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Debt Rattle October 7 2026

Oct 072026
 
 October 7, 2026  Posted by at 6:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Willem de Kooning Woman III 1953


• “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives (ZH)
• Why Might Putin Finally Decide To Bring Ukraine To Its Knees (Korybko)
• White House Declassifies DOJ and FBI Documents of Susie Wiles Targeting (CTH)
• Mamdani Tries to Hide His Jew-Hatred and Only Exposes It Further (Matt Margolis)
• Latin America’s Many Trumps (Daniel McCarthy)
• Brazil Votes: CIA Cultivated Evangelical Churches ‘For Decades’ – (Pepe Escobar)
• Assange Created The ‘Fifth Estate’ – Ex-CIA Analyst (RT)
• The Education Cartel and the Blue State School Scam (Turley)
• Many Germans Long for Merkel (Rainer Zitelmann)

 

 

 

 


This was clear years ago. Is politics blind on purpose?

“Google Plugs Into Constellation’s Nuclear Reactors As PJM’s “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives…”

• “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives (ZH)

For most of 2026, the bear case on the US power producers could be summed up in one sentence: nobody is signing data center PPAs in PJM. Last week Amazon did. This morning Google did, too, and this one is five times bigger.


Google parent Alphabet has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy (CEG) inside PJM, the largest US grid, the companies said on Tuesday, according to Reuters, confirming an overnight report from Bloomberg. Roughly a quarter of it, 890 MW, is new nuclear capacity squeezed out of 11 existing reactors under a 20-year PPA backed by more than $4.3 billion of Constellation investment, expected to start delivering in 2028. The rest is a long-term supply agreement for another 2,700 MW. And in case anyone missed why this is happening now, the companies said it outright: the deal is a response to PJM’s “bring your own power” proposal.

Constellation shares jumped as much as 14% premarket (they were up 6.3% when Bloomberg first broke the story last night), trading above $300 for the first time in a month.

Zerohedge readers know this story didn’t start this morning. We have been tracking the AI-nuclear trade since Microsoft agreed to restart Three Mile Island in September 2024, when nuclear names surged across the board on what was then a shocking headline. (Five years earlier, we were writing about “America’s Chernobyl” finally closing its doors. Funny how the AI capex cycle changes things.) Two years later, Constellation has become Big Tech’s nuclear landlord.

Below we break down the deal, why PJM forced Google’s hand, what Goldman’s power desk and utilities team are saying, and why the cheapest nuclear megawatt is the one already built.

The Deal: 890 Nuclear Megawatts… Plus 2,700 More. The terms, per the companies’ statement and the Reuters and Bloomberg reports:
• 890 MW of new nuclear capacity under a 20-year PPA, coming from upgrades at 11 Constellation units in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The first upgraded plant is expected to start delivering in 2028.
• $4.3 billion+ of new investment by Constellation in “new equipment and technology… increasing thermal and electric efficiency,” as Goldman’s industrials desk put it this morning.
• A separate long-term supply agreement for 2,700 MW in PJM that is “not tied to a specific generation source and serves as long-term revenue certainty for Constellation’s operating plants,” per Google.
Translation: the 890 MW is the headline-friendly “new clean firm power” part. The 2,700 MW is essentially Google locking in a long-dated price for a big chunk of Constellation’s existing output. Who needs a hedging desk when you have a hyperscaler?

Stack it next to Constellation’s other hyperscaler deals and Google’s is bigger than Microsoft, Meta and Amazon put together (2,646 MW combined), at least once the non-unit-specific supply is counted:

It also comes less than a week after Amazon’s 690 MW, 20-year PPA at Calvert Cliffs, which we covered on Thursday in “Amazon Secures 20 Years Of Nuclear Power From Constellation As Goldman Sees Industry-Wide Win”. And Google is hardly new to the game: it is already funding the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold reactor in Iowa (which just landed a $1.9BN DOE loan), and last month lined up new capacity from Southern Co. by paying for upgrades at two of its nuclear plants.

Read more …

Putin doesn’t kill Ukrainians, Zelensky does. The rest is filler.

• Why Might Putin Finally Decide To Bring Ukraine To Its Knees (Korybko)

Regardless of why Putin might have held off on this for so long, he’s now arguably motivated at least in part by the tantalizing possibility of reaching big-ticket resource deals with the US after the conflict ends, the details of which his and Trump’s envoys have been negotiating for over a year already.


The New York Times cited allegedly intercepted Russian communications to report that Russia plans to obliterate Ukraine’s power, heating, and water systems this winter. While their claim can’t be confirmed, it aligns with Putin mildly “escalating to de-escalate” over the summer in response to Zelensky’s strike campaign, which has taken the form of ramping up attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. If the report is true, then Russia doesn’t just aim to sever Ukraine’s military logistics, but to bring Ukraine to its knees.

Putin has thus far eschewed this arguably due to his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are kindred people. Some have suggested that Russia might not have had the drone and/or missile capacity to do so earlier, however, whether due to low production till now and/or to hedge against the scenario of a hot war with NATO. In any case, Putin now seems to have made peace with the humanitarian consequences of ending the war on Russia’s terms sooner rather than later, or at least on as many of them as possible.

He might be motivated by more than just Ukraine’s “war of attrition” against Russia that began over the summer with American backing and interestingly enough France’s as well. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told his Russian counterpart over the summer that no business deals are possible so long as the conflict continues. Since then, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin to discuss such deals among other topics, after which Kirill Dmitriev traveled to the US to follow up on that.

For background, Putin boasted in late February 2025 that American companies “will make a decent profit” from investments in Russia’s resource industry, and Trump’s Special Envoy to Belarus John Coale recently confirmed that he received approval to pitch a Belarusian-like deal to Putin. It would involve sanctions relief in exchange for the release of “political prisoners”. Putin’s ally Alexander Lukashenko already agreed to several such deals and is now negotiating a massive potash one with Trump.

Just last week, Lukashenko also proposed a trilateral Belarusian, Russian, and US fertilizer plant deal, but that requires the US lifting its sanctions on Gazprom. Russian officials from Putin on down have called for the West to lift its sanctions on Russia, and while the US might lift some if Putin agrees to a Belarusian-like quid pro quo, the Ukrainian Conflict will first have to end for this to happen at scale. Their resultant resource-centric strategic partnership could then revolutionize the global economic architecture.

The Russian economy has survived the West’s unprecedented sanctions onslaught, largely due to the combination of its natural resources and national payment system, but its Economic Development Ministry expects only 0.6% GDP growth this year. United Russia’s landslide victory during last month’s Duma elections, the first since the large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict began, gives Putin the mandate to do whatever is needed to win the war and deliver more prosperity to his people afterwards.

It’s therefore within the realm of possibility, consistent with Russia’s policy of demanding the lifting of Western sanctions, that Putin is motivated at least in part to end the conflict on as many of Russia’s terms as possible sooner rather than later so as to then reach big-ticket resource deals with the US. This imperative, which could revolutionize the global economic architecture and deliver more prosperity to his people, contextualizes the New York Times’ report about him planning to bring Ukraine to its knees.

Read more …

How was this ever legal?

• White House Declassifies DOJ and FBI Documents of Susie Wiles Targeting (CTH)

The White House has declassified documents from within the executive branch, specifically from within the Dept of Justice and FBI highlighting that Jack Smith used the Washington Field Office of the FBI to target President Trump’s campaign advisor, campaign manager and current Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.


