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      ‘Trump is like a juggernaut’: how the Gaza ceasefire deal was done

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      It is a well-known adage in politics that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Except when Donald Trump is involved, in which case there is only one parent.Nevertheless, many countries and individuals have a right to step forward to claim an authorial role in the deal that it is hoped will bring an end to the two-year war in Gaza.But it is a sign of the collective nature of the effort of the past few months that so many can credibly claim a role, including the US president, who after many false starts was finally persuaded to focus, end the fantasy of driving tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and instead spell out to Benjamin Netanyahu the versions of victory the Israeli prime minister could and could not have.The turning point was a meeting in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly chaired by Trump, soon after his baroque speech to the gathering. Trump described the sidelines chat as his most important meeting at the UN. In the encounter organised by the United Arab Emirates, he set out for the first time his then 20-point plan for peace in front of a group of Arab and Muslim states that could form the backbone of any stabilisation force that entered Gaza in the event of a ceasefire.By then Trump, with the help of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, had been convinced to change his mind on two critical issues. First, Palestinians should not be driven from Gaza and Israel should not rule the territory. “Gaza should be for Gazans,” one said.That meant Trump dropping the displacement rhetoric he deployed earlier in the year, when he triggered widespread alarm by speaking of plans to develop a “Gaza Riviera”.View image in fullscreenSecondly, Trump was persuaded a “day after” plan for the future of Gaza would not complicate the negotiations on a ceasefire-hostage release agreement by adding new contested ingredients, but was the precondition for success. A UK diplomat explained Blair’s thinking: “Hamas was not going to give up unless it knew the Israelis were going to get out and the Israelis were not going to get out and stop occupying Gaza unless they knew Hamas were not going to be in government. Unless you resolved the question of who governs Gaza you cannot bring the thing to an end.”That in turn made it easier for the Arab states to put political pressure on Hamas to negotiate since they could point to a route towards Palestinian statehood, something that has always been their precondition for reconciliation with Israel. The Arab states had also put their names to demands that Hamas stand aside and disarm.One of those involved in persuading the US president said: “People don’t want to hear this but the advantage of Trump is that once he decides to do something he is like a juggernaut. And he really did put pressure on the Israelis.”Trump’s mood towards Israel was clouded by Netanyahu’s unilateral decision to bomb Doha on 9 September in the hope of wiping out Hamas negotiators. Trump had not been consulted, but the US assurances were met with scepticism. As a result Netanyahu, not a man prone to contrition, was ordered to apologise and say he would respect Qatar’s sovereignty in future.View image in fullscreenTo repair relations fully with Qatar, the host of main US airbase in the Middle East, Trump issued an extraordinary executive order saying any future attack on the emirate would be treated as an attack on the US. All this meant the US leader was better disposed to the Gulf states’ vision of a new Middle East. In a sign he was prepared to push the Israeli government hard, in a way Joe Biden had not, Trump told Israel there would be no further annexations in the West Bank.From the very start of the sidelines meeting at the UN in September, the aim of the Arab states was to bind Trump personally into the process. Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, said: “We count on you and your leadership … to end this war and to help the people of Gaza.” He said Israel’s real objective was “to destroy Gaza, to render housing, livelihoods, education, and medical care impossible, stripping away the very foundations of human life”.The concept that Trump personally was central to a solution – indeed its guarantor – flattered the US president who offered himself up as the chair of the peace board, the body that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.In one sense, he would be just a name plate, but to the extent he has a hinterland, it is construction. That means there is a possibility he will remain engaged, for the moment at least.Those observing him said Trump began to feel he had a serious opportunity to solve a conflict he variously said had lasted 3,000 or 600 years, in contrast to his failed attempt in Ukraine. The prospect of winning the Nobel peace prize, Trump’s obsession, hovered once more into view.View image in fullscreenThat meant that once his plan was published Trump did not let go, but kept the pressure up on Hamas, warning of the group’s annihilation if it did not release the hostages in return for 250 Palestinians. But neither did Trump let Israel backtrack. Speed and momentum became of the essence.It was the seniority of the negotiators who went to the