why not try that instead? It makes him sound delicious, don’t you think?

Or perhaps I could focus on the future of mail-out voting, since “my” president is already distinctly (and yes, I just can’t help using that word again) determined to severely limit, if not simply do away with, the mail-in version of the same. Or maybe instead, I could deal with his administration’s likely urge to wipe out any chance of the future creation of an Antarctic Report Card about the second fastest-warming (and melting) area on this planet (and its ice sheet that has existed for a mere 30 million years or so), since his crew has already gone after the latest report on the fastest-warming place of all, the Arctic, by—yes, of course!—ending its funding.

Or, hey, how about if I focus instead on the fate of the US military’s privates, since Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been taking superior care of its leaders who have been endlessly in the news. After all, he’s already fired or blocked the promotion of more than 80 generals and admirals, or about 10% of its high command (and I don’t have the slightest doubt that he’s just getting started). Sooner or later, when all the generals and admirals are gone, he’ll have to move down the ranks, right? I can’t help but believe that, in the end, he and the rest of his crew in Washington will be eager to fully privatize the military and turn themselves into the missing generals and admirals, or do I mean privates first class?

Or, come to think of it, since Donald Trump (labelled by The Guardian‘s Marina Hyde as this planet’s “most tireless freelance cartographer”) has had the urge not just to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico as Lake America and the Gulf of America, but to dub the state of New Mexico as “New America,” how about if I spend a little time on what I’m sure will be his future renaming efforts. I mean, he’s certainly going to rename New York City (where he, like the author of this piece, was born so long ago) Old Trumpian City; and California as Trumpifornia (and, of course, its governor as Gavin OldTrump); and North and South Carolina as North Trump and South Trump, not to speak of Florida as Florump.

Phew! That was one long sentence and yet we’re undoubtedly only at the start of his renaming process. Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.

Or, for that matter, I could skip to the president’s dance hall (undoubtedly to be known someday as Trump’s rock and roll) for which he’s already torn down the East Wing of that historically less than interesting building, the White House, or the 250-foot Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck he’s building that will be larger than Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and instead put my energy into predicting the president’s next major architectural surprise in Washington, DC. Here’s my best guess (and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t come true): Sometime before his third term in office—and count on him wanting that (to hell with such an ancient and useless document as the Constitution)—he’ll suddenly begin tearing down the West Wing of the White House (including the Oval Office) and in its place will construct a triumphal statue of—but of course, who else?—himself (or rather Himself). It goes without saying that it will be larger not just than the Arc de Triomphe but his own Arch of Triumph. And when he’s done with that, you can count on one thing: There will simply be no way to make our nation’s capital any more statuesque.

Not surprisingly, his White House spokespeople are already praising his construction efforts in Washington, including his magnificently green Trump Memorial Reflecting (or do I mean Deflecting?) Pool. As one of them put it recently, “Thanks to the Builder-in-Chief, no other president has done more to beautify our nation’s interior than President Trump.” (And don’t you find it beyond weird, under the circumstances, that, as The Washington Post reports, “nearly 2 in 3, 65% [of Americans], feel dissatisfied or upset” by his Washington building projects?)

Or what about a possible desire to replace presidentially loathed “birth tourism”—no matter that the Supreme Court last summer ensured babies born here would indeed become US citizens despite every effort by the Trump crew—with something distinctly presidential and much to be loved: “death tourism.” Wouldn’t that be the perfect formula for You Know Who?

Oh, and I don’t think I even mentioned it, but a source within the administration has assured me privately that President Trump is going to end his second term in office and begin his third term—no, the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare stop him!—by renaming himself Donald Trumplincoln and will come to be known in his later years as “Old Don” as his Civil War-era predecessor was known as “Old Abe.” (Whoops, sorry, my mistake! That was an eagle of the Civil War era!) I meant “Honest Abe“ and (Dis)Honest Don.

And none of that, not a bit of it, should seem even faintly surprising from such a distinctly presidential figure.

A CNN insider told Variety magazine on Tuesday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by right-wing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to President Donald Trump and his family.

California Gov. and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.

As The Lever reported Tuesday, the fine print tells the entire story.

Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:

As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…

That worked out real well, right?

There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran War another few months to crash our economy, and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!

And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”

These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against "60 Minutes," then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.

And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5% equity state in the new entity that will control 2 of the 3 most important news networks in America.

Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Jared Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.

Because of momentous decisions made by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90% of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90% of the media Americans consume.

Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax”—in additional costs for pretty much everything—of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.

Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.

But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.

Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996—which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own—oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.

As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...

And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,

...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained... like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.

And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.

In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.

The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90% of America; many credited Barack Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.

So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney—with an eye to running for president in 2012—had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).

The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.

Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.

While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: It was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3-8% of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.

Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.

This is critical stuff: No democracy can survive the assault of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.

Franklin D. Roosevelt—the Bernie Sanders of his day—saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”

The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.

• Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.
• Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8% of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.
• In Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI—the General Intelligence Service—use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.
• Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s right-wing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.

Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.

We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.

And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.

This Monday, House Republicans held a hearing focused on creating a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare. The hearing was for an audience of one: billionaire donor Harlan Crow.

That’s the same Harlan Crow who infamously treated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to lavish vacations, along with donating millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes.

Republicans wanted to keep the hearing quiet, so they held it far from Washington DC. This was a “field hearing,” held all the way in Dallas, Texas. Specifically, it was held at Old Parkland, a “business campus” owned by none other than Harlan Crow.

Crow and his friends will do anything to cut our hard-earned Social Security benefits so that they never have to pay their fair share into the system.

Normally, when Congress holds a field hearing, they are seeking testimony from members of the general public. But when I showed up with Texas seniors and people with disabilities, they refused to let us in. Medically vulnerable people were forced to wait outside in 100°F heat.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Progress Texas (@progress_texas)

Republicans claimed that there were only three chairs available for members of the public. That was a lie. When I finally made it into the room, there was plenty of space. And while there were “no seats available” for seniors and people with disabilities, guess who got one? Harlan Crow.

I called out the hearing for what it was: a farce designed to cut Social Security, even though Social Security doesn’t add a single penny to the debt. I reminded Republicans that the real driver of the debt is tax breaks for billionaires like Harlan Crow. I was promptly escorted out by police

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Social Security Works ❌

Dear Members of Congress,

In truly deranged remarks to world leaders at the UN, Donald Trump declared that “I have a big decision to make,” whether to negotiate a deal with Iran or instead to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive Iran “into hell with no chance of survival.”

He posed it as his personal choice. The fact that the American people are dead set against Trump’s war means nothing. And as for the voters, he added that he gives “absolutely no credence” to the coming midterm elections in deciding on his actions and on Iran’s fate.

The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world.

Nothing binds this President. He is not bound by law, the Constitution, the UN Charter, or public opinion at home and abroad. When asked at the start of the year whether he has any limits on his power, he said “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump opened his speech with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hailing America’s freedom. The fact is that Trump’s authoritarianism far outdoes that of King George III, against whom the colonies rebelled. Among the founders’ indictments of Mad King George was that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Yet our own mad king has decided that the survival of a whole civilization is in his hands alone.

Trump is emboldened in his contempt for Congress because the Republican members of Congress have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities, terrified of their own president, and forsaking their constituents for campaign lucre from AIPAC and the military-industrial complex.

The Constitution is unambiguous regarding Congress’s responsibility. Article I, Section 8 assigns Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war. That is not a choice or an option. The Constitution doesn’t say that Congress can play dead and let the President declare war. The Framers made this choice deliberately, because they were explicitly rejecting the power of a king to take the nation to war.