The activity took place while Joe Biden was President, Merrick Garland was Attorney General and Lisa Monaco was Deputy AG. The FBI targeting of Susie Wiles was authorized by Merrick Garland on March 28, 2022. Recommended by Monaco eight days prior on March 20th. The FBI opened an investigation on Wiles that encompassed tracking her phone and email records during President Trump’s pre-campaign under the auspices of a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” that would later become “Plasmic Echo.”

In 2016 the Obama FBI opened an investigation of Donald Trump to monitor his campaign activity. In 2022 the Biden FBI opened an investigation of Donald Trump to monitor his campaign activity. The intents and purposes of the investigations seem identical. This is quite a remarkable series of documents provided by John Solomon. If, like me, you are deep in the weeds on these issues, you might also ask the question: why are we only just now getting to see this information? The answer seems to be at the top of the documents released.

The declassification was done by newly installed White House counsel Will Scharf. On August 9th President Trump noted the departure of White House Counsel David Warrington {source}, who was then replaced by Will Scharf effective September 1st {source}. According to the documents released, Will Scharf declassified them on September 29th {source}.

When Warrington’s exit was announced, there was a curious lack of explanation. Those of you who follow the inside baseball will note my criticism of the White House counsel in both Term-1 and Term-2. Given the context of these releases, it looks like Warrington was an impediment to sunlight on the corruption within the DOJ and FBI. I’m left to wonder if these documents were sitting in the White House counsel’s office, for more than a while.

Why did the White House wait to release these documents showing how the FBI and DOJ were targeting Donald Trump, his advisors and his campaign team until now. You decide. To me, this is beyond frustrating. I am trying to remain gracious, but there is no excuse for keeping sunlight away from this level of corruption. Hopefully the South Florida legal team is reviewing these documents as evidence in the larger conspiracy investigation.

There were different legal justifications used by Main Justice to target Donald Trump. In 2016, ’17, ’18, ’19 it was the nonsense around Trump-Russia. In 2021, ’22, ’23 and ’24 it was the J6 insurrection. However, the outcome of both DOJ/FBI efforts is identical – keep Donald Trump under FBI surveillance.

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“We all know that Mamdani is an antisemite, and his efforts to pretend he isn’t don’t fool anyone.”

• Mamdani Tries to Hide His Jew-Hatred and Only Exposes It Further (Matt Margolis)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is desperately trying to prove that he’s not antisemitic, yet his efforts to do so only keep proving that he is. Last week, Mamdani rolled out his long-awaited strategy for fighting antisemitism, complete with a new Interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and a $30 million price tag. He needed it badly. The city’s first Muslim mayor has spent months fending off charges that he has no use for the Jewish community, and Jewish New Yorkers keep getting attacked at a growing rate on his watch.


NYPD data released in August showed hate crimes climbing 9.4% citywide this year, and more than half of those incidents targeted Jews. That happened while all seven major crime categories dropped across all five boroughs, with murders and shootings hitting historic lows. Crime is falling everywhere in New York except where the victims are Jewish. The department’s figures also showed antisemitic attacks up 8% through August, with anti-Jewish incidents accounting for an outsized majority of all reported hate crimes.

So what did he deliver? A plan to combat antisemitism that never defines antisemitism. Nothing in it explains what sets Jew-hatred apart from any other racial or religious bigotry. Mamdani also declined to formally recognize Israel’s existence while unveiling it. The document never uses the word Zionism and gives Israel a single passing mention. Think about that for a second. Mamdani produced an entire plan about hatred of Jews and scrubbed out the Jewish state, the one thing his political allies despise most.

And the $30 million? It’s proving itself to be a ruse. Most of the plan recycles measures former Mayor Eric Adams already put in place, so New Yorkers get little that’s new. What is new is classic Mamdani, because the plan boosts funding for a group tied to anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour. Here’s what reporting on the plan’s partners turned up:

One of the top advocacy groups involved in P.A.T.H. — which works to prevent hate crimes across the city through community programs and grants — is the anti-Israel Arab American Association of New York. The Brooklyn-based group, which was run for over a decade by Mamdani’s mentor and pro-Palestinian firebrand Linda Sarsour, repeatedly cheered on the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University and other protests following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

The organization pocketed $3.3 million in city funding between 2017 and 2024, the Washington Examiner first reported, citing data analyzed by the transparency watchdog group OpenTheBooks.= P.A.T.H. partners also include the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, aka “the Godsquad,” the LGBT NYC Anti-Violence Project, the Asian American Federation and the Hispanic Federation.

Mamdani’s answer to surging attacks on Jews is to hand more public money to an outfit that applauded the mobs at Columbia. He is asking the people who helped make Jewish students feel hunted on their own campus to protect Jewish New Yorkers. It’s outrageous, and he expects the city to thank him for it.

None of this should surprise anyone who watched his rise. Mamdani supports the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He campaigned alongside Sarsour on arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His wife celebrated the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Anyone who knows Mamdani’s record knew his plan to combat antisemitism was going to be phony, and he happily obliged.

Jewish leaders certainly noticed. More than two dozen of them denounced the report and demanded that the Mamdani administration reissue it with a version that deals with Zionism. They understand what the mayor refuses to admit, which is that the hatred driving attacks on Jews in his city so often arrives dressed up as hatred of Israel.

We all know that Mamdani is an antisemite, and his efforts to pretend he isn’t don’t fool anyone.

Read more …

No more Democrat playground. How can that be a bad thing?

• Latin America’s Many Trumps (Daniel McCarthy)

Latin America is turning right, and it’s a vindication for President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In some ways, the Cold War never really ended in the Western hemisphere: Socialism has haunted the nations of Central and South America long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the same Cuban regime the Soviet Union propped up for decades remains in power to this day.


The hard left thought it had cemented control over Venezuela, too, thanks to Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — until American forces snatched Maduro right out of his bed back in January and took him to New York to stand trial. Yet most of our neighbors to the south are not ruled by dictators. Instead, elections in Latin America have swung back and forth between left and right. Only now they’re all swinging to the right, as the region’s biggest nation dramatically illustrated last weekend.

Brazil is now the scene of the greatest right-wing comeback since President Trump’s own reelection two years ago. Flavio Bolsonaro — whose father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is under house arrest — defeated leftist incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the first round of the country’s presidential contest on Sunday. Bolsonaro took 47% of the vote to Lula’s 45%, and with other right-leaning candidates garnering nearly 5%, Bolsonaro’s prospects in the runoff election on Oct. 25 look bright.

Yet that’s only half the story: The right, and the Bolsonaro family itself, also made huge advances in the nation’s legislative elections. “The Bolsonaro clan claimed victory in every race they contested,” the Buenos Aires Times noted. The ex-president’s wife, Michelle, won a federal senate seat, as did his second son — Flavio’s younger brother — Carlos, while third son Jair Renan Bolsonaro was elected as a federal deputy, as was the former president’s brother, Renato.

Their party, the Liberal Party, nearly doubled its number of senators, from 15 to 28, and won the largest number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies of any party since the nation’s current constitution came into effect in 1988. Smaller conservative parties also fared well on Sunday — the Brazilian people sent an unmistakable message that they are through with the leftism Lula represents. In this, the Brazilian electorate is moving in synchrony with voters throughout Latin America, who in election after election have tossed out left-wing regimes or reelected conservatives who were already in office.

