Russia's ageing reactors leave a €21bn clean-up bill it keeps putting off

Rosatom is building reactors from Turkey to Bangladesh while its own state nuclear operator faces an €18.7bn shortfall for retiring 35 units at home. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Ben Aris in Berlin October 5, 2026

Russia is short of about €18.7bn ($21bn) to decommission 35 ageing nuclear reactors on the books of state operator Rosenergoatom, whose own estimate puts the total bill at about €21bn, Arshak Makichyan, a Russian-Armenian climate activist and political scientist, wrote in an October 4 op-ed for Al Jazeera.

Some of Russia's reactors are already more than 50 years old. Rather than dismantling them soon after shutdown, Russia often places them in long-term "safe" storage, pushing the most expensive stages of decommissioning, and much of the technical and financial risk, into the future, the author argues.

The liability is growing at the same time as Rosatom expands abroad. Nuclear exports are booming: the state corporation is building 28 power units in nine countries, from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Egypt to Bangladesh and Hungary, has agreements for 17 more and is negotiating some 50 further projects, and nuclear is one of the few parts of Russia's energy sector that Western sanctions have largely left alone.

A bill that only grows

Rosenergoatom's figures are likely to prove optimistic. Decommissioning nearly always costs far more than first planned: the former East German plant at Lubmin was originally expected to cost €1bn to dismantle and is now put at €10bn. Lithuania, which had to close the two Soviet-built reactors at Ignalina as a condition of joining the EU, shut them in 2004 and 2009; by 2020 the estimated cost had reached €3.3bn and only 49% of the work was done, and completion has slipped from 2038 to 2049.

Environmental group Bellona, citing Rosatom's own projections, says the corporation's decommissioning and remediation obligations could exceed its net profit by around 2037. The longer the work is deferred, the greater the financial, technical and safety risks become.

Russia also inherited about 774,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste from the Soviet Union, and the coming decommissioning of 36 reactor units at eight plants is expected to add another 800,000 cubic metres.

War economy first

The money may simply not be there. Defence is by far the largest single item in Russia's federal budget, environmental protection a small fraction of it, and the government has weakened environmental rules to keep the war economy running. Russia has form in leaving others to clear up: in the Kemerovo region, which produces about half its coal, waste heaps scar the landscape and some burn, and when coal companies go bust the clean-up falls to the state and local communities.

Nuclear waste and shut reactors cannot be abandoned the same way, the author warns, and countries buying Russian plants should have "a Plan B in case something goes wrong in Russia", since they may one day need maintenance or decommissioning that Moscow can no longer pay for.

Fewer people watching

Independent scrutiny inside Russia has all but disappeared. Bellona and Greenpeace have been declared "undesirable" organisations, and EcoDefence, which campaigned on nuclear issues, was designated a "foreign agent" and its members prosecuted. Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the now-exiled EcoDefence, warns that Europe's continued dependence on Russian nuclear technology and services could itself be used for sabotage or political pressure.

History suggests the risk is real. Soviet authorities hid the 1957 Mayak disaster and did not acknowledge it until 1989, more than three decades later, while thousands lived with the contamination, and their attempts to play down Chornobyl fed the distrust that helped bring the Soviet system down.

 

Slovenia’s Triglav Glacier shrinks to just a few square metres

/ Image by Peter Tarkusch from PixabayFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Valentina Dimitrievska in Skopje October 5, 2026

Slovenia’s Triglav Glacier, one of the country’s most recognisable natural landmarks, has shrunk to just a few square metres, with researchers warning that its remaining ice could disappear completely by the end of this year’s melting season, Gorenjskainfo reported last week.

The last visible remnant of the glacier’s main section has continued to retreat in recent weeks amid unusually high temperatures, in line with predictions by researchers that the glacier could vanish entirely this autumn.

Researchers from the Anton Melik Geographical Institute at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts have monitored the glacier since 1946.

They said in late August that it had been reduced to isolated patches of ice for several years and that the remaining ice was very likely to disappear by the end of the 2026 melting season.

The melting season typically runs from early May to the end of October, when the average monthly temperature at nearby Kredarica, at 2,513 metres above sea level, is above freezing.

However, temperatures have been exceptionally high this year. The average temperature at Kredarica in September was more than 3C above the 1991-2020 long-term average, while June and August were similarly warm. Daily temperatures exceeded 12C in the final days of September.