talks in Egypt that revealed the stars were finally aligning and Hamas would be forced into releasing all the hostages it held, even though Israel would not immediately leave all of Gaza. The scenes were extraordinary enough in that the Hamas negotiators were – albeit through mediators – holding talks with a government that had tried to assassinate them a month earlier. By the time they started the participants sensed a deal was unavoidable.The arrival of Kushner, the head of the intelligence office of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İbrahim Kalın, and the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, confirmed a breakthrough was imminent.During the talks, Hamas negotiators led by its leader Khalil al-Hayya, Mohammad al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general of Islamic Jihad, and Jamil Mezher, the deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, sought to clarify the names of the Palestinians to be released, the mechanism of the release of the Israeli hostages and the “day after” aspects of the agreement, poring over the maps showing a withdrawal of Israel’s forces.But Hamas was told while the critical “day after” principles stood, the details would have to wait for a second linked negotiation. The risk for Hamas now is that it loses its leverage upon handing over the hostages – and that fears Israel will then refuse to engage with the plans for Gaza’s future or find a pretext to restart the fighting will be realised. The domestic brake on Netanyahu resuming the fighting – the demand to save the hostages – would have gone.Here Trump’s continued willingness to keep up the pressure on Netanyahu was critical, and is acknowledged by Hamas in its statements referring to the US president as guarantor of the plan. On Fox News, Trump said he had told Netanyahu that “Israel cannot fight the world”, adding: “And he understands that very well.” He said: “You will see people coexisting and Gaza will be rebuilt.”By contrast Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu, said: “There’s no phase two. That’s clear to everyone, right? Phase two might happen someday, but it’s unrelated to what’s just been signed.”Many elements of Trump’s 20-point plan are being addressed by diplomats from the US, Europe and Arab states at a separate gathering in Paris on Wednesday.View image in fullscreenOn the agenda are issues such as the Hamas handover of weapons; its exclusion from future administrations; the mandate of an international peacekeeping force; the delivery of resumed aid flows; and the future relationship between Gaza and the West Bank as the nucleus of a future Palestinian state. On almost all these, there have been deep differences between Israel on the one hand, and Europe and the Arab states on the other.But in a promising sign, US officials will attend this meeting, suggesting Washington does not favour an armed status quo.At the centre of these discussions is Blair, who is to sit on the peace board or interim government that will oversee the Palestinian technocrats that help implement reconstruction plans. Blair will have to convince the Palestinian Authority that he is not offering a colonial-esque arrangement, as the former prime minister says it fears. But he is unlikely to do the job unless he has real powers, something he feels was not given when he was Middle East special envoy to the quartet.Arab leaders are seeking assurances that the international stabilisation force that eventually enters Gaza has a UN security council mandate, and that there is a clear plan to treat Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity.One of the most difficult issues unresolved in the rushed talks in Egypt is the timing of the Hamas weapons handover. The group may be willing to deliver its arms to an Arab-run authority, or a Palestinian civil police force, but not to Israel. Some diplomats even believe Hamas may feel the need to take a new political course, something it has been close to doing before. “Gazans are going to demand to know what the past two years were about,” one diplomat said.One diplomat involved in the talks said: “The tragedy is that this could have all been agreed 20 months ago, all the elements were there. The key Israeli objective – which is why it is a tragedy this war has gone on so long – was the removal of Hamas from future rule, and that was obtainable a long time ago.” More

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      ‘You cannot undo a wrongful execution’: push to halt killing of Texas man in ‘shaken baby’ case

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      At 6pm next Thursday, barring a last-minute reprieve, Robert Roberson will become the first person in America to be executed under the theory of “shaken baby syndrome”, a medical diagnosis from the 1970s that is so disputed it is now widely denounced as junk science.Roberson, 58, will enter the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas, where he will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs. He will be put to death having been convicted of shaking to death his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002.A coalition of advocates is calling for the execution to be called off, arguing Roberson is innocent of a crime that never even happened. They include several people exonerated from shaken baby syndrome convictions; more than 80 bipartisan Texas lawmakers; the lead detective in Roberson’s original investigation; and members of his trial jury.Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Guardian that not only was her client’s life in the balance – so too was justice. “If Robert is executed next week, with all that is known about the profound due-process problems on top of his actual innocence, then Texas would have no legitimate justice system.”She added: “How could you have confidence in a system that cannot fix a case like this, where the science has been so thoroughly discredited?”A year ago, Roberson came within two hours of dying by lethal injection and was only saved by a frenzied late-night intervention by Texas legislators. In an interview with the Guardian from death row shortly before that execution date, he denied having shaken his daughter.“I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that to be on nobody: to lose a child, especially if you tried to do right and you loved her and tried to get to know her, then to be accused.”Now Sween and Roberson’s legal team are scrambling yet again to prevent him becoming a statistic – as the first person on death row to be judicially killed on the back of disputed shaken baby syndrome.Last week his defense team petitioned the US fifth circuit court of appeals requesting a federal review of new evidence that points to an alternative explanation for Nikki’s death. The petition includes expert testimony from 10 medical pathologists who question the findings of Nikki’s 2002 autopsy.The experts conclude that the child’s brain swelling was not caused by violent shaking, but was the result of serious infection. Nikki had undiagnosed pneumonia at the time she slumped into a coma, according to the experts, exacerbated by improper prescription of dangerous medicines and a short fall from the bed in which she was sleeping.The petition also highlights that a few years ago Roberson was found to have autism, a condition which had gone undiagnosed at the time of his daughter’s death. His lawyers argue that this helps explain how flat and unemotional he appeared when he brought the dying girl into hospital, a demeanor that was used against him at trial as evidence of guilt.A separate petition has been pending for eight months at the state’s top criminal court, the Texas court of criminal appeals. The 163-page document filed by Roberson’s lawyers in February argues that science behind shaken baby syndrome had been so undermined by new evidence that today “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder”.A decision from the court is expected any day.Last year, the same criminal appeals court overturned the 35-year sentence of Andrew Roark, who had been found guilty of injuring his girlfriend’s 13-month-old child in 1997. The judges found that key scientific testimony at Roark’s trial had been unreliable, and concluded that if it were presented to a jury today it would “likely yield an acquittal”.There are glaring similarities between the Roark case and Roberson’s conviction. Both men became the subject of shaken baby syndrome accusations on the back of a diagnosis from the same child abuse specialist, Janet Squires, delivered from the same hospital.“The similarities between the cases are overwhelming,” Sween said.The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, continues to stand by Roberson’s death sentence, describing the efforts of the condemned man’s supporters as “11th-hour, one-sided, extra­ju­di­cial stunts that attempt to obscure facts and rewrite his past”.In an unusual move, Paxton secured next week’s execution date while the prisoner’s petition was still pending before the appeals court.Some of Nikki’s other family members are also pressing for the execution to go ahead.Shaken baby syndrome (SBS), which often now goes under the name “abusive head trauma”, was developed in the early 1970s to diagnose children who became severely ill or died from internal brain injuries without necessarily showing outward signs of harm. One of its earliest proponents was the British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch.View image in fullscreenBy the 1980s the theory had hardened into the presumption that a triad of symptoms in children under two years old conclusively indicated abusive shaking. If those three symptoms were indicated – brain swelling, bleeding between the tissues covering the brain, and bleeding behind the eyes – then a crime must have been committed.In the past 15 years medical understanding has grown. It is now widely recognised that other factors can lie behind such brain injuries, including underlying conditions, infections, and even relatively short falls.Studies have also shown that it is physically unlikely that severe brain trauma is caused by shaking alone, without there also being visible injuries to the spine or skull. In Roberson’s case, Nikki displayed no such injuries.Guthkelch himself warned in 2012 that the three symptoms he had identified should not be taken as categoric signs of abuse. “There was not a vestige of proof when the name was suggested that shaking, and nothing else, causes the triad,” he said.In 2023 a group of global experts drawn from many disciplines including pediatrics, pathology, ophthalmology, neurology, physics and biomechanics reviewed the literature on SBS. Their work was published as a book, Shaken Baby Syndrome: Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy.The