Week of June 26, 2026
The Guardian
Leon Black accused of stonewalling Congress as Epstein hearing ends abruptly
Leon Black, one of the wealthiest private equity vampires on the planet — a man who paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million dollars for ‘tax advice’ (sure, Leon, sure) — sat in front of Congress and essentially told elected representatives of the American people to go pound sand. The hearing ended ‘abruptly’ because that’s what happens when the Epstein Class decides accountability is for little people. Black’s lawyers stonewalled, deflected, and ran out the clock like a quarterback protecting a fourth-quarter lead. Except the scoreboard isn’t touchdowns — it’s abused girls and buried secrets.
Here’s the pattern you need to understand: the Epstein network wasn’t a sex trafficking ring that happened to involve billionaires. It WAS a billionaire network that used sex trafficking as its operating system — blackmail, leverage, and mutual complicity binding the ultra-wealthy together in a pact of silence more durable than any NDA. Leon Black didn’t pay Epstein $158 million because he needed help with his taxes. H&R Block does taxes. You pay that kind of money for something that can never be spoken aloud in a courtroom.
And here’s why your blood should be boiling: Congress had ONE job — drag these men into the light and make them answer under oath. Instead, the hearing collapsed like a cheap lawn chair, Black’s team ran roughshod over the committee, and the Epstein files remain as buried as ever. This is what happens when the Epstein Class owns enough of Washington that even congressional oversight becomes a polite formality. They are not afraid of you, they are not afraid of Congress, and they will not stop until someone makes them stop. Demand your representatives grow a spine — or find ones who have one.
ScheerPost
Gaza Deals Blow to Democrats in NYC Primaries
The Democratic Party establishment is doing what it does best after every electoral humiliation: absolutely nothing useful. Voters in New York City — one of the most reliably blue urban centers on Earth — just sent the party a message written in flaming letters ten stories tall, and the consultants are already busy explaining why it doesn’t really mean what it obviously means. It means this: when you fund, defend, and provide diplomatic cover for the mass killing of children on live television, voters notice. Turns out genocide is not, in fact, a wedge issue that can be managed with carefully focus-grouped language about ‘de-escalation pathways.’
The dark money machinery that keeps the Democratic establishment in its comfortable center-right crouch is deeply wired into pro-Israel donor networks — AIPAC alone spent over $100 million in the 2024 cycle to primary anyone who dared question unconditional military aid. So when you wonder why Democratic leaders sound like they’re reading from a State Department press release written in 1987, follow the money. The revolving door between defense contractors, think tanks, and Democratic leadership offices spins so fast it generates its own wind. Politicians who question the military-industrial consensus get primaried. Politicians who toe the line get rewarded. It’s not complicated; it’s corruption with a liberal branding strategy.
Here’s why this matters beyond New York: the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging exactly the voters it needs to survive — young people, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, progressive independents — and its response is to double down on the donor class and call the departing voters naive. This is how parties die. This is how movements are born outside party structures. The establishment can keep cashing those AIPAC checks and losing elections, or it can remember that democracy requires actually representing the people. The clock is ticking, and the gravestones of ‘electable’ centrists are piling up faster than the consultants can cash their retainers.
ScheerPost
How the Iran War Fuel Crisis Is Reshaping the Pacific
While Genghis Don was busy tweeting about his ballroom and Pete Hegseth was getting his crusader tattoos touched up, something genuinely catastrophic was quietly unfolding in the Pacific: the Iran war — which, let’s remember, nobody voted for, Congress never formally authorized, and the ‘Techno-fascists’ in the defense industry absolutely love — is now scrambling global fuel supply chains in ways that ripple from the Strait of Hormuz all the way to the South China Sea. When you blow up the energy logistics of one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, the shockwaves don’t politely stop at national borders. Ask Japan. Ask South Korea. Ask every Pacific nation that depends on stable fuel prices to keep their economies breathing.
