https://truthout.org/articles/maryland-workers-are-fighting-to-divest-their-pensions-from-israels-genocide/

Over the past two years, the U.S. has supplied Israel with more than $21 billion in military aid, but public opinion is changing. Polls show half of U.S. voters and three in four Democrats now believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Even still, the campaign acknowledges divestment won’t come easily but sees it as a concrete way for constituents to put pressure on public officials and hold Israel accountable.

“Federal policy is not going to change,” said Lauren Leffler, 31, an organizer with the campaign. “But we can make it politically inconvenient for state officials to continue these investments.”

In the past two years, Israel has turned to international bonds to finance its war machine, including selling $5 billion worth to U.S. investors, mostly state and local governments.

Using Public Information Act requests, the campaign uncovered that Maryland’s state pension system quietly purchased about $10 million in Israel Bonds between July and December 2024, raising its total holdings to $74 million — even as major international funds divest over genocide concerns and credit rating agencies downgrade the investments.

“People can feel really helpless seeing a genocide funded by your tax dollars,” said Leffler. “Until you realize it’s not just at the federal level — it also happens at the state and municipal level. And that’s maybe something I can change.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUcHXs2zXC4

Whitney Webb argues that the Epstein scandal is a window into a much larger, transnational network where organized crime, intelligence agencies, and elite financiers collaborate and protect each other from accountability. She highlights how the FBI’s selective release of evidence, the suspicious deaths of key witnesses, and the bipartisan desire to keep investigations superficial all suggest a coordinated cover-up. Webb traces the origins of this system to World War II alliances between US intelligence and the mob, showing how these relationships have evolved into a “meta-cartel” that operates above the law.

She explains that the same names, institutions, and methods—such as blackmail, arms trafficking, and financial crimes—recur across decades, with power passed down through generations. Webb concludes that the only way to challenge this entrenched system is through local economic independence and community action, as both major political parties and mainstream institutions are deeply compromised.

https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/employment-law/bank-of-america-faces-lawsuit-over-alleged-unpaid-computer-boot-up-time/554302

Bank of America is facing allegations that hundreds of hourly workers performed up to 30 minutes of unpaid computer setup work daily for years. 

A former Business Analyst filed a class action lawsuit in federal court on October 23, claiming the banking giant systematically shortchanged remote employees who had to boot up complex computer systems before their paid shifts began. 

https://progressive.international/wire/2025-11-06-pi-briefing-no-40-kerala-ends-extreme-poverty/en

The Extreme Poverty Eradication Project (EPEP) represents a historic victory for the people of Kerala. The southwestern Indian state has long been among the country’s poorest. In the 1970s and 1980s, incomes in Kerala were roughly two-thirds of the national average. In the 2000s, incomes in the state surged ahead of the rest of India and, by 2022, they were over fifty percent higher. In mere decades, Kerala had become one of India’s wealthiest states.

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2511/S00017/affording-and-financing-wars-with-reference-to-the-united-states.htm

Wars are costly. Very intensive and extensive in the use of resources and the destruction of resources; let alone the loss of quantity and quality of life.

In all wars, all parties incur costs; significant costs. Sometimes, a party to a war can avoid most of those costs through having someone else pay. Of course, the United States paid to some extent for the wars against Iraq in terms of American lives lost and degraded; little cost was borne by those Americans who propagated those wars, though.

The material costs of the wars in the 2000s were paid – indirectly – by Chinese households not consuming large swathes of the goods they produced; Chinese workers and capitalists were, on an increasingly massive scale, exporting the fruits of their labour and their capital to the United States. More sending than spending. Much more. (A Marxian analysis would attribute the seemingly costless affording of the US-Iraq war to the extraction of ‘surplus value’ from the Chinese working class by the American capitalist class.)

Yet these Chinese costpayers didn’t much mind, because – while their abilities to enjoy the increasing fruits of their labours were highly constrained by China’s export policy – they were happily stacking up claims on future production; deferred enjoyment, rather than the pure exploitation which occurred in the early years of Chinese Communism.

China bore the West’s costs in other ways too; in those years Chinese people suffered huge environmental costs, at a time when natural environments were improving in the deindustrialising West.

There was a wider set of ongoing costs, however, arising from the ensuing highly unbalanced global capitalism. United States’ industrial survival is now largely dependent on its specialisation in military hardware and software; meaning that the United States’ economic deformation has made that country into a predatory warrior state. Violences, especially upon non-Americans, are today directly committed by the American state; and through both exported and gifted military goods and services, and through violations committed directly by America’s proxies (and, as in Sudan, by its proxies’ proxies).