Monday, March 9, 2026
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.
I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.
If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.
If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.
If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.
It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
And that’s the part that should chill us.
Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?
Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.
Now the mask is off. Now we know.
And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.
– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Israeli authorities are imposing strict penalties on individuals who share videos from Tel Aviv during ongoing security tensions. The alleged measure is described as part of emergency restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of sensitive information during active military operations.
Governments sometimes introduce temporary media or security restrictions during conflicts to prevent real-time information from revealing military positions or damage assessments. Such measures are often justified as necessary to protect operational security and civilian safety.
Israel has previously enforced emergency regulations during wartime or national security crises, including limits on broadcasting certain footage that could assist hostile forces. Military censorship laws in the country allow authorities to restrict information that could endanger national security.
At the same time, legal experts and civil rights organizations often debate the balance between security measures and freedom of expression. Restrictions on sharing images or videos can raise concerns about press freedom, transparency, and the rights of civilians documenting events.
Because situations during conflicts change rapidly, official details about emergency policies are often clarified through government statements or military spokespersons. Observers typically rely on verified announcements and credible reporting confirming the exact scope of such restrictions.
Is Israel now censoring all photos or videos of bombings and damages to Tel Aviv buildings and Israelis? Asked in Google browser Mar. 8, 2026
Answer: Israel has implemented strict measures and laws that can lead to the arrest and punishment of individuals who post footage of missile strikes or other attacks within the country. These restrictions apply to both professional journalists and regular social media users.
Key Restrictions and Legal Consequences
Military Censorship: All publications, including social media posts, blogs, and chats that reveal the location of a strike from "enemy war material" (such as missiles or drones) must be submitted to the IDF Military Censor for approval before being posted.
Severe Penalties: Violating these orders or sharing real-time sensitive videos can result in serious legal consequences, with reported penalties of up to 5 years in prison. Under some state security laws, sentences for unauthorized publishing of damage to military sites can reach up to 15 years.
Enforcement Actions: In 2025, authorities introduced "zero-tolerance" enforcement. Police have confiscated equipment from photographers and questioned individuals for attempting to record from locations overlooking strategic areas like Haifa Port.
Broader Crackdown on Social Media
Beyond footage of strikes, Israeli authorities have significantly expanded their monitoring of social media since October 2023:
"Consumption of Terrorist Materials": A 2023 amendment to the Counter-Terrorism Law criminalizes the "systematic and continuous consumption" of publications from designated terrorist organizations (like Hamas or ISIS) if it indicates identification with the group. This is punishable by up to one year in prison.
Incitement and Solidarity: Hundreds of people, primarily Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of East Jerusalem, have been arrested for posts deemed to express "incitement to terrorism" or "solidarity with a terrorist organization".
Civil Consequences: Many individuals have faced disciplinary actions, including being suspended or fired from their jobs or facing expulsion from universities, for their online activity during the conflict.
TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
BREAKING: “Trump Is Lying To You - All Our Bases Have Been Damaged” - Former U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor
"The mainstream media, the defense contractors, and the establishment are lying to you about what is actually happening in the Middle East right now. Russia and China are sitting on the sidelines feeding top-tier satellite intelligence directly to the Iranian government. Because of this intelligence pipeline, Iran is experiencing successes against Israel and U.S. positions... The military-industrial complex are cheerleading a slaughter while our service members are sitting ducks..."
*This is the man, Douglas McGregor, former U.S. Army Colonel who advised Bush and Cheney there were no weapons of mass destruction. They ignored him.
The ICC issued a warrant. Most EU countries ignored it. Slovenia didn't.
Slovenia declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu persona non grata on September 25, 2025, becoming the first European Union member state to ban him from entering its territory. The government cited the ICC arrest warrant issued which charged Netanyahu with war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the military offensive in Gaza.
The move followed a series of escalating steps by Slovenia, which had already recognized Palestine as an independent state in June 2024, banned two far-right Israeli ministers from entering the country in July 2025, and imposed the EU's first arms embargo on Israel in August 2025. Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar addressed the UN General Assembly the same week, calling on all nations to act.
Netanyahu's flight to the UN that week reportedly avoided the airspace of every country that might enforce the warrant.
Saturday, March 7, 2026
Secret #1: Humans are a Cooperative Species
Secret #2: Self-Importance is the Enemy of Kindness
Secret #3: We are a Part of Nature
Secret #4: We Can End Capitalism, and Build a Better Economy
For most of my life, I have assumed that capitalism was an economic system, and that if we didn’t like it, we had to replace it with something else. And that’s where the wheels usually fell off the bus, for as someone once said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
I must admit to some nervousness in publishing this Substack essay, since most people have a knee-jerk response that says it’s okay to want to modify capitalism, but not to end it entirely. So please bear with me. I invite your thoughts to critique it or improve it.
In the ten years of research for my forthcoming book The Economics of Kindness, I have noticed that most authors either address the shortfalls of neoliberal capitalism, followed by a final chapter in which they list some proposals for change; or they focus on the emerging wellbeing/social solidarity economy, without paying much attention to how we might end capitalism.
Clearly, we have to do both - to stop the multiple harms that capitalism is causing, and build a new economy based on new values.
I now understand that capitalism is not an immutable economic system that we are stuck with forever. It is a cultural system that has been assembled over thousands of years by people who were primarily motivated by “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital” (Sven Beckert). From this perspective, a capitalist is someone who seeks the growth of their capital above all else, regardless of the cost to Nature, workers, or the communities where they invest. I’m not alone in thinking this way, that capitalism is primarily a cultural system. I share this perspective with several other critics of capitalism, including Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Antonio Gramsci, and David Graeber.
This perspective makes it much easier to imagine the end of capitalism, and to analyze how it can be done, piece by piece.
Dissatisfaction with Capitalism
Across the democratic world, dissatisfaction with capitalism is no longer marginal. The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 56% of people globally believe that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good.” A 2025 Gallup poll found that 61% believe the system is unfair, and that it serves primarily the wealthy and powerful. In the United States, only 54% of people view capitalism positively. Many believe that capitalism is no longer working for ordinary people.
It’s not the market economy that’s the problem. When it is well regulated it works really well. Its intricate dance of cooperation and competition creates innovation and jobs, while constraining prices. Socially responsible businesses, whether private, cooperative, public, or social enterprises, also work really well, providing meaning and purpose for millions.
It’s the system we call capitalism that’s the problem. Under its protective canopy people give themselves license to destroy Nature, disrupt the climate, and enrich the few at the expense of the many, causing inequality, distress and anger. If we tolerate it for much longer, it will bring climate catastrophe, ecological collapse, financial collapse due to its burden of private debt, and the collapse of democracy. For a deeper dive into the origins of capitalism, I recommend the 1,000-page Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert.
