Robber barons political cartoon by Samuel Ehrhardt, 1889.

All that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness.

— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, July 28, 1750

Trump at the UN, sounding like Lex Luthor on ludes: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran? Or do I annihilate them, and do it quickly? Do I drive them into Hell with no chance of survival and no hope?” No wonder he wants to get rid of the International Criminal Court…

While US presidents traditionally greet foreign heads of state at the White House, Trump couldn’t wait to meet Xi. He rushed to embrace the Chinese leader at Joint Base Andrews outside DC, where the bemused Xi was welcomed with a red carpet, color guard, military band, and a less-than-stealthy flyover by two B-1 bombers. 

With Trump, there’s always a quote and it’s inevitably moronic, hypocritical and self-indicting…

This is a really weird photo. A bored Xi is already plotting how to skip out early. Trump wears a deranged grin on his face and, even though it’s only the first days of fall and a pleasant 65F in Maryland, he is bulked up in a winter overcoat and leather gloves. Melania looks grim as ever, while Liyuan is bemused by it all, feeling the power shift into her husband’s naked hands… 

Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and his cultish admirers could well be applied to the mysterious allure, only now beginning to fade, of our own bombastic despot:

He treats his defects as virtues…He has the mentality of a dilettante and [his music] cannot tell or demonstrate but only attack, disturb…horrify. What is it Wagner expresses about our era? The mixture of crudeness and softest fragility, barbarization of the natural instincts and nervous hypersensitivity, an obsession with emotion stemming from exhaustion and the delight in exhaustion.

(See: Mazzino Montinari’s What Nietzsche Really Said, Verso)

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has hit its lowest level since 1982 and all the oil swiped from Venezuela won’t fill it up any time soon.

A Pentagon investigation cited a kill-chain of an “overwhelming air assault order, severely outdated intelligence, and an overreliance on AI tools like Palantir’s Maven Smart System” that contributed to the February 28, 2026, U.S. Tomahawk missile strike that hit an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165 civilians, most of them children.

Sen. Rick Scott, Medicare scammer:

We didn’t decide to go to war. We decided to defend ourselves from somebody that wants to have a nuclear weapon to kill your kids and your grandkids. We all hate high gas prices, but we do not want to be killed by a nuclear weapon. He’s doing the right thing.

Your kids and grandkids are infinitely more likely to be killed by an AR-15-wielding psychopath raised in the schools and churches of Tallahassee than a non-existent Iran nuke. And neither Scott nor Trump will do anything to lessen the likelihood of that happening.

Since Rick Scott began serving in the US, at least 109 children have been killed in school shootings in the US.

Ha! At this point, Trump and Hegseth’s high-T, low-morale military probably couldn’t even launch a successful invasion of Grenada…

Marco Rubio gloating over the extreme executive powers that Trump has wielded at the expense of the Congress (and the Constitution):  “The legislative branch has limitations when it comes to the national security of our country… The President has extraordinary powers, both constitutional and otherwise.”

The Neo-Cons will swallow every aspersion, smear and calumny Trump has hurled at them if he just nukes Iran…

According to Moody’s, the Iran War has now cost the average U.S. household around $1,760.

Twice a week: the average number of Predator drone strikes on Somalia under the Trump Restoration since January 2025.

A former American diplomat who served for years in the Middle East told The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins that Trump’s negotiating posse, which includes Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and his sons, David Sachs, the crypto man, and Trump’s own family, are using their positions to pad their portfolios:

I know all of these guys. They go to these meetings and they’re doing business right alongside the diplomacy. ‘O.K., enough about the ceasefire. We have this hotel we want to build.’ That’s the kind of foreign policy America has now.

U.S. home sellers outnumber buyers by a record 563,000, creating a 58% gap. The number of US home sellers has hit a 6-year high.  In Nashville, Tennessee, there were an estimated 139% more home sellers than buyers in the market in August. A similar story is playing out in Houston, which currently has 131% more home sellers than buyers.

A US household would need $124,674 a year to afford a median-priced home, 44% more than the current median income, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Federal Reserve.

University of Chicago economist Brent Neiman, writing in the New York Times: “Workers are earning a smaller and smaller share of the economy’s income.”

Consumer prices have risen 3.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3.1% wage growth.

This is not a difficult question…

Fewer stocks are lifting the market than at any time since the dot-com boom/boost. According to MarketWatch, “the last time there were that many S&P 500 components below their 200-day moving averages with the index within 1% of its record high was indeed March 27, 2000 — right around the dot-com bubble peak.”

The affordability of housing in the US has hit an all-time low…

Brooke Rollins, the former Cotton Bowl Queen, now serving as Trump Sec. of Agriculture: “Instead of eating less beef as the price continued to rise, Americans began to eat more beef. And even though the price of a pound of ground beef was $6.50, most Americans say, ‘I’m good with that. I want this protein for my family.’ So they continue to buy.”

Brooke Rollins, screen capture from video posted to X.

