Lessons from Minneapolis

Organization, spontaneity, and the mass strike

Thursday 19 February 2026, by Tempest Collective

Drawing lessons from Minneapolis and the day of protest on January 30, the Tempest National Committee argues that the only kind of action that can stop Trump is the kind that seriously impacts the economy: mass strikes. While workers in the U.S. currently lack the organizational capacity to launch mass strikes, campaigns in the here and now can help us develop and nurture that capacity. [1]

The murder of Alex Pretti—the day after workers shut down Minneapolis in protest of ICE’s invasion of their city–has raised the stakes for those resisting the war on immigrants. Masked government agents violently attacked Pretti moments after he helped a fellow protester who had been pushed down by ICE thugs. He was maced, beaten, and shot in the back.

All of this was captured on video from multiple angles by eyewitnesses, and the world watched in horror. Kristi Noem’s outlandish claims that the victim was a “domestic terrorist,” who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” stood in stark contrast to the video evidence watched by millions who learned that Pretti was an intensive care nurse for military veterans.

Coming just sixteen hours after a massive march in subzero temperatures—the culmination of a day of mass civil disobedience, work stoppages, school closures, and business closings—Pretti’s murder left many wondering if it was in revenge for the Minneapolis resistance, and what it would take to defeat this kind of occupying force. As the movement confronts an entrenched and dangerous enemy, it is increasingly clear that protests and demonstrations are essential, but the only thing that will stop Trump is the kind of action that seriously impacts the economy: mass strikes.

No work, no school, no shopping

The mass actions of January 23 put tens of thousands in the streets in response to a call for “no work, no school, no shopping.” Almost one thousand businesses closed their doors, even if only for a few hours, in solidarity. Workers called in sick or took a “mental health day.” Some workplaces were forced to close by the collective will of employees. Even while labor unions stopped short of officially declaring a strike, many endorsed the day of action.

The protest was spurred by the murder of Minneapolis ICE resister Renee Good on January 7. The general strike, as it was widely referred to, was organized by a coalition of trade unions, faith organizations, and neighborhood rapid response networks. Some of these formations came together in 2011 around common bargaining demands. They also built on the long history of anti-racist mobilization in the wake of the George Floyd uprising. This organizational cross pollination combined with popular sentiment against ICE raids to produce a significant showing. One survey found that one in four voters in the state participated or had a loved one who did. This is all new territory for the movement.

When the administration sent 3,000 federal officials into Minneapolis—which, to put things in perspective, employs about 600 police officers—they declared war on the immigrant population. The Border Patrol officers who murdered Pretti were in pursuit of a delivery worker who was sheltering in a local business behind locked doors.

Immigrant unions and entire neighborhoods sprang into action to defend their community. Masked officers escalated their violent attacks, entering schools and confronting students and educators. The image of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, arrested on his way home from preschool in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights on January 20, became a symbol of the cruelty of ICE. This only added to the indignation many already felt and drove more to take action on the 23rd.

The people vs. the billionaires

Thirty-five people have died while in federal custody since President Donald Trump began this campaign in July 2025, and eight have been murdered in the field by ICE officials.

Almost all of the people killed and injured by these agents so far have been immigrants and people of color. These individuals include Keith Porter, an African American father of two in Los Angeles, and Silverio Villegas González, also a father of two elementary school children in Franklin Park, Illinois—a Chicago suburb. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were outliers in that they were both white.

The “domestic surge” has deployed thousands of heavily armed, armored and masked agents mostly to cities in blue states, regardless of the actual concentration of immigrants. ICE has been met with popular community resistance, from Los Angeles to Chicago to the Twin Cities. In each case the opposition has learned new lessons, which have been shared with protesters elsewhere. Minnesota is the latest link in the chain of learning how to resist.

Communities across the Twin Cities and beyond have stood up to these racist attacks on people who are just trying to live their lives and raise families. Their actions are inspiring as they show the depth of opposition to MAGA and the potential for an alternative.

The outpouring of protest and support for immigrants is a multiracial fightback based in the working class with anti-racist politics at its heart. It is a powerful antidote to Trump’s use of anti-immigrant scapegoating to divert attention from the billionaire class while it cuts SNAP benefits, health care, and funding for education.

National Nurses United, a health care union representing 225,000 workers, organized vigils across the country for Alex Pretti. At an event outside a Veteran Affairs hospital in Chicago, one speaker called on us to recognize the “state sanctioned violence” of unaffordable health care as well as targeted murder by government agents.

The administration attacks immigrants in the name of fighting crime. But the true criminals are the richest one percent and their hired help in Congress. They spend billions of our tax dollars terrorizing immigrants and billions more on regime change in Venezuela and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. They fund their imperial projects by cutting domestic services at home.