It’s as if the whole region has been going through its own version of Trump’s 2024 reelection over the past two years. And more than one wit on social media has remarked leftists haven’t won a single national election in Central America or South America since USAID was dismantled. Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras and Costa Rica have all moved right, while Javier Milei’s party staved off left-wing challenges and won big in Argentina’s legislative elections last year.

No, this isn’t just because American taxpayer dollars are no longer being funneled by progressive non-government organizations — NGOs — into humanitarian efforts that get co-opted by left-wing foreign interests.But the ecosystem of international aid, which during the Cold War was seen by Washington as a way to blunt the appeal of Communism in the Third World, has for a long time helped rather than hindered the global left. That’s been true of Washington’s rhetoric as well:

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued in the late ’70s that Washington treated foreign friends on the right worse than most enemies on the left, as if the only way to beat Communism and socialism was to prove America could appeal to left-wing sensibilities, too. Trump and Rubio have taken the opposite approach: They encourage pro-American, right-leaning governments, especially close to home in the Western hemisphere.

This has given Central and South Americans a moral boost to free themselves from left-wing governments, much as the stark contrasts President Ronald Reagan drew between freedom and Communism helped inspire Eastern Europeans to tear down the Berlin Wall. The people of Eastern Europe knew better than anyone how evil Communism was, but they had reason to wonder whether the West was really willing to stand for an alternative, rather than offering endless moral accommodations and capitulations.

Until now, the State Department and Washington’s foreign-policy elite have habitually thought our country isn’t good enough and must prove itself equal to the professed — yet entirely fraudulent — ideals of left-wing regimes.

The Trump administration has a different attitude: It’s proud of America, and in the places around the world where hope and pride matter more than resentment and shame, that new attitude gets results.

Latin America knows it has a choice — and now that it’s clear, the people of South and Central America are choosing “Trumps” of their own.

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US funding and interference have played a role in the South American country’s presidential election, the independent journalist has told RT..

No, we are not surprised. Is there even one single person who is?

• Brazil Votes: CIA Cultivated Evangelical Churches ‘For Decades’ – (Pepe Escobar)

The US has sought to influence Brazilian politics for decades, including through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and has played a role in the country’s current presidential election, independent journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar has told RT.


He was speaking after Sunday’s first round of voting, in which right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, finished ahead of incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Both fell short of the 50% threshold needed to win outright. The two are set to face each other in a runoff on October 25.

Brazil’s government has previously accused Washington of interference in its internal affairs, while Trump has denounced the prosecution of the former president – who is serving 27 years for plotting a coup – as a “witch hunt.” Brazil’s Federal Police have since opened an investigation into alleged US interference in the election, following a request from the Attorney General’s Office over reported US funding of projects aimed at undermining the country’s Supreme Court.


“The Americans put a lot of money in this election,” Escobar said, calling for a federal investigation into possible foreign influence. He singled out Brazil’s influential evangelical churches, claiming that the CIA had spent “decades” funding efforts to cultivate them and that this was now “paying off.”

Escobar’s remarks come as US involvement in Brazilian politics has already become a point of contention between Brasilia and Washington. Flavio Bolsonaro met US President Donald Trump at the White House in May, while his brother Eduardo has lived in the US since 2025. Eduardo was sentenced by Brazil’s Supreme Court in June to four years and two months in prison for coercion after the court found that he had sought US pressure on Brazilian authorities in an effort to interfere with proceedings against his father.

Escobar also claimed that two days before the vote, the CIA already knew Bolsonaro was ahead, even as Brazilian opinion polls showed Lula leading. He attributed Bolsonaro’s strong showing in part to the influence of evangelical voters, who now comprise some 27% of the country’s populations, a historical high from the 15% in 2000.

The runoff is widely seen as a highly polarized contest over Brazil’s political direction. Lula has sought to strengthen the country’s role in BRICS and deepen ties with China and other Global South powers, while Bolsonaro has advocated closer relations with Washington.Lula previously served two terms as president from 2003 to 2010 before returning to office for a third term in 2023, following the annulment of corruption convictions that had prevented him from running in 2018.

A Bolsonaro victory could also have major implications for Brazil’s foreign policy, according to Escobar. He predicted a “complete reversal” toward closer alignment with Washington and the Trump administration. Such a shift could diminish Brazil’s role in BRICS, Escobar argued, saying the country could become a “bystander” within the group. Brazil is a founding member of BRICS alongside Russia, India, and China.

Read more …

“The WikiLeaks co-founder has played a key role in creating an alternative to mainstream media, which has been controlled by intelligence services for decades, Ray McGovern has said..”

• Assange Created The ‘Fifth Estate’ – Ex-CIA Analyst (RT)

Julian Assange has become a key figure in the creation of alternative media, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has said, expressing hope that the Australian journalist and activist is preparing to get back to work. McGovern spoke to RT as WikiLeaks marks its 20th anniversary. The website, co-founded by Assange in 2006, has published some of the most explosive leaks of the past two decades, exposing CIA hacking tools, classified US war records, illegal mass surveillance, and other closely guarded secrets.


The platform became a global phenomenon, making Assange one of the most prominent contemporary publishers, while also embroiling him in more than a decade of conflict with the US and other governments. Ahead of the anniversary, Assange suggested that he was returning to public life two years after striking a deal for his freedom with the US and securing his release from British custody.

Assange has become a key figure in the creation of alternative media, the “fifth estate,” McGovern said, adding that traditional media have long since lost their intended purpose, becoming closely controlled instruments for many governments worldwide. “The media in our country, and I dare say in many countries, the UK, Germany, is very tightly controlled. And so that’s the fourth estate, as Edmund Burke said, more important than Parliament itself. The fourth estate is co-opted now, it has been for decades,” he said.

“It’s very clear that the intelligence services have a lot of influence over what goes out into the media. And so you need an alternative. That’s why we placed great hope in what we call the ‘fifth estate,’ namely WikiLeaks and outfits like it that would encourage people to blow the whistle in a secure way and not endanger themselves,” he added.

McGovern welcomed the prospect of Assange’s return to active work, calling it a “salvation” for people willing to blow the whistle on dirty government secrets. “He will find ways to make it possible for people like me and my colleagues, if we come upon information that needs to be spread out into the media or out into the public, to have a secure way of doing that. That was his success. He’s bright enough to do that again, I am convinced,” he added.

Read more …

I had no idea things were this bad.

• The Education Cartel and the Blue State School Scam (Turley)

“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote in an 1879 travel book. “That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” It appears that most Americans now agree with him. New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.


What is most troubling is that the near-total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to an education cartel, a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of American adults say they are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. That is the lowest figure in Gallup’s 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since just 2024.

The collapse comes at a time when universities are reporting that college students are entering higher education without basic math and other skills.We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students. In May, faculty in the University of California system (which eliminated standardized testing to achieve greater equity in admissions) reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among new students.

Most recently, a University of California, San Diego, faculty report found a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020 in incoming students whose math skills fell below a high-school level.For many of us, neither the drop in skills nor public support is surprising. For generations, the public school system has failed students in major cities. Despite massive budget increases, actual test scores continue to fall or remain at subpar levels.

