The Guardian
US inflation rose at fastest pace in three years in April as Iran war hikes up prices
Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening here: working Americans are paying more for groceries, gas, and rent so that Napoleon Bone-Aspur can play War Chief and Pete Hegseth can cosplay as a Crusader. The Iran war — which was never put to a congressional vote, never debated by the people it’s bankrupting, and never subjected to anything resembling democratic scrutiny — is now bleeding directly into your wallet. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature. War is the ultimate corporate subsidy, and inflation is how ordinary people foot the bill.
Follow the money, because it always goes somewhere. Defense contractors are posting record profits. Oil majors are laughing all the way to their offshore accounts. The same donor class that bankrolled Trump’s return to power — the ‘Epstein Class’ of untouchable billionaires — had energy and defense stocks loaded up before the first missile was fired. Dark money think tanks spent years engineering the foreign policy conditions for exactly this moment, and now they’re cashing out while you figure out how to split one paycheck between rent and gas.
This is what imperial decline looks like from the inside: endless wars abroad, a collapsing standard of living at home, and a political class that responds to both with a shrug and a press release. If your grocery bill is higher this month, that’s not an accident of geopolitics — that’s the price of letting billionaires buy a president. Get angry. Then get organized.
ScheerPost
How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard) The Chris Hedges Report
Here’s the throughline that the corporate media will never draw for you, because drawing it indicts their own cheerleading: the War on Terror wasn’t just a foreign policy catastrophe — it was a domestic demolition job. Twenty-plus years of ‘extraordinary measures,’ indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and the slow normalization of executive lawlessness built the legal and cultural architecture that Trump simply moved into and redecorated. The surveillance state that was supposedly pointed at terrorists abroad got quietly turned around and aimed at dissidents, journalists, and immigrants at home. Shocked? You shouldn’t be.
The national security-industrial complex — Lockheed, Raytheon, Booz Allen, and the revolving door of generals-turned-lobbyists — made out like bandits during the War on Terror and never faced a single day of accountability. That impunity is contagious. When you establish that the rules don’t apply in a ‘state of emergency,’ you hand every future strongman the master key. Trump didn’t invent authoritarian executive power; he inherited it from two decades of bipartisan empire-building and decided to use it on domestic political opponents instead of foreign ones. The machine was always going to be turned inward eventually.
This is why the ‘but Trump is unprecedented’ crowd misses the point. He’s the logical conclusion, not the aberration. The Patriot Act, the drone kill lists, the black sites — these weren’t temporary measures. They were the foundation of the post-democratic state we’re now living in. If you want to dismantle the Age of Trump, you have to be willing to dismantle the bipartisan war machine that built him. That means naming names — including the Democratic ones.
The Guardian
Pam Bondi admits to ‘redaction errors’ in Epstein files but defends DoJ’s handling
‘Redaction errors.’ Let that phrase marinate for a moment. The Department of Justice — armed with a team of lawyers, a classified document handling infrastructure, and the full force of the federal government — accidentally redacted the wrong things in the most politically explosive files in living memory. Files that implicate a global network of powerful men who sexually trafficked children. Files that name names the ‘Epstein Class’ would spend any amount of money to keep buried. And Pam Bondi, the woman who transformed the DoJ into a personal concierge service for Donald Trump’s legal problems, wants you to believe this was a clerical mistake.
Bondi spent her entire tenure at Justice running interference for the powerful. She buried the Epstein files, stonewalled Congress, and perfected the art of performative outrage that covered for substantive inaction. Now she’s out — thrown under the MAGA bus, as we noted when Trump finally got tired of her — but the damage she did to any serious Epstein accountability is lasting. The ‘redaction errors’ story is a gift to everyone who trafficked in or adjacent to Jeffrey Epstein’s operation: it buries the scandal under a procedural fog of ‘mistakes were made’ that never requires anyone to answer for anything.
Here’s the thing about the Epstein files that never gets said loudly enough: the cover-up has always been bipartisan, and it has always been about protecting the donor class. Republican and Democratic administrations have each had opportunities to blow this open and each has declined. That’s not coincidence. That’s consensus among the powerful. Bondi was just the latest custodian of the secret. Demand a special prosecutor. Demand unredacted files. Demand it loudly and repeatedly, because polite requests have gotten us exactly nowhere.
The Guardian
As 2028 approaches, America needs ranked-choice voting more than ever | Jamie Raskin
Jamie Raskin is right, and we should say so plainly — which is itself a statement about how broken our political discourse has become, that ‘agreeing with a congressman about basic electoral math’ feels like a radical act. Ranked-choice voting isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a silver stake through the heart of the two-party duopoly that the donor class uses to keep the electorate trapped in a permanent lesser-of-two-evils death spiral. When your only choices are the corporate Democrat and the fascist Republican, the corporations win either way. RCV cracks that cage open.
Predictably, the dark money apparatus is already mobilizing against ranked-choice wherever it appears on the ballot. We’ve seen it in state after state: well-funded opposition campaigns, misleading ads, astroturfed ‘voter confusion’ narratives — all bankrolled by interests that have a direct financial stake in maintaining a system where two parties with the same donor base take turns running the country. The Techno-Fascists of Silicon Valley and the old-money oil barons alike understand that a genuine multiparty democracy with real competition is an existential threat to their stranglehold on policy. That’s exactly why they’re spending to kill it.
With 2028 looming and the authoritarian infrastructure of the Trump years still largely intact, electoral reform isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a survival mechanism. A democracy where voters are perpetually held hostage to binary choices is a democracy that can be bought wholesale for the price of two candidates. RCV, proportional representation, public campaign financing — these aren’t wonky procedural tweaks. They are the battlefield. Fight on it.
The Guardian
With oil markets nearing the danger zone, a US-Iran deal can’t come soon enough | Heather Stewart
The oil markets are ‘nearing the danger zone’ — which is economist-speak for ‘the people who got us into this mess are about to make it catastrophically worse for everyone who doesn’t own an energy company.’ Let’s be precise about the architecture of this crisis: a war that was engineered in part by fossil fuel industry donors, defense contractor lobbyists, and neocon think tanks funded by both, is now threatening to blow up the global energy market in ways that will hurt working people in every country on earth while the same donor class hedges its positions and profits on the volatility.
A US-Iran deal ‘can’t come soon enough’ — but here’s what that framing obscures: the people with the most power to make that deal happen are the same people with the most financial incentive to delay it. Every week of elevated oil prices is a week of windfall profits for the energy majors who helped put this administration in power. The revolving door between the fossil fuel industry, the defense establishment, and the executive branch means that the people nominally ‘negotiating’ are in a permanent conflict of interest with the people suffering the consequences. That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system.
When oil hits the danger zone and your heating bill spikes and airline tickets become unaffordable luxuries, remember that none of this was inevitable. It was chosen — by people who made the calculation that your economic pain was an acceptable cost of their political and financial ambitions. The least we can do is name them clearly and refuse to let them escape into the fog of ‘complicated geopolitics.’ This is corruption. It has authors. Make sure those authors are held accountable.