In order to get away with this blatant theft, the billionaire class suppresses individuals and organizations that defend our rights. They have decimated public unions, criminalized outspoken organizers like Mahmoud Khalil, and murdered people in the streets in an attempt to scare people away from protest.

They have not succeeded in stemming mass protest by students, neighborhood organizations and workers, but they are forcing us all to confront the daunting question of how we can stop these attacks.

The power of the mass strike

More people than ever are asking how we can stop the war on immigrants and also address the raft of economic problems known as the “affordability crisis.” The pledge by Democrats to reform ICE and Border Patrol to refocus on their mission only reveals their complicity. Some Democrats sense the political winds are shifting. One candidate for Senator from Illinois, Raja Krishnamoorthi, voted as a member of the House to express “gratitude” to ICE in June 2025, when they were arresting union leaders in Los Angeles. He is now calling for ICE to be abolished.

ICE should be abolished, and the priorities of our society should be thoroughly recalibrated. But as we argued in our January editorial, we cannot expect these changes to come from above. Our collective ability to redirect funding away from war and occupation (domestically and internationally), towards health, housing, and education should look instead to the lessons from Minneapolis.

Our greatest power is in our potential ability to organize mass strikes.

Recent years have seen political strikes globally, such as in South Korea when martial law was declared in December 2024, or in France in January 2023 when the retirement age was raised. While the U.S has seen strikes over contractual or safety issues, such as the tens of thousands of health care workers on strike in New York and against Kaiser Permanente, strikes over political issues are not common here.

When a call for a general strike on January 30 went out via social media following the murder of Alex Pretti, the Google search for the word “strike” increased dramatically, as people across the country attempted to educate themselves. In multiple cities, students demonstrated, small businesses shut down, and people gathered to rally and march in solidarity with the resisters in Minnesota. This shows tremendous potential, but until labor is far better organized, most workers cannot simply walk out without risking their jobs. Most unions are far from ready to launch the kind of coordinated, disciplined strike action that could really make a difference, and most workers lack a union, given that unionization rates are below 10 percent.

So the pressing question is how we can harness the collective strength on display in Minnesota, and everywhere that people are standing up against ICE, in order to make a significant economic impact.

What do we do next?

The U.S. workforce does not currently have the organizational capacity to launch a mass strike on the scale of those in South Korea. But with the vision of this goal, we can plan and build campaigns in the here and now that will help us build this organizational capacity and the infrastructure to nurture and sustain it. These campaigns will vary depending on the particular location and context, but there are many available options for both union and non-union workers.

We can hold strike schools that help unionized and non-unionized workers to become strike ready. We can build emergency response networks to move into action against ICE and CBP. We can form workplace-based emergency response networks, especially in schools, which are powerful sites at the intersection between the community and workplace and therefore of great strategic importance for a mass strike. We can agitate to make every workplace a Fourth Amendment zone which refuses access to ICE and CBP. We can push to force towns and cities to pledge non-compliance with ICE and CBP, even if that means defying federal law (even Minnesota, a so-called sanctuary state, does not have such measures).

In the upcoming months we should join local organizing efforts for the March 28th No Kings protest, with the explicit plan of projecting mass actions for May Day—which is on Friday, a work day—including strikes and sickouts against the Trump regime.

Finally, we should join May Day Strong. 3,500 people participated in a virtual call on February 1, entitled “How We Build a General Strike,” where union leaders, organizers, and even the mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson addressed this question. The focus of that meeting was building towards coordinated actions across the country on May 1, 2026.

We can draw inspiration from the anti-ICE movement and commit to building the kind of sustained, ongoing organizing in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods that will increase our capacity and power. A better world is waiting to be born, and it will take all of us to help make that happen.

9 February 2026

Source: Tempest.

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Footnotes


[1] Photo: Detroit: Peoples Assembly volunteers put together whistle kits designed to alert community members when ICE is nearby. (Jim West) ATC.

Tempest Collective

The Tempest Collective sees the activity of the vast majority of the world’s population whose ability to work is their only means of survival as the crucial factor in building the socialist movement and winning reforms. The working class is the agent of social transformation – of ridding our society of capitalism, addressing the existential environmental catastrophe, and building a socialist society – if we can organize ourselves.

Marxists.orgwww.marxists.org/ebooks/luxemburg/mass-str.pdf

The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions

The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, ...

 KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA

The republic on trial: Militarised sovereignty and accountability in Kashmir

By Sankha Subhra Biswas

Published date 21 February, 2026

On the night of February 23–24, 1991, soldiers of the 4th Rajputana Rifles entered the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kupwara district in what was described as a routine cordon-and-search operation. By that point, such operations had become embedded in everyday life across Kashmir. 

