Avarice, Fraud, Hypocrisy, and Revenge

Vice-President J.D. Vance was in Maine today to tout what the Trump administration claims is its push to combat fraud in public services. Vance blamed Democrats for fraud in Medicaid programs and vowed that the Trump administration would stop such fraud by refusing to distribute funds to states that were not cooperating with the federal government’s anti-fraud efforts. He announced yesterday the administration intends to withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.

This alleged push against fraud is part of an old playbook the Republicans have used since at least 2000 in which they accuse the Democrats of their own weak points and misdeeds.

This play was often associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, but in 2024, Caroline Wazer of Snopes noted that it is most usually associated with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Accusing opponents of what you, yourself, are doing, muddies the waters and makes it hard for real accusations against you for the same thing to stick.

Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients. Republican rhetoric claims a high rate of “improper payments,” but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services itself stresses that “improper payment measurement is not a measure of fraud.”

Rather, that term identifies payments where the paperwork provided by the state or provider was incomplete. Those numbers have been high recently because the government allowed states greater flexibility during the Covid-19 public health emergency.

According to the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy, MaineCare is overseen by both state and federal agencies, and the most recent federal review found that only about 0.1% of total program spending was in incorrect payments.

Indeed, last month, Reed Shaw of Just Security noted that the administration’s claim to be rooting out fraud appears simply to be a new way to punish perceived political enemies that might have a better chance of getting through the courts than the administration’s previous attempts did.

Accusing Democrats of fraud will also accomplish the political goal of muddying the waters to make it harder for voters to see that the Trump administration is the most corrupt U.S. administration in history. And concern about voters’ perceptions of corruption must be uppermost in the minds of administration advisors right now, since new Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Trump ally Viktor Orbán was driven in large part by voters’ fury at Orbán’s corruption.

Muddying the waters for voters is the best the Trump administration can hope for because, for all the administration’s claims to be fighting fraud, Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling.

He has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general—the people key to oversight—and in 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse. Matthew Purdy and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times noted in March that in both terms as of March 2026, Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.

Steven Greenhouse of The Guardian reminded readers today that in January, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker reported that the Trumps have pocketed about $4 billion, primarily through cryptocurrency enterprises.

Greenhouse notes that Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran, and that the Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”

Even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is acting as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East, he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has already invested $2 billion with Kushner.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects to remake the national capital. As Greenhouse notes, corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami.

In December 2025, Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart of the New York Times estimated that Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.

On May 11, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, and Allan Smith of NBC News reported that Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Although the UFC is paying for the event—and expects to lose as much as $30 million on it—and although tickets are technically free, Trump is picking who gets most of the tickets.

Sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC would comment on where the money is going. A Republican lobbyist told the NBC News journalists: “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump. They are raising a sh*t ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

And now Trump is in China on a state visit on which he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. 

Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”

On Tuesday a group of Miami residents sued Trump, his library fund, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Miami Dade College and its trustees, and Florida officials to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported Tuesday that the Department of Justice was working with Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax returns from thousands of wealthy individuals to the media. The Department of Justice and Trump were eager to settle before the judge in the case could rule on whether the case was valid, a decision that could easily go against Trump since he was both the plaintiff and, as the person overseeing the IRS, the defendant in the lawsuit.

This evening, Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported that Trump is in talks to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the government’s establishing a $1.7 billion fund to compensate those of Trump’s allies who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s alleged “weaponization” of the Department of Justice.

Those eligible for payments from this taxpayer-funded account would include nearly 1,600 people convicted of committing crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, people Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of shortly after he took office in January 2025. While Trump himself will probably be barred from direct payments, entities associated with him will not be.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the ABC News reporters: “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"Irresponsible": backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

 

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.        

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.   

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up. “At a time when the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis, approving a project that will consume water and energy at this scale is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Franque Bains, director of the Sierra Club’s Utah chapter. “Utahns want to see the Great Salt Lake restored, not stripped.”

The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV show Shark Tank and recently played a villainous tycoon in the movie Marty Supreme. O’Leary has claimed Stratos will deliver thousands of jobs and help the US compete with China in the burgeoning AI industry.

