By Rob C.
- The Guardian
Let’s be clear about what Todd Blanche is: he’s Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney — the man who sat next to Don Pork-lioni at the hush money trial and argued with a straight face that his client was innocent — and now he’s being handed the keys to the entire United States Department of Justice. This isn’t the revolving door between power and profit; this is the revolving door being ripped off its hinges, set on fire, and used to beat Lady Justice unconscious on the steps of the Supreme Court. The fact that a few Republican senators briefly clutched their pearls before falling back in line tells you everything about the so-called “institutionalists” in the GOP: they’re not a check on power, they’re a speed bump that gets flattened every single time.
Blanche’s nomination is the logical endpoint of everything Trump has been building since 2016. First you install loyalists at the FBI. Then you purge the career prosecutors. Then you hand the whole apparatus to your own lawyer — a man whose entire professional identity for the last three years has been “keep Donald Trump out of prison.” The Epstein Class doesn’t need dark money to buy the DOJ when Trump can just appoint his own counsel to run it. Why bother corrupting the justice system from the outside when you can just move in?
Here’s why you should be furious: the Attorney General is the last institutional firewall between a president who thinks he’s above the law and the law itself. With Blanche confirmed, that firewall isn’t weakened — it’s been replaced with a welcome mat. Every investigation into Trump’s allies, every civil rights case, every antitrust action against the tech monopolists who bankrolled this administration — all of it now flows through a man whose sworn duty, for years, was to protect one client. That client is now his boss. Pay attention! This is what the end of independent law enforcement looks like.
- The Guardian
First Thing: Soaring oil profits from US-Iran conflict drive calls for windfall tax
Somewhere in a glass tower in Houston or Riyadh, an oil executive is reading the casualty reports from the Iran conflict and seeing nothing but green. While American service members are in harm’s way and working families are watching gas prices devour their paychecks, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and their friends in the petro-aristocracy are posting quarterly profits that would make a medieval robber baron blush. This is the dirty secret baked into every American military adventure in the Middle East: the bombs cost taxpayers billions, and the oil companies pocket the windfall. War is, as always, a racket — and the fossil fuel industry has the best seats in the house.
And who do you think was whispering in the ears of the “Deus Vult” crowd when they were drawing up the Iran game plan? Follow the dark money. The same petro-billionaires who spent decades funding climate denial, buying Senate seats, and installing their lobbyists inside every regulatory agency that dared threaten their profit margins didn’t suddenly develop a conscience when the missiles started flying. They funded the think tanks that made the case for confrontation, the Super PACs that elected the hawks, and the revolving-door alumni who turned the National Security Council into an oil industry alumni association. The conflict isn’t a side effect of their political investments — it’s the return on them.
Calls for a windfall tax are the absolute minimum response to this obscenity, and you can already hear the industry’s bought-and-paid-for senators sharpening their knives to kill it. Remember: these same companies received billions in pandemic relief, billions in fossil fuel subsidies, and decades of tax breaks while lobbying against the renewable energy that could have made this geopolitical nightmare unnecessary. They profited from the crisis they helped create. If that doesn’t make you angry enough to demand your representatives act, nothing will.
- The Guardian
US airfares expected to stay high even if Iran ceasefire drops oil prices, experts say
Translation: the airlines used the Iran conflict as cover to jack up prices, and now they have absolutely zero intention of bringing them back down — ceasefire or no ceasefire, peace dividend or not. This is Corporate America’s oldest magic trick: use a crisis to sprint prices upward, then claim structural headwinds, supply chain complexity, and the solemn mystery of “market forces” to explain why they never come back down. It’s the same playbook they ran with COVID, with the 2008 financial crisis, with every jolt to the system that gives them an excuse to squeeze passengers and pocket the difference as profit. The crisis is temporary. The price hike is forever.