“This year's and also the last melting season will almost certainly be the warmest since 1955,” researcher Miha Pavšek said.

The remaining ice is located on the slopes of Mount Triglav at around 2,470 metres, below the face of Mali Triglav. In recent days, the remnant measured about five metres along its longer side and was only around half a metre thick at its thickest point.

The glacier has undergone a dramatic reduction in recent decades. Its fragmented ice patches in this section have covered less than 0.2 hectares in recent years, compared with around one hectare a decade ago.

Researchers can still see markings used over decades to record the glacier’s former boundaries. The exposed bedrock also contains thin carbonate crusts formed beneath the glacier.

Dating of these deposits indicates that glacial ice has occupied the location since the end of the Pleistocene, nearly 12,000 years ago.

According to Pavšek, the carbonate crust is highly unstable on geological timescales and can disintegrate within decades to several hundred years after a glacier disappears. Its continued presence therefore provides evidence that much of the Triglav foothills remained covered by ice for most of the Holocene.

 

Albania launches ‘Flamingo Mirror’ for government files on developments that sparked protest movement

Flamingo Revolution protesters in Tirana. / IntelliNewsFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By IntelliNews October 5, 2026

Albania on October 3 launched an online platform publishing government documents and legal references on sensitive projects, beginning with files related to proposed developments at Sazan island and Zvërnec, as Prime Minister Edi Rama seeks to respond to demands for greater transparency.

The government said the “Flamingo Mirror” would make documents available in Albanian and English and would be updated as new material becomes available. The platform is part of a broader initiative, Pasqyrë Albania, which is also intended to allow citizens to track publicly funded projects.

"It is very important to make clear that Flamingo Mirror contains no rhetoric, no political statements, and no rebuttals targeting the various sources that spread fake news or half-truths, which are also the biggest lies," Rama said at its presentation.

"It contains only the language of facts, supported by legal references and official documents," he said.

The initiative follows the “Flamingo Revolution”, a protest movement that began in late May over planned tourism developments in protected areas around Zvërnec and Sazan. The protests quickly broadened into a wider campaign against corruption and Rama's government, with demonstrators calling for his resignation.

The flamingo became the movement's symbol because the Vjosa-Narta protected area around Zvërnec is an important habitat for the bird. The protests have also focused on a planned luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and a separate development on Sazan.

Rama said the Sazan-Zvërnec file would remain open and be expanded as documents become available, including an environmental impact assessment and urban planning and architectural designs that have not yet been submitted.

 

US Treasury chief leaves door open to fresh financial support for Milei

"I was able to use the balance sheet of the United States of America, make money for the American people with a fully secured currency swap, central bank to central bank, and the bridge President Milei during the election," Scott Bessent said during an interview with Axios.Facebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By IntelliNews Latam desk October 6, 2026

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has left open the possibility of renewed financial intervention to support Argentina's government under President Javier Milei, citing the US response during the country's 2025 market turmoil and arguing that economic stability can serve Washington's broader strategic interests.

Bessent made the remarks in an interview with Axios' co-founder Mike Allen after Argentina's country risk reached 655 basis points last week, its highest level of 2026. The increase came amid higher global interest rates, weaker domestic economic indicators and investor concerns about the future of Milei's radical economic programme beyond 2027.

Asked whether the United States could intervene in financial markets again, Bessent pointed to Washington's support for Argentina ahead of its October 2025 legislative elections, when the Treasury extended a $20bn currency swap line that he described at the time as a "lifeline."

“Let’s think about what we did in Argentina,” Bessent said. He described Milei as “a great ally of the United States who had done a great series of reforms” and said the president's opponents had been trying to turn markets against him and create “financial panic” ahead of the October 2025 mid-term vote, which Milei's party went on to win by a large margin.

Bessent said the previous intervention had been carried out “with the blessing of President Trump” and under the principle that “economic security is national security, and national security is economic security”.

He said the United States had used its balance sheet through a fully collateralised currency swap and had generated a return for US taxpayers while helping Argentina's government navigate the political and financial pressure surrounding the election.

The Treasury secretary linked the operation to Washington's wider efforts to strengthen relationships in Latin America, as part of the Trump administration's renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere. “I would say that the stabilisation of Argentina has led to a sea change in Latin America, something generational or maybe first time in history that we’ve never had this many Latin American countries allied with the US. So could we do that again? Sure." he said.