“I don’t think there’s a bigger site in the world than this,” O’Leary told Fox News. “It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around, we are going to get this done, move it forward and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country.”

In an X post, O’Leary added: “We’re not gonna drain the Great Salt Lake. That’s ridiculous. We are gonna create incremental jobs.” But these jobs will not outweigh the longer-term impacts to Utah and beyond, critics argue. Stratos is expected to raise the state’s planet-heating pollution by about 50% by consuming a huge amount of energy and water to power and cool itself, according to one impact analysis.

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

“The thermal load from the proposed Stratos project is extreme,” Davies said. “Of course it has effects. One of those effects is this: this facility imposes substantial drying on a watershed and ecosystem already in active collapse.”

O’Leary said the extra electricity demand won’t raise residents’ energy bills as new gas-fired generation will power the facility. “We are building power from scratch, from the pipeline,” he said. “We are going to burn it with turbines, clean,” he added, although gas is a fossil fuel that is dangerously overheating the world and isn’t clean.

Nearly 4,000 people have lodged objections to the project being approved, with this pushback leading to contentious public meetings that Lee Perry, the Box Elder county commissioner, said have left him feeling “physically sick” amid alleged death threats and false accusations.

O’Leary has claimed in social media posts that most of the protesters don’t live locally and have been paid to object to the project. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X last week. “They’re being bused in.”

Opponents of the project have rejected this accusation. On Monday, a group calling itself the Box Elder Accountability Referendum filed an application for a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

“Instead of speaking with us, Kevin O’Leary went on social media saying we were out-of-state, paid protesters, and we don’t want people from out-of-state making decisions for us,” said Brenna Williams, lead sponsor of the referendum push.

“The only thing he’s right about is that we don’t want him, an out-of-state billionaire, making decisions for us.”

Last week, there was a further twist when the developers withdrew their application to divert 1,900 acre-feet of water from ranching to the project. However, Stratos “fully intends to move forward” with a new application set to be lodged with state regulators, according to the developers.

This new process will invalidate the objections already raised by Utahns and require each person to pay $15 to file a new complaint. Opponents claim this move is aimed at skirting public disapproval of the project. “I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this has all the hallmarks of an out-of-state megaproject with little to no concern for the local community,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and executive director of Grow the Flow, a group that aims to protect the Great Salt Lake.

The growth of datacenters across the US has been championed by Donald Trump’s administration and the AI industry but has been met with local unrest. Anger at growing electricity bills and fears of water depletion have helped spur several local and state election victories for candidates skeptical of the AI sector’s unfettered growth.

Faced with a similar public backlash in Utah, Spencer Cox, the state’s governor, on Friday said he will require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills. The developers will build the datacenter in phases, he said, initially spanning 2,000 acres before scaling up further subject to future reviews.

“Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability,” Cox said. Last year, the governor asked people in Utah to pray and fast to help break fierce drought conditions.

“Industry is our state’s motto,” Cox added on Friday. “And in our pursuit of economic strength, we must always ensure that development is thoughtful and in line with Utah values.”

-The Guardian

"Trump’s catastrophic miscalculation in Iran and refusal to accept the inevitability of defeat is pushing us towards a global depression and ensuring the suffering and immiseration of millions"

 

America’s newest quagmire in the Middle East is like its old quagmires in the Middle East. It is based, as were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on a gross misreading of our adversaries, a catastrophic failure to understand the limits of imperial power and no discernable strategy. It swells the profits of the war industry, wasting billions of public funds, alienates our allies and erodes the global power and prestige of the United States.

Dying empires, governed by the corrupt and the incompetent, are blinded by militarism and hubris.

 They are unable to read the world around them. They stumble into self-defeating cul-de-sacs — as we did in Iraq, Afghanistan and earlier in Vietnam — where military adventurism accelerates self-inflicted wounds.

The war on Iran is one more chapter in our precipitous and ultimately fatal decline.