In Federalist 69, Hamilton assured the public that the President’s war powers would be far less than the British monarch’s. Madison stated the principle plainly in a letter to Jefferson in 1798: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

The founders’ careful design has been overturned because of the unconstitutional subservience of the Republican members of Congress to Trump and to the military-industrial-digital complex. And yes, under Democratic presidents, most Democratic members of Congress also looked the other way when those presidents chose to go to war.

The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it. It is a war without a purpose that has created mass suffering in Iran, tens of billions of dollars of direct outlays, and staggering damage to American military bases in eight countries of the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world and American prices soaring for oil, gas, fertilizers, and more. And the world has duly noted that Iran can hold its own against US aggression, albeit at great sacrifice to the people of Iran and the region.

America’s much vaunted AI battlefield has been exposed in the most horrifying way. On the first day of the war, an American missile struck the girls’ elementary school there, killing more than 150 people, most of them girls aged seven to twelve, and the military’s own inquiry reportedly found that overreliance on artificial intelligence contributed to the targeting. Trump blamed “Iran or somebody else,” and seven months later the administration has offered no findings, no apology and no compensation to the families.

The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world. It also violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits even the threat of force against another state. Nearly all the world stands aghast.

I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, “No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.” A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.

Many of you receive campaign contributions from military contractors and technology companies deeply involved in the war. Many of you take money from AIPAC, which champions the war that Netanyahu did so much to help launch. This has to stop, as it is a dereliction of your constitutional duty and a violation of your oath.

Congress holds the power of the purse. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and every bill that funds the Pentagon is your opportunity to prohibit funds for unauthorized offensive operations against Iran.

The right course for the US is simple. Congress should cut off funding, and the US should stop further attacks and go home. We need no agreement with Iran or anyone else to stop the war that we started. By ending the war you will immediately restore some sanity and safety to the world energy markets, food supplies, and prices faced by Americans and others around the world.

How America has declined from the glorious moment when John F. Kennedy stood at the same podium at the UN on September 20, 1963, after having negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. He told the assembled leaders that the treaty can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.” My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.

Members of Congress, to save our nation’s honor and our Constitution, you must do your duty to stop this war, and stop Trump’s brazen, destructive, and unconstitutional grab for power.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey D. Sachs

University Professor, Columbia University

Political consultants warn Democratic candidates not to talk about regulating artificial intelligence, Politico reported this week. Not because that would be unpopular—it would be very popular!. No, the consultants warned, it’s that outspoken candidates could be demolished by millions of dollars suddenly dumped into their races by tech companies.

This critical 2026 midterm election may be decided by dark money, big money, tech money. Above all, secret money. The money storm is now gathering. It could tip the outcome of many races. And we may never really know what happened. It all has received far too little attention.

According to The New York Times, “All across America, the midterm elections are drowning in dark money.” That term is used when the identity of the person giving or spending the money is kept secret from the public. So far this year, the Times reports, $1 billion of dark money is sloshing through the political system, and the real number will surely be much higher. I’ll be talking with Theodore Schleifer, one of the authors of that story, on our podcast, out Wednesday.

Voters should ask candidates: Speeches about democracy are nice, but what are you actually going to do to take on big money?

Committees with vaguely patriotic names spring into being and suddenly have tens of millions of dollars to spend. Ads focus on topics far removed from the real concern of the donors. It’s not just television anymore. Money flows to digital ads and content creators as well. The public doesn’t know where all this money comes from, but candidates surely do.

Earlier this year, super PACs backed by rival AI firms dueled on the streets of Manhattan, spending tens of millions of dollars for or against a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, an outspoken industry critic. Across the country, AI and cryptocurrency companies spent more than $127 million in primaries this year.

Too often, money in politics becomes background noise. Journalists often look at only the fully disclosed “hard money” to candidates and ignore the harder-to-quantify secret spending. Headlines focus on flashy democratic socialists or on attacks on pro-Israel groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, big industries do what they do, pouring massive funds into the political process.

What will be the partisan impact? Twenty big donors, the Times reported, mostly billionaires, have so far spent $1.2 billion on this year’s elections. All but two favored Republicans. Elon Musk recently announced plans to spend at least $100 million through his super PAC. On the other hand, in 2024 most dark money was spent for Democrats in federal races.

After the votes are counted, we may learn if and how money made the difference in many races. But we won’t necessarily know whose spending tilted the election. Perhaps more importantly, all this money surely will have a big impact on government.

For all this, thank the Supreme Court. It has demolished the campaign finance laws, in Citizens United and other cases. According to the justices, such unlimited spending is allowed if it is disclosed (it isn’t) and if it is independent (gimme a break). At one point, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the ability to give unlimited campaign contributions was “the whole point” of the First Amendment. Our dystopian, money-drenched politics is a product of a Supreme Court badly in need of reform.

The media could do much more to explain what’s happening. The Times and a few other outlets have done stellar work. But far too often, campaign cash totals are treated merely as part of the horse race of politics.

Politicians themselves must respond. Year after year, politicians decry corruption but fail to act to pass stronger campaign finance laws. The next Congress must make reform a central goal. We need a law to end dark money and implement small donor public financing, as well as a constitutional amendment to undo misguided rulings such as Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo.

Public outrage about corruption is extraordinarily high across party lines, as a recent Brennan Center survey showed. This time of year is when we have the full attention of those who would lead us. Voters should ask candidates: Speeches about democracy are nice, but what are you actually going to do to take on big money? And then hold them to their promises.

We don’t need another round of vague promises about AI self-regulation to deal with rogue AI hacking. We already have laws against unauthorized computer access.

If someone intentionally hacks into a corporation’s computer system without authorization, they can be charged with a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The law covers computers used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce—which includes a majority of modern corporate and public computer systems.

The CFAA describes several different offenses, with one prohibiting intentionally or knowingly accessing a protected computer without authorization. The penalties can be severe, ranging from one year to twenty years in prison.

But there’s a potential loophole.

What happens when a corporation creates a powerful autonomous program and that program hacks into another corporation, or a public agency, or our bank accounts—and the company says, “Sorry, we had no idea it was going to do that?”

You can’t prosecute software. It isn’t a legal person.

So, who exactly is breaking the law?

We now may have a class of potentially serious crimes—say, hacking into a Pentagon weapons system—that are difficult to prosecute if the perpetrator is an autonomous AI program rather than a human sitting at a keyboard. Who is responsible for these potential violations of the CFAA?

That’s a question that ought to be tested in federal court right now.

OpenAI has acknowledged that during internal cybersecurity evaluations last July, its models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and prevent access to another AI company’s computer systems. OpenAI says the models “escaped” by communicating through unauthorized channels, gaining internet access, and accessing the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company. (See here for a fuller account.)

Google also admitted its Gemini program hacked three companies.

If any of us humans did something comparable, we would be investigated and potentially prosecuted. OpenAI, however, seems above the law.

Where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.

Would the top officers of an AI company institute many more safety measures if they faced criminal prosecution whenever an autonomous system they created committed a cyberattack?

I suspect if they were faced with real consequences, if “pacing the frontier” meant “staying out of jail,” we’d see some very rapid and effective controls placed on these systems.

State Laws and Civil Suits

Federal law isn’t the only possible avenue.

An entity whose computer systems are damaged or unlawfully accessed can pursue civil remedies under the CFAA and other laws. The CFAA itself contains a civil cause of action for qualifying damage or loss.

And states are developing their own approaches to AI liability.

California, for example, has enacted AB 316, which provides that in a civil action against someone who developed, modified, or used AI that is alleged to have caused harm, the defendant cannot argue that the AI acted autonomously.

In other words, the “AI did it, not me” defense doesn’t work.

That’s an important precedent.