A Ten Year Transition
My analysis tells me that capitalism rests on ten pillars: eight around the edge, two in the middle, and a canopy on top to provide a cover story.
The change we need is not an overnight revolution, but a steady transition. And by ‘transition’, I’m not thinking 100 years. I’m thinking 10 years, if the majority of people in the world’s democratic nations can be inspired to support the transition, and their leaders get behind it. The longer we delay, the greater the danger that capitalists’ predatory behavior will cause climate, ecological, and financial catastrophe.
There’s no reason to fear economic collapse if we transition to a democratically-guided mixed market cooperative economy: evidence shows that it will be more successful, more fair, more stable, and more resilient than capitalism, not less. So let’s get to it: We need ten new pillars, and a new canopy.
Pillar #1: Private Property
The first pillar was built long ago, with the transition from communal land stewardship to private land ownership. In England, less than 1% of the population owns half of all the land, while 38% of the people own none. My own ancestors were thrown off their land in Scotland during the Highland clearances. In almost every country, a minority of people own the majority of the land.
The Transition
We should leave this pillar in place. It does enable capitalism, but it also enables millions of people to enjoy the security of home ownership. We need to extend it so that it includes everyone, and no longer excludes a third or more of the people in any given country. Even in Denmark, 40% of Danes don’t own a home, and have little to leave to their children. This is how inequality grows.
For home ownership, the transition requires the construction of millions of units of cooperatively owned housing for those who can’t afford to buy; ‘right-to-buy’ legislation for tenants and mobile home owners; taxes and restrictions on multiple home ownership and absentee owners; and a ban on Real Estate Investment Trusts buying up homes. We also need community ‘right to buy’ legislation for cherished properties and land. To create the money that will be needed, we need public banks, supported by central bank underwriting.
Many nations also need land reform, as Taiwan, Korea and Japan achieved after World War 2, and as Peru has recently demonstrated. It’s a bumpy road, as Michael Albertus shows in Land Power: Who Has It Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025), but we can’t have a true cooperative economy without it.
For major assets that private equity firms are buying up, such as water, we need a return to public ownership. For minor assets, such as pubs and veterinary services, we need community and worker buy-outs. (See Pillar #5)
Pillar #2: Labor
The second pillar arose when people lost their land. Deprived of the means to support themselves, they had to seek work from others, becoming employees, dependent on landowners and business owners to hire them - or not. Capitalists prefer some people to be unemployed, so that workers will take whatever wages are on offer. They also need a welfare state, to make it less likely that angry workers will rebel. Historically, as well as paid workers, capitalism has also depended on the brutality of slavery, and other forms of coerced labour.
The Transition
The transition that’s needed here is to far more worker ownership, whether through cooperative or employee shareholder ownership, or indirectly through enterprise foundations, common in Denmark. Governments need to support the right of workers to become owners of their place of work, and set a goal that 50% of workers will be employee-owners by 2050.
In Spain, the 80,000 workers in Mondragon’s cooperatives share the wealth they create, with pay-gaps no greater than 5:1. In America, it’s 632:1. At Starbucks, where a typical worker earns $15,000, in 2024 the CEO was paid $96 million. We need a future in which Starbucks workers can vote both to form a union and to become employee-shareholders.
The second need is stronger labor unions, including for gig economy workers, so that workers can stand up for their rights without barriers and objections.
The third need is community wealth building, creating a solid structure in which cooperatives and social enterprises can thrive. Scotland is leading the way with the Community Wealth Building Act, passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament in February 2026, which requires every local government to produce a Community Wealth Building action plan. The local economy champion Michael Shuman has also proposed ten state policies and ten local policies to support local job creation.
Pillar #3: Private Debt Creation
The third pillar of capitalism is the private creation of money. In non-monetary relationships, debts are invisible “I owe you’s” that float in the air between people. Digitalize them, and you have the origin of money. It is the expression of reciprocal social trust. New money is created whenever someone offers you a kindness (or a loan), and is cancelled when it is repaid.
When Italian bankers began storing people’s wealth in the 14th century, they soon realized that they could lend more than they managed, since only very rarely did everyone ask for their money back on the same day. They also realized that they could charge interest on the money they created. This is more or less how banks still operate today.
It’s not the process of debt creation that’s the problem. It is a powerful extension of trust that enables people to achieve great things, whether it’s building a solar utility or buying a home. It is the way money is created without concern for social purpose that’s the problem. To a private equity banker, it doesn’t matter whether a loan is to trawl the ocean floor or to build a liquified natural gas plant that will make the climate crisis worse. All that matters is the return, ideally 15%. It’s the indifference to ethics and morality that creates the rot in the heart of the money-creation pillar. It’s the Golden Rule of Capitalism, which is to treat others worse than you’d like to be treated yourself, if it enables you to generate a capital gain.
Knowing the disasters that the climate crisis is lining up for us, creating money to invest in fossil fuel extraction in 2026 should be as unthinkable as creating money to manufacture tanks for the Nazis in the 1940s.
The Transition
To end the disconnect between investment and ethics we need legislated Red-Amber-Green standards to distinguish between beneficial and harmful investments. Green-listed loans that build a new ecological civilization could be offered 2% lower interest. Red-listed loans would be banned.
We also need to restrict short-term speculative loans where the sole purpose is profit at someone else’s expense. A financial transactions tax (Tobin tax) would be a useful start. Commodity futures trading should be restricted to commodities dealers, as it was before America’s 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act gave banks the freedom to speculate, causing inflation in food prices.
My personal solution is that every bank be invited to adopt a Social Purpose Charter, committing it to operate in a socially purposeful way, with various sub-clauses. Banks enjoy three important public privileges: loan deposit insurance; a central bank relationship; and a bail-out in the event of a threatened collapse. After a ten year transition, these privileges would be withdrawn from banks that chose not to adopt the new charter.
We also need to change the way banks are taxed - or not taxed; and regulated - or not regulated. The economist Gerald Epstein has a host of recommendations in Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (2024), including prohibiting deposit-taking banks from engaging in speculative lending, and breaking up mergers that make banks “too big to fail”. Elizabeth Warren has more changes in her 2021 Stop Wall Street Looting Act.
To build the new cooperative economy, to replace capitalism, alongside socially responsible private banks we will need public banks, cooperative banks, and community banks, all of which have the ability to create money. In Germany, the public bank KfW has created money to finance millions of units of affordable housing.
Pillar #4: The Primacy of Capital
This is capitalism’s central rule: that capital comes first. In corporate law, market practice, and financial culture, the overriding obligation of directors and executives, whether it is perceived, legal, or by pressure from activist shareholders, is to increase returns to capital.
Companies may speak of purpose, community, or sustainability, but when trade-offs arise, the growth and protection of capital always takes priority. This structural primacy creates a continuous competitive pressure imposed by capital markets that drives firms to cut costs, suppress wages, weaken unions, externalise environmental damage, pursue monopoly power, and tie executive pay to share price performance. It is not profit that defines capitalism - profit is essential. It is the elevation of capital gains above every competing claim.
