Sunday, March 15, 2026

THE EPSTEIN CLASS




'Everybody knew' what was happening on that island: ex-Epstein architect


Epstein's architect and interior designer Robert Couturier (YouTube Screengrab)

March 13, 2026
ALTERNET


CNN reporter Kyung Lah provided an exclusive interview with architect and interior designer Robert Couturier, who was hired by convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to work on his infamous island. CNN reports Couturier backed out of the project after a few months and then alerted the FBI of what Epstein had requested he build.

“There's no mistaking,” Couturier told Lah. “You don't put women on bunk beds. I'm sorry. Everybody knew what was happening on that island. Even his staff people worked for him.”

When Couturier first noted all the puzzling bunk beds he asked who they were for.

“There were bunk beds and I said to him, I said, ‘oh my god, are you expecting grandchildren?’ And he said, ‘no, these are for my — these are for the girls.”

Lah reports a former staffer said the main home had “many pictures of young girls, some topless, looking about 15 to 16 years old” in room after room of the island home.

According to CNN, files show “visible signs of something off,” including Epstein in his kitchen chasing girls or young women, which his staff noticed. A former chef, said Lah, claimed every hour Epstein would take a girl down to his master bedroom then order his maid to clean up. Another staffer worried about Epstein’s guests.

“He described seeing an unnamed man with girls who did not look 18, and they were all naked,” said Lah. “He also told the FBI he saw then Prince Andrew grinding against some young girl in the pool. UK authorities arrested Andrew last month saying they're reviewing claims he shared sensitive government information with Epstein.”

CNN reports Virgin Islands prosecutors say Epstein coerced girls as young as 12 into sexual activity.

“One victim said she was trapped on the island and tried to escape Epstein and the others by trying to swim off [the island] after spending the day being raped,” said Lah.

“The girls and young women went on the island were basic prisoners,” said Couturier. “You couldn't leave.”


Dark money group offers influencers cash to trash Illinois Democrat: report


Democratic Congress candidate Kat Abughazaleh was targeted by a dark money group. (Wikimedia Commons)

March 14, 2026 
ALTERNET

A dark money group offered at least two social media influencers $1,500 apiece for a single negative social media post about progressive Illinois Democrat candidate Kat Abughazaleh.

Abughazaleh is running against 15 other Democrats in their primary for the chance to replace retiring Representative Jan Schakowsky in Illinois’s 9th congressional district.

MS Now reports TikTok and Instagram influencer Amanda Informed was among those approached with the offer. The dark money group, Democracy Unmuted, requested an anti-Abughazaleh post. She declined and reported the approach to the media.

The memo sent to Amanda from Democracy Unmuted asked influencers to “encourage voters to look past viral personalities and ask real questions about who is running and why.” They disparaged the candidate as being from a wealthy family who doesn’t know her district.

“Kat’s campaign appears designed for attention rather than impact,” it stated.

Amanda Informed said she turned it down because of the source’s anonymity.

“The money didn’t feel right coming from someone who’s not disclosing where the money is coming from,” Amanda Informed told MS NOW. “That’s not something that I want to be involved in. I want to make sure that it’s coming from a source that is not doing nefarious things like interfering with elections.”

However, others may not have turned down the bounty. A Missouri political influencer named Justin Kralemann, known as “The Woke Ginger” on social media, read Democracy Unmuted’s anti-Abughazaleh talking points word for word in a recent Instagram and TikTok post, MS Now reports.

He mispronounced Abughazaleh’s name, but later denied being paid for the video blast.

Democracy Unmuted just registered its website two weeks ago. It is reportedly a group of “individuals from the [Illinois] area who have served in the highest offices and been at top of their game in the media,” said Matt Anthes, founder of the digital political advocacy firm Advocators, to MS NOW.

Anthes was the facilitator of the dark money offer, but he refused to reveal details of just who is behind the group. “We don’t comment on or disclose the identity of our clients. What we can tell you is that all of our dealings and practices are fully compliant with FEC rules and regulations, including those at our creative agency partner, Upstart Factory.”

Abigail Bellows, senior policy director of anti-corruption at Common Cause, said weak campaign finance laws have made such social media attempts possible and completely legal.

“Dark money groups have grown to exercise tremendous influence.… With a lot of these competitive races, these groups can spring up overnight,” Bellows said to MS-NOW. “These dark money groups use these shadowy vehicles for political participation that really undercuts voters.… It just breeds distrust.”

Abughazaleh’s campaign has called the claims defamatory.