In a prior column, I was particularly moved by the frustration of a mother in Baltimore who complained that her son was in the top half of his class despite failing all but three of his classes. Her story led to my changing my view of school vouchers. Despite my long support for public schools, I believe vouchers may be the only way to wrest control away from the education cartel by introducing real competition based on academic performance.

Faced with low proficiency scores, teachers’ unions and school administrators have continued to lower proficiency requirements. They are simply pushing students out the door without basic skills, robbing these kids of any chance to break out of cycles of poverty and unemployment. When confronted with their poor performance, school board members have declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of so-called “equity.”

In any other field, such generational failure would be unthinkable. No business or enterprise could sustain itself. However, that is the point. There is little competition in this system. Blue states have largely blocked voucher systems while protecting teachers from performance-based standards.

Actual students have become irrelevant to budgets. In Chicago, there are schools that remain open despite 80 percent vacancy rates. One school, Frederick Douglass Academy High School has only 27 students, or 2 percent of its building’s capacity. The school system spends $55,000 for each student at Frederick Douglass Academy.

Overall, 35 percent of Chicago schools are half full or less. But that did not stop the schools from spending a couple million on transcendental meditation sessions or giving teachers and students days off to join May Day protests (with city-subsidized buses).

According to a recent study, in 2025, Chicago Teachers Union spent a record $4.2 million on politics and lobbying but less than 18 percent on representing teachers. This included massive contributions used to elect former teacher and union organizer Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former organizer for the union. Johnson, in turn, has effectively turned over his office to the far-left union.

In economics, there are few scourges older and more damaging than the cartel, which uses its power over an area to create “higher prices, lower quality, and stifled innovation.” There is a natural tendency for people to form such groups to stifle competition and feather their own nests. Adam Smith warned that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

The Education Cartel is becoming one of the greatest and most insidious forms of such anti-competitive conduct. Teacher unions have used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to acquire unchallenged power in blue states where they can dictate ever-increasing salaries, pensions, and budgets. One estimate found that, since 2015, the nation’s two largest teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — spent $669 million on federal campaigns and another $336 million on state and local campaigns.

Figures such as Randi Weingarten with the American Federation of Teachers effectively made their unions piggy banks for the Democratic Party and appear at far-left rallies to support Democratic causes. In return, Democratic leaders give this cartel most everything that it demands, including barring competition in the form of public vouchers or tying budgets to improving the education of actual students.

It is a closed circuit. Democratic leaders increase school budgets and salaries and the unions then send back hundreds of millions to fund Democratic campaigns. If you want to understand the priorities of the unions, just watch one of National Education Association head Becky Pringle’s unhinged speeches.

Her declarations that the union will “win all of the things” clearly did not include educational improvements for students.

A recent study found that blue states with strong teachers’ unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than red states. At least eight of the ten states with the worst literacy scores were liberal districts with politically powerful teachers’ unions, according to the Progressive Policy Institute.

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The most destructive housewife ever?!

She’s worse than Thatcher, right?

• Many Germans Long for Merkel (Rainer Zitelmann)

The polling institute YouGov recently asked: “Do you think Angela Merkel, as chancellor, would be better, worse, or just as well suited as the current chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to solving the problems and challenges Germany faces today?” The result: Forty-eight percent of Germans believe Merkel would be better suited than the incumbent Friedrich Merz to solving today’s problems. Twenty-nine percent thought Merkel would be just as well or as poorly suited as Merz. Only 8% thought Merkel would be worse. Fifteen percent gave no answer.


A Forsa poll published in early September produced an even more dramatic result: Only 7% considered Merz a better chancellor than Angela Merkel, while 71% considered him worse. Even among CDU and CSU supporters, 57% share this view.

Presumably, many Germans think this way because the economic data during the Merkel years was significantly better than under her successors. But that was not her achievement. Merkel, who took office in 2005, benefited from the reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD). He cut taxes and liberalized the labor market, leading to strong and sustained economic growth. As so often happens in politics, the successor benefits from free-market reforms, while the politician who actually implements them is punished.

Merkel herself carried out neither tax reform nor labor-market reform. Instead of cutting taxes, she raised them: In 2007, VAT went from 16 to 19%, while the so-called “rich tax” added three percentage points to the top income-tax rate for high earners. Social spending also went from 26.9% of GDP in 2007 to close to 32% in 2021.

During the same period, Merkel neglected investment in infrastructure, the negative consequences of which only became apparent much later. In 2020, the OECD noted that Germany had one of the lowest levels of public investment. During Merkel’s time in office, the backlog in municipal investment grew massively despite a strong economy and low interest rates: KfW estimated it at €132 billion as early as 2015 and at a then-record level of almost €159 billion in 2018. Germany’s crumbling bridges and dilapidated schools are part of the legacy of the Merkel era.

One of the main causes of Germany’s current problems is its high energy costs. This is a direct consequence of Merkel’s “Energiewende,” or energy transition, which has cost €500 billion to date. Merkel’s decision after the Fukushima accident to accelerate Germany’s nuclear phaseout was just as consequential as the fact that — despite warnings from the United States and Eastern European countries — she made Germany dependent on Russian gas. Germany is therefore now among the countries with the highest electricity prices in the world — a direct consequence of Merkel’s policies, which effectively transformed Germany’s energy sector into an ideologically driven planned economy.

Mass immigration is another problem, due to policies initiated by Merkel during the 2015 refugee crisis. And she was the midwife of the right-wing AfD, which, according to current polls, is by far the strongest party. It was founded in response to Merkel’s misguided “euro rescue” policies. As late as August 2015, the AfD stood at just three percent in the polls. By January 2016, it had risen to 11%, and in the 2017 federal election it ultimately won 12.6%, compared with 4.7% in 2013.

The problems caused by Merkel’s policies or left unresolved during her 16 years in office also include: Germany’s dramatic lag in digitalization and the erosion of Germany’s defense capabilities. When Merkel left office in 2021, the Bundeswehr lacked operational aircraft, helicopters, ships, ammunition, and personal equipment — Germany had allowed its ability to defend itself and its NATO allies to deteriorate for years.

Then there is the failure to reform the pension system despite demographic change that had been foreseeable for decades. Instead of using the economically strong years to carry out fundamental reform, Merkel’s government introduced additional benefits costing billions of euros, including retirement at 63.

Merz’s responsibility is that he has failed to initiate the urgently needed change of course after Merkel — a change he had promised. His defenders argue that this is impossible with the SPD. Exactly! But who forced Merz to enter into a coalition with the SPD? He voluntarily assumed the role of captain of a sinking ship.

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Debt Rattle October 3 2026

Oct 032026
 
 October 3, 2026  Posted by at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Hieronymus Bosch Ascent of the Blessed c1510


• Iran’s Regime Is Running Out of Options (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Trump Expected To Name National Intelligence Head Clayton As 1st Ai Czar (JTN)
• Super Interesting, as long as this AI/SI Czar Report is NOT a Leak Trap (CTH)
• Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Incl. Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked (ZH)
• The West Tried To Rein In Russian Oil. What Went Wrong? (RT)
• NATO Chief Advocates War of Aggression (RT)
• Europe’s Housing Crisis Is An Immigration Crisis (RMX)
• Always Watching (John Stossel)
• The Ancient Parable (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Tyranny Of One Man’s Opinion (Judge Andrew P. Napolitano)

 

 

 

 

 

 


It’s about time.