Tehran’s 10-point temporary ceasefire proposal — brokered by Pakistani mediators and presented to the U.S. 40 days after war against Iran had begun — is tantamount to surrender terms. It demands the end of U.S. and Israeli attacks, including in Lebanon. It calls for the removal of U.S. military bases and installations from the region. It solidifies Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. It refuses to abandon uranium enrichment. It calls for the end to sanctions and termination of anti-Iranian resolutions by the United Nations Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency. It also requires release of frozen assets — estimated at $100 billion — and reparations for the U.S. and Israeli attacks.

This is too bitter a humiliation for the U.S. and Israel to accept.

Within hours of the Iranian proposal, Israel — determined to sabotage any agreement — launched a devastating air attack against Lebanon. The attack, which was carried out over 10 minutes, included the bombing of central Beirut. It involved 50 fighter jets and 108 airstrikes that dropped around 160 bombs, killing 350 people and wounding 1,000 others. The lightning and unprovoked massacre, known as “Black Wednesday,” is a potent reminder that Israel has no intention of allowing this war to end. With the U.S. not ready to admit defeat, and Israel’s bloodlust, we are in for a very rough ride.

Iran submitted an updated proposal last week, which Trump said is “totally unacceptable.” But Iran, with its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, can afford to wait. The longer it maintains its blockade over shipping — roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz — the more global economic pain it inflicts.

There is no good outcome for the U.S.

The Trump administration’s obstinacy and Israel’s determination to resume attacks on Iran ensures that the global economy will barrel towards a global depression. The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilizers which are produced in the Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz this year if the war continues. This ensures a huge rise in food costs.

Shortages are already shutting down global manufacturing and production. The fragile, interdependent global supply chains are seizing up. This economic ecosystem, as Iran has shown, is easy to destroy. It will be very hard to piece back together.

Iran suffered devastating blows to its civilian infrastructure and economy — including residential areas, schools, health centers, police stations, churches and synagogues and energy, desalinization plants, steel and pharmaceutical facilities — as well as its military assets, including parts of its navy, air force and missile launch capabilities. It endured “decapitation strikes” against its senior political and military leaders at the start of the war, which included the assassinations of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the secretary of Iran’s Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Abdolrahim Mousavi, among others.

None of the U.S. and Israeli objectives, however, have been met.

The new Iranian leadership — centered around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — is more defiant and intransigent than the previous leadership. Iran maintains control over the Strait of Hormuz. It charges as much as $2 million for every oil tanker passing through it. These tariffs — which Iran introduced as part of its demand for war reparations — must be paid in Chinese currency, part of an attempt by Iran, China and Russia to break the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Iran also retains significant missile and drone stockpiles and enriched uranium, which it has warned it will increase to 90 percent purity if attacked again.

Iran is the clear winner of Operation Epic Fury. Trump is the clear loser. 

The dilemma is that Trump’s penchant for inventing his own reality means he is unlikely to acknowledge his blunder and negotiate a way out of the debacle he created. Trump, without Congressional approval, has already squandered at least $29 billion on the war according to the Pentagon, although analysis by Stephen Semler of Popular Information places the figure closer to $72 billion.

The human cost is already high. U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed more than 3,300 Iranian civilians, including at least 221 children. Over three million Iranians have been displaced, along with over one million Lebanese from Israel’s ongoing bombardment and ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon. There are, at the same time, over two million displaced Palestinians from the genocide in Gaza and another 1,100 killed and 40,000 displaced Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Fuel shortages and supply disruptions are crippling countries in Asia, with Thailand facing panic buying and rationing at some petrol stations. Vietnam and South Korea are scrambling to secure alternative crude and fuel supplies. Japan, which relies on the Persian Gulf for roughly 95 percent of its crude oil imports, has had to dip twice into its strategic reserves since the war started in February.

The rise in price of liquefied petroleum means cooking fuel prices have increased by about seven percent for domestic use in India, but have skyrocketed by around 76 percent in the commercial sector. This has resulted in production cuts and job losses in the garment and textile sector in India, as well as in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

There are shortages of helium, aluminum and naphtha, also transited through the Strait of Hormuz. These shortages have seen production declines, including among microchip manufacturers, construction firms and the plastic packaging sector. Steel mills in India and automakers in Japan have cut production. Tens of thousands of workers across the globe have already lost their jobs.