The comments come as Argentina prepares for a year in which access to external financing and foreign-currency liquidity are expected to remain important issues. Economy Minister Luis Caputo has presented investors with what he described as a financial “shield” of about $72bn to navigate the electoral period.

The figure includes a $20bn currency swap with China, a $20bn facility with the US Treasury, a $17bn target for reserve accumulation and about $15bn in potential intervention through futures markets. The components differ in their practical availability, with only part of the Chinese swap described as potentially flexible and the futures position providing exchange-rate protection rather than liquid dollars.

The availability of the US facility during 2027 has been a specific concern among investors. Caputo has said the line remains available, while Bessent's latest comments provided an additional political signal without specifying the conditions under which any future operation could take place.

The 2025 intervention remains the principal precedent. Ahead of Argentina's legislative elections that year, the US Treasury intervened in the foreign-exchange market and agreed to a currency swap of up to $20bn. Argentina's central bank drew $2.5bn from the arrangement and repaid the amount before the end of that year, later reporting $17.7mn in interest payments.

The US government and Argentina have since expanded cooperation beyond financial support. In September, the two countries advanced the Andes-Atlantic Corridor, a framework intended to facilitate up to $7bn in financing in 2027 for energy, mining and infrastructure projects through institutions including the US Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation.

Argentina LNG, developed by YPF with Eni and XRG, has emerged as a central project under that framework. The Exim Bank has presented a non-binding indicative proposal for up to $6bn in financing, although any funds would depend on project approvals and conditions and would not represent an immediate increase in Argentina's central bank reserves.

 

Poland demands apology from former MAGA star Tucker Carlson over World War II remarks

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s interview with former British cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. / Tucker Carlson via YouTubeFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Wojciech Kosc in Warsaw October 6, 2026

Poland wants US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson to apologise for remarks justifying Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Poland’s chargé d’affaires in Washington Bogdan Klich said on October 5.

The diplomatic intervention follows Carlson’s October 2 interview with former British cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, in which Carlson said Nazi Germany’s territorial claims against Poland were justified and that Britain would have made the right decision had it not entered the war.

Klich demanded an immediate public retraction and apology, saying Carlson had become “an apologist for Adolf Hitler” and spread historical falsehoods.

Klich said Germany’s September 1939 attack was a premeditated war of aggression aimed at destroying the Polish state and physically eliminating its population. The official also pointed to Hitler’s agreement with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

“Nazi propaganda cannot be rehabilitated under the guise of free speech,” Klich said in a social media post.

Poland does not currently have a full ambassador to the US, an effect of a long-running dispute between the government and the president's office over ambassadorial appointments.

President Karol Nawrocki, who has cultivated close ties with US President Donald Trump, has maintained his predecessor Andrzej Duda’s refusal to approve Bogdan Klich, the government’s nominee, who instead heads the embassy as chargé d’affaires.

Carlson's interview with Rees-Mogg also prompted a reaction from the Trump administration. US Ambassador to Poland Tom Rose, who is Jewish, called Carlson “the most dangerous demagogue in America” in response to the interview.

“Hitler's ‘legitimate claims’ against Poland justify the conquest and destruction of an entire nation in the most murderous occupation in human history? Was defeating Nazi Germany even worth it? By asking these 'so-called' questions, Tucker's goal isn't to illuminate history, it's to invert it,” Rose said on social media.

Carlson’s goal was the “deliberate destruction of moral truth,” Rose also said.

World War II cost Poland 20% of its population, including nearly the entire community of Polish Jews. Warsaw typically reacts sharply to claims distorting its wartime history, such as descriptions of Nazi death camps on Polish soil as “Polish camps”. On the other hand, some Jewish historians accuse Poland of whitewashing its attitude towards the Holocaust.

President Nawrocki demanded on September 1, the anniversary of the German invasion, that Berlin pay reparations for the loss of life and widespread destruction Poland endured during more than five years of brutal Nazi occupation.

In the October 2 interview with Rees-Mogg on The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson’s own online show, the host said the idea that Hitler had simply invaded Poland without a preceding territorial dispute was false.

Germany had lost substantial territory after World War I, including parts of Prussia, he said, angering Germans and providing what Carlson called “a justification for it”.