• Iran’s Regime Is Running Out of Options (Victor Davis Hanson)

Sami Winc: Iran, let’s turn to. It looks like internal strife is increasing, not because of the protesters out there, although I’m sure there are some. The women are openly defying the hijab in universities.


Victor Davis Hanson: They are. Daily, daily they do.

Sami Winc: But their administration knows it because they’ve increased patrols and checkpoints in fear of the protests from universities.

Victor Davis Hanson: For all you people who are worried and have sworn the war is lost, Robert Kagan, the whole left-wing media, what are you going to say when the people rise up? Three things are going to happen, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Number one, the people are going to rise up, and this time when they try to kill them, the U.S. will add air support. Number two, they are so desperate for a deal. Today they said, “We have a deal, we have a deal.” You can’t trust anything they say, but they will basically give most of us what we want, and it won’t be worth anything.

And number three, they will have a final fireworks October surprise, where they’ll call everybody up. How many drones you have in that mountain over there? Don’t we have a tunnel over there somewhere with six more missiles? We want them all to go at the Saudi oil field or something. And when that happens, he will unload on them, and the regime will be destroyed, conventionally.

So it’s gonna be like Greenland. It’s going to be like the NATO problem. It’s gonna be solved, but it’s not gonna be solved in a way that’s gonna bring credit. It’s the most existential problem the United States has faced since the Cold War. A lunatic regime that’s going to get nuclear weapons and whose terrorists dominate the entire Middle East, terrify every Arab government that has Shia Arab minorities in it.

It’s gonna be solved, and it’s gonna be solved very quickly. And I’m sure the people who say that Donald Trump was a warmonger and a war criminal and it was a forever war, left and right. Tucker Carlson says he should be impeached. He’s satanic. He loves nuclear weapons. I’m sure they’re all going to say that when the people overthrow this government or this government dissolves, that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It had to do with their criticism of Donald Trump.

Sami Winc: Well, adjacent to that, did you see that there were passengers that rescued a plane? It was going from Dubai to Israel, Tel Aviv, and it was taken over by a terrorist who was one of the pilots, and the passengers wrested control of it. There were pilots among the passengers, wrested control of it and landed it safely.

Victor Davis Hanson: Now, there’s this preliminary. It happened early this morning as I speak. I think we’ll get the whole story. You really don’t wanna predict what the whole story will be, but from the fragmentary evidence adduced so far, I think you can come up with two or three legitimate suppositions.

One, any flight that leaves an Arab country, like even from moderate Dubai to Israel, there are Israeli security on that flight. And one of them or two of them know how to fly it. They’re probably ex-Israeli pilots, right? Military. So they not only know how to fly a plane, they know how to fly a plane in danger.

From what we can tell, as you said, the captain attacked the co-pilot, thinking that my mission is to hijack the plane and ram it and kill everybody and ram it into an iconic Israeli building when we get there 30 minutes later. [Editor’s Note: The co-pilot attacked the pilot.] Sami Winc: Yeah, we could guess in Tel Aviv maybe.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it’s good. And so the Israelis, thinking way ahead of them, have people on every one of the flights. And number two, to enact that, I have to kill the co-pilot so there’s no other buddy that can grab the plane. And those cabins are locked. So I will be the only person here.

The co-pilot is dead or injured, and they can’t get me, and I’m just going to do what Mohamed Atta and those guys did. But what they didn’t know is that there were security, and Israelis are not normal people in the sense they just said, Oh my gosh, we’re hijacked. We’re all dead. They stormed and they broke through, and they rescued the co-pilot, and I guess they killed the pilot, and they got him out, and they had dropped about 12,000 feet in a minute, and the sheer stress on the airframe broke the rudder on the back of the tail.

[Editor’s note: The co-pilot who attacked the pilot was not killed.] So there was no way really, it was kind of wagging like a dog’s tail. And this pilot or pilots, Israeli I assume, were able to, as they do with fighter planes, use the wing flaps and rotate, I mean, wiggle back and forth and stabilize the plane, and they landed in a Saudi airport.

Three, I would not be surprised if that pilot had some connection with Iran. I don’t know how. In the same way, I would not be surprised as the five would be, I don’t know what we’d call them, would-be attackers of the RAF U.S. base in England had ties to Iran. But because that’s how Iran operates. And then they have deniability of culpability. Oh, we didn’t do that. That’s crazy. This guy was an Arab. He was Sunni. We have nothing to do with it. And then they brag, you know, in Farsi among themselves how they did this.

And we’ll see what happens, but I would be very careful if I was them. If this is traced … I’ll be candid. There’s an election coming up in Israel. It’s deadlocked. Has anybody noticed that of the missiles they’ve sent the last five months, most of them, half of them went to the UAE, over 5,000 of them, and Kuwait, less but substantial. A few on Qatar—their ally—Saudi Arabia, Oman, but not Israel. Not one on Israel.

And Benjamin Netanyahu‘s up for election, and he’s under pressure, and they’re promulgating this conspiracy theory that he knew about [the Oct. 7 massacre], and the UAE people told him, which we discussed was not true, I think.

So if this is traced, that they tried to … The Iranians used an agent to try to destroy a whole planeload, 737 Max, and then do so by ramming it into an iconic building, he’ll attack them. He’ll retaliate and he’ll get the entire support of the Israeli people and the United States, and Iran will be in big trouble because he had … The Israelis have a different…I don’t like to use that word existential, but they’re in a life-and-death situation with no margin of error.

So the Americans, we have kind of a reluctance of targeted assassinations. Barack Obama did 500 of them, but he was Obama, so they weren’t gonna criticize him, even when he killed, I think, three American citizens. But the Israelis have no compunction because it’s an existential fight. So that’s why they haven’t hit Israel, because the retaliation would take out the fourth and fifth tier of their leadership. But if this is traced to them, Israel, it’ll go after all of their grandees that are left running that country.

And it’ll be very interesting in the next few days to see what transpires, and it will ensure Netanyahu’s re-election. If that happens.

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“The president had suggested Clayton would be chosen, and he’s expected to make an announcement on Truth Social as early as Friday.”

• Trump Expected To Name National Intelligence Head Clayton As 1st Ai Czar (JTN)

President Donald Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the artificial intelligence czar. The president had suggested Clayton would be chosen, and he’s expected to make an announcement on Truth Social as early as Friday, NBC News reported, citing an unnamed source.


The selection comes after executives of major technology companies met at the White House on Tuesday, a meeting that Clayton attended. He would assume the responsibilities of the AI czar role alongside those of his current role. A White House spokesperson told NBC that personnel announcements would come from the president and “reporting until then is baseless speculation.”

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Sundance is dreaming of Tulsi.

• Super Interesting, as long as this AI/SI Czar Report is NOT a Leak Trap (CTH)

According to CNN, current Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton is likely to be appointed the AI/SI Czar. If that is accurate, and not a leak trap – which considering the source is sketchy, then that leaves the DNI position open again.


(VIA CNN) – President Donald Trump is expected to pick Jay Clayton to be the White House’s new czar of artificial intelligence, two sources familiar with the discussion told CNN. The president could announce his decision about Clayton, who is director of national intelligence, as early as Friday, one of the sources said.