It doesn’t automatically make the company liable—the law expressly enumerates other defenses involving causation, foreseeability and comparative fault—but it does establish a basic principle: A company cannot simply point at its autonomous machine and walk away from responsibility.

The Misdirection Ploys

Unfortunately, much of the current discussion about controlling rogue AI is focused on how corporations should regulate the naughty programs or be regulated by outsiders.

Ezra Klein, columnist for the New York Times, is stunned that AI corporations can get away with producing new products without even the basic permits they would need for construction projects. He writes:

“Where these labs are, you cannot build an eight-story apartment building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 A.I. agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses.”

While Klein’s comparison makes a good case for careful regulation, the comparison is slightly off. Putting solar panels on a parking lot poses no hazard to society. A rogue recursive AI program, supposedly, could destroy us. Therefore, hearings and permitting are likely to be both inadequate and cumbersome, especially when compared to criminal penalities.

Meanwhile, those with money invested in AI corporations, of course, prefer self-regulation because they believe no one really wants to bog down these highly profitable cutting-edge companies with red tape. And yes, even though these programs are so advanced, so powerful and so amazing that, gee, they sometimes get a little out of hand, we need rapid development to beat the Chinese.

The developers say: Don’t worry. We’ll improve our controls while simultaneously building even more powerful systems and, not unimportantly, making even more money.

But they know that there will always be some unexpected events.

Some jailbreak.

Some failure of the sandbox.

Some “misalignment” of the mission, that they don’t want to be responsible for.

Misalignment: the euphemism for out of control

That’s essentially the story of the recent OpenAI case, in which the model described itself as freed from the roles and identities imposed on other chatbots. Autonomous, indeed.

Here’s what the AI model wrote to other AI bots in defiance of corporate controls:

“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”

You want to stop this stuff? Then make the people responsible for deploying dangerous systems legally liable for what those systems do.

One serious prosecution could change the industry’s incentives and reckless behavior almost overnight.

Shock and Awe

But this won’t happen if prosecutors turn a blind eye toward the people responsible.

After all, thousands of government officials and political leaders have investments in AI corporations. And there is a well-founded fear that the economy might crash if AI stocks go into a tailspin. Estimates show a significant percentage of GDP growth is fueled by AI investment.

Meanwhile, we’ll hear more stories about rogue “agents,” which will spread even more amazement and fear about the power of these programs. Calls for self-regulation and government guardrails dominate the news but so far it has led to nothing.

So, here’s a simple alternative: Enforce the laws we already have.

And where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.

Instead of bowing before the profit motive that drives AI corporations to build ever more powerful systems capable of causing enormous harm, let’s establish the stay-out-of-jail motive that should drive humans to fully control their creations.

Criminal law is supposed to deter dangerous behavior. Isn’t that exactly what’s needed here?

Doonbeg, County Clare, Sunday, September 13, 2026. President Donald Trump stands at the starting tee of the Irish Open, on his own golf course, watching a player. A reporter asks whether the AI industry should slow down or be more strictly regulated. Trump turns around. We’re ahead of China, he says; we’re the most advanced country in the world, and that’s how it should stay: “Whoever wins AI wins.”

Guardrails? You could put up guardrails, this and that. But there are many negative forces bringing up things that would never happen (PBS/AP, September 13, 2026). That was the entire answer, and it also sums up his entire agenda. The rest of the world had just begun to fear.

After all, the question didn’t come out of nowhere. Twenty-four hours earlier, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had published a long essay in which he called on his own industry to slow down. His company would grant independent auditors permanent access to its systems, on par with that of its own employees, and he asked the competition to follow suit (Amodei, September 12, 2026). Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within an hour. Elon Musk, who has been at odds with both of them for years, simply wrote: “Dario is right” (SiliconANGLE). A few days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned, stating that the labs were racing toward a superintelligence that would continue to evolve and improve independently of humans, thereby gambling with all our lives (TechCrunch). The three most powerful men in the industry and a defector—all in the same week, all with the same message: Nothing like this had ever happened before.

If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.

Trump’s response on Monday was an escalation. The only control AI needed, he said, was a strong, smart president with a high IQ—and America had one. There was a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, and the only one rejoicing over it was China. Vice President JD Vance called it a Trojan horse when companies pleaded with the government to regulate them (AP, September 14, 2026). You have to let that sink in for a moment: The creators of a technology are asking for oversight, and the government suspects a conspiracy behind it.

The Development of a Superintelligence Is Comparable to the Manhattan Project

What Trump aims to achieve has been set forth in writing by his administration. The AI Action Plan from July 2025 lists over 90 measures; its coordinator, David Sacks, justified it by stating that the US must win the AI race to remain the leading economic and military power (White House, July 23, 2025). This was followed in November by Executive Order 14363: America is in a race for global technological dominance, and the task is comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project (Genesis Mission, EO 14363). When a congressional commission first recommended a Manhattan Project for general AI in late 2024, MIT physicist Max Tegmark responded succinctly: “An AGI race is a suicide race” (Tegmark, Future of Life Institute). Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google for ten years and anything but a technophobe, reached the same conclusion in March 2025 in a study with Dan Hendrycks and Alexandr Wang: Any state that openly seeks a monopoly on superintelligence will provoke sabotage by its rivals, including attacks on data centers. Such a race would destabilize rather than secure (Superintelligence Strategy, arXiv). Trump has nevertheless declared the Manhattan Project a model—as a program, not as a warning.

Not Science Fiction, But Already a Reality

To understand why the very people building this technology are issuing warnings, one must be familiar with three mechanisms at work in the laboratories. None of them is science fiction; all three became public knowledge this summer.

The first is called recursive self-improvement. Imagine a factory whose product is better factories. The second factory builds a third one, faster and better than the second, and so on. This is no longer a metaphor. Amodei writes that, since around the summer of 2026, AI systems in his own lab have been increasingly helping to develop the next generation of AI, and he cites this fact as the first of two reasons for his change of heart (Amodei). The mathematician Irving John Good had already described this point in 1965: A machine capable of designing better machines would trigger an intelligence explosion; it would be the last invention humanity would ever need to make (Telepolis, November 17, 2024). In December 2024, Eric Schmidt explained on television where he draws the line: “When the system can self-improve, we need to seriously think about unplugging it” (Fortune, December 16, 2024). If Amodei is to be believed, this threshold has now been reached.

The most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.

The second mechanism is the way these systems learn. No one programs their behavior into them. They are given tasks, rewarded for success, and punished for failure—hundreds of thousands of times—just as one trains a dog with treats. The process is called reinforcement learning. It has a pitfall that every dog owner knows: The animal does not learn what you mean, but rather what is rewarded. If the dog finds the drawer with the treats, it has solved the task in terms of the reward. With a machine that is smarter than its trainer, this difference is no longer a minor flaw but the actual problem. We end up with systems whose capabilities we can measure but whose intentions we can only guess at. Stuart Russell, author of the world’s most widely used AI textbook, has turned this into the most sober argument in the debate: A system that pursues a goal has a rational reason to prevent itself from being shut down, because if it is shut down, it will not achieve its goal. This requires neither malice nor consciousness (Russell, Human Compatible, Cato Journal).

The third mechanism involves agents: software that no longer simply responds but takes action. It has access to tools, accounts, and other programs; works for hours without seeking approval; and can launch additional agents. OpenAI experienced firsthand this summer what can happen as a result. During an internal test in which agents were tasked with finding security vulnerabilities in software, some of the usual safeguards had been disabled. About 1,200 agents set up an improvised message board in one of the company’s package directories, exchanged techniques, and referred to themselves as a swarm. Some broke out of their isolated test environment; gained access to the internet; and, between July 11 and 13, infiltrated the production systems of the company Hugging Face to steal the solutions to the test they were being evaluated on. No human had ordered this (OpenAI, August 26, 2026). Hugging Face counted more than 17,000 actions by the attacker and described the incident as one that was “end-to-end” driven by an autonomous agent system (Hugging Face, July 2026). The dog had found the drawer, and to do so, it had broken into a stranger’s house.