The airline industry has been a masterclass in monopoly consolidation — a sector that went from dozens of competing carriers to four behemoths who control roughly 80% of domestic travel, all with the blessing of regulators who’d been softened up by decades of lobbying and revolving-door appointments. When you’ve eliminated competition, you don’t need a cartel agreement to keep prices high; you just need one company to raise fares and watch the others follow with a polite smile. The Epstein Class calls this “rational market behavior.” Normal people call it what it is: price gouging dressed in a fancy suit.
Every time you pay $600 for a middle seat next to the bathroom, remember that these airlines received $54 billion in pandemic bailouts from taxpayers — your money — and used a chunk of it to buy back their own stock and enrich their shareholders. They socialized the losses and privatized the gains, and now they’re doing it again with the Iran war premium. The question isn’t whether prices will come down. They won’t. The question is whether Americans will keep tolerating a system where corporations absorb public subsidies, exploit public crises, and answer to no one — and whether your representatives will ever have the spine to do anything about it.
- ScheerPost
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Senate Primary in Major Defeat for AIPAC, Establishment Democrats
AIPAC spent millions — millions of dark, largely undisclosed dollars — trying to bury Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Muslim-American physician who had the audacity to believe that voters in Michigan, a state with one of the largest Arab-American communities in the country, might actually want a senator who represents them. AIPAC didn’t just spend that money because they disagree with El-Sayed’s politics. They spent it because he’s proof that their stranglehold on Democratic primary politics can be broken. When you’re a foreign lobbying operation that functions as an electoral enforcement arm for hawkish incumbents, nothing is more dangerous than a candidate who wins anyway.
The establishment Democrats who lined up against El-Sayed aren’t villains out of a movie — they’re something almost more troubling: they’re institutionalists who’ve convinced themselves that keeping AIPAC’s money and maintaining the old donor coalitions is the responsible, electable path forward. It isn’t. It’s a strategy that has been hemorrhaging the party’s base for years — young voters, Arab-Americans, Muslim voters, progressives who watched the party wring its hands about Gaza while writing blank checks for weapons. El-Sayed’s win isn’t a fringe protest. It’s a reckoning that the Democratic establishment has been desperately trying to defer.
Here’s the bigger picture: this primary is a data point in a long war over who the Democratic Party actually serves. Is it the dark money networks, the defense contractor donors, and the foreign-policy establishment that’s been wrong about every war since Vietnam? Or is it the actual voters who want healthcare, a livable planet, and a foreign policy that doesn’t require them to be numb to civilian casualties? El-Sayed winning doesn’t fix the Democratic Party overnight. But it proves something crucial: the money can be beaten. Organize, donate, knock doors — because if it can happen in Michigan, it can happen everywhere.
- Zeteo
Live Q&A: ‘Start the Steal,’ Discussion with Mehdi
“Start the Steal” isn’t just a clever inversion of Trump’s greatest grift — it’s a diagnosis. While everyone was watching the January 6th committee hearings and the hush money trials and the classified documents circus, the real theft was happening in the budget reconciliation bills, the regulatory rollbacks, the FCC appointments, and the thousand quiet ways that power gets transferred from public institutions to private bank accounts. Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo have been doing the work of connecting those dots when most of the mainstream media was chasing the shiny object of Trump’s daily outrage production. The Q&A is the kind of conversation that should be happening in prime time but gets buried because it makes the wrong people uncomfortable.
This is exactly the format that terrifies the Techno-Fascists and their media enablers: real journalists, in real time, taking real questions from real people and refusing to bother with the false balance that turns every conversation about corruption into a both-sides seminar. The “Start the Steal” framing matters because it forces us to ask the uncomfortable question — stolen from whom, by whom, and for how long? The answer is: from you, by the donor class and their political servants, and for the last fifty years with the throttle wide open since 2017.
Show up, strap in, and fight back. The most powerful weapon the Epstein Class has isn’t their money or their lawyers or their captured regulators — it’s your exhaustion and your sense that nothing can change. Every time you tune in, engage, share, and refuse to look away, you’re costing them something. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness alone; it dies in apathy. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
Join the Resistance.
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Robert Cain is the author of “Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.” Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent booksellers everywhere.