Carlson thus omitted that Poland was re-established as an independent state after World War I from territories previously ruled by Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary, amid the collapse of Europe’s old empires.

Hitler’s objectives in 1939 went far beyond recovering German territories lost after the war: Nazi policy aimed to destroy Poland as an independent state and turn large parts of Eastern Europe into Lebensraum — literally “living space” — for German settlement, with much of the Polish population ultimately intended for expulsion, forced labour or killing.

Carlson also said Britain had no stake in the dispute and had ultimately damaged itself by going to war, saying that the decision “destroyed their empire and their country”. Rees-Mogg responded by saying World War II was “the classic good versus evil” and that Britain “did the right thing” by fighting and defeating Hitler.

Britain entered the war days after Germany’s invasion of Poland and endured months of German air raids, dealing Hitler his first serious setback of the war, with far-reaching consequences later in the conflict.

Carlson rose to prominence after joining Fox News in 2009, where he hosted Tucker Carlson Tonight, one of the network’s flagship prime-time programmes, from 2016 until Fox abruptly parted ways with him in April 2023.

Carlson then launched his subscription-based Tucker Carlson Network in December 2023 and The Tucker Carlson Show podcast in 2024.

Once one of Donald Trump’s most prominent media allies and a speaker at the 2024 Republican convention, Carlson broke sharply with Trump over the US war with Iran, apologising in April 2026 for having supported him and saying in June that he would no longer support the Republican Party.

How Can We Build a World Post Capitalism?

In Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025), Seven Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.


A woman holds a banner ‘Capitalism Is the Crisis’ during Climate Strike protest organized by Fridays for Future movement also known as Youth Strike for Climate in Krakow, Poland on September 24, 2021.
(Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Cynthia Kaufman
Oct 05, 2026

Common Dreams


The billionaires are putting our world at risk through support for unregulated AI, funding the fossil fuel industry, and undermining democracy. They are using their unprecedented levels of power to lead us toward multiple pathways of total human annihilation.

Now is a good time to reflect on ways to challenge capitalism, a driving force behind the madness we face. And yet, on one side we have many people who are hesitant to name capitalism as a force behind destruction we face. On the other side, many of those few who do name capitalism use outdated and unhelpful frameworks for understanding how to challenge capitalism.

Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025) is a book worth reading if you are interested in building a world past capitalism. Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.

Its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism.

Beckert’s book has received awards and is being read widely. Yet much of the attention has been negative. Writing in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus faulted the book for having such a diffuse idea of capitalism that it becomes “an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.” In his review in The Nation Corey Robin criticized it for offering a fuzzy and imprecise understanding of capitalism, which then makes the book unhelpful for shaping our anti-capitalist thinking.

These criticisms miss the political power and potential of this unorthodox approach to understanding capitalism. Beckert’s book takes capitalism to its origins and puts it into a global framework. It focuses on the agency of capitalists as a group of people who over time bring capitalism as a global system into being. Beckert’s analysis helps us update our understanding of capitalism in ways that make pathways to challenging it clear and actionable. Many anti-capitalist thinkers are stuck in a stale 19th century understanding of what we are up against. Those approaches make our search for solutions narrow and not actionable in the present.

There are three dead ends to anti-capitalist thought that Becker’s approach avoids. One is that capitalism began in Britain with the industrial revolution. That idea encourages anti-capitalist thinkers to focus on class as something separate from race and patriarchy. A second is that the main victims of capitalism are the industrial working class, that idea leads us to focus on the industrial working class as the most important carriers of movements to challenge capitalism. The third mistaken approach is that the only way to get rid of capitalism is through overthrowing the system in a dramatic revolution. That leads anti-capitalist organizers to focus on getting others to see how bad capitalism is but does not encourage them to build power to challenge it in the present. Each of these tendencies has its own way of being unhelpful for building anti-capitalist politics. Beckert’s approach to capitalism helps us find pathways beyond all of them.

Rather than staring his analysis of capitalism at the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as most anti-capitalist thinkers do, Beckert’s story begins in 1150 in Aden, in what is now Yemen. He argues that at that time, largely in the Muslim world, there emerged a global trade in luxury goods. It impacted very few people’s lives, and there were no societies based on it. This was a period of the emergence of capitalists—a very small subset of the population who traded goods for the sole purpose of generating wealth.