The Transition
The voluntary solution, already being practiced by 10,500 B Corps companies, is to adopt a Benefit Corporation charter, giving directors the fiduciary duty to fulfil a social or environmental mission, not to maximize their capital assets. Much the same happens in the world’s three million cooperatives, and in social solidarity enterprises, of which there are 2,000 in New York alone. There are 300 million companies in the world, however. Voluntary reforms will never be enough.
To build a cooperative economy beyond capitalism we will need legislation that requires every company and its directors to act in a socially and environmentally responsible manner, with transparent verification and reporting. Britain’s proposed Better Business Act, already supported by 3,000 businesses and organizations, is a big step in this direction.
New legislation needs to affirm that a director’s fiduciary duty is to prioritize social purpose goals, and require that executive pay is linked to social purpose achievement, not share-price metrics. Governments will also need to reduce capital mobility (see Pillar #9), so that investors cannot punish a company’s social responsibility by moving their capital at the drop of an index report.
How can we make this universal, so that it becomes normal for the world’s 300 million businesses to pursue meaningful social purposes, and cease being subject to capitalism’s capital-maximizing discipline?
In The Economics of Kindness (Palgrave Macmillan, sometime in 2026), I propose that every business be required to adopt a Social Purpose Charter within a set number of years. Adopting the the Charter would commit the company to state its social purpose; to declare that its fiduciary duty is to its employees, communities, and Nature, as well as its investors; not to invest in Red-listed activities (see Pillar #3); to commit to labor union strength, profit-sharing, and worker representation, both in works councils and on the Board; to require majority worker support for any proposed take-over or merger; to give workers first right of refusal to buy their company if it faced bankruptcy or sale; and a bunch of other things.
Companies that adopt the charter would be rewarded with priority access to government contracts, grants and loans, a reduced borrowing rate, and a reduced rate of corporation tax. After a set date, five or ten years ahead, companies that have not adopted the new charter would be denied license to operate. We need to condition the privileges of limited liability and market access on social purpose and responsibility. This is how we can transform the selfishness of capitalism into the kindness of a cooperative economy.
Pillar #5: The Corporation
Capitalism’s seventh pillar is the accumulation of laws that support corporations,. A corporation has a legal existence separate from its owners, which means it can own property, and a bunch of other things. In America, a note written by a court reporter in 1886 stated that the Court accepted corporations as persons for equal protection purposes, which has been seized upon to expand the range of corporate activity.
In 2010, America’s Supreme Court ruled that money was a form of free speech, and that a corporation, being a person, could spend unlimited money to achieve a political result. This has enabled wealthy people to interfere in democratic elections and buy the influence they desire.
Corporations also enjoy limited liability, introduced in Britain in the 1850s to encourage capital pooling for big investments like railways. It allows investors to wash their hands of harmful activities and keep receiving their dividends. This builds the rot of selfish immorality into the core of the pillar. The same limited liability is written into property law, contract law, bankruptcy law, and trade agreements, giving privilege to the needs of capital over labour or environmental claims.
Without limited liability, however, most people would refuse to invest, fearing that they could lose their homes. It is a useful financial innovation, but also a public privilege, so it needs to be constrained in some way and not be a license to plunder.
Another legal device that upholds a corporation is the requirement that its directors have a fiduciary duty to maximize the shareholders gains - and no other purpose. Christopher Marquis explores this in detail in The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs (2024).
The Transition
We need legislation that will require a corporation to behave in a socially responsible manner, relieving investors of the need to constantly check what it is doing. We probably need a limitation on limited liability, such that if a company is found guilty of a crime the fine will come out of the investors’ pockets, deterring investors from companies with a record of costly lawsuits.
Overturning Citizens’ United in America could be done with a constitutional amendment, as 22 states have called for, or with state legislation that “Every corporation operating under the laws of this state has all the corporate powers it held previously, except that nothing in this statute grants or recognizes any power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity,” as Robert Reich has pointed out.
Pillar #6: Asset Management
Mutual funds, private equity funds, exchange traded funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and institutional portfolios hold some $120 trillion under management - a quarter of the world’s $500 trillion of wealth. Pension funds and sovereign wealth funds own much of the world’s capital, but their voting control and portfolio execution is increasingly being delegated to asset managers.
Asset managers like BlackRock, with $11.4 trillion assets under management, Vanguard ($11 trillion), and State Street ($5.7 trillion) own 20–25% of the shares in S&P 500 companies. For many firms, they are the largest single shareholder. In the United States, these three firms alone control a quarter of all corporate America. Globally, ten firms hold a third of all publicly traded equity. They claim to be passive in their investment strategies, but their shareholder voting influences executive compensation, mergers, and positions on climate policy, all with minimal democratic oversight.
Within the sector, private equity firms increasingly own housing, energy systems, water utilities, nursing homes, farmland, data centers, veterinary clinics, dentists, private colleges, and entire corporations. Even prison phone services, where they impose exorbitant rates on captive prisoners. They are creating a rentier economy, where the funds own the assets and the people have to pay inflated prices.
The Shadow Economy
Much of the asset management happens in the $250 trillion shadow bank economy, where there is minimal or no regulation. The ease of money creation enables speculation through the proliferation of hedge funds, private equity funds, money market funds, and so on. As Brendan Ballou says in Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, private equity funds are creating ‘systemic risks for our economy as a whole.’
We need a government whose people have read and understood Ann Pettifor’s The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet. My diagram based on her book shows how damaging the shadow economy investments are.
The Transition
As we transition off capitalism we should limit private equity and other forms of asset management to 5–10% of the ownership of any major publicly traded firm, and of overleveraged companies in private equity portfolios; prohibit cross-ownership and interlocking directorates in competing firms; prosecute colluders; use antitrust legislation to challenge monopolies and mergers; and require pension funds to allocate a percentage of their funds to local productive investment. For Index funds, where shareholder votes control the constituent companies, we need to require pass-through voting to the actual fund holders, and mandatory disclosure of their voting rationales.
Essential public services such as healthcare systems, water systems, energy, broadband, ports, airports, colleges, and hospitals should be protected against private equity ownership. Public services that are under private control should either be taken back into public ownership, or be required to have majority public or cooperative ownership, golden share rights for the government, and public interest tests prior to all major acquisitions.
Future governments need to cap management fees; prohibit the loading of debt onto acquired firms; impose long-term holding requirements for a minimum of 10 years unless it’s for sale to the workers or the community; require worker representation on the boards of acquired firms; and ensure that workers have first right to buy if the owners choose to sell. Brendan Ballou, quoted above, has a full inventory of remedies.