“We have become aware of a coordinated influencer campaign attacking Kat Abughazaleh that appears to be funded through opaque entities exploiting loopholes in federal election law. The materials being circulated are filled with false and defamatory claims about Kat’s background and campaign,” the campaign statement read. “At a minimum, this raises serious questions about transparency and whether voters in Illinois’ 9th District are being targeted by undisclosed money and potentially foreign-linked actors across social media platforms.”
The real winners of Trump's war


U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at the McDonald's Impact Summit at the Westin Hotel in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 17, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein

March 15, 2026
ALTERNET

Today I want to talk about who’s getting the most out of Trump’s war.

That war is costing the U.S. about $1 billion a day. The Pentagon’s budget is around $1 trillion this year, and Trump wants an additional $500 billion. Because of the war, the cost of oil has topped $100 a barrel, and the price of a gallon of gas at the U.S. pump now averages $3.67 — up from $2.92 before the war.

The strain on the federal budget has given Republicans an excuse to demand further cuts in federal assistance to people in need. JD Vance recently kicked off a “war on waste and fraud” by announcing suspension of Medicaid payments to Minnesota, charging that the program is rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … [who] decide to make themselves rich.”

But if you want to find real waste and fraud, look no further than Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War.”

A new analysis by government watchdog Open the Books found that as the 2025 fiscal year was ending, Hegseth’s Pentagon spent: nearly $100,000 on a Steinway grand piano to outfit the home of the Air Force chief of staff; $60,719 on premium office furniture, including at least one luxurious $1,844 Aeron Chair; $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands; $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $6.9 million on lobster tail, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $1 million on salmon; $124,000 for ice cream machines; and $26,000 for sushi preparation tables.


The Pentagon has failed every audit since it was legally required to start submitting them in 2018, and reports say it will continue to fail them at least through 2028.

The ballooning profits of military contractors are helped by their near monopoly on defense production. Since the 1990s, the number of prime contractors for the Defense Department has shrunk from 55 to five.

Keep following the money.


These giants have been spending more on enriching their investors than expanding production. Between 2020 and 2025, top military contractors devoted $110 billion to stock buybacks and dividends — more than double what they spent on capital expenditures — which boosted their stock values and the pay packages of their CEOs.

And who are their biggest investors and CEOs? Trump loyalists.

Larry Ellison’s Oracle provides Hegseth’s war machine with cloud infrastructure and enterprise software. (Reminder: Ellison is the second-richest person in America and a Trump loyalist on the verge of owning a media empire comprised of CBS, CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, and HBO.)


Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured billions in contracts for launching sensitive satellites and space surveillance. Musk’s xAI has received a Pentagon contract to develop advanced AI tools. (Reminder: Musk is the richest person in the world and spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump reelected in 2024.)

Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies has landed multibillion-dollar defense contracts, including a $10 billion agreement with the U.S. Army to provide AI-driven data analytics and software to integrate AI, surveillance, and battlefield management systems. (Reminder: Thiel is a billionaire who contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, including $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and then $10 million to getting JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.)

Not to forget Big Oil, now enjoying windfall profits as global oil prices soar. (Recall Trump asking oil company executives for $1 billion for his 2024 campaign, in return for undisclosed favors.)

Among others benefitting from the turmoil is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, who’s busily raising at least $5 billion or more for his private-equity investment firm from governments in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.


Finally, there’s Trump’s on-again, off-again ally Vladimir Putin. In just two weeks of war, Russia has reaped an estimated $6.9 billion from the increase in oil prices and the easing of sanctions.

What to do? At the very least, Congress should:

Prohibit defense contractors from making campaign donations or lobbying Congress. Why should taxpayers subsidize these activities?

Tax windfall profits from Trump’s war (or from any war). America has had windfall profits taxes during wartime before. Given the size of current windfalls, we need it again.

Cut the defense budget. Start by cutting it 10 percent each year it fails audits. This is particularly important during the Trump-Hegseth era of defense bloat.

As long as Trump and his Republicans control Congress and the executive branch, these reforms don’t have a prayer. Still, Democrats should introduce them and push for them. Let Trump and his Republicans go on record voting against them.




Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
Time to Grow Out of ‘Playing’ War

By saying the quiet part out loud, Trump is revealing that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human na
ture.


A video shared by the White House combines footage from Wii golf with video of US strikes on Iran.
(Photo: The White House/X/Screengrab)


Robert C. Koehler
Mar 14, 2026
Common Dreams

Boys will be boys. Just ask the president.

At a gathering of Republicans a few days ago, Donald Trump talked nonchalantly about the recent sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate by the US Navy—in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf. A total of 104 crew members were killed and 32 more w

The president proceeded to make this more than merely another brutal, pointless act of war. He turned it into a glaring—shocking—revelation of truth... about the American-Israeli war on Iran and, quite possibly about all wars: about war itself. He was upset at first, he told the crowd, that the 
And the crowd laughed. Uh... are we “playing” war or waging it, with that trillion-dollar annual military budget America has? No doubt we’re doing both, but normally the “fun” part of war—the dehumanization of the enemy, the abstraction of people’s deaths (including those of children)—is airbrushed from public discussion by politically correct strategic and political blather. But this is Trump, spouting the quiet part out loud—in the process, causing the global infrastructure of nation-states, borders, and militarism to tremble. Could it be that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature?