Villages were sealed. Men were assembled outdoors for identification. Homes were searched through the night. The stated objective was counterinsurgency. The practical effect was the visible performance of state authority in a territory where sovereignty was under open challenge.

By morning, women in the two villages alleged that soldiers had entered their homes after separating the men and subjected them to sexual assault. The scale of the accusations was significant. The army denied the charges. 

Senior officials characterised the accusations as fabricated, implying that their purpose was to undermine counterinsurgency operations. Local police registered a First Information Report. A medical examination was conducted. 

The case entered the formal register of the criminal justice system. Investigations followed. Reports questioned the credibility of the allegations. A closure report was eventually filed. No full criminal trial ever tested the evidence in open court.

That absence is the defining feature of the case. Not conviction. Not acquittal. Not adversarial adjudication. No criminal courtroom has examined the allegations through cross-examination, evidentiary scrutiny and judicial determination for more than three decades. They have remained administratively contained.

Counterinsurgency as governance

To understand why, the events must be situated in the early 1990s, when armed insurgency in Kashmir escalated sharply, as demands for self-determination moved from protest to armed movements. 

The Indian state responded with a heavy troop deployment and institutionalised counterinsurgency as a governing framework. Emergency powers were not exceptional interventions; they became routine instruments of rule.

Counterinsurgency is often described as a military doctrine. In practice, it is a political order. It regulates mobility, domestic space, speech and suspicion. It redraws the boundary between civilian and suspect. 

Armed personnel physically enact sovereignty when they seal entire villages overnight and search households. Authority does not simply exist; it is staged.

In that setting, claims of sexual abuse have ramifications that extend beyond personal misconduct. They propose that the coercive rationale of counterinsurgency may have infiltrated personal domains. Sexual violence in conflict situations is not just assault; it shows who is in charge.

The state’s immediate response was denial, followed by investigative framing that foregrounded insurgency conditions and questioned credibility. From the outset, the case became entangled in a broader struggle over narrative: was Kashmir a site of necessary security operations, or a site where civilians were exposed to unchecked force?

Survivors and activists pursued reinvestigation through courts and petitions. The matter resurfaced periodically. But it never matured into a decisive judicial reckoning. The unresolved status hardened into a structural outcome. Kunan and Poshpora endure because they reveal the internal tensions of militarised governance.

When emergency powers become the grammar of rule, accountability narrows. The issue extends beyond the events of that night. It concerns how democracies respond when allegations implicate the coercive institutions tasked with defending territorial integrity.

The issue is of serious importance for Indian democracy. Undoubtedly, a democracy that is confident in its institutions is willing to subject them to scrutiny. A democracy that hesitates signals a different priority: preserving the apparatus before testing it.

AFSPA and immunity

The unresolved status of Kunan and Poshpora cannot be understood without examining the legal regime governing Kashmir. At the centre of that regime stands the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA).

AFSPA authorises armed forces operating in “disturbed areas” to arrest without warrant, conduct searches and use force under broad conditions. Most consequentially, it requires prior sanction from the central government before any prosecution of armed forces personnel can proceed in civilian courts. Without that sanction, criminal proceedings cannot begin.

In theory, this provision is presented as protection for soldiers operating in high-risk environments. In practice, it has functioned as a structural bottleneck. Allegations against armed forces personnel remain contingent on executive approval, significantly limiting judicial autonomy in initiating proceedings.

In the wake of the Kunan and Poshpora allegations, investigations were initiated and a closure report generated, although survivors sought further reinvestigation. The legal proceedings encountered obstacles, primarily the sanction requirement, preventing the case from reaching a trial.

AFSPA embeds counterinsurgency logic within statutory law, altering legal priorities in disturbed regions and relaxing operational constraints on security forces. While defenders of the act maintain that such legal protections are essential to prevent debilitating litigation against soldiers, this narrative must not absolve the necessity of accountability.

Allegations of serious crimes should undergo transparent processes, rather than be obstructed by routine sanction clauses, which foster "immunity by design." This procedural impunity, though not formally declared, cultivates perceptions within communities that certain actors operate beyond judicial scrutiny.

The Kunan and Poshpora cases underscore the impact of emergency legislation on democratic accountability, wherein legal structures intended to curb power paradoxically become instruments of shielding it. 

The central issue transcends operational freedom for soldiers; it questions the legitimacy of a democracy that permits executive discretion in determining accountability for its own agents.