Trump announced last month that he was planning to create an “AI Force” and name an AI czar as the government faces growing calls to impose guardrails on the technology’s rapid development. Trump gathered several AI and technology CEOs at the White House on Tuesday for a meeting that culminated in the signing of a new commitment aimed at better “self-policing” their companies’ AI models.

If it is accurate that Clayton is going to the Super Intelligence Czar position, and considering the sudden reappearance last week at the White House, is there a possibility of someone returning to the administration as DNI?


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As he’s said for 26 years.

• Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Incl. Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked (ZH)

Now it’s no longer just high-ranking Krezlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials. Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he’s willing to use “all weapons” in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.


“The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region,” Putin said. “If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable,” he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.


NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described: The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has “information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region.”

The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency. The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany. Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.

The letter accused NATO of an “unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia’s region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies’ officials.””This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance’s member states right from the outset of the conflict,” the letter said. NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow’s letter:

“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.” Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.

Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:


Newsweek described, “The statement follows a miniseries aired by British broadcaster Sky News last week, The Wargame, which traces a hypothetical Russian attack on the U.K. and how the country might respond—including by authorizing operations against the Baltic territory of Kaliningrad.”

Read more …

Nearly four years after Western governments set out to squeeze Russia’s oil revenues, Moscow is shipping crude worth more per week than at any point since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

• The West Tried To Rein In Russian Oil. What Went Wrong? (RT)

The gross value of Russia’s seaborne crude exports surged to $2.75 billion in the week through September 27, the highest weekly figure in four years, according to tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Shipments averaged 3.71 million barrels per day over the latest four weeks, their highest since early August.


The rebound exposes a central problem with the Western strategy. Sanctions were designed to keep Russian oil on the global market to avoid a supply shock while forcing Moscow to sell it more cheaply.Instead, Russia rerouted crude from Europe to China, India, and other markets, built alternative shipping networks, and reduced its reliance on Western services. Now, soaring global prices fueled by the US-Israeli war on Iran are making those barrels more valuable.


The plan: Keep Russian oil flowing but slash Moscow’s earnings
When the West moved against Russian oil in 2022, it faced an obvious problem: Russia was too large an exporter to remove from the market without risking a surge in global prices. The EU was also Moscow’s biggest oil market. Europe took more than half of Russia’s oil exports in 2021, while Russia was the EU’s largest crude supplier, accounting for roughly a quarter of its imports. China, by comparison, was Russia’s largest single-country buyer.

The EU banned most seaborne Russian crude imports in December 2022, while the G7-led bloc imposed a $60-per-barrel price cap. Western shipping, insurance, and other maritime services could still handle Russian crude, but only if it was sold below the ceiling. Sanctions on petroleum products followed in February 2023.The logic was simple: cut Russia’s revenues without removing its oil from the global market. The strategy therefore depended on keeping Russian crude flowing while using Western dominance of shipping and insurance services to constrain its price.

The plan backfired. The $60 cap initially coincided with steep discounts on Russia’s flagship Urals crude. But Moscow gradually reduced its dependence on Western shipping and insurance services by which the ceiling was supposed to be enforced.

Even the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) – a Helsinki-based research organization that has repeatedly advocated tougher sanctions on Moscow – now says the policy has “failed to impose a durable constraint on Russian crude export earnings.” It says the measure worked only for limited periods on Urals, while other grades and export channels were largely unaffected.

The EU repeatedly tightened the mechanism, lowering the ceiling first to $47.60 and then to $44.10 per barrel from February 2026. The latter was intended to remain 15% below the average market price for Urals.Yet Urals averaged $60.22 a barrel in July – roughly $16 above the EU and UK ceiling. Russia’s ESPO crude, heavily oriented toward Asian buyers, has also consistently traded above both the old and new caps, according to CREA.

Brussels has responded by sanctioning hundreds of tankers, targeting traders, and tightening restrictions on third-country entities accused of helping Moscow circumvent the measures. Russian crude, however, continues to flow.

Four years later: Where is Russian oil going?
Russia did not stop selling oil when its biggest European customers turned away. It found other customers. China and India emerged as the dominant destinations for Russian crude, while Türkiye also increased its role. In July alone, India imported $6.25 billion worth of Russian crude – a record high for a second consecutive month – while seaborne deliveries to China were 16% higher than a year earlier, according to CREA.

Russia also built up shipping capacity outside the traditional Western system. By June, sanctioned “shadow” tankers were carrying 66% of its seaborne crude exports, compared with just 31% aboard G7-linked vessels, CREA estimates. Sanctions changed the routes, ships, and customers. They did not stop millions of barrels of Russian crude from reaching the global market.

Why is Russian oil worth more now?
The biggest twist has come not from Brussels or Washington, but from the Middle East. The US-Israeli war on Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have pushed global crude prices sharply higher, while attacks on regional energy infrastructure have further strained supplies.

The result is precisely the type of supply shock Western governments sought to avoid when designing the price cap – and Russia is among the producers benefiting from higher prices.

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There is no Russian nuclear threat. They simply say they will defend themselves if attacked.

“NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has argued that European members of the bloc should have attacked Iran when the US did.”

• NATO Chief Advocates War of Aggression (RT)

European NATO members should have been able to attack Iran instead of relying on the US and Israel, according to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the head of the self-described defensive alliance. Iran has been attacked twice in two years, both times over allegations that it seeks to develop nuclear weapons, which Tehran rejects as false. Speaking at the Euronews Defence & Space Summit on Friday, Rutte endorsed the idea that European nations should acquire the military capabilities needed to carry out such wars of aggression themselves.


In the future, “the Europeans will be able to take care of their backyard themselves. It should be us doing this, not the Americans,” he said. “Europe was not able to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We couldn’t. We didn’t have the capabilities. In 10 years, we can and we should,” he added, referring to multi-billion euro rearmament efforts now underway in European members of the military bloc.

Earlier in the day, the NATO chief dismissed Russian concerns over hostile rhetoric by some members of the bloc regarding the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Region. “Basically what we said is, ‘hey, listen, we are a defensive alliance, and stop the nuclear threat’,” he told journalists when asked about a formal warning Moscow had sent to Brussels.

Russia cited remarks by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who proposed in September deploying additional troops near the Russian border so that Moscow would be “uncertain of what we will do.” Moscow said it would use its “entire available arsenal” to defend Russian territory from a possible attack by NATO states.

NATO was created in the early years of the Cold War, ensuring a continued US military presence in Western Europe. The Soviet Union later established its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which no longer exists. While NATO describes itself as a defensive alliance, it has carried out military attacks against other countries, including the UK- and French-led 2011 intervention in Libya, after which the North African state was balkanized.

Russia considers NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War a major national security threat and has cited it as one of the principal causes of the Ukraine conflict. Rutte’s argument in support of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran echoed remarks by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said in June 2025 that the Israelis were doing “[the] dirty work for us.”

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They will never acknowledge this.

How can your birthrate fall like crazy, and you still have a housing shortage?

“In a system that rejects mass immigration, the population can fall, opening up room for cheaper housing, lower rents, and even an increase in the birthrate.”

• Europe’s Housing Crisis Is An Immigration Crisis (RMX)

Across the West, native Europeans are dying out but rental prices continue to go up every year. While the left would like to point the finger at capitalists and greedy landlords, the primary factor driving the housing affordability crisis is mass immigration. Berlin is a prime example of this trend, as German journalist and author Jens Winter pointed out on X using clear population and housing data.