Many societies have engaged in trade to obtain goods that they could not produce themselves. What distinguishes capitalists from other traders is that they engage in trade for profits alone. The goal of any given transaction is money itself rather than something that money could buy.

Capital itself is money, or resources, invested for the sole purpose of generating more money. Early capitalists originally worked within the political realities they found around them. Over time these merchants worked to create political systems that would enable them to generate more wealth. These early capitalists often engaged in work to get governments to create conditions that were favorable to them. Think of Columbus and his relationship with Queen Isabella.

When these disparate acts of capitalists began to be elevated to the society-wide phenomenon we now call capitalism, was when they were able to control a land base and extract wealth, not just from trading, but from producing as well. Over time these merchants came to control more land and resources. Forced labor in the form of slavery was central to the early days of capitalism. So was colonialism: the forcible taking of land on which to engage in profit-seeking actions.

As more and more resources are controlled by capitalist processes, and as capitalists became more politically powerful, a large part of human society came to be dominated by these logics. Eventually, resistance to slavery made that form of exploitation less desirable to the elites. Employers were able to hire people into wage labor as the enclosure of commons threw them off the land they had previously used to sustain themselves. Colonialism was beaten back by people fighting for control over the political systems that dominated the places they lived. In many places colonialism was replaced by neocolonialism, where local people controlled the political system but continued to run the economy in the interest of faraway elites.

Beckert’s analysis broadens our frame in ways that allow us to avoid the pitfalls of an anti-capitalism that focuses only on the class-based harms of capitalism. If you accept the older framework, which focuses on capitalism as mostly about the exploitation of the industrial working class in Europe, then its relationships to slavery and colonialism are hard to understand. Much anti-capitalist thinking sees capitalism as a step forward from slavery and colonialism, rather than as their cause.

With regard to patriarchy, much anti-capitalist thinking focuses on the experiences of wage laborers rather than on the impacts of capitalist processes on the broader matrix of society that it transforms and destroys. This can lead to an anti-capitalist politics that defines the victims of capitalism so narrowly that racism and patriarchy are outside the frame of analysis. That makes building broad coalitions for anti-capitalist politics harder to achieve.

Moving on to the second dead end of much anti-capitalist thinking, if you see capitalism as fundamentally about the exploitation of labor, then you will not see the wide variety of ways that capitalism destroys the social fabric in which it operates. By prioritizing production and distribution that are done in markets for profits, capitalist ways of operating marginalize and deny resources to the caregiving matrix of our lives.

Caregiving labor, which has been disproportionately done by women, becomes socially invisible and undervalued. It is especially not valued in the discipline of Economics, which is largely the study of the profit-making sector. That narrow focus ignores the wide variety of ways that many people’s lives are made miserable by not having access to the resources they need to live well. It also ignores the many non-capitalist aspects of our economies that continue to thrive, even as the capitalist sector has increasingly large impacts on our shared social world.

By focusing on the capitalist class, as a group of people who are ready to subordinate our world to profit seeking, and by showing that members of that class act in a variety of ways in relationship to government, and the rest of society, in order to make the world over to enable their profit seeking, Beckert opens up our perception to the wide range of ways that capitalism causes destruction. He therefore opens us to a wide range of ways to fight against it.

Beckert’s approach is aligned with the work of Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, his pathbreaking book from 1944, Polanyi argued that, in previous times, markets were subordinated to other social logics, and so their negative impacts were limited. What distinguishes capitalism is that the logic of markets comes to dominate, and their centrality undermines other ways societies have been structured to ensure that people’s needs are met. Markets come to have lives of their own, and the needs of markets come to dominate over the needs of people or the rest of nature.

Beckert updates Polanyi’s analysis by adding more detail, and also by naming more clearly than Polanyi does the forms of agency behind these destructive practices. This approach allows us to understand capitalism less as a total system and more as a set of destructive practices driven by those addicted to the profit motive. This approach helps us imagine a variety of ways to challenge capitalism.

We need to break the spell of pro-capitalist thinkers’ claim that human economies are best served when markets are allowed to decide what is produced, how it is produced, and who gets the things produced. We need to figure out how best to ensure that we are making the things we need, in ways that are sustainable, and distributed in ways that ensure that everyone’s needs are met.