A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness.

In contrast, I quote from a recent essay written by my friend Laura Hassler, founder and director of Musicians Without Borders:
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.

She calls this worldwide awakening “Radical Empathy,” a term in widespread use, which means a deeply rooted sense of connection among people, well beyond merely sympathy and shared feelings. We are one planet, one people, and we will survive together or not at all.

“Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent,” she continues. “We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed...

“And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for radical empathy into a force for good.”

In other words, Radical Empathy isn’t simply emotional. You can say it’s spiritual, but it’s also political. It’s a movement: ever changing, ever manifesting in the moment, ever addressing conflict by reaching for connection and understanding. Yes, global nationalism still maintains the power to wage war. And war is everywhere these days. As Jeffrey Sachs noted in a recent interview, “World War III is here...” from Ukraine and Gaza and Iran to Asia to the Western Hemisphere. And the fighting across the world is linked.

But at the same time the world is changing. A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness. Finding understanding with your enemy—connecting with “the other”—can be incredibly difficult, especially in the midst of conflict, but Radical Empathy is making it a reality across the planet.

Laura Hassler’s organization, Musicians Without Borders, exemplifies this movement. The organization was founded in 1999, in Alkamaar, a city in the Netherlands. Laura, who was a choir director and organized music events, had put together a concert for the town’s annual honoring of the dead of World War II.

But as I wrote in a column several years ago:
The bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news, and Laura couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.

She decided, “We’ll perform music from the people suffering from war now—folk songs from Eastern Europe,” she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence... and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.

One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: “This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!”


And they went to Kosovo. Gradually, Musicians Without Borders became global, working with local people in war-torn regions all over the world—people on both sides of the divide—to create music that transcends the war of the moment. The organization currently has long-term projects in the Balkans, West Asia, Eastern Africa, and Europe.

This is Radical Empathy, or at least one example of it—our complex force of hope even as the world’s leaders continue bleeding away the planet’s resources in order to play war. Radical Empathy transcends war. It’s who we are—when we find ourselves.



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


Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Full Bio >
The Iranians Probably Wish They Had Developed Nuclear Weapons!

The lesson that Iranian government and the world has learned is that NOT developing a nuclear weapon will lead to the US and Israel assassinating the leadership of your country and bombing the hell out of the rest of the country.


Smoke rises from Shahran oil depot after US and Israeli attacks, leaving numerous fuel tankers and vehicles in the area unusable in Tehran, Iran on March 8, 2026.
(Photo by Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Ann Wright
Mar 14, 2026
Common Dreams

Including the minute when the US and Israel fired missiles and dropped bombs on the home of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his wife and other members of his family killing over 40 members of the leadership of Iran, senior Iranian officials had maintained that Iran would never develop a nuclear bomb.

The Omani foreign minister who was in discussions with Iran and the United States on February 27, 2026 only days before the US-Israeli attack on Iran said Iran agreed to “never, ever have… nuclear material that will create a bomb.”

“There was no evidence that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon,” said Jeffery Lewis of of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies after the US attack on Iran.

Arms control experts have disputed President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran “soon” could have missiles capable of reaching the US, and they say there’s a lack of evidence that the country “attempted to rebuild” nuclear enrichment facilities damaged by US strikes last year.
US Intelligence Community Said That Iran Was NOT Developing a Nuclear Weapon

Prior to the US-Israeli June, 2025 attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, in March 2025, the US Intelligence Agencies’ 31-page “threat assessment” states that “we continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” (Page 26)
Lesson Learned: Nuclear Weapons Are A Deterrent to US Attacks

The lesson that Iranian government and the world has learned is that NOT developing a nuclear weapon will lead to the US and Israel assassinating the leadership of your country and bombing the hell out of the rest of the country.

All you have to do is ask the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans about the value of nuclear weapons to deter the United States from attacking them.

Will developing and testing nuclear weapons keep the United States from attacking? So far, the answer is YES.

So that’s the foreign policy imperative of 2026: Develop nuclear weapons or always be threatened by the United States.
Venezuela: No Nuclear Weapons—US Attacked

Venezuela had no nuclear weapons and its head of state Nicolás Maduro and the former Attorney General and President of the National Assembly, Maduro’s spouse Cilia Flores, were kidnapped and imprisoned in the US on January 3, 2026 by the military of the United States and the other leadership of the country threatened with the same treatment.