“Rental prices on the market have more than doubled in Berlin since 2011—plenty of money for corporations. But where is the increased demand coming from? While the native population of the capital has declined by 260,000 since 2011, the number of foreigners and people with a migration background has risen by 650,000 over the same period. That means: Without migration, there would be less demand for housing in Berlin today than in 2011,” he wrote. In a follow-up post, he wrote that the German “conservative” party is just as guilty as the left.

“The CDU-aligned real estate lobby is raking in big money with migration in Berlin. The Germans have a choice: dying out in the CDU’s multikulti capitalism or in the Left’s multikulti socialism. Understandable response: If we’re going to disappear anyway, why bust our asses for it?” he wrote.

While the doubling of rents is real, there is a basic supply and demand reality that the left would like to deny. It is indeed true that predatory property owners, major institutional players, and money printing have played contributing roles to the housing crisis, but no matter how many greedy property owners are involved, if the population of a city falls, rental and housing prices are almost inevitably going to fall.

Mass immigration means that population numbers never fall. Any breathing space for German families to repopulate, have more children, and fill in the gaps left by older generations passing away is immediately filled by hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

The data shows that the population of native Germans fell by 260,000 people. In a system that rejects mass immigration and foreign real estate investors, this could have been a boon for birthrates and increasing home ownership. For one, Germans who already lived in Berlin, and those looking to move to Berlin, would have been more easily able to afford rents and housing due to less competition on the housing market. Secondly, more native Germans would have had a chance to start families — and those who already had families could have afforded an extra child or two — by securing affordable housing.

However, Germany does not reject mass immigration. Instead, 650,000 foreigners arrived in the same period of time and housing and rental prices soared. The left, however, refuses to do simple math. There is of course another solution, but it is far more complicated than simply allowing population levels to fall in a country that has never had so many people living in it. Instead of ending mass immigration, left-wing parties, along with the CDU, demand more housing is built.

However, there are myriad reasons why the required housing is not being built, including high construction and material costs, red tape, zoning, and a lack of skilled workers. The same parties have been making the same demands for years now, but construction cannot keep pace with demand in Berlin or other major cities across Germany.

The Left Party may promise to build more, but the reality is that it will not happen. Nothing the left offers will lead to the necessary building. Before Olaf Scholz of the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) won the chancellorship, he promised that his “goal” was to create 400,000 new apartments per year, which would include 100,000 units of social housing, saying, “That’s not witchcraft, we just have to want to do it.” It never happened under Scholz and it won’t happen under a left-wing government in Berlin either.

Should more housing even be built?
As Western cities race to replace their native European populations, the question becomes whether life really becomes better in a crowded multicultural city when it means more traffic, longer waiting times at hospitals, crowded classrooms, and imported crime — just to name a few ills.

The newcomers also did not fix the skilled worker shortage that could potentially build all the homes and apartments politicians and lobbyists claim Europe needs. While a certain number of new houses and apartments always need to be built, the question then becomes should Western civilization really be involved in endless building to accommodate millions of foreigners.

On top of all of these questions, the buildings developers managed to build are now in fact uglier than ever, more expensive than ever, and are built more slowly than ever. In fact, data shows that the time from start to completion for a project is longer than it has been in decades. Again, where are all these young migrants from Africa and the Middle East to fuel a new construction boom with their master artisan and building skills?

The reality is they largely do not exist. Many skilled builders who are immigrants are from neighboring European countries, such as Poland, and they increasingly see fewer reasons to work in Germany.Winter’s X post is especially relevant given that the Left Party recently won a first place finish in Berlin elections, securing over 25 percent of the vote. Commentators and analysts have contributed the rise of the party in Germany’s capital due a variety of factors, but two major components are the party’s ability to secure the vote of German citizens with a migration background and young voters.

The second factor is Berlin’s housing crisis, which helped drive support from groups like non-voters, the young, and foreigners.

German taxpayer-funded Deutsche Welle, wrote: “That makes sense to 17-year-old Liska, who voted for the socialists: ‘The Left Party did appeal to me, especially because of the social issues — getting prices down, making rents more affordable.’ Rents in Berlin are indeed rising at a massive pace — by some 7% in the last two years alone — and first-time tenants are likely to be the hardest hit. Polls also showed that by far the biggest proportion of Berlin voters — 37% — thought that the Left Party was the most likely to create affordable housing.”

The Left Party and various other left-wing parties have convinced young people that there are easy fixes to the housing crisis. The problem is not relegated to Berlin, as all of Germany has seen tight vacancies as more and more migrants arrive, as Remix News previously reported.In the end, the left and its voters are choosing a path where more and more building only leads to overcrowding and environmental degradation.

Mass immigration and higher housing costs hurt birthrates
Numerous studies have shown that immigration has helped drive soaring rental and housing prices across the Western world — not just in Germany. In turn, studies have also shown that soaring housing prices have depressed birthrates, including in countries like the Netherlands, according to the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).

Again, the same story is taking place in the Netherlands, with the natural population increase for the Dutch at near zero or negative. Nevertheless, the population rose from about 16.8 million in 2013 to 18.1 million in 2025, with net migration accounting for virtually all of the recent increase. It must also be remembered that just like in Germany, most of these migrants want to head to the major cities, such as Amsterdam.

Official housing-need forecasts in the Netherlands also attribute a large share of future extra demand, often 45 percent or more of the extra dwellings required, to population growth that is itself 95 percent migration-driven. Great for landlords, bad for the citizens. Of course, the Alternative for Germany has tried to tie the housing crisis to mass immigration, and they have successfully made this case to some extent.

https://twitter.com/RMXnews/status/1758244447630811445?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1758244447630811445%7Ctwgr%5E6a6a0002fa81d70c14f1195ae8b1b5c23809cd34%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Feuropes-housing-crisis-immigration-crisis-berlin-data-confirms


The problem is that as more and more of the population becomes foreign, this argument holds less and less sway. Immigration may raise housing prices but if immigration brought a person to a country in the first place, and if more immigration might also enable more and more of their family members and fellow countrymen to arrive, then these voters have every incentive to keep immigration levels high regardless of housing costs.

Many of these migrants are not paying for rent anyway. There are millions of foreigners on social welfare, which means not only are they taking housing places of native Germans, but they are being paid to do it. They then often have far higher birthrates than native Germans, even with limited space, which entitles them to larger spaces. The cycle is self-reinforcing and relentless. That means unless dramatic action is taken against mass immigration, housing and rental prices may never truly come down.

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One more final frontier lost. We did see the far west, and the new lands to be discovered by Columbus et al.

Now every move we make will be recorded.

• Always Watching (John Stossel)

Do you worry that you’re being watched? If you drive, you probably are. My new video covers the cameras that photograph the backs of millions of cars. A company called Flock has 80% of that market. Flock’s CEO says the goal is to “eliminate crime.” But lots of people hate the cameras. “We are asked to give up our privacy for really nothing in return,” says ACLU lawyer Chad Marlow. “These cameras save lives,” I push back, “catching criminals.”


When a car thief kidnapped a child in Atlanta last month, Flock cameras helped police find the car and arrest a man within 15 minutes. Marlow says, “That car could and would’ve been found anyway without violating the privacy rights of every single person in America … Surveillance doesn’t actually deter criminal activity, with one exception, car thefts in public parking lots.” “I hardly feel like my privacy’s invaded,” I tell him. “It’s just my license plate number. Anybody can see it.” Marlow replies that today, AI lets police use that photo to learn much more about us.

