By Rob C.
-The Guardian
Cheers as US House passes resolution on Trump’s Iran war powers - video
Let’s unpack this: the United States House of Representatives — an institution that can barely agree on what day lunch is — managed to pass a War Powers Resolution telling Donny draft dodger he needs congressional approval before he turns the Persian Gulf into a fireworks display. And they’re cheering. They’re literally cheering. That’s how low the bar has dropped, folks. We’re celebrating the fact that a co-equal branch of government is attempting to perform its constitutionally mandated function. Pop the champagne.
But here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud: while Congress claps for itself, the defense contractors are already cashing the checks. Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman — the holy trinity of profitable apocalypse — have seen their stock portfolios glow like a reactor core every time the con-mander and theif rattles his sabers at Tehran. The Epstein Class doesn’t care who wins the war. They’ve already won. Every cruise missile launched is a dividend payment, and every congressional ‘resolution’ that arrives too late is just a press release pretending to be governance.
The resolution almost certainly dies in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell’s ghost still haunts the chamber and ‘institutional norms’ is code for ‘we’ll do nothing until we can profit from it.’ But here’s why you should care anyway: if Congress doesn’t reclaim war-making authority RIGHT NOW, the next president — any president — inherits a blank check to bomb whoever their donors find inconvenient. This isn’t about Iran. This is about whether your elected representatives have any power left at all. The answer, increasingly, is no.
-The Guardian
California governor’s race remains too close to call as vote-counting continues
California — the largest state economy on the planet, a place that makes more money than most countries and has more registered Democrats than the entire population of Florida — is apparently having a nail-biter of a governor’s race. How? HOW? The short answer is dark money, targeted suppression, and the fact that the billionaire class has decided that if they can’t win California at the ballot box, they’ll just buy the primary process wholesale and install someone more amenable to their yacht-parking needs.
Follow the money, because the corporate press sure won’t. The Chamber of Commerce crowd, the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian contingent, and a rotating cast of real estate developers who’ve spent two decades turning California’s housing market into a crime scene — they’ve all got a dog in this fight. A ‘too close to call’ race in California isn’t organic. It’s engineered. It’s what happens when you flood airwaves with enough SuperPAC slurry to make voters forget who actually has their interests at heart versus who hired the right consultants to sound like they do.
This matters beyond California. The Golden State is a policy laboratory — what passes there eventually spreads, or gets kneecapped nationally by corporate lobbying. If the revolving-door crowd installs a governor friendly to the gig-economy vultures, the insurance industry, and the prison-industrial complex, they don’t just win California. They win the narrative. They win the template. Pay attention to who’s counting the votes, who’s funding the recount lawyers, and most importantly — who’s popping champagne in a Palo Alto server farm tonight.
- Zeteo
First Draft: Hamawy Wins! The Witness to the Genocide in Gaza Is on His Way to Congress
In the middle of a political landscape that looks like a dark money dumpster fire, something genuinely extraordinary just happened: Hamid Hamawy — a man who has been a living, breathing witness to the slaughter in Gaza — just won a congressional primary. Not a protest candidate. Not a ‘raise awareness’ campaign. An actual, going-to-Congress winner. The Democratic establishment, which has spent the better part of two years trying to pretend Gaza wasn’t happening or wasn’t their problem, just got a message delivered in the bluntest possible democratic language.
And make no mistake — the machine tried to stop him. AIPAC’s political arm and the constellation of pro-apartheid SuperPACs that have made it their mission to ensure Congress never hears an uncomfortable word about Gaza spent real money in this race. These are the same groups that have successfully kneecapped progressive candidates from coast to coast, the same dark money apparatus that operates as a shadow HR department for American foreign policy. They lost. A grassroots campaign with moral clarity beat a checkbook with no conscience. Write that down.
Hamawy’s win is bigger than one congressional seat. It’s proof that the iron grip of donor-class foreign policy orthodoxy can be broken at the ballot box — even when the opposition has unlimited funds and a compliant media that treats ‘ceasefire’ like a dirty word. The Epstein Class and their think-tank enablers will spend the next few months trying to make sure Hamawy is isolated, defunded, and politically radioactive before he even gets sworn in. Don’t let them. His election is a crack in the dam. Help make it a flood.
-The Guardian
Senate approves $70bn for immigration crackdown amid splits over Trump fund
Seventy. Billion. Dollars. Let that number marinate for a second. That’s more than the entire GDP of a dozen countries, approved by the United States Senate to build what is, functionally, the world’s most expensive fear-based political theater program. While schools crumble, bridges rot, and Americans pay $400 for insulin, the bipartisan donor class has agreed that the single best use of your tax dollars is making brown people’s lives more miserable. This is not governance. This is a protection racket with a seal on the door.
Here’s who’s actually getting rich off this $70 billion: GEO Group and CoreCivic — the private prison cartel that turns human suffering into quarterly earnings reports — just got handed a golden ticket. Add the surveillance tech contractors, the drone manufacturers, the ‘border security’ consulting firms staffed entirely by former DHS officials who now charge $800 an hour for advice they used to give for free, and you have the full portrait of the immigration-industrial complex. The ‘splits over Trump fund’ mentioned in the headline? That’s just senators negotiating their cut of the corruption, not actually objecting to any of it on moral grounds.
This $70 billion won’t stop migration — because migration is driven by the same economic destabilization that American foreign and trade policy has spent decades engineering in Latin America. It will, however, make a small group of very connected people extraordinarily wealthy. The revolving door between DHS, Congress, and the private prison industry spins so fast it’s basically a perpetual motion machine powered by human misery. If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention. And if your senator voted yes, you need to know their donor list by heart before the next election.
-The Guardian
An ‘escalation without end’ — that’s the polite, Guardian-friendly way of describing what happens when the defense industry’s business model becomes American foreign policy. Gaza has been under siege for years. Lebanon has been bombed back into generational trauma. Iran is now directly in the crosshairs of an administration that gets its military theology from former FOX commentator with crusader tattoos . This isn’t a foreign policy crisis. It’s a foreign policy product — manufactured, maintained, and monetized by the same interests that have been funding Washington think tanks and congressional campaigns for thirty years.
The ‘escalation without end’ framing is itself worth interrogating, because it implies a kind of tragic inevitability — as if history just sort of drifted this way, like weather. It didn’t. Specific decisions were made, specific weapons were sold, specific vetoes were cast at the UN, specific senators were bankrolled by specific PACs. The Epstein Class didn’t accidentally find themselves at the helm of a multi-front Middle East war. This is the portfolio performing exactly as designed. Chaos is profitable. Reconstruction contracts are profitable. Permanent instability is the most profitable thing of all.
While Americans are told to be afraid of migrants and trans kids and college professors, the actual existential threats — climate catastrophe, nuclear escalation, the slow cremation of international law — are being actively accelerated by the people who bought your government at a discount. Gaza, Lebanon, Iran: these aren’t separate stories. They’re chapters in the same book, written by the same authors, funded by the same donors. And unless we start electing people who will slam that book shut, the next chapter gets written in a language we won’t survive to translate.
— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.
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