Afghanistan: No Nuclear Weapons—US Attacked

Iraq: No Nuclear Weapons—US Attacked
Cuba, Nicaragua, Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Mexico

Cuba has no nuclear weapons, and after the Cuban missile crisis of 1961, has no means of strategic defense of the country, and its leadership is threatened daily by Trump.

Nicaragua has no nuclear weapons, and its leadership is threatened by the United States.

Canada, Greenland, Denmark, and Mexico have no nuclear weapons and the threats from the US come almost daily.

When is enough… enough?

When 72,000 are killed by US bombs in the genocide of Gaza—is that enough?

When the head of state of another country is kidnapped and imprisoned in the US—is that enough?

When Israel dictates when the US goes to war on a country that has not attacked the US and has not developed nuclear weapons—is that enough?

When the US threatens a 70-year-old revolution 90 miles off the United States with decapitation and destruction—is that enough?

When the president of the United States orders the assassination of 125-plus?? persons in boats allegedly transporting drugs and then pardons the former president of Honduras who was convicted by a federal court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug operations while president of his country—is that enough?

When the president pardons over 1,000 persons convicted of the 2020 rioting and destruction of the US Capitol—is that enough?

When its policy for 100,000 non-criminal human beings to be locked up in horrific detention or prison facilities—is that enough?

And on and on! Is that enough?

In the words of religious friends, “Sweet Jesus, What will be Enough?”
When Does It End?

It ends at the White House when the people of the United States have had enough.

It ends when the US Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have had enough.

Have we had enough yet?

On one level, it seems like NOT---but on other levels, we are reaching that point.

Will There Be Blowback from these Policies?

In one word: YES
Trump’s Environmental Massacre

The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up.



The pictured oil refinery, owned by Exxon Mobil, is the second largest in the country on 28th February 2020 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States.
(Photo by Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images


Derrick Z. Jackson
Mar 14, 2026
Common Dreams

Last March, I interviewed staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago who were horrified by the Trump administration’s staff and funding cuts, which notably included eliminating environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The threat of those cuts was so severe that Brian Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based in Michigan, predicted: “People will die. There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”

How many additional deaths? The Trump EPA will not say. As part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to destroy federal science and roll back environmental safeguards, his EPA announced recently that it will no longer consider the monetary value of saving lives by regulating fine particulate matter, commonly called soot, smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM 2.5) and ozone smog from vehicles, fossil-fuel-burning power plants, and other polluting industries.

In other words, the agency intends to conduct cost-benefit analyses by only considering the cost.
We Need Stronger Pollution Regs

The data documenting soot’s deadly damage even with environmental rules in place is voluminous, much coming from the federal government itself, suggesting that we need stronger regulations, not weaker ones.

A 1997 EPA report found the first 20 years of the 1970 Clean Air Act were so effective that 205,000 premature deaths were avoided from all air pollution sources in 1990. The same report concluded that the 1990 amendments to the law would save more than 230,000 lives a year by 2020 and prevent 2.4 million asthma attacks.

By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal.

Even so, air pollution remains mortally high in a nation that is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas and stubbornly prioritizes individually owned vehicles over public transportation. A 2021 study funded by the EPA and published in the journal Science Advances found that PM 2.5 alone still accounts for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year.

The conclusions of nongovernmental studies echo the EPA’s own findings. A 2022 University of Wisconsin study, for example, estimated that if the United States eliminated all fine particulate, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions from electricity generation, vehicles, factories, and buildings, 53,200 premature deaths a year could be prevented, providing $600 billion in health benefits from avoided illness and mortality.
Drill Baby Drill’s Collateral Damage

The Trump EPA’s recent announcement is just another of a string of nonsensical—and dangerous—moves by the agency. They include abandoning the Paris Climate Accord and killing the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” determining that carbon pollution threatens human health, which the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) estimates will cut short the lives of as many as 58,000 people over the next 30 years due to additional pollution.

Taken together, the Trump administration’s assault on public health has the potential of triggering an environmental massacre, particularly among the most vulnerable Americans.

Because of our nation’s history of housing discrimination, communities of color, regardless of income, face more than twice the risk of exposure to PM 2.5 than white communities. According to the 2021 Sciences Advances study, this “phenomenon is systemic, holding for nearly all major sectors, as well as across states and urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels…. Targeting locally important sources for mitigation could be one way to counter this persistence.”