Here’s what the defense contractors don’t put in their glossy PowerPoint decks when they’re lobbying for the next escalation: every military adventure creates economic aftershocks that working-class people absorb while shareholders collect dividends. The fuel crisis reshaping the Pacific isn’t a bug in the war machine — it’s a feature. Volatile energy markets mean windfall profits for oil majors, defense stocks soar, and the Techno-Fascists funding both parties get richer while Filipino fishermen and South Korean factory workers pay more for everything. This is not an accident. This is the business model.
You should care because the United States is now conducting a shooting war with a major regional power, the economic consequences are cascading across an entire ocean, and the American public was never meaningfully consulted. Congress — constitutionally required to declare war — has been reduced to a potted plant while the executive branch and its billionaire backers run foreign policy like a hedge fund making a leveraged bet. The Pacific is being reshaped in real time, and most Americans can’t find the Strait of Hormuz on a map because nobody in power thinks you need to know. They’re wrong. Find out. Demand answers.
ScheerPost
Congress Is Preparing to Surrender American Sovereignty on the Eve of America’s 250th Anniversary
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men — flawed, hypocritical, slave-owning, and occasionally brilliant — signed a document declaring that sovereignty belongs to the people, not to kings, not to corporations, and not to unelected international bodies controlled by the interests of the powerful. This July 4th, as the fireworks go off and the beer gets warm, Congress is quietly preparing to hand chunks of that sovereignty to exactly the kind of supranational corporate trade architecture the Founders would have recognized immediately as a new form of colonial extraction. The timing isn’t ironic. It’s insulting.
What we’re talking about — whether it’s trade deal fast-tracking, World Bank/IMF structural leverage, or investor-state dispute mechanisms that let corporations sue governments for daring to regulate them — is the systematic legal architecture by which multinational capital overrides democratic decisions. Your town votes to ban a toxic chemical? A corporation can sue your government in a private arbitration tribunal that operates outside any court you’ve ever heard of. Your country passes a minimum wage law that cuts into profit margins? Same deal. This is sovereignty surrender dressed up in the language of ‘free trade’ and ‘global competitiveness,’ and the dark money networks funding the think tanks writing these agreements are the same ones funding the politicians voting for them.
On the 250th birthday of American independence, here is your assignment: ask your representative, by name, what provisions they have personally read in the trade and sovereignty agreements moving through Congress right now. Watch them squirm. Record it. Post it. Because the most patriotic thing you can do in 2026 isn’t waving a flag — it’s demanding that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people not be quietly sold to the highest corporate bidder while everyone’s distracted by the fireworks.
Zeteo
Only in the gilded psychosis of late-stage Techno-Fascism does a man worth $1 Trillion get to gut children’s health and nutrition programs, watch the mortality projections roll in from public health researchers, and then threaten to sue the people pointing at the body count. This is Elon Musk’s America now: DOGE carved through USAID, vaccines, food assistance, and children’s health infrastructure like a buzzsaw through balsa wood, the epidemiologists ran the numbers and the numbers are horrifying, and the world’s richest man’s response is to lawyer up and silence the math. The math, Elon. You want to sue the math.
Let’s connect the dots: Musk didn’t slash these programs because they were a burden on the federal budget. He slashed them because cutting social spending is the ideological precondition for cutting taxes on the ultra-wealthy — which is the entire point of the exercise. Every dollar stripped from child health programs is a dollar that can theoretically become a tax cut for someone who already owns multiple superyachts. This is not conspiracy theory; this is the published policy agenda of every dark money network from Heritage Action to Club for Growth. The kids are collateral damage. They are the price that other people’s children pay so that the Musk class can avoid paying taxes.
And now he wants to sue journalists and researchers for saying so out loud. This is the authoritarian move hiding inside the billionaire move: first you buy the influence, then you write the policy, then you threaten anyone who documents the consequences. Do not be silenced. Share the researchers’ findings. Post the numbers. Repeat the projections. If Elon Musk wants to spend his legal budget suing everyone who can read a mortality table, let him try. Four million kids don’t have a PR team or a legal department. We are their amplifier. Let’s use it.
F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
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Robert Cain, author of “Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.” Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.