Gendered power in a militarised territory

It is easy for the discussion about Kunan and Poshpora to get mired in controversies about facts, figures, accounts and inconsistencies. But the underlying level is just as important: how sexual violence works in a militarised setting to maintain a hierarchy that favours the powerful.

Cordons and searches blur the distinction between public and private. Men are assembled outside; women remain inside; armed forces enter homes under the guise of the law. The home ceases to be a safe haven and becomes a site of surveillance and domination. Power enters the domain of the intimate.

Civil society reports, including documentation by the Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, have identified numerous cases of sexual violence linked to the conflict and have argued that legal immunity structures enable such abuses.

In a patriarchal world, the social implications of sexual violence are exponentially greater. A woman’s body is inextricably bound to her family's honour and the community’s identity. An act of violence has repercussions that reverberate beyond the survivor — shaking kinship, conjugal prospects and social status. Stigma multiplies the pain. Silence can be a shield, even as it conceals the injury.

This narrative plays out in the way charges are treated. Victims are confronted with both state power and social coercion. To speak out is to invite ostracism; to remain silent is to retain social status at the expense of justice. When women in Kunan and Poshpora turned to the law for redress, they challenged both militarised power and the social norms that regulate speech in their society.

The state’s response follows the usual pattern in war zones. Allegations are couched in terms of exaggeration or political motivation. In insurgency situations, allegations of abuse are frequently restated as disinformation. The onus is on the complainant to demonstrate injury and establish noble intentions.

However, emergency governance heightens gendered vulnerability. Armed men possess legal sanction, mobility and impunity; civilian women do not have a comparable level of leverage. Even in the absence of policy, the asymmetry creates risks.

Kunan and Poshpora remain important because they highlight this asymmetry. They expose how counterinsurgency obscures the distinction between security operation and social regulation.

The political question is not confined to the truth of individual allegations. It concerns whether emergency regimes adequately protect bodily autonomy. If domestic space becomes penetrable under state authority and allegations of abuse remain untested in court, then vulnerability is structural, not episodic.

Exceptional law and unequal citizenship

The Indian Constitution officially guarantees the principles of equal treatment before the law, due process, and judicial remedies against state wrongdoing. These principles form the normative foundation of republican legitimacy, under the assumption that independent courts can effectively check abuses of state power, regardless of their magnitude.

In regions governed under prolonged emergency legislation, that equilibrium shifts. The formal architecture of constitutional rights remains intact, but its operational character changes. The requirement of executive sanction before prosecuting armed forces personnel introduces an additional layer between allegation and adjudication. Legal accountability becomes conditional on administrative approval.

Kunan and Poshpora exemplify this structural tension. In ordinary criminal law, the filing of a First Information Report and the collection of evidence can culminate in trial if prosecutorial thresholds are met. In Kashmir, under AFSPA, the path from accusation to courtroom is mediated by executive discretion. The effect is not the suspension of the law but rather its recalibration in favour of operational protection.

This recalibration alters the citizen–state relationship. Constitutional equality presumes that public officials and civilians stand before the same judicial forums when accused of grave crimes. Where prior sanction operates as a gatekeeping device, that presumption weakens. Even when legally authorised, the appearance of differential accountability carries political consequences.

The 2019 reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir into Union Territories intensified this contradiction. The stated objective was integration and normalisation. Yet the legal instruments that institutionalise exceptional security governance remain largely unchanged. Political autonomy contracted while emergency frameworks endured. The assurance of constitutional uniformity exists alongside differentiated layers of accountability.

Legitimacy in a democracy rests not only on territorial control but institutional credibility. Public confidence in procedural equality erodes when serious allegations against state agents fail to reach open judicial examination. The issue extends beyond the reputation of the armed forces. It concerns systemic questions: whether constitutional guarantees operate with the same force in frontier spaces as they do elsewhere.

A republic with strong institutions allows for scrutiny, especially when coercive power is at its highest. Shielding institutions from prosecution may preserve short-term operational strategies, but it carries long-term costs for constitutional trust. The persistence of unresolved cases such as Kunan and Poshpora underscores the tension between emergency governance and equal justice.

The republic on trial

Kunan and Poshpora cannot be treated as an aberration or tragic residue of a turbulent decade. What followed 1991 was not administrative drift; it was the structured outcome of a state that chose insulation over scrutiny. 

The long refusal to subject grave allegations to open trial reflects not institutional weakness but a political priority: preserving the coercive apparatus deemed essential to governing a contested territory.

At stake is not only justice for survivors. It is the character of the Indian state under conditions of internal conflict. Modern states claim a monopoly over legitimate violence. In democratic theory, that monopoly is justified by law, equality and accountability. 

But when the institutions that exercise sovereign force are shielded from ordinary judicial testing, sovereignty begins to detach from democracy. It becomes managerial, securitised and increasingly insulated from popular scrutiny.