Governments can also use their powers of taxation to impose an annual wealth tax on institutional assets above a certain threshold; financial transaction taxes; an exit tax to discourage the rapid flipping of infrastructure or housing; and higher capital gains taxes for short term investments.
Asset management companies will need social purpose charters, with a legal framework that defines their fiduciary duty to include climate stability and social wellbeing. They will need to publish annual climate, ecological, and social wellbeing reports, and have worker and community representation on their Boards.
Pillar #7: Political Power
It is their political power that enables the financial elites to protect capitalism and oppose every move to restrict it. It is this that enables them to fight labor unions, stop legislation to tackle the climate crisis, prevent the break up of monopolies, and so on. In the 2020 US election cycle, private equity funds inserted more than $200 million into candidates’ campaigns.
Political power is also needed to sustain the other pillars. This makes it the strongest pillar, if elites can control political parties through donations, lobbying, cocktail parties and think tanks, but also the weakest. A progressive majority in government can give serious pushback, as it did in America in the Progressive Era between 1901 and 1920; in 1932, enabling the New Deal to happen; and in Britain in 1946, when the workers and returning troops rejected Churchill’s Conservatives and voted Labour, enabling the National Health Service and the welfare state to be created. In both instances, the elites fought hard to stop these things from happening.
The Transition
We need to take back control of our democracies. We need to ban big campaign donations, overturn Citizens United (in America), guarantee fair elections, and rebuild public trust by using proportional voting, Citizen’s Assemblies, participatory democracy, and regular referendums, as they do in Switzerland, where trust in government remains high at 82%.
Pillar #8: Wealth Preservation
The preservation of wealth is not just about tax avoidance. It is about transforming wealth into legally shielded, self-replicating capital. It is about dynastic trusts, philanthropic foundations, family offices, and jurisdictional shopping to find the safest and most secret place to store it. It is about the privilege of unrealized capital gains, wealth that grows year after year without being taxed at all unless it is sold.
Political power is used to ensure that wealth is protected, using weak campaign finance laws, judicial appointments, stock buy-backs, lower taxes on capital gains, and capital mobility.
The Transition
Governments need to continue working together to shut down the tax havens, whether they are in Hong Kong, Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands. One path is multilateral agreement. For jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate, coordinated financial transaction measures could restrict access to major capital markets.
Professional accountability also matters. Lawyers, accountants, and private wealth managers who design or facilitate illegal offshore avoidance schemes should face meaningful penalties and professional sanctions.
Governments should ban anonymous shell companies, require full beneficial ownership transparency, tax inheritances fairly, close capital gains loopholes, and ensure that corporations are taxed where their economic activity actually occurs, not in a country such as Ireland where corporation taxes are deliberately super-low.
Pillar #9: Capital Mobility
This is capitalism’s silent superpower. At the first hint of higher taxes, stronger labour laws, climate regulation, or public ownership, capital can move across borders and into tax havens, currencies, bonds, or offshore funds, disappearing faster than an elected government can act.
This gives investors huge leverage. Governments are warned not to “spook the markets,” since bond traders can raise borrowing costs, and currency markets can punish policy shifts. The threat of exit becomes an unwritten veto that has become deeply embedded in economic life, making elected politicians feel powerless.
In 2022, when the UK government under Liz Truss proposed unfunded tax cuts, the bond markets reacted within days. Yields spiked, the pound fell, pension funds teetered, and the Bank of England had to intervene.
The Transition
Allowing capital mobility is a policy choice, which can be unchosen. Future governments could tax short-term financial flows, require minimum holding periods, and regulate foreign-currency borrowing. This would not block productive investments, but it would slow destabilizing speculation.
Governments can reduce the incentive to flee. By cooperating on international taxation, ownership transparency, limits on offshore secrecy, and exit taxes, they can weaken regulatory arbitrage. If profits can no longer vanish into hidden jurisdictions, capital will become more accountable.
If nations are to have sovereign power, some degree of capital control must be restored. This is not a modern conclusion - it was Keynes’ conclusion in the 1930s. Even the IMF accepts that managing capital flows is needed to protect stability. One method could be a tax on financial transactions, to throw sand in the machinery of capital selfishness and bring it to heel.
We need a new global financial architecture to govern the oceans of speculative money that slosh to and fro, beyond the reach of morality or financial prudence. We will need to revisit Keynes’ 1946 Bretton Woods proposal for an International Clearing Union that would harmonize imports and exports, and stabilize currencies. It may take the shock of a financial crisis to bring people to their senses, but at least we will know what’s needed.
Pillar #10: Central Bank Protection
Central banks were established to step in when the banks threatened to collapse. They were a stabilizer at the heart of a nation’s economy, the ultimate repository of financial trust. Having a monopoly on the creation of currency, they can create the money needed to save the banks, preventing unemployment, the loss of savings, and economic depression. In practice, central bankers’ money creation works to the benefit of the financial markets, and only later — if at all — for society as a whole.
Central bankers should work to protect the nation as a whole, but most work primarily to protect their fellow bankers. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve created $2.5 trillion in emergency liquidity and asset purchases to bail out the banks, not to help the nine million people who lost their homes when the bankers’ risky bets turned bad. The banks, in turn, lent to wealthy people, enabling them to get yet wealthier by buying more assets in a rising market.
When COVID struck the central banks intervened again, backstopping corporate bond markets and financial institutions. The message was unmistakable: they would have their back. By encouraging more speculative investments, they have created moral hazard. The expectation of an emergency intervention becomes structural, that central banks will always come to the defense of capitalism.
The Transition
In a future where purpose is set by a progressive government, the central bank should be given a mandate to protect against all emergencies, including the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the housing crisis, and a pandemic, as well as a financial crisis. The central bankers’ ability to create money is not inherently inflationary. If the newly created money mobilizes idle labour and productive capacity, it can save us from crisis. Only when there is no capacity for growth within an economy will it cause inflation.
A future progressive government can coordinate its monetary and fiscal policy. It can revise its central bank’s mandate, and ask it to deploy macroprudential tools including capital requirements, credit guidance, and limits on destabilizing cross-border capital mobility. It can steer new money away from destructive Red-listed investments, and toward green regenerative investments.
The Canopy: Cultural Legitimacy
Finally, capitalism needs a cover story - a canopy. For this it uses the imaginary laws of neoclassical economics, which state that humans are always rational and selfish (‘homo economicus’); that markets are always efficient; that growth will always bring progress; that competition is natural; that profit is rational; that left to itself an economy will always move towards equilibrium; and that government intervention should therefore be minimized.
There are no such laws, however. They were invented in the 19th and 20th century to persuade people that economics was a complex science, and economists were the only people who understood the laws. These myths have been reinforced by wealthy people through their funding of right wing think tanks, and their media monopolies.
