“…Quietly over the last decade, Ohio has become a state of incredible national importance, as it continues to attract data centers from American “royalty” and Big Tech stalwarts into its friendly regulatory borders. But long before Amazon, Meta, Anduril, Microsoft and others took their power-hungry –– literally and figuratively –– refuge in the Buckeye State, the most well-known financier of Jeffrey Epstein, Leslie Wexner, and his extensive crime-linked network were laying the foundation for the new Silicon Valley, now known as the Silicon Heartland, along the Ohio River.

Wexner’s own statements last year underscore Ohio’s coming importance in the age of ascendant, AI-powered technocracy. Last May, he stated that Columbus in particular would soon become an international AI destination. He also asserted that “probably the largest AI investment in the world will happen in Columbus.” Wexner would know, as he’s personally responsible for Ohio’s –– specifically Columbus’ –– rise as one of the most important AI hubs in the country.

Yet, Wexner, with Epstein’s help, has done much more than attract massive AI data centers to the state. As this investigation will show, Wexner and his closest allies, Epstein among them, worked to create a model for the takeover of local governments via public-private partnership, starting first in New Albany beginning in the late 1980s. It has since spread to cover the entire state of Ohio via a network of public-private partnerships Wexner helped create. This system has allowed Wexner to use billions of dollars of Ohio taxpayer money, with little to no public scrutiny, to finance what can only be described as a massive welfare system for corporations. Among that system’s current biggest beneficiaries are Wexner’s New Albany Company as well as massive Big Tech corporations with important ties to Jeffrey Epstein (e.g. Amazon and Google). Meanwhile, regular Ohioans are seeing their power bills jump, provoking an affordability crisis in the state, while funding for public schools, libraries and healthcare is cut dramatically –– all to keep the corporate welfare engine designed by Wexner running full tilt…”

~ Full article…

“…The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.

By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.

About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds…”

~ Full article…

“…It is being reported that Trump has delivered an ultimatum to the Gulf States that “If you want the war to continue – 5 trillion dollars. If you want it to end – 2.5 trillion dollars.” Omani journalist and international relations researcher Salem Al-Jahuri, on BBC Arabic, confirms reports of US pressure on the Gulf Cooperation Council states to make them pay, regardless of the circumstances. According to the leaks to which Al-Jahuri refers, Trump demands from Middle Eastern states either 5 trillion dollars to continue the war, or 2.5 trillion dollars as a payment for its termination, presenting this as a payment for “what has been achieved.”…”

~ Full article…

“…For years, Donald Trump has treated the stock market as his personal scoreboard, boasting when indices rose and raging when they fell. But in this phase of the Iran war, that instinct has fused with something more dangerous: an awareness that a single presidential post can send oil and equities lurching in opposite directions, and that the story told about war — “on the brink” or “productive talks” — is itself a lever on trillions of dollars in paper value.​

The pattern around his supposed Iran talks makes the point. Over one weekend, he careened from doubling down on war — threatening Iran’s power plants and setting ultimatums over the Strait of Hormuz — to suddenly suggesting that the U.S. was “considering winding down” operations and had engaged in “productive conversations” with Tehran. Iranian officials have flatly denied that any such substantive talks are happening, calling his claims “fake news” deployed “to manipulate the financial and oil markets to escape the quagmire” in which Washington and Tel Aviv now find themselves. Iran specialists who actually speak to people in the country say the same thing in more careful language: whatever contacts exist are superficial, nowhere near the hard bargaining and concessions that a real ceasefire would require.

The timing around one particular morning is hard to ignore. At 6:49 a.m. in New York, on an otherwise quiet Monday with no major economic releases or central bank speeches scheduled, roughly 6,200 Brent and WTI futures contracts changed hands in a single minute. The notional value of those trades was about $580 million. Veteran traders describe the move as “really abnormal” for that time and context — an unusually aggressive sale into a market with no obvious catalyst. Just a quarter of an hour later, the president posted on social media that there had been “productive conversations” with Iran and that strikes on its power infrastructure were being postponed. Oil prices quickly fell, futures on the S&P 500 jumped, and financial outlets framed the whole move as a “relief rally” driven by hopes of de‑escalation. As one journalist close to Iranian officials put it, “Somebody made an enormous amount of money this morning on that.”

