Tax Day 2026: Taxpayers Are Paying More than $4,000 for War

Posted on by

“…We broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.

We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid over $4,000 for weapons and war last year — a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages — even as the programs to help families get by are getting cut. We’ve compiled some of those findings below.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion in war funding for next year – a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers below — including the shockingly high line items for militarism and the dwindling sums for human needs — all the more lopsided…”

~ Full article…

Tax Day 2026: Notes and Sources

Meta creating AI version of Mark Zuckerberg so staff can talk to the boss

Posted on by

“…Until Zuckerberg launches his AI self, however, he will have to present in person at meetings with thousands of Meta staff, such as the one he carried out in 2023 two days after he announced that 10,000 employees would be laid off. Then, the tech chief was questioned by “rattled” staff about job security and the future of remote working.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zuckerberg could be helped to prepare for such sessions by a “CEO agent”, a personalised AI system that is being developed at Meta and is already helping him to get internal company information faster. Zuckerberg is driving Meta to use AI more internally, in the expectation that it will help lower costs and accelerate the pace of work.

Through integrating AI into its business, the company, which also owns the messaging service WhatsApp, aims to minimise its organisational structure and increase efficiency, which Zuckerberg has said is key to “get more done”. “We’re elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” he said in January.

The reported moves form part of a company-wide effort to invest in AI in a drive to remain competitive with tech rivals that are also pouring billions of dollars into the technology. Zuckerberg is presiding over a multibillion dollar investment in AI in an attempt to create “superintelligence”, the term for a system that can perform any cognitive task far better than a human…”

~ Full article…

IMF Warns Of Potential Global Recession Amid High Oil Prices

Posted on by

“…The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has cut its economic outlook for the world economy and warned it could sink into a recession if the Iran war is not soon resolved. In its April 2026 World Economic Outlook, the Bretton Woods institution has predicted that global GDP will expand by 3.1% in the current year, down from its earlier projection of 3.4%, if the conflict is short-lived and oil prices soon normalize to around $82 per barrel. However, the IMF says the economy might expand by 2.5% if the tensions linger for long and oil prices average $100/barrel throughout the year, and only grow by 2.0% in case of deepening hostilities and infrastructure damage, putting the world on the edge of a recession. The outlook for the leading global economies is mixed…”

~ Full article…

Tokenized Finance Could Make The Next Financial Crisis Faster And Harder To Stop, IMF Warns

Posted on by

“…The IMF said traditional financial systems rely on settlement delays and batch processing to absorb shocks. These delays allow banks and institutions to net exposures, mobilize liquidity and respond before obligations are finalized.

Tokenized systems remove these safeguards. Transactions settle instantly and continuously, which means liquidity demands appear in real time.

The report warned that this could force institutions to meet obligations immediately, increasing the risk of sudden liquidity shortages during periods of volatility…”

~ Full article…

Whitney Webb: Why Does BlackRock Keep Showing Up When the System Breaks?

Posted on by

“…Why does BlackRock keep showing up when the system starts breaking?
This video breaks down the fear that BlackRock is becoming more than a company — and getting closer to the controls.

What if one private firm became so large, so connected, and so embedded in the financial system that it kept appearing whenever the system itself started to shake? In this video, we break down why BlackRock has become such a lightning rod — not just because it manages trillions, but because it sits unusually close to the machinery of markets, corporate governance, and crisis response.

Whitney Webb argues that BlackRock keeps surfacing at key turning points, and Reuters documented one of the clearest examples: in 2020, the Federal Reserve hired BlackRock to help execute bond purchases during the COVID market shock. Jerome Powell said BlackRock was “just our agent” and that conflicts were being handled “extremely carefully,” but critics see that episode as part of a larger pattern — a private financial giant repeatedly positioned near public emergency power.

The official story is straightforward: BlackRock is an asset manager and fiduciary. BlackRock says investment stewardship is core to its role, that it engages with companies and votes at shareholder meetings on behalf of clients, and that about 90% of its clients’ public equity assets under management are held in index equity strategies. It also says eligible clients can participate more directly in proxy voting through BlackRock Voting Choice. That may sound dry, but it is exactly why scale becomes influence: when one institution sits between trillions of dollars and thousands of public companies, power often looks less like a command and more like constant proximity.