By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal. An August 2025 Science Advances study found that the life cycle of oil and gas extraction, storage, transporting, refining, and combustion results in 91,000 annual premature deaths due to exposure to PM 2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone. It found that, with rare exception, “Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American groups experience the worst exposures and burdens for all life-cycle stages and pollutants.” A 2023 New England Journal of Medicine study, meanwhile, concluded that reducing PM 2.5 pollution alone would disproportionately benefit Blacks at all income levels as well as low-income whites.
EPA Now Stands for Every Polluter’s Ally

Without a single fact to back up its claim, the Trump EPA—led by the fossil fuel industry-friendly Lee Zeldin—stated it did away with calculating lives saved because prior estimates were done with “false precision and confidence.” In fact, the agency is now simply repeating the talking points of the oil and gas industry and the US Chamber of Commerce, which has a long history of lobbying Congress to resist climate legislation and filing endless amicus briefs on behalf of polluters to counter environmental lawsuits.

In 2018, during the first the Trump administration, the chamber asserted—also with no evidence—that previous to the Trump EPA, the agency “historically misinformed and misled the public by using inconsistent and opaque analytical and communication methods regarding costs and benefits.”

That same year, the Trump EPA offered a revealing nugget of information that was hardly opaque. It admitted that its effort to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reined in power plant carbon pollution, would result in in as many as 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030, and thousands more annual cases of respiratory diseases. At the time, Trump was also trying to roll back Obama-era clean air vehicle standards that were projected to save nearly 40,000 lives a year by 2030.

In its last year in office, the Biden administration proposed tightening PM 2.5 standards, estimating that it could prevent as many as 4,500 premature deaths in 2032 and lead to $46 billion in health benefits in 2032.

There is not a single word about protecting lives or lowering healthcare costs in the EPA’s February 12 press release announcing its repeal of the endangerment finding nor in its February 20 press release hailing the repeal of tighter mercury and air toxics standards enacted by the Biden administration. Instead, Zeldin claimed—without proof—that the air pollution rules would have “destroyed reliable American energy” and revoking the endangerment finding would save Americans more than $1.3 trillion, including an average cost savings of more than $2,400 on a new vehicle.

While Zeldin is trying to use the greater availability of cheaper, gas-guzzling cars as a lure to seduce the public to look the other way on environmental regulations, the pollution they emit will smoke the nation. EDF estimates that higher-polluting vehicles could, by 2055:Cost US drivers as much as $1.4 trillion in increased fuel costs;
Emit carbon pollution that will intensify climate change-related extreme weather events, costing $1.5 trillion to $4.2 trillion; and
Increase respiratory and heart disease, as well as the number of premature deaths, costing $170 billion to $500 billion.

None of that mattered to the first Trump administration, which admitted its regulatory rollbacks could kill people. When the second Trump administration barreled into office with its cutbacks and deep-sixing of environmental justice and DEI programs, staffers in the EPA Chicago Region 5 office feared the worst. They included Kayla Butler, a Superfund community involvement coordinator. The stories her team collects in the field of people living with toxic horrors are precisely the stories she said the Trump administration is “trying to erase.”

The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up. With the death toll from air pollution still so high, the Trump EPA is burying the data with the bodies, so we will never know the cause.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

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

Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Pulitzer Prize finalist; a National Headliner and Scripps Howard winner; a 14-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists; and co-author of The Puffin Plan (2020, Tumblehome), the 2021 winner in Teen Nonfiction from the Independent Book Publishers Association.
Full Bio >
Obamacare Won’t Work: Time for Medicare for All

Our healthcare ‘system’—with or without the Affordable Care Act—is unsustainable: we have reached the end of the line.



Members of National Nurses United union members wave “Medicare for All” signs during a rally in front of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in Washington calling for “Medicare for All” 
(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Caroline Poplin
Mar 14, 2026
Common Dreams

Those without employer sponsored insurance (or Federal insurance like Medicare or the VA) in Red states, who signed up for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), are now learning what they voted for: higher premiums for health insurance, maybe unaffordable. Meanwhile, premiums continue to rise relentlessly for employers and employees.

Our healthcare “system” is unsustainable: we have reached the end of the line.

Americans pay more for healthcare (about18 percent of GDP) than any other developed country, with mediocre outcomes. Yet the other countries, with better outcomes, have universal coverage.

It is time for change. Extend traditional Medicare to all Americans (gradually, over the course of several years). Medicare is familiar; it works. Private for profit-health insurance, less than a century old, makes no sense today.

Sick and injured patients have turned to medicine—to healers—since time immemorial. Health insurance is new: Blue Cross started as a community non profit organization in 1929, to cover surgery in hospitals.

Private for profit-health insurance, less than a century old, makes no sense today.

Yes, we are a capitalist country, and markets are efficient at producing many things, like commodities: groceries, shoes, cars, even some insurance, when it is straightforward and highly regulated, like auto insurance. But for-profit health insurance does not work.