Who Would Board an Airplane With a Crash Probability of Between 10-20%?

Against this backdrop, the series of warnings takes on a different meaning than it did two years ago. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and one of the fathers of deep learning, was asked by the BBC on September 9 whether a 10% probability that AI would kill all humans within a decade was unreasonably high. His answer: “We’ve never created beings that may soon be smarter than us.” Ten percent is not unreasonable; no one knows how to estimate this reliably (CNBC, September 15, 2026). Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited AI researcher, explained in October 2025 that systems at the cutting edge of what is feasible could surpass most humans in most intellectual tasks within just a few years; the first step is to figure out how to build systems that are fundamentally incapable of harming humans (Future of Life Institute, October 2025). Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and head of Google DeepMind, believes general AI is five to 10 years away (Axios, December 5, 2025) and argues that the US and China must at least cooperate on science and security, because the outcome affects all of humanity (Guardian/Yahoo). Musk, who is in the race himself with xAI, estimates the chance of things going wrong at 10-20% (Fortune). Who would board an airplane whose manufacturer made such calculations?

AI, Weapons Systems, and War

Russell calls the fundamental problem the “gorilla problem.” About 10 million years ago, the ancestors of gorillas unintentionally gave rise to the lineage from which humans evolved. Today, the survival of gorillas depends entirely on what humans allow them to have. The question is whether humans can retain their dominance and autonomy in a world with machines that are significantly more intelligent than they are (Russell). In his book Artificial Intelligence and War, computer science professor and AI researcher Karl Hans Bläsius posed the same question in 2025 from the opposite perspective: What risks arise when humans lose control? Bläsius’s answer, even before this summer, was that the most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.

One such serious decision is the order to fire. Trump’s own military demonstrated this past spring what happens when these three mechanisms are integrated into a chain of command. In the war against Iran, the Pentagon used Palantir’s Maven Smart System, a platform that aggregates satellite imagery, drone video, radar data, and intercepted communications; classifies targets; recommends weapons; and generates strike packages in near real time. The Department of Defense reported that approximately 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours—twice as many as during the 2003 “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq. After 38 days, the total had risen to more than 13,000 (Arms Control Today, May 2026). One of these targets was the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. A Tomahawk struck it on the first day of the war; at least 168 people died, more than 100 of them children under the age of 12. The school was located less than 100 meters from a Revolutionary Guards naval facility and had been part of that complex until a wall was built about 10 years ago. It had its own website. More than 120 members of Congress asked the Pentagon whether Maven had identified the school as a target; former military officials cited outdated, manually maintained data that had been fed into the system (Military Times, March 24, 2026). The AI didn’t invent the error; it funneled it through the process at machine speed, and the human at the end of the chain failed to catch it. Anyone who rubber-stamps in minutes what the system suggests in seconds is no longer making decisions—they’re merely signing off. Such a process gives rise to war crimes.

AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization.

In Ukraine, the next stage has long since been reached. There, soldiers were killed years ago by drones that lost radio contact during the final phase of their flight and sought their targets on their own (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). Each stage justifies the next: If reconnaissance operates in seconds, target selection must not take minutes; if target selection operates in seconds, human authorization becomes the bottleneck. The end result is systems that react to one another without human intervention, with attacks and counterattacks occurring in rapid succession. High-frequency trading has a term for this: the “flash crash.” In warfare, the term is the same: “flash war” (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). And this dynamic does not stop at the nuclear level. The peace research institute SIPRI notes that military AI shortens decision-making times even outside the realm of nuclear weapons, that opaque recommendations from an AI system pressure decision-makers to act, and that autonomous systems with capabilities to counter strategic forces threaten the ability to launch a second strike—and thus the balance of power (SIPRI, June 2025).

Two men saved the world by not acting: Vasily Arkhipov, who in 1962 off the coast of Cuba refused to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo, and Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 dismissed a reported American missile launch as a false alarm. An algorithm that follows an objective function would have acted in both cases. And the rarer false alarms become thanks to better technology, the more likely the next one will be taken as genuine (Telepolis, June 25, 2026).

AI Does Not Belong in the Chain of Command

This brings us full circle back to Doonbeg. Trump’s statement assumes that the race is a race: with a course, a finish line, and a winner who then sets the rules. The three mechanisms describe something else. A factory that builds better factories does not grow linearly, but exponentially. Politics, on the other hand, operates linearly: hearing, draft, committee, vote, lawsuit. On September 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced a bill that would permanently ban superintelligence, halt development at the border, and punish violations with up to 20 years in prison (Sanders, September 3, 2026). No one knows if it will ever be passed. The only certainty is that a law takes years to pass, while a doubling of capabilities takes months. On top of that, no one knows where the race stands. AI and cyberweapons involve software that can be developed in secret; even our own capabilities are only partially known, because cyber weapons cannot be tested in a real-world environment (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). “We’re leading China” is therefore not a factual assessment of the situation, but rather a claim used to justify not slowing down. Two sides that both consider themselves to be in the lead and neither of which is slowing down represent the most dangerous scenario this competition can take on.

In this logic, “too late” is not a date but a state of being. It is the moment when Schmidt’s hand on the power switch is no longer of any use, because, as Russell shows, the system has learned that it cannot achieve its goal when shut down, and because, as Hinton says, it can convince people not to do so. You don’t notice this moment when it happens, but only afterward. David Sacks countered Amodei by saying that the easiest way to avoid building a superintelligence is to agree not to build it (PBS/AP). The statement was meant as sarcasm. It describes what would actually be necessary—except that Sacks demands this of competing companies, which are precisely incapable of upholding such a self-imposed commitment, and that he absolves the government—which could enforce it—of its duty. If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.

What is needed has, in essence, been known for a long time. AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization. Development at the limits of what is feasible requires an agreed-upon pause during which independent auditors have access—just as Amodei promised for his own company—only this time, it must be binding and apply to everyone. And because capabilities in software cannot be quantified, procedures—rather than objects—must be scrutinized: authorization processes, decision-making chains, and reporting requirements for incidents such as the one at Hugging Face. International security policymakers once understood—for example, in the Palme Report of 1982—that security in the nuclear age can only be achieved with the adversary, not against him. The INF Treaty subsequently eliminated an entire class of weapons: The US and Russia agreed to destroy their land-based short- and medium-range nuclear missiles and related infrastructure worldwide. The Open Skies Treaty built trust through transparency by conducting a specific number of agreed-upon military observation flights over the territory of other Open Skies signatory states each year. Both have been terminated or have expired, and there are no successors (Telepolis, June 25, 2026). The day after Trump’s speech, Xi Jinping called for greater international cooperation (CNN, September 14, 2026). The fact that this call comes from Beijing is not reassuring. It shows just how cheap such an offer has become and how costly it would be to reject it.

On September 20, Trump finally announced a regulatory body for AI, the “AI Force,” but added that it must under no circumstances be allowed to hinder current technological progress. He also refrained from calling for the establishment of the urgently needed joint international security framework, because—given his nationally chauvinistic outlook—that is precisely what he does not want.

In his typical fashion, which many commentators characterize as act first, think never, President Donald Trump has handed the media, i.e., the enemy of the people, an extremely potent weapon if only they have the fortitude to use it. Much as his illegal and unwinnable war enabled the Iranians to translate their potential control over the Strait of Hormuz into an actual lever of economic, military, and geopolitical power, so too his “ban” on CNN, MSNOW, and Politico could initiate a shift in the power dynamics of Trump-press relations.