AFSPA is not merely an emergency statute. It is an expression of how the state manages peripheral regions, where consent is fragile. In such spaces, coercion is normalised and legal exceptions become routine. 

While executive sanction regimes are defended as operational necessities, in practice, they produce stratified citizenship. One legal order for the core, another for the frontier where sovereignty is enforced through prolonged militarisation.

This hierarchy bears significant political implications. It indicates that the priorities of territorial integrity and strategic control take precedence over equal justice. It implies to citizens residing in militarised zones that constitutional guarantees are conditional and subject to security considerations.

Over time, such behaviour corrodes the ideological claim that the state represents a unified democratic community. Compliance may persist but political legitimacy erodes significantly.

From our perspective, the issue is not simply a question of procedural reform. It exposes the deeper logic of a state that defends property, territory and geopolitical standing with extraordinary powers while narrowing democratic accountability. Legal exceptionalism at the margins reshapes the centre, rarely limiting militarised governance to its original theatre.

Accountability, therefore, is not a liberal luxury. It is a material question of power. Either the armed apparatus of the state remains subject to the same judicial processes as the citizens it governs or a differentiated sovereignty takes root — one that reserves immunity for those who wield force in its name.

What would accountability entail? Enforced limits on executive sanction, independent prosecutorial authority in areas under emergency law, and sustained legislative review of exceptional security regimes are the minimum requirements for accountability.

But more fundamentally, it requires rejecting the premise that security and equality are mutually exclusive. A democratic state confident in its social foundations does not fear judicial scrutiny of its own agents.

Thirty-five years on, the unresolved status of Kunan and Poshpora is not merely a legal anomaly. It is a political marker. It reveals the tension between a constitutional promise of equal citizenship and a governing practice that privileges militarised order.

Until allegations of this magnitude are tested in open court, that contradiction remains active — a reminder that sovereignty without accountability drifts toward domination and that democracy without equality becomes rhetoric.

AI and the economy: A losing bet for working people

By Marty Hart-Landsberg

Published date 21 February, 2026

First published at Reports from the Economic Front.

Tech billionaires and the Trump administration, with the apparent support of most of the capitalist class, are betting big on artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, AI investments have become the primary driver of US economic growth.

But this is a losing bet for us. The AI boom is not sustainable. And because it is delivering little of value, unbalancing our economy, intensifying our ecological crisis, and threatening the quality and responsiveness of our social institutions, the longer it goes on the greater the harm done and the more difficult will be the task of economic and social renewal.

The AI boom

Many people believe that artificial intelligence is an ethereal technology, “living” in the clouds. In reality, AI systems are firmly rooted. They need electricity for training and operation, water for cooling, and racks of servers with chips built using hard to acquire minerals, all of which must be housed and accessed in gigantic data centers.

It is the massive spending on these data centers and their associated equipment and software that is most responsible for the US economy’s current growth. The economist Jason Furman estimated that US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was almost entirely due to these AI-related investments. Excluding them, GDP growth, on an annualized basis, would have been minimal, only 0.1 percent. OECD researchers held a more pessimistic view, believing that without that spending the US would have been in outright recession.

Yearly AI-related capital spending by the biggest tech companies — Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — rose from $150 billion in 2022 to $360 billion in 2025. And they collectively plan to spend a substantially greater amount, $650 billion, in 2026. Bloomberg reports that “The companies’ estimates for [2026] are expected either near or to surpass their budgets for the past three years combined.” To put that spending in perspective: “the largest US-based automakers, construction equipment manufacturers, railroads, defense contractors, wireless carriers, parcel delivery outfits, along with Exxon Mobil Corp., Intel Corp., Walmart Inc. and the spun-off progeny of General Electric — 21 companies — are projected to spend a combined $180 billion in 2026.”

These four tech companies are not the only ones investing in data centers. xAI, which was merged with SpaceX in 2026, completed a massive data center in 2025 with another still under construction. Oracle has recently become a major supplier of cloud services and, according to Larry Ellison, its CEO, the company aims to build “more cloud infrastructure data centers than all its infrastructure competitors combined.” In 2025, it signed a $300 billion contract with OpenAI to provide five years of computing services.

AI’s growth supporting effects are also felt through another channel — the stock market. The November 2022 launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT sparked an explosive growth in the value of a group of tech stocks known as the “Magnificent 7” — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon. These stocks currently account for close to 40 percent of the value of the S&P 500 and are responsible for approximately 80 percent of the market’s overall rise in 2025. They generated an average return of 27.5 percent in 2025, compared with 7 percent for the rest of the S&P 500, producing a sizeable market capitalization weighted gain of 17.5 percent.