The Fast Food Index remains dire. Even Chris Kempczinski, the CEO of McDonald’s, admits that inflation is here to stay, will likely climb higher and, as a result, fast food outlets, whose business is always a sign of how the economy is going for working people, are going to see fewer and fewer diners.

Where’s the beef (and what’s in it), Don? At least 300 Wendy’s fast food outlets nationwide may close because of the rising costs of beef.

If oil prices stay at their current levels, home heating oil customers can expect to pay as much as 31% more this winter.

The Financial Times reported that Europeans are spending an extra €30 every time they fill their tanks with diesel, as a result of the Iran war.

About the same time Trump said he would support a ban on diesel exports, his Energy Secretary Chris Wright said a ban on diesel exports could push up gasoline and jet fuel prices. Disorder in the House!

At $6.52 a gallon, the average price of diesel in the US has risen by 91 cents from a month ago. Meanwhile, the price of Group III base motor oil in the US has nearly quadrupled since February, hitting a record $12.45 a gallon in mid-September.

$5,851: the amount car owners in the U.S. spend an average of annually on auto insurance, gas, and maintenance or repairs.

When two  scumbag industries merge: “Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.”

The Washington Post reports that “even medical professionals are skipping health insurance because of high prices.”

The Trump administration has now kicked more than 1.5 million people off of ObamaCare coverage and into the merciless vagaries of a for-profit health care system that profits off of chronic illness and where even the most basic level of care drives people into bankruptcy. On top of that, the US doesn’t produce doctors anymore. The US is a health-obsessed but unhealthy country that can’t (and doesn’t even try to) provide care for the majority of its citizens. No wonder people take their chances with ivermectin, zinc, essential oils and green tea…

Number of doctors per 1000 people…

Cuba: 9.2
Monaco: 8.6
Greece: 6.5
Portugal: 5.9
Austria: 5.5
Argentina: 5.1
Russia: 5.1
Norway: 5.0
Germany: 4.5
Denmark: 4.5
Switzerland: 4.5
Sweden: 4.4
Spain: 4.3
Australia: 4.1
Poland: 4.0
Finland: 3.6
Belgium: 3.6
South Korea: 3.6
New Zealand: 3.6
Ukraine: 3.5
France: 3.3
U.K: 3.2
Chile: 3.3
China: 3.1
Canada: 2.8
Japan: 2.6
Mexico: 2.6
U.S.: 2.6
Brazil: 2.4
Venezuela: 1.7
Puerto Rico: 1.6

Source: World Bank.

Trump: “Whoever wins AI, wins.” We know what Trump wins: money. But what do we win?

The Washington Post reported just how deeply the Trump Organization is invested in AI and associated industries…

Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has announced a merger with a nuclear fusion company that plans to develop power plants as electricity demand surges, in large part because of the rapid expansion of AI data centers. Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in a number of AI and data center ventures, primarily through the investment firms 1789 Capital and American Ventures. Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that announced it had closed a $1.2 billion fund that will focus on real estate ventures, including deals aimed at digital infrastructure like data centers.

At least 105 members of Congress hold personal investments in the AI industry, according to an analysis of financial disclosures and hundreds of stock transactions this year by Real Sludge.

The Trump administration, which rarely seems to get out among their peeps anymore, continues to contend that popular opposition to both AI and data centers is being bankrolled by China, missing the fact that most people, right, left and center, have a visceral hatred for both.

There’s no political divide on AI. Only 10 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of Democrats and Independents say they are more excited than concerned about AI, according to a Pew survey from late June.

Appearing before the UN Security Council, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei warned that

AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole…For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time. No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone.

If you want to know the likeliest scenario for how AI could destroy humanity, then you’ll want to read Andrew Cockburn’s latest Substack offering, “Nuclear War Could be Just Another Hallucination.” Not only could it happen, it almost did. Let’s just say that the scenario involves AI, Pete Hegseth and the gang of incompetent tech-warriors he’s installed through the Pentagon….

Students who use AI almost every day score lower in science reading tests, which makes it much less likely that future programmers will be able to control their AI creations…

David Wallace-Wells on AI:

By any concrete measure, the country threw more at the project of building AGI than it had at anything in many decades. And today the number of Americans who believe A.I. is moving too fast outnumbers those who believe it is moving too slow 33 to 1.

Trump admin is moving to construct 12 sprawling data centers on 17,600 acres of public land across six states…

The idea that we’re in a data center Cold War with China is ludicrous…

Abdul El-Sayed: “AI shouldn’t be able to fire you. AI shouldn’t be able to deny you health care. AI shouldn’t be able to fire a weapon.” That’s a pretty clear and succinct way of putting it.

AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries “most of the time,” according to the Financial Times.

A new class-action lawsuit charges that UnitedHealth and its subsidiary Optum used a flawed predictive AI model known as “nH Predict”, which had a 90 percent error rate, to wrongfully deny post-acute care to Medicare Advantage patients.

The fast-food Chipotle chain has hired Palantir to track employee illnesses, Health Department scores, and food safety issues.

Seattle has become the first city to pass a measure stopping large grocery stores and online grocery........

© CounterPunch