The idea of insurance is to spread risk over a maximum number of subscribers, each of whom is at the same low risk of unpredictable casualty, like fire. This was essentially the situation of Americans a century ago—illness and injury were acute and unpredictable, patients either recovered or died. Everyone was at similar risk, only surgery was expensive.

Today is different: illness is not only predictable, it can be chronic, even life long. Moreover, today’s scientific care is expensive. The social determinants of health—income security, education, adequate food and shelter, social support (your zip code, not your genetic code)—plus public health, keep healthy people healthy.

Medical care is for the sick.

For-profit health insurers maximize premiums, minimize cost (provider fees), keep the difference, and most important, avoid the sick. Insurers exclude those with “pre-existing” conditions whenever allowed (not under the ACA), deny “authorization” where they can. They tailor “plans” with carefully engineered restrictions you don’t discover until you file a claim. They are not even providing insurance: the payments from the Federal government are risk adjusted, so the insurers are paid more for riskier patients (and they are now illegally upcoding). The providers are not. Making this happen entails huge administrative expense, which adds no value for patients or providers, only massive returns to investors. United Health Group is the third largest company in the Fortune 500.

Healthy people don’t know what plan is “right for them”; they hate the annual “choice.” They only know what they can afford. (Sick people know what they need.) They do want to choose their doctor.

Traditional Medicare eliminates these problems for its beneficiaries: by law, everything medically necessary is covered. The Federal government determines fees for doctors and hospitals based on cost, as it did historically when markets didn’t work. Beneficiaries pay premiums based on income.

Fee-for-service works when we pay the right fees for the right services. Today, based on 1950’s medicine, Medicare pays too little for office visits, so-called ‘cognitive’ services (versus procedures) both primary and specialized, so there are too few providers, especially as Medicare rolls expand with retiring


Boomers. No office doctor can make a living from Medicare anymore. That is, however, easy to fix: pay providers more to care for the sickest people, who need the services only highly skilled, experienced physicians can provide. Pay surgeons less.

Best of all, Medicare is simple—ask your grandmother.

But where will the money come from?

Start by eliminating Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D, while updating Medicare to cover prescription drugs, along with vision, hearing aids, etc. MA was supposed to save taxpayers money by providing care more efficiently. Instead, Medicare pays MA companies 20 percent more than traditional Medicare for comparable patients.

Then, require all employers (including those who currently don’t provide insurance) to pay premiums to Medicare based on payroll. Require employees to pay Medicare premiums based on wages. Just like Social Security (of which Medicare is technically a provision). The Federal government continues to pay a share.

Everyone pays, everyone gets the care they need and nobody is left out. People can choose any qualified provider. Providers remain private, and are paid enough to attract and sustain the clinicians we want and need.

We have tried every kind of private for profit health insurance there is: employer sponsored, government subsidized, market based, capitation, value-based, catastrophic, health savings accounts—it no longer works for employers, taxpayers, or the sick. This year premiums will go up, coverage will go down.

Americans’ health will suffer.

Americans need care, not coverage. We clinicians have dedicated our lives to providing it. Medicare has served millions of us well for 60 years. We cannot allow opportunistic capitalists to stand in the way for the rest.



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


Caroline Poplin
Dr. Caroline Poplin is an attorney (Yale Law School), Board certified general internist, health policy analyst, and retired Federal career civil servant. She has published columns for McClatchy and Medpage, also articles in academic journals, one of which was quoted by Justice Brennan in a 1976 landmark civil rights Supreme Court case.
Full Bio >
As His Iran War Drives Up Oil Prices, Trump Orders Restart of California Offshore Drilling

“Mandating a restart of these defective oil pipelines won’t curb high gas prices, but it will put coastal wildlife at huge risk of another oil spill,” one advocate said.



An offshore oil platform with Santa Cruz Island in the background is seen in Santa Barbara Channel, California.
(Photo by Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)


Olivia Rosane
Mar 14, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


State leaders and environmental advocates responded with outrage after the Trump administration on Friday ordered the restarting of a California pipeline that caused one of the largest oil spills in the state’s history, a move that comes as oil prices have skyrocketed following President Donald Trump’s launching of an illegal war against Iran and Iran’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

After Trump issued an executive order on Friday authorizing the Department of Energy (DOE) to ramp up oil and gas development under the Defense Production Act, Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered Sable Offshore Corp. to restart operations on the Santa Ynez Unit and Pipeline System, which include an offshore rig and a network of offshore and onshore pipelines along the Santa Barbara coast. Among them is a pipeline that ruptured in 2015, spilling around 450,000 gallons of oil into Refugio State Beach and killing hundreds of marine mammals and sea birds.

“Californians have repeatedly rejected dangerous drilling off our coast for decades,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Saturday. “Now, after dragging the US into a war with Iran and driving up oil prices, the Trump administration is trying to exploit this crisis to further enrich the oil industry at the expense of our communities and our environment.”