“The data they collect when combined with AI is terrifying. Combine them with all other sources of electronic data from the government and our own personal lives, you are literally looking at what George Orwell warned us about.” Is Flock really that much of a threat? Some cops have been jailed for using Flock data to track women. One Denver police officer casually boasted, “You can’t get a breath of fresh air without us knowing.” But there are limits. When using Flock’s camera database, police must give a reason.

Marlow laughs at that. “They have these security measures, but a 10-year-old could defeat them … (One) law enforcement department, 111 times, listed the reason for their investigation as ‘investigation.’ Twenty times, it was ‘hehehe.’ And it went through!” Public anger about Flock cameras has politicians on left and right moving to limit them. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled them from state highways. “Stop Flock,” says a tweet from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

This is a mistake, says Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute. “They are a useful law enforcement tool with really incredible potential to aid investigations.” I point out the misuse, but Mangual replies, “That is no more a reason to ban the technology than it would be a reason to disarm police in response to a handful of bad shootings.”I remind him that when DeSantis shut down Florida’s cameras, he warned about a “surveillance state.”

“It’s not a surveillance state,” says Mangual. “These cameras see less than half a percent of the visible roadway. The idea that they can track you from place to place the way a GPS tracker attached to the bottom of your car is just wrong.”China is an actual surveillance state. Cameras track people’s movements, clothes, cars, even relationships. “It is only going to get worse as technology advances if we don’t stop it now,” says Marlow.

Flock has no plans to stop. The company now promotes surveillance drones. So far, I’m not very bothered by the privacy threat. I worry more about government’s endless wars, increased debt, inflation, growing handouts that make Americans dependent … Flock surveillance is way down on my list.

“That’s a mistake,” Michael Ricci, president of Stossel TV tells me. “Camera surveillance makes it easier for a tyrannical government to track where you go, and who you meet with. It also normalizes surveillance. As storage gets cheaper, maybe they will store videos instead of just photos. Maybe add facial recognition. Maybe they will connect the system to the ‘kill switch’ they’ve mandated in new cars. Government always finds ways to expand its powers.”

He makes good points. China’s surveillance did not start with its current system. They started with a few cameras. This is not a path we want to start traveling.Giving governments more power is always dangerous. Government is force. Only government can legally take our property and freedom.

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“I will throw you in prison. I want Chinese style communism to happen inside of the democratic party right now. I want to do cultural revolution shit.” —Hasan Piker, DSA Spox

• The Ancient Parable (James Howard Kunstler)

Translation: Chuck Schumer knows that the Democrats have already been thwarted from rigging the election, from flooding the polls with illegal immigrant voters, with dead voters, with voters who moved out of state but still got mail-in ballots sent to their old addresses, with voters registered as living in Walmart parking lots, and so on. Chuck Schumer knows that the Civil Rights Division of DOJ is sending hundreds of lawyers to observe the action in swing state polling places. ICE might even be on hand to see who turns up.


So, Chuck Schumer is pretending that the Republicans will try to do what the Democrats actually did in several previous elections (including the last midterm, 2022, viz., AZ, GA, NV), and would have liked to do in this midterm, but can’t. The Democrats will holler like crazy about it before the election to plant this idea in credulous minds. They will jump up and down going woo-woo-woo on Election Day itself to water the idea. And after the election they will blitz every critical precinct with lawsuits to prevent the vote from being certified, using select “activist” judges to issue TROs and writs to delay election results and de-legitimize the vote.

And if none of that avails — which it won’t — they’ll call out their ground troops, Antifa, BLM, Free Palestine, LGBTQ2S+, the furious transsexuals, the hysterical cat ladies, and suchlike to make a giant ruckus so as to provoke the president to invoke emergency powers to quell the mayhem. And then they’ll point at Mr. Trump shrieking, “See! Tyrant!”

Chuck Schumer is such a shithead. Everybody knows that he intends for the Democratic Party to inflict lawfare and commit warfare on the midterm election (in that order), and hence on the American people, behind an Alinsky-grade cloud of gaslight claiming the other side is doing it.

Of course, it’s the president’s constitutional duty (Article II, Section 3) to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. You have seen that Mr. Trump is taking a good deal of care vis-à-vis this midterm election to avoid any hint of interference. You can infer that’s at least one reason we have seen no indictments of the Deep State sedition artists operating so brazenly since 2016.

By the way, doing what’s possible to make sure that only citizens can vote is taking care to faithfully execute the law, in case there’s any question about that. A September 25 SCOTUS decision in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters (No. 26A308), a 6-3 majority (usual suspects dissenting) paused by lower-court judge Sparkle Sooknanan that had blocked the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — further proof that the Lefty-left won’t abide any restrictions on who can vote.

The SCOTUS stay allows state and local officials to match their voter rolls against federal Social Security records, to sort out who can legally vote. AI could do this with novel efficiency. The catch is, states’ participation is voluntary. Only twenty-seven states have moved to participate in this record-sharing. Another catch is that SCOTUS waited, for unknown reasons, before issuing their ruling until well into the “90-day rule window” (in the National Voter Registration Act) that doesn’t allow actual changes in the voter rolls during this period, only identification of problems. We’ll see if any of that dissuades non-citizens from attempting to cast a vote.

You have to wonder why the Democratic Party is acting like they’ve already won the midterms. After ten years of narrative control through their allies in the network media and what’s left of the major newspapers, the Democrats apparently believe that if you assert an outcome often enough, Oprah Winfrey style, it will come true.

It’s just another gaslighting op. Look at the Democratic Party’s marquee candidates, a ragtag and bobtail of avowed jihadis, communists, neo-Jacobins, and plain old creeps such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Angie Nixon in Florida, James Talarico in Texas, and Troy Jackson up in Maine. The old Chuck Schumer / Hakeem Jeffries wing of the party pretends to support this rabble, who have declared they are merely running under the party’s banner for convenience and aim to deep-six the likes of Schumer and Jeffries at the first opportunity.

Will the Democrats still try to cheat their way through the midterms despite the obstacles and disincentives piling up around them? Probably, yes, because that will trigger conflict between the states and the Feds, and post-election chaos is what the party needs to keep hope alive, as they like to say. They want the results to remain in limbo as long as possible, with maximum lawfare around it to further confuse and confound the outcome. It’s in their nature. They are the scorpion riding the frog across the river in the ancient parable.

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Sounds cute Judge Nap, but did you point this out about Bush, Obama and Biden, too? If not, that’s a problem.

You can claim that Trump is more of a threat, but in the end that’s just a partisan thing to say.

• The Tyranny Of One Man’s Opinion (Judge Andrew P. Napolitano)

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office – one of whom was St. Thomas More – and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne.


When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of “the tyranny of one man’s opinion.”

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process – a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers’ money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks. A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration’s attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president’s characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker – or even a mass murderer – does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders. The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians – beyond the thousands he has already killed – if a peace agreement is not soon reached. Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump’s war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.Nor can the president’s personal assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department’s compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president’s personal belief – whether informed or uninformed – is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump’s vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them. The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power – and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man’s conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions – particularly actions that kill innocents. The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man’s opinion.

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