In line with the class nature of the US economy, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, owners of close to 90 percent of the stock market, were the chief beneficiaries of this market showing. The wealth effect, where a rise in asset values encourages an increase in consumption, then played its part. The consumption share of the top 20 percent of earners soared over 2025, reaching 60 percent of total US consumption by the end of the year.

The celebration of AI as economic savior distracts from the fact that it is a very specific type of AI, known as generative artificial intelligence, that is largely responsible for the boom. Artificial intelligence technologies are typically divided into two main groups, machine learning and generative AI. Machine learning models use algorithms to identify patterns, make decisions, and improve their performance through experience. They do not generate new content. Generative AI models, which are trained on large data sets, can produce human-like text and respond to and manipulate audio and image inputs. The best known are ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), Grok (xAI), Copilot (Microsoft), and Llama (Meta).

The owners of these generative AI systems are locked in intense competition, with each hoping to secure market dominance and the resulting monopoly profits. But that is only the short-term goal. They also appear to believe that further development of their respective AI systems will produce a higher level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a superintelligence that will lead to, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg (Meta’s CEO), the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO) believes that a soon to be created AGI will provide a solution to global warming, enable us to colonize space, and live forever with our minds uploaded to computers. Elon Musk (xAI’s CEO) believes that AI-powered robots will soon make work optional and money irrelevant.

The race to achieve market dominance, and eventually AGI, pushes these companies to continually offer new models that are said to be faster, more reliable, and more powerful. And it is this competitive upgrading that is propelling data center construction and the economy’s growth. The reason is that existing data centers cannot easily be retrofitted to accommodate the needs of the new models, which require a greater number of larger server racks, each with more numerous energy hungry powerful chips, and more complex energy and cooling systems.

Trouble ahead

Despite all the excitement and confident assertions that generative AI is a revolutionary technology capable of transforming the US economy for the better, the AI boom is likely near exhaustion. That is because these advanced AI systems suffer from serious and unescapable flaws and limitations that make them incapable of serving as a bridge to anything resembling AGI and too unreliable and expensive (if priced to cover cost) to win widespread adoption by sufficient numbers of individuals or businesses.

Despite the use of the term intelligence, these systems do not think or reason. They operate by probabilistically selecting words or images based on pattern recognition developed from training on massive data sets built largely from material scrapped from the web. As a consequence, they periodically make nonsensical connections, leading them to produce factually inaccurate responses. This proclivity to “hallucinate” makes them untrustworthy, as the many lawyers, doctors, journalists, coders, students, and business owners who have relied on them have discovered. And because these systems are trained on largely unfiltered material from the web, they can also produce output that replicates the hateful and discriminatory material found there, making their use unacceptable in a variety of social, educational, and employment settings.

The companies developing these systems generally downplay the seriousness of these and other related problems, claiming they will be overcome with better and larger data sets, more sophisticated algorithms, and greater computational power. However, new human created material in sufficient quantity for additional training has proven difficult to obtain because AI generated material now dominates the web. While some developers claim that this “synthetic data” is just as useful as human generated material, studies have found that its use leads not just to a loss of accuracy but to a structural degradation of how reality is represented or, in the words of tech researchers, “model collapse.” As for the problem of hallucinations, even OpenAI employed researchers have concluded that “large language models will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering.”

Not surprisingly then, businesses employing AI have found productivity gains difficult to realize. An MIT Media Lab study, reported on by Forbes, concluded that “AI pilot failure is officially the norm — 95 percent of corporate AI initiatives show zero return.” A survey of more than 1,000 enterprises across North America and Europe found that 42 percent had abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17 percent in 2024.

The upshot? None of the major generative AI systems are profitable or on the road to profitability. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most widely used system. Yet, as tech commentator Ed Zitron points out, the company lost $5 billion in 2024 and will likely lose upwards of $8 billion in 2025.

An article in The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization, offers some insights into why:

Free [generative AI] services, and cheap subscription services like ChatGPT and Gemini, cost a lot of money to run. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been candid about how much money his firm spends, once quipping that every time users say “please” or “thank you” to ChatGPT, it costs the firm millions. Exactly how much OpenAI loses per chat is anyone’s guess, but Altman has also said even paid pro accounts lose money because of the high computing costs that come with each query.

Some analysts estimate OpenAI might run out of cash by mid-2027 without new funding. OpenAI itself forecasts a loss of $14 billion in 2026 and expects to continue to make huge losses totaling $44 billion until 2029.

Things are not much better for Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla, which have their own AI systems and also build and operate their own data centers. Collectively, these firms spent more than $560 billion on AI related capital expenditures over the years 2023-2025, all to generate combined earnings, not profits, of only $35 billion.