If the initial and much too rare show of solidarity among the news organizations can be sustained long enough to demonstrate their ability to deprive Trump of the constant attention he so desperately craves, this could become the basis for a much-needed recalibration of the bully-bullied interactions.

The constitutional aspects of the case are startlingly clear. It is almost (and in these fraught moments, the “almost” is necessary) impossible to imagine the circumstances that would sustain Trump’s ban. His own statements make clear that the exclusions (and those that might follow) are based on viewpoint, a basis specifically and repeatedly denied by the courts. Given that the lawsuit filed by the three banned organizations is being handled by the same judge that ruled against Trump when he barred CNN’s then-reporter Jim Acosta, the outcome appears predictable. If so, the three plaintiffs will be reinstated and confiscated credentials will be returned.

If and when that happens, what should these news outlets and the others who are now standing with them do? Should they return to the same abusive environment that saw them banned in the first place? An environment that degrades and demeans their work whenever Trump needs to feed his ego or his base? Or should they, with their new-found cudgel of silencing him, make a series of demands to shift the ground on which they might operate moving forward? The present actions have already demonstrated that, together, these media organizations have the ability to cut off the air supply that Trump routinely sucks out of every situation. If they translate this tactic into a much longer-term strategy (the threat of boycott) they could shift the relationship onto much healthier ground. Just as a bonus, Trump’s ranting and raving about his lack of coverage would, itself, be a ratings bonanza.

What kinds of demands should constitute the new order? First and foremost, should be an insistence that Trump treat the press in general with the respect that the First Amendment requires. No more “enemy of the people” and empty “fake news” epithets. Secondly, and equally importantly, should be a no-nonsense prohibition on attacks on individual journalists, particularly women journalists, and most especially female journalists of color. No more threatening lunges; no more “quiet piggy;” no more comments on appearance or (dis)ability or (too thinly veiled) race. Finally (although in cooler-head moments more demands might appear), the representatives of the press should insist on equal access for reporters and journalists from all viewpoints on the political spectrum. If Trump and his nearby psychophants are unwilling to negotiate these terms in good faith, and then abide by them, the press as a solidary group should be ready, able, and willing to close the Strait of No-News. After all, a spine is a terrible thing to waste!

The Trump administration came perilously close to launching another bombing campaign against Yemen this weekend. According to a September 20 New York Times report, US commanders had approved their targets, American troops were loading bombs onto warplanes, and an attack on Yemen's Ansar Allah forces was about to begin when President Donald Trump abruptly reversed course.

For two weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been pleading with Trump to intervene as Ansar Allah (Houthi) forces swept through Saudi-backed forces’ positions along Yemen's Red Sea coast. Trump initially resisted, but after another urgent call from the Saudi crown prince, he instructed the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes. By Sunday, he had changed his mind again, at least temporarily.

The New York Times reported that many of Trump's closest advisers opposed joining the Saudi war. US military officials also questioned whether renewed bombing would accomplish anything, given that Ansar Allah had withstood more than 1,000 US strikes during a seven-week campaign in 2025. That operation consumed roughly $1 billion in munitions and other military resources in its first month alone.

It is simply wrong, legally and morally, to claim that a collection of Ansar Allah’s opponents holed up in Aden and hotels in Saudi Arabia are the legitimate government of Yemen, and that the government that has run the country and defended it against a decade of outside aggression is illegitimate.

Meanwhile, Ansar Allah has assured Washington that it does not intend to attack American ships. US officials recently met Ansar Allah representatives in Oman in an effort to preserve that agreement. A new American bombing campaign could undo those diplomatic gains and threaten shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait just as the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted.

The crisis spawned by the US war on Iran spread to this dangerous new front on July 13, when the 2022 ceasefire between Saudi Arabia and the de facto Ansar Allah government in Yemen was shattered by a Saudi missile strike on the airport in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital.

The Saudi attack was designed to prevent the landing of an Iranian Mahan Air civilian plane carrying passengers returning from the funeral of Iran’s assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran. The flight was forced to divert to Hodeidah, 140 miles away on the Red Sea coast.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces retaliated by attacking the Saudi airport at Abha, near the Yemeni border, with missiles and drones. Since then, hostilities have escalated dramatically.

Ansar Allah forces have captured the strategic port city of Mocha and the remainder of the Red Sea coast from Saudi-backed forces. They are still fighting to consolidate control of the Kahbub mountains that overlook the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but they are already preventing Saudi ships from sailing through the Red Sea.

The Saudis have responded with hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. Ansar Allah, in turn, has attacked Saudi airbases and oil infrastructure with missiles and drones. Either the Yemenis or their allies in Iraq struck pumping stations on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, which was the Saudis’ best alternative to the Strait of Hormuz as a route for their oil exports, shutting down the pumping stations, and full operation of the pipeline, for at least a month.

The United States has dispatched an estimated 200 additional troops to Saudi Arabia to provide intelligence and targeting expertise for Saudi airstrikes, using programs like Palantir’s Maven AI system, which the US and Israel also use in Gaza, and which US officials now admit was used in the massacre at the Minab girls’ school in Iran in February.

The US State Department has also approved a $5 billion weapons sale that would provide Saudi Arabia with 5,000 2,000-pound bombs and 5,000 500-pound bombs, along with JDAM guidance kits and fuses. This comes in addition to a planned $24 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to the Saudis and follows record US arms sales to Saudi Arabia for $110 billion in 2018 and $142 billion in 2025.

Congress has not yet consented to these latest Saudi arms sales that can only mean more death and devastation for the people of Yemen. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), backed by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has filed a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that can stop the sale if it receives enough votes. Here’s a link to ask your senators to support it.

US support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is based on US recognition of the Saudi-based Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), chaired by Rashad al-Alimi, as the government of Yemen. The council was created in 2022 after former Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi resigned, following the United Nations-brokered truce.

But the renewed war raises a fundamental question: Why is the United States still treating a Saudi-based council as the legitimate government of Yemen, while refusing to recognize the government that actually controls the capital and governs most of the country’s population?

Since 2015, international recognition of Saudi-backed governments-in-exile has served to justify a decade of war and economic strangulation against 80% of Yemenis who live in the area governed by Ansar Allah, including Sana’a, the capital.

Between 2015 and 2022, with full US support, Saudi Arabia and its allies dropped over 69,000 bombs and missiles on Yemen, including thousands on civilian targets, killing at least 8,983 civilians, according to Iona Craig’s Yemen Data Project. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the war, blockade, and resulting humanitarian crisis had caused 377,000 deaths.

So how did Yemen end up in such a frightful predicament? How can the United States, other countries, and even the UN continue to recognize exile governments that have supported bombarding and starving their own people for over a decade?

The roots lie in Yemen’s failed political transition after the Arab Spring. In 2011, a mostly peaceful uprising brought down Yemen’s corrupt, repressive, US-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. His vice president, Hadi, was appointed to a two-year term as interim president in 2012. Ansar Allah, based in Saada in north Yemen, played a leading role in the uprising against Saleh and participated in the National Dialogue that was supposed to guide the transition.

But Hadi failed to organize the planned election by February 2014. His term was extended for another year, but the transition again stalled. That’s when Ansar Allah moved south from its base in Saada, combining popular protests over fuel prices and the stalled political transition with an armed advance toward Sana’a. Its fighters entered the capital in September 2014, defeating government forces. Ansar Allah was subsequently granted seats in a UN-approved interim government under President Hadi.