We need to fight against the powers of the owners of capital by breaking our dependencies on capitalism for our survival. Fighting against the exploitation we experience in wage labor is a part of that. But gathering social resources for the caregiving aspects of our lives, developing public goods, and preventing the environmental damage caused by corporations pursuing profit at any cost, are also crucial aspects of challenging capitalism.

Finally, Beckert’s approach allows us to avoid the third and most destructive element of standard anti-capitalist thinking: the belief that we need to wait for a revolution. If you think of capitalism as a focused system that came into being all at once with one major transformation, it is easy then to imagine the way to get rid of it is through overthrowing that system with one large blow. That way of thinking about how to get rid of capitalism doesn’t position us well to understand the work we need to be doing right now to build power to stop the forces of social destruction while building the better world we are looking for, now.

Rather than waiting for a revolution to overthrow capitalism, anti-capitalists need to build power to fight against the variety of ways that the capitalist class is destroying our world. One way to think of this is with the idea of revolutionary reforms, the steps we take to make our world better, as we fight against the forms of destruction caused by capitalism and against the power of the capitalist class to destroy our social fabric.

Both Beckert, and Polanyi before him, owe a great deal to the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s criticism of capitalism remains an invaluable starting point for anti-capitalist thinking. But Marx’s narrow focus on the exploitation of labor as the single most important form of destruction caused by capitalism has led generations of anti-capitalist activists to hope the industrial working class would lead us away from capitalism. Those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed.

Marx faulted colonialism and slavery for the ways they were part of the destruction caused by capitalism, but many of his followers see those processes as side issues to the problem of capitalism. And so many anti-capitalists insist on a class-first analysis, which undermines their ability to work well in broad coalitions.

On the question of revolution or reform, Marx actually said very little. And much of what he said was contradictory. In places, he argued that the path away from capitalism was through building political power via elections. At other times, he claimed that all of that was a distraction from a revolution that would overturn all social relations in a short dramatic period. Many followers of Marx assume, incorrectly, that he only supported the second strategy,

Much of the criticism of Beckert’s book from the left has rested on the ways his understanding deviates from a telling of the history that leads to the core set of beliefs that have kept anti-capitalist thinking from being politically productive. Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History doesn’t address these questions of political strategy. But its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism. If we want to bring anti-capitalist analysis into the broad liberatory social movements that are animating our time, we need to base our anti-capitalism on an updated understanding of what we are up against. Beckert’s book offers a starting point for that understanding.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Cynthia Kaufman

Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of six books on social change: Solidarity Economics: Building Sustainable Social Relations (Routledge 2026),Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). Visit her website.
Full Bio >

Trump White House Told DOJ to Wait Until After Midterms to Push for Abortion Pill Ban

“They’re trying to pull one over on voters,” said one reproductive rights advocate.


US Attorney General Todd Blanche checks his watch as he takes questions from reporters during a press briefing in the Rose Garden of the White House on September 15, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Oct 02, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Trump administration is intentionally slow-rolling efforts to restrict abortion pill access until after the midterms. Once they’re over, “the gloves will be off,” according to one anti-abortion advocate who spoke with The Washington Sun.

US Attorney General Todd Blanche said during his July confirmation hearing that rules allowing abortion pills to be shipped nationwide were “wrong” and that he’d seek to review them. He’s also reportedly assured faith leaders he would work to ban abortion “in every single state.”

But according to a Friday report from the Sun, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has intervened to limit the potential political fallout of new sweeping restrictions on a method that accounts for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US.

Six in 10 Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 68% say they oppose the banning of medication abortion nationwide. According to senior White House officials, Wiles warned Blanche that an aggressive effort to ban the drug would further alienate voters in November, when Republicans are already predicted to take heavy losses.

“No one wants us taking any real action before the midterms,” one senior administration official told the Sun, passing on the message apparently being pushed by White House staff to the Justice Department.

The White House has denied that the meetings took place, saying the report was “completely false.”

But anti-abortion activists who have pressured the White House told the Sun they believe officials are just biding their time until, in their view, the opinion of voters no longer matters.

“Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time, we’ve heard the gloves will be off,” one of them said. “We have heard we have friends [in the White House], and there are definitely people who are staunch pro-lifers.”

During President Donald Trump’s second term, the DOJ has asked federal courts to pause several state lawsuits challenging Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policies that allow mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and delivered by mail. But critically, it has not defended those FDA policies on the merits, but rather sought to slow litigation against them on procedural grounds.