Despite model shortcomings and profit challenges, the major AI players remain determined to press ahead. But with planned spending far outstripping revenue, they can do so only if they are able to obtain the required funds from debt and venture capital markets. And the amounts needed are sizeable. For example, OpenAI has signed deals committing it to spend some $1.4 trillion dollars over the next five years, including $500 billion to purchase chips from NVIDIA, $300 billion for computing services from Oracle, $22 billion for computing services from CoreWeave, and an unknown amount to Broadcom to help it develop and deploy racks of its own designed chips. Oracle, for its part, is planning to raise some $50 billion in 2026 through a combination of debt and equity sales to finance its construction activity.

Even the largest data center builders are finding it necessary to tap debt markets. As Bloomberg explains:

More than $3 trillion. That’s the ­staggering price tag to build the data centers needed to prepare for the artificial intelligence boom. Not even the world’s biggest technology companies—not Amazon.com, not Microsoft or Meta Platforms—are prepared to foot the bill with only their own cash.

So where will the money come from? Debt markets.

Which ones? All of them.

Blue-chip bonds, junk debt, private credit and complex asset-backed pools of loans. “The numbers are like nothing any of us who have been in this business for 25 years have seen,” says Matt McQueen, who oversees global credit, securitized products and municipal banking and markets at Bank of America Corp. “You have to turn over all avenues to make this work.”

For the moment it appears that lenders and investors are willing to back the AI bet. But with AI developers unable to produce a dependable, cost-effective, and broadly useful product, company revenue projections are bound to disappoint and there will come a time when lenders and investors will simply refuse to throw good money after bad. When that moment arrives, the AI boom is finished.

OpenAI may be the most vulnerable to such a financial squeeze. As noted above, it has signed a number of agreements to purchase services from other companies. However, at the rate it is burning through money, it may not be long before its financing needs outgrow what lenders and investors will find acceptable. If they pull back, OpenAI will be forced to retrench, slashing employment and investment, with negative consequences for its stock price, development program, and the companies counting on its business. Oracle is one of those companies. It borrowed heavily to finance its data center construction counting on OpenAI for most of its future revenue. Without that revenue, Oracle’s own financial situation will quickly deteriorate. Both OpenAI and Oracle are major customers of NVIDIA, so their difficulties will affect its bottom line. And on it goes.

A growing number of investment analysts are starting to take this danger seriously. NPR reports that “Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that Big Tech companies will dish out about $3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028, with their own cash flows covering only half of that,” leading one analyst to say: ‘If the market for artificial intelligence were even to steady in its growth, pretty quickly we will have over-built capacity, and the debt will be worthless, and the financial institutions will lose money.’”

In early February 2026, these concerns led, as Bloomberg describes:

to a series of punishing [stock market] selloffs, wiping more than $1 trillion from the market values of big tech companies. . . . [This] marks a major break from the sentiment of the last few years, when speculation that AI would set off a transformative productivity boom kept pushing stock prices higher. . . . But the pile of money the tech giants are throwing at AI is getting so big that there’s increasing skepticism about whether it can continue.

In fact, there are signs that even tech players are growing worried. OpenAI was encouraged to pursue its spending plans because NVIDIA had agreed to make a $100 billion investment in the company. However, only months later, NVIDIA walked back that commitment, with Jensen Huang, the company’s CEO, claiming that the deal was nonbinding. Bloomberg cites reports that Huang has privately voiced concerns about OpenAI’s business strategy and standing relative to its competitors.

The problem, of course, is not a matter of competition. Rather it is that these generative AI systems cannot deliver what they promise. Surveys may show significant business and public use, but paying customers are few and far between. While OpenAI claims more than 500 million weekly users, only 15.5 million are paying subscribers, which as Zitron notes, “is an absolutely putrid conversion rate.” And this still beats Google, whose latest Gemini model is now getting rave reviews. As Zitron explains, “When you look at the actual business lines, the revenues are pathetic, with Google’s Gemini Enterprise only having eight million paying subscribers…which could mean everything from “paying $17 to $30 a month for a Google workspace with Gemini account” to “has used the Gemini Enterprise API.”

The way forward

The AI boom will end. But it would be a mistake for us to just wait for that to happen. It could take years and every year it continues we pay a price. The massive investment in generative AI and its data center infrastructure is drawing funds away from areas of greater social importance, leaving our economy ever more unbalanced and incapable of responding to our needs.

