Last year, the economic impact of violence reached $19.1 trillion, or $717 billion higher than the previous year.
This came as conflict deaths hit 25-year highs, and wars continued in the Ukraine and Gaza. In response to heightened geopolitical tensions, European nations have injected billions into defense spending. Even Japan plans to double its defense spending to 2% of GDP.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/19-trillion-global-cost-of-conflict/
In a statement, Earthjustice blasted Thursday’s announcement by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, writing, “Trump’s plan would risk the health and well-being of millions of people who live along our coasts. It would also devastate countless ocean ecosystems. This administration continues to put the oil industry above people, our shared environment, and the law.”
There are, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, and video game simulations that test how teachers respond to a fake threat of a school shooter. The school safety industry has become an estimated $4 billion juggernaut, aided in part by a $1 billion infusion from Congress in 2022 to support mental health services and infrastructure upgrades, instead of meaningful gun reform.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/thoughts-prayers-hbo-school-shooting/
// SYSTEM ERROR: CONNECTION TO CAPITALISM LOST
This is a coordinated economic shutdown—a collective refusal to participate in a system that profits off our pain, exploits our labor, and buys our politicians.
NO SPENDING. NO WORK. NO SURRENDER.
The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed—for the wealthy.
The Mass Blackout is a nationwide economic action, coordinated across aligned organizations, calling Americans to:
Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
Stop work
Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
Remove the regimeIf you must spend: support small, local businesses only. Pay in cash.
We’re not targeting small businesses or communities—we’re targeting the corporate systems that profit from injustice, fuel authoritarianism, and crush worker power.
To obtain the reduced 15% tariff rate, Swiss companies had to promise to invest $200 billion in the US by the end of 2028. Switzerland also had to agree to reduce import tariffs on American industrial goods.
The Alpine nation’s highly protected agricultural sector was not spared either. Tariffs on American fish and other seafood will be reduced under the new arrangement. This is not such a big concession as this sector is not a sensitive one for the landlocked country that imported 825 tonnes of fish and seafood from the US in 2024.
However, meat, deemed a sensitive sector by the Swiss Farmers’ Union, is on the dealmaking table. According to the MoU, Switzerland will grant the US duty-free access for certain meat products. This concession will only apply to a fixed quota every year to ensue Switzerland is not flooded with American meat. American farmers will be allowed to export 500 tonnes of beef (nearly double 2024 imports of 261 tonnes), 1,000 tonnes of bison meat and 1,500 tonnes of poultry to Switzerland duty free.
[…]
It is estimated that anywhere between two-thirds to 90% of American beef cattle raised conventionally are given hormone implants or fed growth regulators at the feedlot. Such meat can be sold in Switzerland provided testing in Switzerland does not reveal any residue of hormones.
In the United States, systems of federal accountability and control are being steadily dismantled, including the loss of civil service protections and of long-held notions of government professionalism and checks on executive action. The extensive use of the pardon power, the gutting and politicization of parts of the Department of Justice and other enforcement agencies, along with the Supreme Court’s grant of broad immunity to the president, all provide impunity for powerful actors. At the same time, the president, his family, and close friends appear to be benefiting financially during his time in office, raising serious conflict of interest or undue influence concerns.
Many of these events seem to fall into a definition of state capture: large-scale corruption that distorts both the formulation and implementation of laws, norms, decrees, rules and regulations; provides impunity for powerful actors; and leads eventually to a reconfiguration of the state to serve certain powerful interests.
Much has been written on the United States’ democratic backsliding, illiberal regimes, and competitive authoritarianism, including comparisons with other countries. Yet far less attention has been paid to the related phenomenon of state capture: how leaders weaponize bureaucratic, law enforcement, and regulatory institutions to disable guardrails, evade accountability, enrich themselves and their allies, and reconfigure state institutions to perpetuate themselves in power and use the state for private gain.
This analysis examines the experiences of South Africa, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Guatemala to illustrate how state capture took root in those countries and the lasting damage that unchecked corruption and self-dealing have inflicted on their institutions. Specifically, it looks to three aspects of state capture in those countries: the weakening of accountability and oversight mechanisms, the entrenching of impunity for the powerful, and the instrumentalizing of political power for personal and party gain.
https://www.justsecurity.org/124560/us-captured-state-comparative/
Today, the Commission published its proposal for ‘simplification’ of digital rules, a package intended to deregulate digital laws to support businesses. The deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook comes at a time when the tech industry is spending a record-breaking €151 million on EU lobbying. Most prominent is an attack on data privacy rules (GDPR) to support the development of artificial intelligence.
Corporate Europe Observatory published a new piece of research documenting how Big Tech has influenced the digital omnibus.
Key findings include:
Key demands from Big Tech firms and their affiliated lobby associations to water down the AI Act and weaken data protection made it into the Commission’s proposals;
Big Tech weaponised the Trump administration to attack the EU’s digital rulebook;
The Commission has opened the doors to business lobby groups in highly secretive meetings. Crucial steps in the preparation of the digital omnibus were five so-called Reality Checks, meetings heavily dominated by industry. Out of 138 invitees, 114 were business representatives. Only 9 civil society organisation representatives were invited.Corporate Europe Observatory has retrieved a document which shows that the Commission has decided to exempt ‘Reality Checks’ from transparency measures that apply to other meetings with “interest representatives”.
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/11/roll-back-digital-rights-prepared-secrecy
First, many countries now tax human workers more heavily than their potential AI competitors in the labor market. In the case of the US, roughly 85% of federal revenue comes from taxing people and their work (through income and payroll taxes), while capital and corporate profits are taxed far less. Technologies like AI benefit from favorable treatment in the form of generous write-offs, low corporate rates, and carve-outs.
Second, economists expect AI to increase the financial returns to capital relative to labor, even if it doesn’t cause unemployment. The most extreme version of this would entail AI agents that can design, replicate, and manage themselves – meaning that capital would be performing its own labor. Under current tax policies, such a shift would widen inequality and shrink government revenue as a share of GDP.
An AI tax could help level the field between humans and machines. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI might eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10-20% within five years. Whether such forecasts are borne out may depend partly on policy. Taxing labor more heavily than capital tilts the scales toward automation that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. At the very least, we shouldn’t let our tax system help put people out of work.
Moreover, at a time when the fiscal outlook is darkening, an AI tax could protect public revenues from technology-induced shocks. If mass job losses or hiring slowdowns do occur, governments that rely on income and payroll taxes could face fiscal crises even if new AI-ready jobs emerge later.
Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global scale.
The totality of today’s Economic Update is devoted to exploring (1) the multiple ways that capitalism imposes class warfare on its people, and (2) how class warfare shapes the capitalist system’s impact on employers and employees. Specific examples show (1) what kind of class struggle is involved in tariffs such as those imposed by Trump, (2) how inflation exemplifies class war, and (3) how unemployment reflects and includes class war. A question addressed throughout today’s program is “Why establish and maintain an economic system that produces and reproduces class war across its history?”