Seen from the Situation Room, the temptation must be obvious. With one set of words you can raise oil, sink equities and tighten the screws on an adversary. With another set — “very good talks,” “Iran wants a deal,” “we’re winding down” — you can reverse the move and bathe domestic markets in a momentary sense of relief. The risk to American troops, to Iranian civilians, to everyone downstream of higher prices and disrupted flows does not show up on the trading screens. The profit and loss on those half‑hidden trades does.​

War as Side Bet

On the tape, that 6:49 a.m. episode looks less like coincidence and more like choreography. In a dead patch of the calendar, thousands of oil contracts hit a thin market in one concentrated burst, driving prices down. Minutes later, the president appears, announces “productive conversations” with Iran and a pause in strikes on its grid, and the same screens flash green as equities rebound on cue. What gets sold to the public as a passing mood swing — “relief” on hopes of de‑escalation — is a reminder that a single, well‑timed message can turn war risk into a tradable pattern…”

~ Full article…

“…Risk and Privilege are intertwined in ways that define our lives and the system we inhabit. Privilege boils down to being buffered from risk, and this is scale-invariant, meaning that it works in the same way from the individual to the nation-state: wealth and power serve to insulate us from risk. Those without wealth and power are fully exposed to risk.

(…)

The point here isn’t just the asymmetric distribution–it’s the buffers against risk have been dismantled by government policies favoring those with the least exposure to risk. The percentage of the national output / economic activity that is distributed to wage earners has been declining for decades. The money and the privileges it buys have been diverted to benefit capital.

This is what’s different now: apologists can claim that “the rich have always collected most of the income and owned most of the wealth,” but that’s not the point: the point is the buffers against risk have been dismantled as policy decisions that favored the already-wealthy and already-privileged who already had ample buffers against risk.

For the bottom 80%, the lifestyle you ordered is out of stock. For the top 10%, the serial credit-asset bubbles have fattened their wealth and income. Risk for them is now concentrated in The Everything Bubble: should it pop, their buffers will melt like sand castles in a rising tide of risk…”

~ Full article…

“…While much public attention has focused on travelers and workers from the United States and Europe trying to leave the region, most migrants to the Gulf come from the rest of the world — Africa, Asia and other countries in the Middle East. Undoubtedly, one reason that almost all of the civilians killed have been foreign nationals is that they make up a majority of the region’s population. In Saudi Arabia, foreign residents are roughly one-third of the population; in the Emirates and Qatar, the proportion is an estimated 80 to 90 percent.

But low-paid migrant workers are also uniquely vulnerable as the conflict widens. They are more likely to live in overcrowded housing with insufficient exit routes, putting them at greater risk if explosions or fires occur. And they are more likely to hold essential jobs, as grocery store cashiers, sanitation workers and delivery drivers, that require them to continue working as usual while many citizens and wealthier foreign residents can take shelter.

(…)

Leaving is a choice that is typically not available to the lowest-paid migrants, who are bound by employment contracts, debts or family obligations. And whatever the risks they face in the Gulf countries — more common than war is abuse and exploitation — they keep coming, because the remittances they send home are a lifeline…”

~ Full article…

See also:

‘If I don’t work, I go hungry’: The migrant workers risking their lives to keep the Gulf running

…”As missiles target the Gulf, the region’s vast population of migrant workers – who make up the majority of residents in countries such as Qatar and the UAE – are being left to fend for themselves, according to a human rights organisation with researchers embedded in the affected countries.

Mustafa Qadri, executive director of Equidem, told MEE that the organisation’s network of migrant worker investigators across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan has documented widespread panic, psychological trauma and systematic exclusion from official safety measures.

(…)

Qadri said workers face two distinct forms of discrimination.

The first is exclusion from official safety communications. While some formal statements have referenced all residents, workers on the ground say they have not received meaningful guidance on shelters, evacuation routes or emergency support.

The second is structural discrimination. As essential workers in every sector of Gulf society – construction, hospitality, healthcare, security, domestic service and logistics – many of these workers are required to continue working through attacks, often moving toward danger rather than away from it.

(…)

Particularly alarming, he added, is the situation of delivery riders and other gig economy workers, who remain on the streets while their wealthier clients shelter at home.