In his statement, Wright emphasized the defense benefits of resuming drilling, arguing that “today’s order will strengthen America’s oil supply and restore a pipeline system vital to our national security and defense, ensuring that West Coast military installations have the reliable energy critical to military readiness.”

“Directing a private oil company to push its project through without safety checks and adherence to California laws that keep our coast safe is appalling and illegal.”

The DOE added that “Sable’s facility can produce approximately 50,000 barrels of oil per day, a 15% increase to California’s in-state oil production, that can replace nearly 1.5 million barrels of foreign crude each month.”

Yet, far from a novel response to an unexpected emergency, the order is actually an escalation in a preexisting battle between California and the Trump administration over the future of the pipeline system. The state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to stop the administration from a federal takeover of two of the pipelines in January.

Sable also faces several lawsuits due to its attempts to restart the system after it purchased it from ExxonMobil in 2024, and has not yet cleared all of the state permitting requirements, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

“In its latest brazen abuse of power, the Trump administration is attempting to seize exclusive federal control over two of California’s onshore pipelines,” Bonta said on social media Friday evening. “We will not stand by as this administration continues their unlawful all-out assault on California and our coastlines, and we are reviewing all of our legal options.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also spoke out against Wright’s announcement.

“Trump knew his war with Iran would raise gas prices,” he wrote on social media. “Now he wants to illegally resurrect a pipeline shut down by courts and facing criminal charges. And it won’t even cut prices. I refuse to let Trump sacrifice Californians, our environment, or our $51 billion coastal economy.”

The Center for Biological Diversity noted that this order would mark the first time that the Defense Production Act was used to force an oil company to restart out-of-use Infrastructure and to disregard the state permitting process.

“This is a revolting power grab by an extremist president. Trump is misusing this Cold War-era law just to help a Texas oil company skirt vital state laws that protect our coastline, and Californians will pay the price,” Talia Nimmer, an attorney for the center, said. “Mandating a restart of these defective oil pipelines won’t curb high gas prices, but it will put coastal wildlife at huge risk of another oil spill. Overriding state law to let an oil company restart pipelines sets a radically dangerous precedent. It’s clear that no state is safe from Trump.”

The center also promised to push back against the order.

“Directing a private oil company to push its project through without safety checks and adherence to California laws that keep our coast safe is appalling and illegal,” Nimmer said. “We’re exploring all legal avenues. This dangerous action should be swiftly blocked by the courts.”
A dizzying web points to who owns Trump and the depth of his treason

Thom Hartmann
March 13, 2026 
RAW STORY

LONG READ


Donald Trump waves as he boards Air Force One in Alaska. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Eight of our American service members are dead and more than 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, airmen, and marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.

The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added:
“Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”

When asked about the reports, Donald Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer — basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him, Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service members:

“They’d say we do it against them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”


His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and who has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Vladimir Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC:
“I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”


Putin himself, though, was nowhere near as circumspect, saying:

“On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”


As if to confirm that Trump is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts of Russian oil directly to India.


Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump asks, “How high?”

Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against him?”

Is it possible that Trump is actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least 2017?


That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).

And let’s not forget that right after Trump won re-election in November 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?

Jack Smith’s case in Florida was limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).


That said, you can bet your bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for essentially unlimited access Club membership.

But what if it goes beyond that? What if Putin has owned him for years?

From Russian oligarchs laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering — to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?


Or perhaps blackmailing him?

What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Jeffrey Epstein’s videos of Trump with underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of his beauty pageants?

Which begs the question: exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what does he have planned for the next three years of this second term?


And is he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?

In 2019 the Washington Post revealed that throughout his last presidency, Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Putin (more than 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.


The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed help.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As the New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. [Konstantin] Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”


There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents in those countries, told him to?


Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can makes money off them. Or he’s scared.
“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” the Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”


When Robert Mueller’s FBI team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Manafort, asking FBI Director James Comey to “go easy” on Gen. Michael Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”


It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:
“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”


There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):
“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”


The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:
“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”


Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Sen. Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”


Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As the Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:
“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”


On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on Aug. 2, the Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, the New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”


And now, to complicate matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk who, the Wall Street Journal reports, has also reportedly been having his own secret conversations with Putin.

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by the Guardian found:
“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”


An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, D.C. for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe on Sept. 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:
“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”


As the Guardian reported in 2021:
“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”


Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off Gen. Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

The big question is, “Why?”



Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.
Warren Slams Trump for Iran War Costing ‘American Taxpayers $11,500 Per Second’

According to more recent Pentagon figures, it’s actually even worse.



Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) talks with reporters after a Senate Armed Services Committee closed briefing on the Iran war, in the Capitol Visitor Center on Tuesday, March 10, 2026.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Mar 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren took President Donald Trump to task on Friday for making life “more expensive” with his war in Iran.