The Transition
We need a new narrative, one that tells of the ancient historical tension between selfishness and kindness, and how for 5,000 years most people have been subjugated by wealthy, powerful elites. But not any more. We can end capitalism, and it will not cause the collapse of the global economy. Quite the opposite - it will enable us to craft a far better economy based on cooperation that works for all humans, not just the elites, and also for Nature, for the world we love, and for a new ecological civilization.
In Conclusion
That’s a lot, if you have got this far. The global economy is not a simple affair.
If we have a vision that’s clear enough, and the determination to make it happen, we can dig ourselves out from the mess that capitalism has created, and build for ourselves instead a new economy based on cooperation and kindness.
Secret #5: Coming up soon.
Guy Dauncey works to develop a positive vision of a new ecological civilization, and to translate it into action. He is author of The Economics of Kindness: The End of Capitalism, the Birth of a New Ecological Civilization (Palgrave Macmillan, sometime in 2026)
Bibliography
Jonathan Aldred – License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us (2019)
Brendan Ballou - Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America (2023)
Sven Beckert - Capitalism: A Global History (2025)
Javier Blas and Jack Farchy – The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources (2021)
Brett Christophers – Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? (2022)
Gerald Epstein - Busting the Bankers Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (2024)
Gary Gerstle - The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022)
Marjorie Kelly - The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy (2003)
Marjorie Kelly - Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (2023)
Christopher Leonard – The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy (2022)
Nancy MacLean – Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017)
Jane Mayer – Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US(2016)
Noami Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – The Big Myth – How American Business Taught us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023)
Ann Pettifor - The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers (2018)
Ann Pettifor - The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet (2026)
Nomi Prins – Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (2018
David Whyte - Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us (2020)
I’ll summarize for you what the CEO of Palantir Technologies just said. It’s FUCKING CHILLING. Original in comments. Heres the gist of what he said. I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. My company is valued at a quarter of a trillion dollars. Let me be clear: that is not a typo. Two hundred and forty-nine billion dollars. Our stock has surged 320% in the last year alone. And what do we sell? Surveillance. Not ‘data integration.’ Not ‘operational intelligence.’ Not ‘decision advantage.’ Those are just the sanitized terms I use on stage, in front of audiences who prefer their oppression dressed up in corporate jargon. But in rooms where the truth is an asset, I call it what it is: surveillance. Mass surveillance. The kind that doesn’t just watch you—it predicts you, controls you, and, when necessary, erases you.
I gave a speech on March 3rd at the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Summit. ‘American Dynamism’—what a charming euphemism for what it really is: a slush fund for military tech. The kind of fund that turns patriotism into profit margins, where ‘defending the nation’ is just another revenue stream. And let me tell you, the thesis works. It made me a billionaire. Not because I built something better, but because I sold the one thing this country’s power structure will always buy: compliance at scale.
Here’s what I said, word for word, to a room full of people whose combined wealth could buy and sell entire nations:
‘If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job and you’re gonna screw the military—if you don’t think that’s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded.’
Yes, I said retarded. The clip went viral—eleven million views. My comms team flinched. They asked me not to say it again. They don’t get it. The word wasn’t a mistake. It was a test. A test of who’s really in charge. The stock went up. The audience laughed. The message was received.
Let me break down what I actually meant by ‘nationalization.’
I meant it literally.
I was telling the most powerful people in tech that if they refuse to hand over their tools to the military-industrial complex, the government will take those tools by force. And I said it from a stage designed to look like a cozy living room, complete with throw pillows that cost more than most Americans make in a month. I sat on one of those pillows. I sipped San Pellegrino. I delivered an ultimatum wrapped in venture-capital charm.
And the audience? They laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because they thought I was talking about someone else’s company.
I was talking about someone else’s company.
Three weeks before my speech, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic—a rival AI company—a ‘supply chain risk.’ Why? Because Anthropic had the audacity to set ethical boundaries. They said: If our AI is used for lethal autonomous weapons, we stop. If capability outpaces safety, we stop. The Pentagon didn’t see ‘ethics.’ They saw a threat to the supply chain. So what happened? Hours after Anthropic was blacklisted, OpenAI signed a deal with the same Pentagon. The terms? Classified. The timing? Deliberate. The lesson? The military AI market does not pause for morality. It does not negotiate. It consumes.
Two hundred thousand people signed a petition—#QuitGPT—begging OpenAI to honor its original charter, the one that promised to ‘benefit all of humanity.’ That charter is still on their website. So is the announcement of their Pentagon contract. They occupy the same digital space. One is the marketing. The other is the product.
And Palantir? We don’t even pretend.
We are the surveillance state’s favorite tool. We have over a billion dollars in contracts with the Department of Defense. We work with ICE. We work with intelligence agencies whose names I’m not allowed to say out loud, even in a room full of billionaires. Our software has been used to track undocumented immigrants, to dismantle families, to do things I’m not permitted to describe in public. The revenue from the things I can’t talk about? It dwarfs the revenue from the things I can.
The ACLU called our ICE contracts a system for ‘tracking and deporting families.’ They were right. Did we stop? No. Did the contracts stop? No. Did the families stop being tracked? No. We issued a statement. They issued a statement. The machine kept running.
Oh, and the name of my company? Palantir. It’s from Tolkien—the seeing stones, the palantÃri. In the books, Sauron corrupted them, used them to manipulate and destroy anyone who gazed into their depths. I named my surveillance empire after a fictional device designed to corrupt absolute power. I have a doctorate in social theory. I’ve read the books. I know exactly what I’m doing.
Here’s what you need to understand:
I am not making threats.
A threat implies uncertainty. There is no uncertainty here. The tech industry will cooperate with the military. The companies that jump first will be rewarded with riches beyond imagination. The companies that hesitate will be absorbed by the ones that didn’t. And the companies that refuse? Their technology will be taken—through backdoors, through ‘procurement channels,’ through whatever means necessary. The process has already begun. Anthropic was the first domino. OpenAI was the second. I’m not warning you. I’m narrating the inevitable.
Last year, Palantir’s revenue was $3.12 billion. Up 33%. Analysts keep saying we’re overvalued. They’ve been saying it for four years. Every year, the stock doubles. Every year, the analysts adjust their models. Their models have been wrong four times. I have been wrong zero times.
The market doesn’t reward ideals. It rewards prediction. And my prediction is this: Within three years, every major AI company in America will be working for the military. That prediction is now on the record, right next to the slur that got eleven million views.
The audience gave me a standing ovation. Nine seconds. I timed it. I time everything.
The future of American technology was decided in that room—between the sparkling water, the designer throw pillows, and the applause of men who think they’re the predators, not the prey.
I am the CEO of Palantir Technologies. I am worth more than the annual budgets of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania combined. I built a company named after a device from a story about the corruption of power. I stood in front of the most powerful people in the world and told them their choices were compliance or confiscation. They clapped. The stock soared. The cage locked into place.