Asian airlines, along with many on the European continent — including those from Germany, Turkey and Greece — are loading extra fuel at their airports, cutting flights and raising surcharges with the doubling of the price of jet fuel. The United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s richest states with sovereign wealth funds that total more than $2 trillion — has asked the U.S. for a “Wartime Financial Lifeline” in the wake of missile-damaged gas fields and a halt to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Millions of people, especially in Asia and Africa, are at risk of falling into dire poverty because of the war, according to the United Nations Development Program.

The U.S., which is a net exporter of oil and natural gas, has been relatively insulated from the global shock, although gasoline prices have risen by around 40 percent to more than $1.20 a gallon. The average U.S. diesel price has increased by nearly 50 percent, surpassing $5.60 a gallon. But it is only a matter of time before the breakdown of the global economy ravages the U.S.

The Trump administration is pushing us towards a global depression with all of the social and political instability that comes with a catastrophic financial crisis.

Trump is desperate. He spews out expletive-laden threats to Iran on social media, writing “Open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards.” He also posts Artificial Intelligence generated images showing the U.S. military obliterating the Iranian military. He has threatened to bomb Iranians “back to the stone age where they belong,” and lambasts his critics as traitors:

“When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement.” He declared on Truth Social, “They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

This screed was followed by an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.”

Before leaving for China, Trump claimed: “We have Iran very much under control… We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.”

The rants are pathetic and unhinged. But they are also ominous.

The U.S. is building up troop levels in the region. It has deployed the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit — composed of about 3,500 sailors and Marines — in addition to transport and strike fighter aircraft and assault and tactical assets. It has deployed the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group along with about 2,500 Marines from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit equipped with F-35B Lightning II Stealth Fighters, MV-22B Osprey, tilt rotors and attack helicopters. The U.S. has also sent around 2,000 paratroopers to the Persian Gulf and is reportedly considering augmenting these forces with an additional 10,000 troops.

A resumption of the bombing, coupled with even a limited ground assault, would ensure a long and costly war. It will fulfill Israel’s objective — which seeks to bomb Iran into a failed state — but will be another mortal blow to the U.S. empire.

A ground assault on Kharg Island — which lies 16 miles off Iran’s coast and serves as the country’s main oil storage and export terminal, processing around 90 percent of the country’s oil exports — would send seismic shock waves through the global economy. And if U.S. troops attempt to seize Iranian territory, Iran will deploy its arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, underwater drones and mines, making any occupation deadly.

We are in serious trouble.

The management of the conflict is far beyond the capabilities of the buffoons within the Trump administration. They prefer global misery and carnage to defeat. By the time they face the inevitable, they will have left mounds of corpses in their wake.

The tragedy is not that the empire is dying. The tragedy is that the empire is bringing so many innocents down with it.

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"In the final days of civilization"

 

Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated; wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.

Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

There is a word for these people. Traitors.

These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.

Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. 

They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.

Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.

“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”

He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. 

The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.

The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.

Anand Giridharadas, who wrote “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdose they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:

People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private Merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

“The Epstein emails, in my view,” Giridharadas writes, “together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.”

“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he continues, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”

“These people are,” Giridharadas reminds us, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”

You can see my interview with Giridharadas here.

The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.

The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing taxes to win this year’s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee. Democratic donors pumped a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris’s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades and be defeated in every battleground state.

The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.

The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.

In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures — Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.

Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hyper militarism.

Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.

---

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Are the Russian Attacks on Ukraine Coming to an End?

 

Pausing, turning and pointing, like hounds catching a new scent, Europe’s leaders are picking up a blood trail from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s forces were once the hunters – now they are bleeding and Ukraine has the whiff of victory in its nose.

In the latest sign that Ukraine’s systematic new policy of trying to kill at least 50,000 Russians a month is working, Putin has told his people that the end of the war he started is near. And, in an act that was both desperate and doomed, he suggested that Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, could act as Europe’s envoy in talks.