The hyperscale data centers are themselves enormously harmful. They disrupt communities, displace needed agricultural land, siphon off tax revenue needed to fund social services, push up electricity prices, stress local energy systems and water resources, and contribute to global warming. Encouragingly, community groups and environmental organizations are finding new and effective ways to resist the construction of new data centers and, in some cases, block the operation of existing ones.

AI developers are also aggressively working to embed generative AI systems into as many aspects of our lives as fast as possible. They appear to recognize the growing popular distrust and disapproval of their systems and no longer count on their “organic adoption” by consumers, social institutions, or government agencies. Rather, as the writer Matt Seybold so well puts it, “They have moved on to a new dream of forced adoption mandated by government and managerial coercion.” We can already see signs of their efforts in our schools, health institutions, newsrooms, film studios, and social media, although resistance, especially from unions, is growing.

The end of the AI boom doesn’t mean that tech companies will abandon their efforts to profit from required use of generative AI systems or that our economy will automatically generate a new center of economic vitality. That means we need to deepen our own organizing efforts, with a focus on building a more coordinated and stronger fight for a technology policy and economy that serves majority interests.

 

No Public Funds for Secular or Religious

Charter Schools

by Shawgi Tell / February 19th, 2026

Charter schools are private entities. They are businesses first and foremost, not schools. Calling them “public” does not make them public in any way, shape, or form. They also remain private in character whether they are considered secular or religious, or non-profit or for-profit.

As private organizations, charter schools have no valid claim to public funds. Thus, for example, to assert that a secular charter school can receive public funds but a religious charter school cannot is to promote confusion.

The main reason charter schools are labelled “public” is to fool the gullible and to justify funneling billions of dollars a year from under-funded traditional public schools to privately-operated charter schools.

Last year, on May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) delivered a 4-4 split ruling on the landmark case of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School v. Drummond, which originated in Oklahoma. The split decision left intact the lower court’s decision (in Oklahoma) that blocked the establishment of the online K-12 religious charter school. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case due to her connection to forces promoting the creation of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School. In all likelihood, she will now preside over similar cases, probably swinging the vote in favor of permitting publicly-funded religious charter schools. A full bench bodes well for sectarian forces.

In recent weeks, the news has been filled with reports of new attempts to establish religious charter schools in different states, including, most notably, a Jewish online charter school in Oklahoma. To no one’s surprise, The Journal Record reported on February 11, 2026, that, “An Oklahoma state board on Monday rejected a proposal to open a Jewish charter school, likely restarting a legal fight over public funding of religious education.” Many religious and secular forces have opposed the creation of such a school as well. The case is expected to reach the SCOTUS.

According to EdWeek, the online religious charter school “projects opening in the fall of 2026 with 500 students and state funding of $2.6 million, growing to 1,500 students and funding of $8.3 million by 2030.” This means a loss of $11 million for traditional public schools. The real figure is likely higher.

The core issue in such cases is determining whether charter schools are public or private entities. If they are public, then a certain logic follows. If they are private, a different logic follows. It is thus key to sort out this fundamental issue.

It is important to recognize and grasp that, unlike public schools, charter schools are created by unelected private persons, cannot levy taxes, avoid many laws and regulations, treat teachers as “at-will” employees, are mostly deunionized, and routinely cherry-pick students. These are just some of the major differences between public schools and charter schools.

To be sure, unlike public schools, charter schools are not state actors. They are not political subdivisions of the state. Nor are they considered government agencies or natural components of state public education systems. They are simply not set up like that under state laws. Charter schools, importantly, are not created by the State even though they may be delegated certain functions by the State. Creation and delegation are not synonymous.

To further elaborate, charter schools are performance-based contracts entered into by two distinct parties: a private organization and the government (or government-sanctioned entity). Naturally, partnering with the government is not the same as being part of the government. This is an important distinction in State Action Doctrine. Charter schools are not an arm of the government like traditional public schools are. They are not acting on behalf of a governmental body. Nor do they act with the same authority as the government. Interestingly, the appearance of the word “charter” before “school” is one of the many ways charter schools are distinguished from traditional public schools.

Precisely because they are private entities, various provisions of the U.S. Constitution do not apply to charter schools. Many private actions are not subject to constitutional scrutiny under State Action Doctrine. Certain constitutional standards do not apply to acts of private persons or entities. Constitutional standards apply mainly to the States and their subdivisions (like cities, counties, and school districts). Thus, as deregulated private actors, charter schools are generally not subject to liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983,[4] while traditional public schools are.

As in last year’s landmark case of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School v. Drummond, the SCOTUS will likely promote confusion about the “publicness”/”privateness” of charter schools. But in the final analysis, the main principle guiding such matters is: no public funds for private entities.

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Shawgi Tell (PhD) is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu. Read other articles by Shawgi.