I’m not a villain. I’m not a hero. I’m the philosopher holding up the mirror.
And what you see in that mirror isn’t a warning.
It’s a funeral.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Okay. You are a curious bunch. I’ve received several messages asking me explain our family’s adoption of the very old Southern practice of ‘walking the dead’. So here it is.
When I was 18 years old and a sophomore in college (skipped half of my senior year of high school), the phone rang at our house one day. My mom answered it — one of those old black Bakelite rotary dial phones. She briefly conversed with the caller, hung up, and turned to me. She said, “Well, today you become an adult.” She explained that one of the ladies at our small rural church had passed, and her spinster daughter had called my mom to come. She was distraught and didn’t know what to do.
Mom and I hopped in the family station wagon, and traveled the one mile to her home. Mom immediately took charge. She phoned our local funeral home to come get the deceased.
Within minutes the hearse arrived. We vacated the bedroom while the undertakers loaded the body on a guerney.
As they rolled our friend’s body into the living room, Mom stopped them. She carefully folded back the undertakers’ blanket uncovering the face of the deceased. I watched her neatly smooth out the wrinkles of the blanket tucking it gently under the chin of her dear friend. She then instructed me to stand on the left side of the guerney and place my hand on the side rail. She stood on the right side and did the same, then nodded to the undertakers that they could proceed.
With them at the head and foot of the deceased, and Mom and me on either side, we proceeded slowly and solemnly out the front door of the home and to the hearse, with the daughter following solemnly behind. We stepped aside and let the undertakers load the body into the hearse. Mom told them they could now cover the face of her friend.
Later that day Mom explained to me why we walked the lady to the hearse — the practice known to previous generations as ‘walking the dead’.
She said a person’s soul may be gone, but they were more than just a dead body. They should be allowed to leave their place of death — whether home or hospital — with the same dignity with which they had lived. They should not be surrounded on that brief journey by strangers but rather by people who knew them and cared about them. They should feel one last time the warmth of the sun or the breeze in the air on their face.
In short, ‘walking the dead’ is a solemn ceremony to show respect for the deceased. Simple, solemn, respectful.
When my sister passed last August, my nieces and I waited in the living room while the undertakers loaded her body on a guerney. We explained our tradition to them and asked them not to cover her face. We then proceeded to accompany her body out the front door and to the funeral home’s van. I was a bit amused when one of the undertakers peered out from the back of the van to ask, “Can we cover her face now?” We assured him that, yes, we had fulfilled our duty and they could now cover her up.
I hope that when It’s my time, I won’t have to make that journey alone in the company of strangers.
The photos below are in loving memory of my sister, Barbara, and my parents who rest behind her, Carroll and Estine Edmondson.
~Kentucky Farmhouse Finds~
We're not scared enough. Long (and referenced) but better read it, From Mark A. Shryock: "While the mainstream networks broadcast Pentagon-approved footage of precision air strikes and degraded capabilities, the raw data coming out of the theater tells a completely different story. What is unfolding inside Iran right now is not a war the U.S. is winning. It is a trap — financial, biological, and strategic — and we're walking directly into it. To understand why Iran will never surrender and why they're hitting airports and energy terminals and moving toward the desalination plants, why they're pulling Hezbollah, Houthis and every militia they have left into this fight simultaneously, you have to understand what happened in the 24 hours before the first bomb fell. On the morning of February 27, 2026 — one day before Operation Epic Fury launched — Oman's Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi sat down on Face the Nation and described in specific detail what Iran had just agreed to at the negotiating table in Geneva. Not vague promises. Specific, verifiable, historic concessions. Iran agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium — meaning no accumulated material that could ever be converted into a weapon. Iran agreed to full, unrestricted access for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors at every nuclear site. Iran agreed to irreversibly downgrade its existing stockpiles to the lowest possible level, converting them to fuel that could never be weaponized again. Al-Busaidi told Brennan plainly: "A peace deal is within our reach." He said technical talks were already scheduled for Vienna the following Monday. A fourth round of negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner was being arranged for the week after that. The channel was open. The framework was on the table. The deal was days away. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft noted that for Oman — a nation known for absolute diplomatic caution — to go public on American national television was itself extraordinary. Oman does not grandstand. Al-Busaidi going on Face the Nation was a message, not a press appearance. The message was: diplomacy is working. Give it the space it needs. Within hours of that broadcast, the bombs fell anyway. No address to Congress. No public intelligence briefing. No explanation of why the deal on the table was insufficient. A post on Truth Social, and then 200 Tomahawk missiles. Joshua Scheer, on Feb. 28, documented the timeline precisely: the central justification for war — that Iran refused to give up its nuclear program — was being diplomatically neutralized in real time. What was preempted was not a nuclear breakout. It was a breakthrough. There is something else the networks are not telling you. According to Wikipedia's timeline of the 2025-2026 Iran-United States negotiations, while American diplomats were sitting across from Iranian diplomats in Geneva, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group was already sailing toward the Iranian coast. The military buildup was happening simultaneously with the peace talks. Iran knew it. Their Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said publicly that even if Khamenei was killed, the government would not fall — "they can eliminate me, eliminate anyone. If they hit us, a hundred more like us will come up to run the country." Iran's President Pezeshkian said the same thing the same week. They said it because they already knew what was coming. The United States sat at the negotiating table, accepted Iran's most significant nuclear concessions in history, watched Iran agree to zero stockpiling and full IAEA verification — and then killed their Supreme Leader and launched the largest air campaign in the Middle East in a generation. That is the context for everything happening right now. That is why Iran is not seeking a ceasefire. That is why they are targeting the infrastructure that keeps the entire Gulf region alive. That is why they pulled every proxy they have left into this fight at the same moment. A regime that was willing to make a deal, watched the other side launch a war anyway, and lost its Supreme Leader in the opening hours is not a regime that believes surrender leads anywhere but to a grave. They have nothing left to negotiate with and nothing left to lose. What comes next from Iran will not be de-escalation. It will be everything they have left. ONE MAN SAW ALL OF THIS COMING IN 2024 Before a single bomb fell, before Trump was even elected to his second term, a Beijing-based Chinese-Canadian historian named Jiang Xueqin sat down in front of a camera on May 29, 2024 and mapped out exactly what you are watching right now. Jiang Xueqin is not a cable news pundit. He is a Yale-educated historian, educator, and geopolitical theorist who runs a YouTube channel called Predictive History, where he applies structural historical analysis and game theory to forecast major world events. His May 2024 lecture was titled "Why America Will Invade Iran and Lose." When he recorded it, Joe Biden was still president. Trump had not yet survived two assassination attempts. The lecture got almost no views. Now his channel has gained over 100,000 subscribers in three days as reality catches up to everything he said. In that lecture, Jiang