But evidence also suggests the administration is laying the groundwork to restrict access once the political costs are neutralized. Despite multiple prior reviews reaffirming its safety and effectiveness, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spearheaded an FDA “safety” review of mifepristone that could tighten prescription and delivery rules.

Blanche, meanwhile, has indicated openness to reviving the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the shipment of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail, including those related to abortion.

Amy Littlefield, The Nation’s abortion access correspondent, has described Comstock as a “zombie law from the Victorian era,” but said it could serve as a “nuclear option” for effectively banning abortion nationwide without any need for an act of Congress.

Since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling overturned the national right to an abortion, anti-abortion groups have pushed for the act to be interpreted in the most expansive way possible.

“If abortion opponents are right in their reading of it, if the courts agree with their reading of it, it could essentially be revived as a de facto nationwide abortion ban that would apply even in blue states,” Littlefield told Democracy Now! “Broadly interpreted, it could apply to latex gloves that might be used in an abortion, or syringes... It could be broadly interpreted to shut down not just mail-order abortions, but also clinic-based care, depending on how it’s read.”

In 2022, the DOJ under the Biden administration published a legal opinion stating that Comstock does not prohibit the mailing of abortion drugs unless the sender intends to use them illegally. During his confirmation, Blanche said he would revisit that opinion and would use “every lawful action available” to enforce the law.

One unnamed anti-abortion activist told the Sun they’ve been assured that, under Blanche, the DOJ is “actively working on” plans to use Comstock to restrict abortion. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, has previously told the Sun that she’s had “encouraging” meetings with a DOJ official and that plans to rescind the 2022 memo are in the works.

Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for Students for Life, however, said the DOJ had indicated that “everything but the election is pushed until after the elections.”

Trump has vowed to be the “most pro-life president in history” since returning to office. But while campaigning in 2024, he pledged explicitly that he would “not block” access to abortion drugs.

Katie O’Connor, the director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, told Common Dreams that “asking the DOJ to wait until midterm votes are counted to take action on abortion is an intentionally deceptive move that keeps voters from making their voices heard.”

“This isn’t a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to how this administration operates when it comes to abortion,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, in a social media post.

“Abortion is extremely popular with voters. Trump knows that,” she said. “But he’s also under a ton of pressure from anti-abortion extremists to take away access to medication abortion, which is used in the majority of abortions in the US and has been a lifeline for access post-[Roe v. Wade].”

“They’re trying to pull one over on voters,” she said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

‘This Scheme Is a Poison Pill’: Trump Blasted Over Federal School Voucher Program

“Instead of strengthening public education,” said one union leader, “Trump is diverting $500 billion in taxpayer cash into private hands, with everyone else left fighting for scraps in a real-life Hunger Games.”


Students read in the library of Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Washington, DC after an event to celebrate the completion of a $91 million modernization project on September 28, 2026.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Oct 02, 2026
C0MMON DREAMS

The US Department of the Treasury this week released proposed regulations for the first federal “school choice” program, as proponents call it, drawing a fresh wave of condemnation from critics who have expressed concerns since President Donald Trump signed last year’s Republican budget package.

“The Trump administration’s proposed rules confirm what we expected, that their federal private school voucher program is designed to direct public resources to private schools and organizations and will provide little benefit to the 90% of children who attend public schools,” said Demetria McCain, director of policy at the Legal Defense Fund, in a Friday statement.

“Instead of using federal resources to serve all children, this administration has dismantled the Department of Education, weakened long-standing civil rights protections, and worked to build a two-tiered system of education that benefits a select few,” McCain continued. “Our children deserve better.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act established the Education Freedom Tax Credit, which is set to begin next year. According to the Treasury Department, under the proposed rules, eligible taxpayers could claim an annual credit of up to $1,700—or $3,400 for married couples filing jointly—for contributions to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs).

The program is widely seen as a scheme to funnel tax dollars toward private school tuition, but the department noted that the rules would also allow scholarships to support “academic tutoring, special needs services, books, supplies, computers and other equipment, and other qualifying expenses connected with a student’s enrollment or attendance.”

That “aspect of the program has put Democratic governors in a bind,” The Washington Post reported Thursday. There is no cost to states that participate, but “governors must approve all SGOs that meet the rules. States that want to opt into the program for the benefit of public school students will have to allow private school vouchers as well, and vice versa.”