“It’s costing American taxpayers $1 billion a day to fund this war,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in a video posted to her social media accounts. “That is $11,500 every single second.”

This is, of course, not an exact amount. The figure is based on a preliminary estimate provided by Pentagon officials to Congress last week, estimating that the war would cost about $1 billion per day.



And so far, the war has actually been even more expensive than Warren initially claimed.

On Tuesday, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon gave a more comprehensive briefing, telling Congress that just the first six days of the war had exceeded $11.3 billion in cost, which puts the price tag at about $1.88 billion per day. That’s nearly $21,800 per second.

The Times noted that this was a low-end estimate and that the pricetag did not include many other costs, including those associated with the buildup of military hardware in the region before the war.

Using just these conservative estimates, a live ticker shows that as of Friday afternoon, the estimated cost of the war that began on February 28 is already fast approaching $19 billion, less than two weeks later.




“If we took the money that Donald Trump is demanding to fund the war with Iran and used that money here at home, instead, we could help cover healthcare costs for millions more Americans all across this country,” Warren said.

Indeed, an analysis published last week by the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project (NPP), based on the $1 billion-per-day figure, found that on an annual basis, the cost of the war is “higher than the appropriated budget of any federal agency except the Pentagon itself.”

If all that money were spent domestically, it found, it would be enough to cover the daily costs of federal nutrition assistance for more than 40 million Americans, as well as daily Medicaid costs for the roughly 16 million people expected to lose health coverage due to the Republican budget package that Trump signed into law last year.

As Warren pointed out, calculations of military spending do not even take into account the sharp hikes in gas prices Americans are facing as a result of the war, which has led Iran to retaliate by closing one of the world’s largest oil shipment routes, the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) gas price tracker, US gas prices have leaped to $3.63 per gallon on average as of Friday, up from $2.94 a month ago.

“We haven’t seen gas prices jump this much since Russia invaded Ukraine,” Warren said. “Some cities in Indiana and Ohio have already seen a jump of over 50 cents a gallon. In Texas and Virginia, prices are up by more than 65 cents.”

Citing an image of a Chevron station in Los Angeles posted by a user on TikTok, Warren said: “California is seeing gas prices above $8.” According to AAA, the average cost of gas in the state is $5.42.

Despite rising anger from voters—more than 7 in 10 of whom said in a recent Quinnipiac poll that they fear higher oil and gas costs as a result of the war—Trump has said carrying out his objectives in Iran “is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”

In a post to Truth Social on Thursday, the president framed higher prices as a positive: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote.

While this may be true for Americans who own oil and gas companies, most do not. For the average American, higher gas prices can raise the cost of transportation sometimes by thousands of dollars per year, cutting into spending on food, rent, medicine, and other essentials.

“For someone who campaigned on lowering costs on day one, Donald Trump is constantly raising the bar for how expensive he can make it to live in this country,” Warren said.

Referencing Republican opposition to extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that lowered healthcare premiums for more than 20 million Americans, Warren implored viewers to “never forget that Donald Trump said we just can’t afford to lower health care costs this year.”

“These are about choices,” she said, “and Donald Trump is making the wrong ones.”

Trump's Iran conflict becomes de facto 'tax increase' on struggling Americans: report



David McAfee
March 14, 2026 
RAW STORY


President Donald Trump's military actions in Iran are effectively functioning as a hidden tax on American households, economists warn, as soaring energy costs threaten to erase anticipated benefits from larger tax refunds this filing season.

Americans are poised to receive bigger refunds than last year, with the average federal tax refund reaching $3,742 as of late February—about 10.6% higher than 2025. However, the economic fallout from the Iran conflict is rapidly negating that windfall, according to a new report.

Since the U.S. military actions in Iran began, oil prices have skyrocketed, sending gas and diesel costs surging. The average price of unleaded gasoline jumped to $3.64 per gallon on Friday, roughly $0.72 higher than the previous month's average. Mortgage rates have also climbed sharply to 6.41% for a 30-year fixed-rate loan, up from 5.9% before the conflict.

"The Iran war acts like a tax increase on the consumer, except nobody voted for it," said Paul Dietrich, chief investment strategist at Wedbush Securities.

The burden falls disproportionately on lower-income Americans, who spend a larger percentage of their budgets on fuel and energy. As households redirect refund money toward gas and groceries rather than discretionary spending, the broader economy loses the boost that tax refunds typically provide.


Experts caution that while tax refunds could help insulate consumers from immediate shocks, the economic damage from elevated energy costs and inflation pressures will likely persist throughout 2026, undermining household purchasing power across income levels.

Read the full report here.