made three specific predictions. He predicted Trump would win the 2024 election. He predicted the United States would go to war with Iran. And he predicted the U.S. would lose that war — and that losing it would permanently change the global order. What Jiang understood that almost no analyst was willing to say out loud is that Iran is not fighting to survive this war. Iran is fighting to use this war. According to Jiang's game theory breakdown, Iran sees the conflict as a calculated opportunity — to unify its fractured population under a nationalist banner, to expel American influence from the region permanently, and to bleed the U.S. financially and militarily until Washington has no choice but to leave. Iran does not need to win on the battlefield. Iran needs the United States to stay long enough that the cost of staying becomes politically and financially impossible. That is why they are willing to absorb the air campaign. That is why they activated every proxy simultaneously. That is why they are moving toward the desalination plants. Iran is not trying to defeat the U.S. military. Iran is trying to trap it. Jiang's description of what a ground war in Iran would look like is chilling to read at Hour 72. He told his students that once American troops entered Iran's mountainous terrain, they would not be soldiers. They would be hostages. "To win a war," Jiang said, "you need to avoid encirclement, mass your forces, and protect your supply lines. Iran's geography makes all of this nearly impossible." He estimated that controlling Iran would require at least three to four million soldiers — a number he called militarily and politically impossible for a U.S. military already reliant on outsourced manufacturing and struggling with recruitment. But the piece of Jiang's analysis that nobody in mainstream media is discussing is what he predicted would happen inside the United States when American soldiers start dying at scale in Iran. "The moment that Americans start dying in the Middle East," Jiang told his students, "the moment they institute a draft, it will create chaos in America. People are going to protest, people are going to revolt." He predicted that the resulting domestic division — between those defending the old American empire and those rallying behind Trump's America First — would push the country toward civil conflict. And he predicted that Trump, facing an unwinnable foreign war and domestic chaos simultaneously, would use both as justification to consolidate power and pursue a third term. A failed war, in Jiang's analysis, does not end Trump. It gives Trump the emergency he needs to make himself permanent. "All three players — Trump, Israel, and Iran — want the U.S. to invade," he said. Each for different reasons. Each with a different endgame. All three pulling in the same direction. That is the trap. And we are 72 hours into walking into it. THE MATH OF BANKRUPTCY Iran is not trying to defeat the U.S. Air Force in a conventional fight. They are executing a math equation designed to drain the U.S. Treasury dry, and the numbers prove it is working. Iran is launching waves of LUCAS drones. Operation Epic Fury marks the first combat use of the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, according to U.S. Central Command itself. A single LUCAS drone costs approximately $35,000 to build, roughly the price of a used Honda Civic. To shoot that cheap piece of metal out of the sky, U.S. Central Command — the unified military command overseeing all American operations in the Middle East — is authorizing the launch of defensive missiles that cost as much as a fully equipped hospital. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent national security think tank that tracks military expenditures and weapons procurement, documents the exact cost of that shield: every THAAD interceptor fired costs between $12.7 million and $15.5 million. Every SM-3 missile costs up to $27.9 million. Even the standard Patriot PAC-3 MSE requires between $4 million and $12 million every time it leaves the tube. Iran is throwing pennies. The United States is burning stacks of hundred-dollar bills to block them. In just the first 40 hours of this conflict, U.S. Central Command's own expenditure estimates show the military burned through between $6 billion and $10 billion. The offensive operations are accelerating that drain. Procurement data confirms the coalition launched over 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles at roughly $2 million each. B-2 stealth bombers are flying around the clock, and according to Air Force budget outlines, they cost American taxpayers between $150,000 and $203,000 for every single hour in the air. The U.S. Navy is paying $13 million every day just to keep two carrier groups — the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Gerald R. Ford — positioned in the region. Total daily theater operations are hitting $40 million every 24 hours. The system is bleeding out by design. IRAN WANTS A GROUND WAR, AND THEY ARE ENGINEERING ONE BY TAKING THE WATER Draining the treasury is only the bait. The real objective — documented by defense analysts, regional experts, and the evidence of where Iran is actually aiming its missiles — is to force American soldiers into the dirt. The weapon they are using to do it is water. Understand what Iran is doing and why. Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a televised address after Khamenei's killing: "You have crossed our red line and must pay the price. We will deliver such devastating blows that you yourselves will be driven to beg." This is not bluster from a regime that believes it can win a conventional fight. This is the declaration of a government that knows it is falling and has decided to take as much of the region down with it as possible. Al Jazeera, citing multiple defense analysts, reports that Iran's doctrine has formally shifted since June 2025 toward what military specialists are calling "asymmetric endurance" — accepting the initial damage, preserving strike capability, and using every remaining asset not to defeat the U.S. militarily but to force the United States into a ground commitment it cannot sustain financially or politically. The strategy is not to win. The strategy is to bleed. Iran is attacking the infrastructure that keeps the Gulf states functional specifically to force a collapse that drags American boots off the carriers and onto the ground. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Gulf expert at Rice University's Baker Institute documents Iran's deliberate targeting of airports in Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait, hotels in Bahrain and Dubai, and oil and gas facilities including Ras Laffan in Qatar and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. Ulrichsen states plainly that this choice of targets "reflects a calculation that leaders in the Gulf countries would immediately feel the full impact of the war" — and that Iran's hope is that the economic devastation will force Gulf leaders to press Washington hard for an exit. Qatar shot down two Iranian jets on March 2 in direct response to those strikes on its LNG facilities, confirmed by multiple regional defense ministries. And now Iran is escalating to the one target that would cause complete societal collapse across the entire Gulf region. Ulrichsen states explicitly: "There is concern among Gulf nations that the next step in the ladder of escalation could involve targeting the desalination plants that are so vital to overcoming water scarcity in the region." Read that again slowly. The Gulf states do not have rivers. They do not have aquifers large enough to sustain their populations. The entire freshwater supply for tens of millions of people — in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain — flows out of desalination plants sitting on the coastline. Plants that are now directly in the crosshairs of a regime that has already demonstrated it will hit airports, hotels, oil terminals, and gas facilities without hesitation. When those plants go down, there is no backup. There is no reservoir to open. There is no emergency supply line that can replace millions of gallons of freshwater per day. Cities do not slowly degrade when the water stops. They collapse within 72 hours. Mass panic. Mass displacement. Millions of people moving at once. Allied governments that have been building their legitimacy on economic prosperity and stability for decades will not be able to hold the line. When they cannot hold the line, the United States will have no choice but to send infantry in on foot — to secure the plants if any remain, to manage the displacement, to prevent the complete disintegration of every allied government in the Gulf simultaneously. That is the meat grinder Iran is building. That is why they are hitting the infrastructure in this specific sequence. Airports first. Energy terminals second. Desalination plants next. Iran's military strategy has never been to defeat the U.S. Air Force. It has always been to make the cost of staying so unbearable that the U.S. leaves or collapses trying to hold it together. Defense analyst Tobias Borck notes that Iran is "more risk-accepting and escalatory" than it has ever been — precisely because it has already absorbed the worst the United States can deliver from the air and is still standing and still firing. Despite the Pentagon's silence on ground operations, Open Source Intelligence networks — independent analyst groups who track forward-deployed military assets, radio traffic, and special operations movements long before official admission — indicate that coalition ground assets are already actively engaged in the theater. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, an independent Norwegian-registered NGO with an extensive network of informants documenting conditions on the ground inside Iran, reports the death toll has surpassed 1,500 people in three days, including over 200 confirmed civilian casualties. A girls' elementary school in Minab was struck and destroyed — confirmed through remote geolocation by multiple organizations. Iranian Education Ministry spokesperson Ali Farhadi cited 153 dead at the school alone. TANKERS ON FIRE AND THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ The final jaw of the trap is the energy chokepoint. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander formally declared enforcement of a Strait of Hormuz closure — threatening to fire on any vessel attempting to transit — confirmed by USNI News on March 2. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps transmitted warnings via VHF radio to every vessel in the Strait stating that no ship is allowed to pass, documented in full by Windward Maritime Intelligence, the maritime AI platform tracking vessel movement in real time. Within 36 hours of the strikes beginning, four commercial tankers were struck in the Strait and the Gulf of Oman. Windward's analysis states explicitly that the spread of targets — a sanctioned Iranian-linked tanker, a clearly Western-aligned commercial tanker, a neutral-flagged vessel, and a tanker with mixed Western and Russian trade ties — is not precision targeting. It is area denial, designed to stop all commercial traffic regardless of nationality or cargo. It worked. As of March 2, tanker traffic through the Strait is down 70%, according to Windward Maritime Intelligence. Over 150 freight ships including oil tankers are stalled and anchored outside the strait. War-risk insurance has been withdrawn entirely. Roughly 27 vessels carrying an estimated 12 million barrels of oil are drifting in the Arabian Sea with no confirmed discharge destinations. The U.S. Energy Information Administration confirmed the Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of all oil and liquefied natural gas traded globally — about 20 million barrels per day. Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera: the shock of a Strait closure "would reverberate far beyond energy markets, tightening financial conditions, fuelling inflation, and pushing fragile economies closer to recession in a matter of weeks." This is not a market fluctuation. This is a direct assault on the foundation of American economic power. The entire American financial empire rests on the petrodollar — the long-standing global agreement that countries use U.S. currency to buy and sell oil. When nations grow desperate enough to keep their power grids running, they will turn to non-Western sources and bypass the dollar to get what they need. Economic analysts at Brown University's Costs of War Project — the major research initiative that has tracked the true financial and human cost of every American military operation since 2001 — have documented that if the world stops depending on the dollar to buy energy, American financial dominance does not weaken. It collapses. If the petrodollar falls, the U.S. Treasury can no longer fund its own debt — including the $10 billion it just burned this weekend. THE EARTH IS BEING POISONED While the bodies are counted and the treasury bleeds, the land itself is being permanently damaged. Both sides are hitting this region with high-tech munitions that leave behind deep-soil chemical runoff. Environmental toxicologists and agricultural scientists who study ecosystem destruction warn that this level of chemical saturation in the soil is effectively irreversible. When warhead toxins penetrate the deep earth, the soil does not recover on any human timescale. The region's capacity to grow food and support life is being damaged for generations — long after the last missile falls. Here is what Hour 72 actually looks like. A regime that knew it was falling decided it would rather burn the entire region down than fall alone. It is hitting airports, energy terminals, and hotels across six countries simultaneously. It is systematically working toward the desalination plants that are the only source of drinking water for tens of millions of people. It is bleeding the U.S. Treasury at a rate of $40 million a day while firing $35,000 drones into a $15 million shield. It has pulled Hezbollah off the sideline, restarted the Houthi Red Sea campaign, activated Iraq's Shia militias, and locked 150 tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz. The soil where the missiles land will not grow food again in our lifetimes. And in the middle of all of it, a nuclear-armed Israel is fighting for its survival on every border it has. This did not have to happen. The agreement was on the table February 27. Peace was, in the words of Oman's own Foreign Minister, within reach. What came instead was a Truth Social post and the opening of something that has no clean exit. That is what is actually happening at Hour 72." SOURCES Jiang Xueqin — "Geo-Strategy #8: The Iran Trap / Why America Will Invade Iran and Lose," YouTube channel Predictive History, recorded May 29, 2024; follow-up video recorded June 22, 2025 Newsweek — "The Professor Who Predicted Trump's Return and War With Iran," June 24, 2025 The Online Citizen — "Jiang Xueqin's 2024 lecture predicting U.S.-Iran war and Trump's return goes viral," June 24, 2025 Grunge — "This Historian Predicted Trump's US-Iran Conflict In 2024 And His Theories About WWIII Are Chilling," June 28, 2025 Wikipedia — Jiang Xueqin biography U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) — Operational briefings, social media posts, and expenditure estimates, February 28 – March 3, 2026 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — Operation Epic Fury analysis and Missile Defense Project unit cost data, March 2026 Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Rice University Baker Institute — Iran's targeting of civilian infrastructure and the desalination plant threat, The Conversation, March 1, 2026 Al Jazeera — Iran's military strategy shift to asymmetric endurance, March 2, 2026, citing defense analysts including Tobias Borck Windward Maritime Intelligence — Iran War Maritime Intelligence Daily, March 2, 2026 USNI News — IRGC formal Strait of Hormuz closure declaration, March 2, 2026 U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) — Strait of Hormuz factsheet and global oil flow data Ali Vaez, International Crisis Group — Strait of Hormuz economic impact analysis, Al Jazeera, March 1, 2026 NPR — Hezbollah strikes Israel as American and Israeli planes pound Iran, March 2, 2026 CNN — Six U.S. service members killed, Kuwait operations center strike, March 2, 2026, reporting by Haley Britzky CBS News — Three U.S. troops killed, Trump confirms more deaths expected, March 1, 2026 SOF News — Operation Epic Fury Update, March 1, 2026 UAE Ministry of Defense — Confirmed civilian infrastructure strike damage Iranian Red Crescent Society — Casualty figures and civilian conditions, March 2026 Hengaw Organization for Human Rights — Ground-level documentation of casualties, March 2026 Factnameh (Iranian fact-checking outlet) — Remote geolocation confirmation of Minab school strike, March 2026 Reuters — 40 Iranian officials killed in opening strikes, intelligence source confirmation, March 1, 2026 Brown University Costs of War Project — Middle East military expenditure and economic impact analysis The War Zone (twz.com) — War With Iran Now In Its Third Day, March 2, 2026
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