As the Post detailed:
Governors have until January 1 to opt in. Thirty mostly Republican-led states have already joined. Most of the remaining states that have not rejected the plan are led by Democrats.

The proposed regulations include income limits for eligible families, protections for scholarship funds, and details on how the funds can be used. States cannot restrict the types of schools that benefit, Treasury and Education department officials said, meaning public funds could go toward a religious school that bars LGBTQ students or a private school that doesn’t have certified teachers.

Among the Democrats facing some calls to opt out are New York Gov. Kathy Hochul—who, as Chalkbeat pointed out, “has said she plans to participate unless she finds a ‘poison pill’ in the program,” but “declined Thursday to make it official.”

New York State United Teachers president Melinda Person declared Thursday that “the regulations are loaded with poison pills. If New York opts in, the state would be prohibited from setting standards for scholarship organizations, deciding which organizations can participate, or limiting the types of schools and expenses that receive these federal tax dollars.”

“That means New York could be forced to help funnel taxpayer-subsidized dollars to private schools that have admissions policies and practices that would never be acceptable in our public schools, while being denied the authority to put stronger safeguards around the program,” Person warned. “New York puts its name on the program, but Washington writes the rules.”

“We take responsibility for participating, but surrender much of our ability to determine where the money goes and what standards recipients must meet,” she added. “This isn’t local control. It is a one-way door into a federally designed voucher program, one that could use public resources to support schools that discriminate, while stripping New York of the ability to provide the protections New Yorkers expect. Gov. Hochul should make clear now that New York will not walk through that door.”

Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor who authored the book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, laid out the “good” and “bad” of the regulations on social media Thursday.

Leaders at the nation’s two largest teachers unions also weighed in. National Education Association president Princess Moss said that “with back-to-school in the rearview mirror, more Americans are struggling to make ends meet as the cost of school supplies, packed lunches, and gas continues to outpace salaries and paychecks.”

“Instead of helping families make ends meet, the Trump administration is once again putting its thumb on the scale for private school vouchers at the expense of the public schools that serve 90% of America’s students,” she asserted. “At a time when educators, students, and families are calling for more resources to strengthen neighborhood public schools, this administration is advancing a plan to divert taxpayer dollars to subsidize private education for a select few.”

“We will closely review the Treasury Department’s new voucher regulations and continue fighting to ensure public funds remain invested in public schools where every student—regardless of their race, ZIP code, disability, family income, or immigration status—can learn, grow, and thrive,” Moss pledged. “America’s students deserve policies that expand opportunity, not vouchers that leave most children behind.”

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten similarly charged that “this scheme is a poison pill for the 90% of American children who attend public schools. Instead of strengthening public education, President Trump is diverting $500 billion in taxpayer cash into private hands, with everyone else left fighting for scraps in a real-life Hunger Games.”

While the Congressional Budget Office estimated the program would cost the federal government $26 billion in lost revenue over the next decade, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has found it could cost up to $51 billion per year. A January report from US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted that’s more than the combined federal spending on programs to support students with disabilities and those who are from low-income backgrounds.

Weingarten said that “state governors should reject it—not least of all because they will have no say or oversight over how the vouchers operate. The reality is that for every precious public dollar funneled to private schools—money that could be spent on instruction, lowering class sizes, modern buildings, or new books in the library—public school parents will be hunting for pennies on the floor.”

“This isn’t about ‘school choice’; it’s the about the school’s choice: Private schools can simply refuse to accept poor kids, those with special needs, or those with different religions. And they can refuse to submit to the basic accountability measures their backers hypocritically demand of public schools,” she stressed. “If this were really about ‘choice’ then the administration would be trying to help public schools succeed, rather than eviscerating them.”

“This is yet another cruel chapter in the Trump’s administration’s war on families after the Big, Ugly Bill slashed trillions in support for young people by gutting Medicaid, food assistance, and student loans,” she continued. “If we are serious about the promise of education, then we have an obligation to make every public school a place where parents want to send their kids, educators want to work, and kids thrive.”

The union leader argued that “instead of this voucher scheme, we should commit to creating safe and welcoming schools with a curriculum that is engaging, relevant, and rigorous. That means multiple pathways to career and college, expanding community schools, focusing on literacy and critical thinking, and protecting children against the perils of artificial intelligence while harnessing its potential. These regulations do the exact opposite.”