A longstanding ally and friend of Russia’s president, the former German chancellor has also had deep ties to Russian companies, like the oil giant Gazprom. The idea of Schröder being a European envoy was immediately dismissed. The reaction is best summed up by Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief.

“It’s clear why Putin wants him to be the person – so that actually ... he would be sitting on both sides of the table. If we give the right to Russia to appoint a negotiator on our behalf ... that would not be very wise.” In fact, there is every sign that this was a desperate act from the Russian leader. He has enjoyed the backing of the Trump administration, which has adopted Russia’s side in previous talks and cut all military aid to Kyiv for over a year. But his forces have stalled and have lost ground in his campaign to take Ukraine.

On the front lines, there has been a steady growth in Ukrainian resolve during the winter. It has moved into outright confidence among many soldiers who have enjoyed a turn in their fortunes due to their dominance in drone warfare and successful long-range attacks deep into Russia.

Ukraine controls the Black Sea, where it defeated the Russian navy more than two years ago.

Now, Putin’s own shows of strength are muted affairs. His last, the 9 May Victory Parade to mark Russia’s triumph in the Second World War, went ahead only after he had agreed a ceasefire with Kyiv. He was rightly fearful that Ukraine’s home-made missiles and drones were capable of raining down on his parade.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, mocked his enemy by issuing a decree, including the Red Square coordinates, ordering his forces to observe a ceasefire in a parody of a Kremlin-style order from the top. “I believe that things have started to change after the harsh winter. We have survived one of the most difficult winters in our history, despite Russia’s desperate attempts to destroy our critical infrastructure,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament.

“On the front, Putin has failed and, strategically, he is losing. Ukraine has more deep strikes into the Russian territory, which is rather humiliating for Putin and Russia.” Ukraine has been hitting refineries and airfields more than 1,000km inside Russia, taking on targets around Moscow and conducting a series of assassinations of generals in Putin’s army inside the capital.

Since the beginning of this year, the level of medium-range attacks by Ukraine against Russian logistics in occupied territory has surged by 400 per cent. Ukraine hit 65 logistics and ammunition depots, 33 drone control points and workshops, as well as 17 troop command posts in both occupied Ukraine and in Russian border regions, Kyiv’s Ministry of Defence said.

The results have been incremental gains, like the reported recapture of Kupyansk, a strategic town on the Donetsk River, where Russian forces were cut off and surrounded. They have also been crucial in grinding down Russian air defences to allow Ukraine’s long-range Flamingo missile to hit military-industrial sites, including defence manufacturing facilities in the city of Cheboksary, more than 1,000 km deep inside Russia.

Ukraine’s aim is to collapse the Russian army without having to assault it head on. The families of Russian soldiers are paid $165,000 (£122,000) compensation if the soldiers are killed. If Ukraine manages to kill 50,000 a month, then Moscow’s bill would be $8.25bn a month.

By wiping out its logistics and drone bases, the aim is to undermine Moscow’s command and control systems so badly that Russian troops abandon the fight altogether.

Before Russia’s president claimed that he saw an end to the war soon, the EU’s Kallas had made it clear Europe was not interested in acceding to Moscow’s demands ahead of any talks. “We should not humiliate ourselves by being the demandeurs, ‘Please we beg you to talk to us’, but we should put them in a position where they actually go from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate,” she said.

Europe is taking a more robust line because it can, due to Ukraine gaining military momentum. And a powerful voice in international affairs. Gregoire Roos, director of Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes at Chatham House, said: “Ukraine has stopped presenting itself only as a victim and increasingly presents itself as a security provider. Zelensky is now selling Ukraine’s drone expertise abroad: nearly 20 countries are interested in drone deals with Ukraine, with several agreements already signed, including in the Gulf. “Second, Ukraine has become by far the most innovative and adaptive defence industrial lab in Europe.”