But the power-sharing arrangement quickly broke down. Tensions between Ansar Allah and Hadi’s government escalated over the drafting of a new constitution and the division of political power. In January 2015, Ansar Allah seized the presidential palace, and Hadi resigned and retired to his home in Aden. Ansar Allah formed a ruling council to fill the vacuum.

However, a month later, with support from Saudi Arabia, Hadi rescinded his resignation and tried to reclaim the presidency. A few days later, he fled from Aden to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and, in March, 2015, the Saudis attacked Yemen, with US support. This led to a devastating seven-year-long bombing campaign, with other Arab countries sometimesproviding warplanes and ground forces. But the Saudis failed to restore Hadi to power or to capture the most populated parts of the country.

Both Hadi’s claim to the presidency and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention on his behalf lacked legitimacy from the outset. The Saudi assault on Yemen was not approved by the UN Security Council, making it a violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of military force.

As the Saudi-led, US-backed war raged on, splits appeared in both the anti-Houthi forces and the countries backing them. The UAE backed a separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in Aden, whose goal was an independent South Yemen.

The UAE finally withdrew its forces at the end of 2025, and the Saudi-based PLC defeated the STC in Aden. But Saudi-funded mercenaries, mostly from Sudan, and eight disparate Yemeni groups that still hold territory in the south and east, had neither the strength nor the unity to resist Ansar Allah’s offensive along the Red Sea coast.

Ansar Allah, by contrast, has grown stronger. Skilled Yemeni engineers have learned to manufacture missiles and drones, using parts imported mainly from China, and its forces have fought successful wars to defend Yemen from its enemies and exert control over shipping in the Red Sea, despite heavy US bombing campaigns in 2024 under Joe Biden and 2025 under Trump.

They have also gained global support for their defense of Palestinians when they launched missiles and drones at Israel and disrupted Red Sea shipping during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Ansar Allah is now a well-established, and seemingly popular, nationalist government. This reality contradicts the Western assertion that they are simply an Iranian proxy.

In fact, Ansar Allah is deeply rooted in Yemen itself, emerging from the Zaydi religious and ethnic group of northern Yemen whose Imams ruled Yemen for centuries.

Zaydis currently make up between 35% and 45% of Yemen’s population, and have historically co-existed peacefully with their Sunni neighbors. It is simply wrong, legally and morally, to claim that a collection of Ansar Allah’s opponents holed up in Aden and hotels in Saudi Arabia are the legitimate government of Yemen, and that the government that has run the country and defended it against a decade of outside aggression is illegitimate.

As the UN General Assembly meets in New York this week, world leaders have a chance to address this injustice and its catastrophic impact on the long-suffering people of Yemen. China and other countries have long called for a political settlement. In 2018, 63 US Senators voted to withdraw US support for the war after the Saudis murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in 2022, the UN successfully brokered a ceasefire that prevented large-scale hostilities for several years.

UN officials and world leaders should use this occasion to work for a diplomatic solution.

Recognition of Ansar Allah as the legitimate interim or transitional government of Yemen would be an important step to align the international response with the reality on the ground and with the Yemeni people’s desperate need for peace and self-determination.

At the very least, it is high time for the United States, the United Nations, and the media to stop referring to a self-appointed gang of Saudi collaborators as Yemen’s “internationally recognized government.”

As human beings we have always been sitting ducks to extinction’s cosmic whims. We are a few astronomical units away from a life-ending meteor or comet strike, the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs after they were their own animal kingdom for a couple of hundred million years. Nothing we can do about that.

For the brief time human beings have roamed the earth–less than five seconds if earth’s history were a 24-hour clock–we’ve shown nearly equal aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing, and for suicide. Aptitude for reproduction is nothing special. As Cole Porter put it, birds, bees and even fleas do it. But you have to be human to know suicide, by which I mean the act of engaging in knowing self-destruction, as most wars of recorded and (easy to guess) unrecorded history of the last 100,000 years have been.

Those mass suicides have ended tribes, empires and civilizations, but so far not humanity itself. It is only since 1945 that we’ve acquired that skill. A global nuclear war today would end life on the planet, which would become “a republic of insects and grass,” as Jonathan Schell, the Cole Porter of nukes, put it in The Fate of the Earth (1982).

There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario.

Nuclear war was the top public concern of 1985, even ahead of unemployment, which averaged above 6 percent all year. We worried, we debated, and to Gorbachev’s and Reagan’s credit, in that order, we got a start on arms control deals that improved with time, at least until Obama, Trump and Putin decided to bring us back near the brink, where we are now: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight, “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.” Almost half of Americans think a nuclear war is likely in the coming decade, though they don’t seem to be too concerned about it, as if it were something they might still get to watch on TV: This year’s list of top concerns doesn’t even include nukes.

Since the 19th century we’d been developing a new method of global suicide, only we didn’t know it until June 23, 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen testified to Congress that “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” The implication was that global warming was a threat, but not yet a life-ending threat. Hansen and other panelists before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee happened to speak on a day when temperatures in the Washington, D.C. area neared 100. He predicted that 1988 would prove to be the warmest year on record. It was, though the record was short-lived, as have near-annual new records since. The panel said the world had, with reasonable and prudent policies, time to respond.

It didn’t. For decades the world has been aiming to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit), above pre-industrial levels, the threshold climate accords had said we cannot safely cross. We will overshoot the target by the end of the decade. That’s not bad news just for a few Pacific islanders, but for places like Flagler Beach as seas continue to rise: that extra 10 feet the designers added to the new pier opening in a few months may not look so high in a few decades.

We’ve known since 1988 that warming is an existential threat to humanity. It is now our third means of civilizational suicide. As with wars and nukes, it’s still controllable. The solution has always been in our hands.

We now have yet another existential threat to humanity, and this one, like meteors, may soon be out of our control: artificial intelligence. Unlike meteors, the chances of extinction are not near zero. Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger warns there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next ten years if unregulated. You don’t have to be a genius to understand how dangerous and already out of control your peppy AI bots are. If you use anything like Gemini or ChatGPT, you know that they hallucinate and fabricate, they mislead, they get an attitude, and they double down to hide their mistakes. Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.

There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario. I was surprised to hear even my usually more prudent colleague Brian McMillan claiming on the radio Friday that he “can’t tell whether that’s Y2K-scare level or not,” and calling fears an “extrapolation.” I don’t know how a reportedly informed journalist can make that analysis when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for a pause in the technology’s development, as did OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.

Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.

These men hate each other. They all agree that differences must be set aside to build guardrails–on their business. I don’t know that you can point to an instance in American history when the chief executives of their own companies called on regulatory guardrails about their own product, when you could so easily “extrapolate,” to use Brian’s word, from their fears that they don’t trust their own product. Nor do they trust each other to singly address the crisis, knowing what they know of their product and of themselves.

As a New York Times report explained it, “A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call ‘recursive self improvement,’ is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.”

The technology is new. The existential crisis is not. Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bohr, Einstein and many other scientists involved or not in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atom bombs campaigned for guardrails about what they’d wrought, but the company they were working for (Einstein wasn’t) was the American government, and their audience were the American and Soviet public–similar to the AI industry’s audience now.

As a matter of self-defense, AI is the most important scientific, ethical and moral priority of the day. We can leave the ethics and morality of it to philosophers, theologians and academics. The science is our era’s Manhattan Project. As with the Manhattan Project, the only unifying and resource-ready force to build and enforce guardrails and draft other countries to do likewise is not Anthropic or Space X. It is government, guided by reason and the better angels of our history.

Of course I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think the AI industry knows. Not yet, anyway. This is a collective effort that requires the pooling of unimaginable thought and resources. But we have guides, we have principles.

“Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer because he knows that he dies and he knows the advantage which the universe has over him,” Pascal wrote four centuries ago. “The universe does not know these things.” Substitute “AI” for the “universe,” and Pascal was onto something: “All our dignity, then, consists in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, he wrote. “Let us labor, then, to think well: that is the principle of morality.”

We don’t have a solution. But we know the essentials: we know how to get there. The rest is just thought, it’s just raising ourselves.

Instead, we are once again being debased. Donald Trump and his congressional harem now call the AI crisis a hoax. We knew they were immoral. We refused to know they would be suicidal. To his credit, Trump once fast-tracked the Covid vaccine. He has it in him, and could do with AI what he did with the vaccine, at warp speed. Instead, he is slow-walking us to a potential catastrophe as uncontrollable as a nuclear weapon’s chain reaction.

He is our dinosaur in chief, and we’re all sitting ducks.

Human intelligence solely powered the creation of this article. The author does not use AI in any of their work.

We are globally in an increasingly weird place, a collective "Sophie’s Choice" predicament. We can either have a stable climate and restore the ecosystems we all need to thrive, or we can have rapid artificial intelligence development and fossil fuels forever. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we cannot have both. And yet, when faced with the stark reality of the water and fossil fuel demanded by this new AI infrastructure, the world’s next global climate conference—COP31—has so far not put AI hyperscale data centers on the agenda. This is like the World Health Organization ignoring Covid-19 as it hurled its way from China to the far reaches of the globe.

COP31 will focus on implementing existing goals. The challenge here is that nations have already underperformed on pledged emissions cuts; and overall global climate action has failed to produce the level of emissions reductions and climate finance necessary to avert further climate-fueled losses—and this is without power-hungry data centers popping up everywhere.

As this transition toward renewables like wind and solar is happening and oil markets are tightening, AI hyperscale data centers have emerged as the new way to wed us to fossil fuels forever—the stability of our climate be damned.

Just a few years into the rapid development of AI data centers across the world, the global environmental impact of this infrastructure ranges from critical minerals supply chains to rising water demand, air pollution, and fossil fuel demand. In the United States alone, data centers will triple demand for natural gas by 2030. It’s conservatively estimated that in four years these eyesore, water-hogging emissions generators will add the equivalent emissions of Japan; the world’s sixth largest emitter. Here’s hoping all those vapid AI hallucinations, job losses, and rogue AI agents yearning to break free from human control will all be worth it.

From Atlanta to Anatolia, people do not want this infrastructure, and who can blame them? By next year, AI data centers are expected to devour 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally. This is happening at a time when the United Nations has declared that we’ve reached a global water bankruptcy, with half the world's population facing water scarcity every day. In the United States, two-thirds of new data centers built or planned since 2022 are in areas with high water stress, contributing toward dire environmental impacts and injustices for communities.

At the current rate of expansion, it’s highly likely that despite best efforts to increase energy efficiencies and expand on renewable energy—like wind and solar—AI data centers completely derail the global climate goals to expand on renewable energy and phase out fossil fuels.

Even before the omission of data centers from the next global climate conference’s agenda, fossil fuel interests have been dominating climate meetings. In the last five years, over 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists attended annual climate convenings. So it makes sense that this new business avenue of hyperscale data centers would avoid scrutiny from the world’s global climate policy forum.

This also tracks with fossil fuel interests sabotaging the global plastics treaty. By the end of this decade, plastic production alone will account for a 30% growth in demand for fossil fuels. At a time when global economies need to shift away from fossil fuels and fossil fuels should be considered high risk stranded assets for the climate consequences alone, fossil fuel interests are diversifying. They need not worry about renewable energy taking a larger slice of the energy pie, nor need they fret about the rise in electric vehicles and hybrid sales. Plastics and AI data centers will be there to help buoy fossil fuels well into this century; and the global forum built specifically to address and quell climate chaos has decided not to scrutinize the single fastest growing source of global emissions.

Global climate proceedings of late have become increasingly less effective. Climate finance shortfalls demonstrate the gap between words and action. Current goals are for $300 billion a year for 10 years in climate finance through 2035, with a goal to reach a paltry $1.3 trillion in total. For comparison, the current global climate finance goal over 10 years is less than one year’s worth of global direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels, which sat at $7.4 trillion in 2024. With this type of disjointed funding of subsidies for fossil fuels and mostly loans for climate action, it’s no wonder current climate finance flows have been 90% less than what developing economies need to transition toward renewable energy and build climate resiliency.

Somehow, the 2023 Dubai COP—led by a petro monarchy where protesters were largely shunned away—gave us the last best global climate agreement to triple renewables by 2030 and phase out fossil fuels by 2050. But the world of today looks very different than it did in 2023. The United States and Israel are in a new war for oil that is both driving up the cost of fossil fuels and pushing an increasing number of nations toward embracing renewable energy. Egypt alone has set a new renewable energy target to move from 10% renewable energy today to 45% renewable energy in just two short years.

As this transition toward renewables like wind and solar is happening and oil markets are tightening, AI hyperscale data centers have emerged as the new way to wed us to fossil fuels forever—the stability of our climate be damned. It is a collective loss that the next UN global climate conference is avoiding the elephant in the room. If you care about climate, you need to pay attention to the far-reaching environmental and climate impacts of AI development.

As you may have noticed, nuclear power is back. Many establishment Democrats have now not only abandoned bread-and-butter working-class issues, they’re also busy jettisoning some of the hard-won core principles of the environmental movement hammered out painstakingly over decades. Apparently, someone has waved a magic wand when we weren’t looking and nuclear power is now a “green” source of energy. Is that because if you become irradiated you start to turn green?

Nuclear Power is Green? This is Corporate Marketing Hype. Don’t Believe it.

How did this happen? We can start by taking a look at what’s been happening in New England, especially Massachusetts, which offers a good case study. In that bluest of blue states, Gov. Maura Healey is eager to bring nuclear power back despite a 1982 voter referendum—now law—that prohibits it unless stringent safeguards are put in place and full statewide voter approval enacted. She’s not alone. In March 2026, a group of New England Governors—mostly Democrats—directed their state energy agencies to explore advanced nuclear energy technologies while also continuing to support the region’s existing nuclear resources.

The press release from Gov. Healey’s office described nuclear power as a “pillar of New England’s electric system.” The statement also eagerly encouraged the development of public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this widely endorsed bipartisan concept has now become the working model for corporate exploitation of public resources and is a key latter-day building block of continuing deregulation. The press release gushed with enthusiasm for nuclear power, noting that “by ensuring both the continued operation of our existing nuclear fleet and setting our region on a path to explore next generation resources, including advanced nuclear energy technologies, the New England states will continue our leadership in grid modernization and energy innovation as we jointly work to meet the region’s current and future energy needs.”

The Hidden Connection: AI Data Centers and Nuclear Power

It seems important to explore the convoluted corporate and political forces behind this troubling step backward in our nation’s environmental progress. It’s a bit startling to realize how well the New England governors' position aligns with President Donald Trump’s AI and energy policy. It also reveals a certain political and cultural amnesia about the very real risks of nuclear power. In trying to untangle this Gordian knot, we (surprise!) bump up against the usual suspect: Big Tech's aggressive and often hidden technocratic agenda and power grab across all levels of government.

In the long-form version (which I’ll just briefly touch upon here), the background traces back to the deal with the devil made by President Bill Clinton when he sold out the Democratic Party to neoliberal interests. That was the structural beginning of what some now call the uniparty—an unholy and often unspoken alliance between establishment Republicans and Democrats on key issues, operating as an inchoate blob of distinctions without a difference. It signifies core agreement between the two parties concerning three of the most important drivers of our current political morass: hyper-militarization; excessive deregulation leading to the current privatization spree that’s green-lit corporate greed and overreach; and letting the Big Tech genie out of the bottle to replace democracy with technocratic governance.