And since the start of the conflict, more and more residents in the Gulf are using delivery services, opting to stay inside instead of venturing out to buy basic goods and necessities…”

***

Far from home, millions of migrant workers in the Gulf are trapped by war

“…In 2019, the International Labor Organization estimates there aremore than 24 millionmigrant workers across the Gulf region alone — typically employed in low-wage jobs in construction, domestic housework, seafaring and caregiving. The ILO reports that over 92% of the work force in the UAE alone is made up of foreign workers. Most of the migrant workers across the region hail from countries such as India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal and Indonesia.

Currently, there are an estimated 2.4 million Filipino migrant workers in the entire region. The majority, around one million, work in the UAE, according to Joanna Concepcion, the head of Migrante-International, a Manila-based group that supports Overseas Filipino Workers — or OFWs — in over 20 countries…”

“…In a recent interview with Fortune, University of Pennsylvania economist Kent Smetters, who directs the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the real debt picture looks very different.

“What we call implicit obligations are twice the size of explicit obligations,” Smetters said.

Those implicit obligations are the promises buried inside programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If you count them, he argues, the real number is not $39 trillion.

It’s closer to $100 trillion.

And that’s coming from someone inside the system.

The reality is even worse.

The Official Debt Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

The number politicians like to cite — roughly $39 trillion — is what economists call explicit debt.

That’s the money the federal government has legally borrowed through Treasury bonds and bills.

But the government has made massive promises it hasn’t funded.

These are called unfunded liabilities.

They include things like:

• Social Security benefits
• Medicare
• Veterans benefits
• Federal pensions
• Government healthcare commitments

These programs promise trillions in future payments with no money set aside to pay for them.

According to the Treasury’s own Financial Report of the United States Government, the 75-year unfunded shortfall is already over $73 trillion.

But that estimate only looks 75 years out.

Stretch the timeline further — which economists often do when measuring long-term obligations — and many fiscal analysts place the real number well above:

$200 trillion.

In other words, the $100 trillion estimate being discussed now may still be conservative. Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, a former advisor to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, has spent decades studying what he calls fiscal gap accounting.

His conclusion is far more alarming.

Kotlikoff has estimated the true long-term fiscal gap of the United States at roughly:

$220 trillion.

That figure represents the present value difference between all future government spending promises and expected revenue.

Kotlikoff has been blunt about what that means.

“The U.S. is bankrupt.”…”

~ Full article…

“…In the later years of Mr. Epstein’s life, after he was incarcerated and registered as a sex offender, no one did more to bankroll his opulent lifestyle than Mr. Black, 74, a towering figure on Wall Street and a fixture of the global art scene.

Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million over six years for what Mr. Black has said were tax and estate-planning services. The sum dwarfed what elite law or accounting firms would have charged for similar work, baffling both his Wall Street peers and investigators on Capitol Hill.

The millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and other documents that the Justice Department released this year offer a potential explanation for the size of the payments: Mr. Epstein essentially served as a fixer whose services went beyond modernizing Mr. Black’s finances or reducing his taxes, according to a New York Times review of those records.

Mr. Epstein suggested ways to obscure millions of dollars that Mr. Black paid to women, as well as to Mr. Epstein himself. He brainstormed about how to avoid taxes on some of the payments. He took credit for defusing a government audit of a woman to whom Mr. Black had paid millions of dollars. He planned ways to surveil, intimidate and silence another woman who was threatening to publicly accuse Mr. Black of abuse. He even counseled Mr. Black to separate from his wife after she learned of his infidelity.

Mr. Black paid about $20 million to a dozen women, at least some of whom he’d had sexual relationships with, according to the recently released files and notes taken by congressional investigators and shared with The Times. Mr. Epstein was involved in figuring out ways to dispense a significant portion of that money.

Mr. Epstein summed it up to Mr. Black in a 2017 email: Mr. Epstein’s job, as he saw it, was partly about “saving you from yourself.”…”

~ Full article…

“…While the US attack on Iran throttles energy production and exports to China, following the cutting of energy exports from Venezuela to China in a war earlier this year, and years of attacking Russian energy production via Ukraine, US-backed militants in Myanmar are attacking pipelines leading directly into China;

A US citizen and several Ukrainians were caught bringing in large numbers of combat drones to fight the central Myanmar government and attack key infrastructure across the country including Belt and Road Initiative projects;

Zooming out from any one of these conflicts reveals a global US war and proxy war as well as a developing global oil blockade against China…”

~ Podcast…