-Sam Kiley, Newsbreak

Iranian Peace Deal Defunct

 

Donald Trump has condemned an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable” as the month-old ceasefire appeared to be wearing thin. The president’s response came on a day that drone strikes were reported around the region and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the war was “not over”. The semi-official Tasnim news agency, citing an informed source, said on Sunday night that Iran’s proposed text for negotiations included lifting US sanctions, ending the US blockade of the strait of Hormuz after the signing of initial understanding, and an immediate end to the war with guarantees against any renewed attack. It followed the US’s peace proposal, which was reported to be a one-page memorandum of understanding that would reopen the strait while setting a framework for further talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

What is the US position on Iranian nuclear facilities? The US parameters for nuclear talks reportedly included a moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment for up to 20 years; the transfer overseas, possibly to the US, of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), and the dismantling of Iranian nuclear facilities. What is the sticking point? According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranian counter-proposal suggested a shorter moratorium, the export of part of the highly enriched uranium stockpile and the dilution of the rest, and refusal to accept the dismantling of facilities. How have markets reacted? After Trump rejected the counter-proposal on his Truth Social platform, there was a 4% jump in Brent crude on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before it settled at $103.50. Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.

-The Guardian

Pastors Pray Over Massive Gold Statue of Donald Trump in Florida

 

MAGA evangelical leaders gathered this week at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump National Doral Mami to bless and dedicate a towering gold statue honoring President Donald Trump, in a ceremony that is already drawing praise from supporters and criticism from opponents who compared the spectacle to religious idolatry.

The 22-foot gold-leafed statue, dubbed "Don Colossus," depicts Trump with his fist raised, recreating the gesture he made after surviving the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The sculpture was unveiled on Wednesday during a dedication ceremony led by evangelical pastor Mark Burns, one of Trump's closest religious allies.

Burns, who has repeatedly described Trump as protected by God, told attendees the statue was "not a golden calf" but rather "a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the willpower to keep fighting for the future of America."

According to videos and photos shared online by Burns and attendees, evangelical leaders prayed over the monument while supporters applauded around the base of the statue, which sits atop a seven-foot pedestal surrounded by palm trees at Trump's golf property in South Florida. Trump himself reportedly called into the event by phone to thank Burns and the guests gathered there.

The statue was reportedly commissioned by crypto investors linked to the $PATRIOT meme coin project and sculpted by artist Alan Cottrill, who told media outlets the gold finish was quickly embraced by Trump allies. The project reportedly cost about $450,000.

The ceremony comes as Trump's relationship with evangelical Christianity continues to evolve into one of the defining cultural forces inside the MAGA movement. White evangelical voters remain among Trump's strongest supporters, and several influential pastors and Christian nationalist figures have publicly framed him as divinely chosen or protected.

In recent months, Trump has increasingly leaned into religious imagery. He has promoted the "God Bless the USA Bible," compared political attacks against him to persecution, and sparked backlash after sharing AI-generated images depicting himself as pope and as a Jesus-like figure online.

Critics quickly reacted to the gold statue unveiling online, with some Christian commentators warning that the blending of political devotion and religious symbolism risked crossing into idolatry. Supporters, meanwhile, described the monument as a patriotic tribute and a celebration of Trump's political survival.

Burns rejected comparisons to idol worship directly in his remarks. "We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone," the pastor said during the ceremony. "This statue is a celebration of life.

 -Alicia Civita

A pathological narcissist is an individual with a deeply ingrained, destructive, and pervasive pattern of extreme self-centeredness, an inflated sense of power or entitlement, an insatiable need for admiration, and a profound lack of empathy. It is a persistent, maladaptive mental health condition that severely impacts interpersonal relationships and functioning. 

Characteristics:

Grandiose and Vulnerable States: Pathological narcissists often oscillate between extreme arrogance/entitlement (grandiosity) and hidden deep insecurity/shame (vulnerability).

Lack of Empathy: They have a consistent incapacity to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

Exploitative Behavior: They often exploit others to achieve their own goals without consideration for the impact.

Fragile Self-Esteem: Despite appearing confident, they are highly sensitive to criticism, which can trigger intense anger or shame.

Maladaptive Behaviors: Common traits include, but are not limited to, vanity, arrogance, envy, and the constant manipulation of others to maintain a "false self". 

National Institutes of Health (.gov)