And now the debate is moving beyond Wall Street into digital money. Circle says it deepened its partnership with BlackRock and began investing a portion of USDC reserves in the Circle Reserve Fund, with reserves expected to remain about 20% cash and 80% short-duration U.S. Treasuries. BlackRock’s site lists the Circle Reserve Fund as a BlackRock-managed product. That does not prove BlackRock “controls crypto,” but it does reinforce the concern that the same institutions dominating traditional finance are positioning themselves around the rails of digital finance too. Circle

This video keeps the nuance intact: BlackRock does not literally own the world, managing client assets is not the same as personally controlling every company in a portfolio, and a reserve partnership is not proof of total control over digital money. But even with all of that said, the core concern survives: when a private institution gets this large, this connected, and this embedded in both markets and public-private crisis response, people stop worrying about one transaction and start worrying about the architecture.

This video uses clips from Whitney Webb on Coin Stories and builds around a bigger question: are we watching innovation, stabilization, and market plumbing — or centralization wearing a new costume?…”

`~ Full article…

Jeffrey Epstein Wasn’t Rich. But the Secret Zionist Club That Funded Him Was

Posted on by

“…The Secret Zionist Billionaire’s Club That Funded Jeffrey Epstein’s Fake Financier World

Most Americans have never heard of the Mega Group. And that’s exactly what the members of the Mega Group want.

In 1991 — the same year Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Israeli asset Robert Maxwell, fell from his yacht into the Atlantic and was buried in Jerusalem with six heads of Israeli intelligence in attendance — two North American billionaires quietly founded what they called the Study Group. These men were Leslie Wexner, who would become Jeffrey Epstein’s sole known financial patron, and Charles Bronfman, heir to the Seagram liquor empire. Their “Study Group” was a by-invitation-only consortium of roughly twenty of the wealthiest Jewish businessmen in North America. They met twice yearly, behind closed doors, with membership dues starting at $30,000 a year — equal to about $72,000 in 2026.

The public didn’t learn The Study Group existed for seven years. And even then, barely. This was by design. It would later morph into calling itself the Mega Group instead.

A 1998 Wall Street Journal investigation first brought the Mega Group to public attention. The Journal described what it found in terms that were almost deliberately anodyne: a loosely organized club of Zionist billionaires whose philanthropy exclusively served a political project. The story ran and then disappeared. There was no follow-up. There were no hearings. There were no names released in primetime.

That is worth noting, because the names of the members were extraordinary. They included: Edgar Bronfman, chairman of the World Jewish Congress; Charles Schusterman of Samson Investment; Harvey “Bud” Meyerhoff, Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch, chairman of Loews Corporation (who, like Donald Barr — the man who gave Epstein his first job — served in the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA); Max Fisher, Detroit oil magnate and Republican Party powerhouse; Steven Spielberg, the film director; and Les Wexner — who by then had already handed an unknown college dropout named Jeffrey Epstein the keys to a Manhattan townhouse reportedly rigged with hidden surveillance cameras in every room and said to be the largest private residence in Manhattan, and given him power of attorney over his personal finances.

A college dropout. One known client. Billions of dollars. No one asked where the money came from. Everyone accepted the story of Jeffrey Epstein, genius financier, at face value, despite zero real evidence to back up the claim. Almost every reference you still see today will refer to him in those same terms. He was a wealthy financier…”

~ Full article…

The Palantir Panopticon

Posted on by

“…Foucault shows how the technologies of discipline practiced with the rise of Panopticism have become less forceful, more lightweight, less burdensome to the body, but at the same time utterly ubiquitous.

As it happens, in the U.S., at least, the Panopticon will be owned and operated by Palantir, the software company named after the legendary seeing stones of The Lord of the Rings. On the one hand, Palantir’s Maven AI platform has been made an official “program of record” by the Pentagon, embedding it as the foundational battlefield intelligence system for targeting, resource allocation, and real-time decision-making. Maven employs advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning—technologies that devour colossal streams of data to detect patterns and identify objects with ruthless efficiency—to ingest satellite imagery, drone feeds, radar signals, and intelligence reports. It spots military targets—vehicles, buildings, weapons stockpiles—then automates swaths of the so-called “kill chain,” the military sequence of locating, tracking, and striking a target, compressing decisions from detection to destruction at terrifying speed.

(…)

On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security has signed a billion-dollar blanket purchase agreement to deploy Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry platforms department-wide, fusing data across multiple agencies for threat identification, case management, and operational coordination.

Palantir won a $30 million contract from ICE in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS—an AI-powered system for managing the entire immigration process. This fits with other major Trump-era contracts for the company: a potential $10 billion software and data deal with the U.S. Army, more than $180 million in IRS agreements since 2018 (with recent projects that organize tax records into searchable databases, choose audit targets, and spot fraud), and ongoing work with the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC—including a $443 million project to create a single shared dashboard that pulls public-health data together from multiple systems.