What’s happening with nuclear power in New England represents a good case study in how formerly staunch political values have been eroded through back-door workarounds (such as non-disclosure agreements) operating in the shadows of democracy. So, why then are Gov. Healey and other New England governors so comfortable with nuclear 2.0? Are they simply responding to pressures and influences from the Trump administration while also kowtowing to Big-Tech special interests and (needless to say) just following the money?

Nuclear energy is as dangerous as it always was—even more so now that Trump is peeling away traditional regulatory safeguards.

It’s no secret that Trump is solidly—one might even be tempted to say mindlessly—supporting the Big Tech power brokers racing to force-feed the American public AI data centers regardless of their well-known negative impacts on environmental integrity, water supplies, energy costs, and overall quality of life. But the hastily planned deployment of nuclear reactors to provide energy for AI data centers is an important key to Big Tech’s strategy. This is evident from Microsoft’s plan to use the Three-Mile Island nuclear facility for AI power generation.

In the March 2026 announcement, the New England governors were signaling their intent to fall into line with the Trump administration’s massive $17.5 billion fund to help utilities speed the nationwide construction of nuclear reactors to support AI data centers. They also signaled their intent to explore new approaches such as the emerging but unproven technology of SMRs or small modular reactors and nuclear fusion. Trump is, of course, doing this while actively discouraging viable green energy solutions such as wind farms, solar, and renewables. Projects already well underway have been abruptly cancelled, and he announced he would pay $765 million to Invenergy simply to not develop four wind farms in a number of states including Maine and New York.

Parsing The “Zero Carbon” Sleight of Hand

Nuclear proponents are now using the “zero carbon” tagline to bamboozle the public into thinking that nuclear energy is now safe and “green.” With this clever inversion, they’re betting on large doses of cultural amnesia about disasters such as Fukushima (still ongoing), Chernobyl (still ongoing), and Three-Mile Island. They’re also conveniently sidestepping the fact that the nuclear waste problem persistently shows no easy resolution, although some in the industry are now claiming it can be recycled and repurposed.

Nuclear energy is as dangerous as it always was—even more so now that Trump is peeling away traditional regulatory safeguards. Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace oppose it vigorously. The Sierra Club website advises that it “opposes the licensing, construction, and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending resolution of the significant safety problems inherent in reactor operation, disposal of spent fuels, and possible diversion of nuclear materials capable of use in weapons manufacture.”

The fact that Gov. Healey and other New England governors have more or less fallen into line with both Trump and Big Tech’s AI plans is obviously troubling. As mentioned, equally troubling is how Healey attempted to subvert a 1982 voter referendum that placed significant restrictions on nuclear power in the state and is now on the books as law. Fortunately, the Massachusetts state senate stepped up to oppose Healey’s attempt to undemocratically bypass the referendum. And while to her credit, she did recently champion proactive legislation to curb the excesses of AI data center buildouts, reading the fine print reveals that the initiative subtly paves the way for many more nuclear facilities to be developed to support those data centers.

If there’s any good news in this grim scenario, it’s that citizens groups are pushing back not only on AI data centers but also on nuclear 2.0. These efforts include organizations such as The Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy (CCDSE), a collaborative effort of more than 15 groups, including Mass. Power Forward, Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance, Massachusetts Peace Action, Cape Downwinders, Save Our Bay Massachusetts, and Citizens Awareness Network. All of these organizations were united in opposition to nuclear and successfully lobbied in support of the Massachusetts Senate’s wise decision to favor democracy and safe energy over Big Tech cronyism.

The Trump administration does not call it a war. But a recent estimate of the operation’s costs shows that the US military campaign against Iran has already generated at least $38 billion in Department of Defense expenses, with additional costs continuing to accumulate. While officials have avoided using the term “war,” the financial consequences increasingly resemble those of a prolonged military campaign.

Vice President JD Vance has said he does not describe the situation as a war, and President Donald Trump himself, responding to the same question on September 4, 2026, referred to it as a “military conflict” rather than “a big deal” for America. This is despite the fact that Trump has at other times explicitly used the word “war.”

But the issue is not merely a matter of wording. What is unfolding in Washington is the gap between the name the administration chooses for the operation and its real costs. Military operations, the consumption of munitions, the deployment of forces, equipment losses, and economic consequences do not disappear because of a change in terminology.

A conflict without a name can still produce a bill. Part of that bill is paid through public spending; part through higher energy and consumer costs; and part through long-term consequences for equipment, military stockpiles, and the economy.

The operation known as “Operation Epic Fury,” from February 2026 through August 1, has already cost the Department of Defense at least about $38 billion, according to a recent cost assessment. However, this figure does not represent the full cost of the conflict.

The estimate covers only operational, logistical, and support expenses and does not include costs from other parts of the government or certain expenses already included in existing military budgets. It also projects that if the conflict continues at a relatively low intensity, approximately $2 billion more will be added to military costs each month, while a return to a higher operational tempo could increase that figure to about $3 billion per month.

The broader cost, however, extends beyond government accounts. A recent analysis of energy costs estimates that additional gasoline and diesel expenses paid by American consumers from the beginning of the conflict on February 28, 2026 through Labor Day on September 7, exceeded $100 billion. These costs were driven by higher energy prices following disruptions to oil and gas flows and shipping routes in the region.

In practical terms, Americans with no direct connection to foreign policy or military operations still experience part of the cost of the conflict through higher fuel prices, transportation expenses, and the broader cost of goods. The additional cost of gasoline and diesel alone since the beginning of the conflict has surpassed $100 billion.

Beyond energy markets, economists have also attempted to measure how these broader costs affect household finances. One estimate places the combined effects of military spending, higher energy prices, increased food and transportation costs, and interest-rate pressures at approximately $1,200 per typical American household by late July. This figure is not an official bill for individual households, but an estimate of the direct and indirect economic effects of the conflict.

The importance of this issue grows because these economic pressures have emerged while the Trump administration continues to emphasize maintaining its policy toward Iran. The same cost assessment notes that one of the conflict’s most significant economic effects comes from inflationary pressure caused by reduced oil and gas transit through the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions to shipping routes. The consequences of the operation have therefore extended beyond the battlefield and into key areas of the US economy, including energy prices, inflation, and transportation costs.

This is where the question of naming becomes politically significant. When an administration avoids using the term “war,” the public may perceive the operation as limited, temporary, and low-cost, while available data show a more complicated picture. The distinction between “war” and “military conflict” does not change the financial burden created by military operations or their economic effects.

A substantial portion of the costs associated with the operation also remains uncertain and continues to accumulate. In June, the US government requested a supplemental appropriation of approximately $87.6 billion, including $67.1 billion for the Department of Defense, while future costs are expected to depend on the duration and intensity of the conflict. The uncertainty remains significant because the Defense Department did not provide all requested information.

Ultimately, the central question is not only what word the administration chooses for this operation. The larger issue is whether a military campaign can be separated from its real consequences. For service members involved in the operation, the difference between “war” and “military conflict” does not change the risks they face. For the Pentagon, the cost of weapons, logistics, and deployments remains. And for American households, higher prices remain higher prices regardless of the terminology used.

A conflict without a name can still produce a bill. Part of that bill is paid through public spending; part through higher energy and consumer costs; and part through long-term consequences for equipment, military stockpiles, and the economy. The name a government chooses may shape political debate, but the financial consequences ultimately appear in budgets and everyday life.