Factor in Palantir’s entanglements with more than 30 other federal agencies and the pattern becomes unmistakable: Palantir holds a de facto master database, one that fuses masses of data—on health, tax liabilities, financial trails, travel records, immigration status, and behavioral patterns—into a panoptic tableau. Because Palantir’s tools are built for interoperability, the Palantir Panopticon expands by necessity. Health records flow into immigration files into tax data into predictive policing. Battlefield AI logic migrates seamlessly into domestic law enforcement.

And it’s not only a database. It’s also swarms of AI agents predicting behavior and initiating actions. The “precrime” intelligence capabilities long embedded in Gotham—pattern recognition, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics—are now being scaled for domestic application, turning the entire population into nodes within an ever-expanding, totalizing threat matrix…”

~ Full article…

The Myth that Won’t Die: “War is Good for the Economy”

Posted on by

“…War is the ultimate government intervention. It is the excuse for all kinds of evils to be imposed on the governed. From confiscation through taxes and inflation to restriction of freedom of speech and the redirection and even nationalization of whole industries, nothing increases state power such as war.

As the state is predatory and produces nothing of use, it is the ultimate impoverishing situation. From an ideological point of view, it is even worse, mixing love for one’s culture and homeland with the state itself. It reduces individual’s resistance to loss of liberty and creates in their minds the myth of the protecting government.

There is also another insidious idea that a lot of people hold: That is that war has economic and other benefits, not to certain individuals or groups, but to the community at large. It is worth examining these supposed benefits to show that no, war does not benefit the community, it is just death and destruction…”

~ Full article…

Right-wing media’s narrative that high gas prices are “short-term” and “temporary” is undermined by reporting from major energy conference

Posted on by

“…During S&P Global’s CERAWeek, a Houston-based energy industry conference held this year from March 23-27, attendees and other experts expressed concern over the long-term consequences of President Donald Trump’s war constraining energy supply in the Strait of Hormuz, making clear to reporters that the situation is likely worse than the market is showing.

Some on Fox Business agreed. On other Fox programs, however, network figures and guests dismissed concerns from the energy industry about crude oil prices, instead echoing messaging from Trump administration Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that higher gas prices are the result of a “short-term disruption” and will be “temporary.”

In interviews with CNBC, experts explained why future crude oil prices may actually be much higher than the market is currently predicting. Head of investment at BRI Wealth Management Toni Meadows explained to CNBC that right now, “the market thinks this current uplift in the oil price is transitory.” Katy Stoves, investment manager at Mattioli Woods, attributed this to people “expecting sort of a reduction in hostilities,” a possibility President Donald Trump has hinted at repeatedly. But, Stoves warned, “Even if we do get a resolution, I think it’s very, very important to note that there’s been a lot of energy infrastructure destroyed during this, and even if we do get some sort of ceasefire … repairing those facilities, bringing those facilities back online is going to take time — and I’m not entirely sure the market is probably pricing that in.” [CNBC, 3/26/26; Axios, 3/30/26]

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth also expressed concern to CNBC that chaos caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz may not yet be “fully priced into the futures curves on oil.” According to CNBC, Wirth suggested that because “the market is trading on ‘scant information’ and ‘perception’ … The physical supply of oil is tighter than the futures contracts suggest.” [CNBC, 3/23/26]…”

~ Full article…

Volkswagen in talks to make Iron Dome parts at struggling German auto plant: report

Posted on by

“…The Federal Association of the German Security and Defence Industry last year proposed repurposing idle auto capacity for defense output, as Berlin began unlocking hundreds of billions of euros in new military spending under the country’s ambitious rearmament plans and the EU’s ReArm Europe framework.

(..)

Under a prospective deal, the facility would manufacture support components for the Iron Dome − heavy-duty transport trucks, launch units and power generators − rather than interceptor missiles, which Rafael plans to produce at a separate German facility. Regarding the jobs at the plant, an insider told the FT the goal was to “save everybody, maybe even to grow.”

The talks come as Volkswagen contends with its worst financial performance in nearly a decade. The group’s operating profit collapsed 53.5% in 2025 to €8.9 billion ($10.3 billion), and net profit fell 44% to €6.9 billion − the lowest since the “Dieselgate” scandal.

VW announced plans in March to cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030, including at subsidiaries Audi and Porsche. Negotiations to sell the Osnabrück plant to Rheinmetall stalled, and the defense giant ultimately turned down the deal in mid-March…”

~ Full article…