book’s co-editor, Keith Findley, said that “we consistently reached the conclusion that the scientific underpinnings for shaken baby syndrome are just not there. This is not to deny that abuse happens. It’s to say that medical findings alone simply cannot be a reliable basis for diagnosing child abuse.”Findley, who is founder of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, said: “It is absolutely horrifying to think we are days away from killing a man based on scientific assertions that are known to be wrong”.As medical doubts have grown about the reliability of an SBS diagnosis, so too have concerns about its application in criminal cases. Since 1989, 39 parents and caregivers have been exonerated in the US having been convicted largely on the grounds of a faulty SBS hypothesis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.Two of those exonerations were in Texas, including Roark’s last November.Josh Burns, 49, is an SBS exoneree. In 2014, when he was working as a Delta Air Lines pilot and living in Michigan, his daughter Naomi suffered a bout of vomiting and he was accused of having harmed her by violent shaking.The girl was taken into foster care, and he was convicted of child abuse and spent a year in jail. It took him 10 years to clear his name.An investigation by the state’s conviction integrity unit last year concluded there had been no reliable evidence of harm. Naomi’s symptoms could be explained by dehydration caused by a stomach bug.Burns and his family paid a devastating price for his wrongful conviction. He lost his job as a pilot, and his family was forced to move out of Michigan – ironically, they ended up in Texas, where Roberson is now scheduled to be executed.“I know how gut-wrenching and soul-crushing it is to be accused of harming the person that you love the most,” Burns told the Guardian. He has joined other SBS exonerees to campaign for a reprieve for Roberson, viscerally aware that there is a critical difference between his plight and Roberson’s.“You can undo a wrongful conviction like mine,” he said. “But you cannot undo a wrongful execution.”Audrey Edmunds, 64, has also joined the campaign to save Roberson. She was babysitting a neighbor’s child, Natalie, in Wisconsin in 1995 when the girl fell ill and died.She was convicted a year later of first-degree reckless homicide under the SBS hypothesis. At trial key facts, including that Natalie had visited the doctor 24 times in the 27 weeks before her death, were glossed over.Edmunds served 11 years of an 18-year sentence, before the forensic pathologist in her case recanted his own testimony having taken on board changes in scientific understanding. In 2008 she was released and all charges against her dismissed.“Mr Roberson should never have been put on death row,” Edmunds said. “Executing him would be a crime. He has been through more than enough.”She said that she saw strong parallels between her case and Roberson’s. “They checked into junk science. They went down a one-way road, and didn’t look at all the other factors.”Texas was the first state in the country to allow prisoners to challenge their sentences on grounds of junk science. Since its inception in 2013, the so-called “junk science writ” has been taken up by about 70 death row prisoners.None of their challenges have been successful. More

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      US shutdown deadlock deepens as senators reject competing bills

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      The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.Democrats are demanding that any bill to fund the government be paired with an array of healthcare-centered provisions, including an extension of premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans. Those expire at the end of the year, and costs are set to rise for the plans’ roughly 20 million enrollees if they are not renewed.Donald Trump has sought to pressure the Democrats to accept the GOP’s proposal, which would only extend funding through 21 November. On Tuesday, the White House office of management and budget released a memo arguing that federal workers were not entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law saying they should be.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, poured cold water on that prospect at a press conference the following day, saying: “I think it is statutory law that federal employees be paid. And that’s my position. I think they should be.”Both parties otherwise remained unmoved in their demands. The House of Representatives passed the GOP’s bill on a near party-line vote last month, and Johnson has kept the chamber out of session ever since in a bid to force Senate Democrats to approve it.At his press conference, the speaker alleged that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer was opposing the Republican bill out of fear from a primary challenge by the “communists” in his party.“They are worried about the Marxist flank in their Democrat party,” Johnson said.“He’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left. I’ve noted that Chuck Schumer is a very far-left politician, but he is not far enough left for the communists, and they’re coming for him, and so he has to put up his dukes and show a fight.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer once again faulted Republicans for refusing to negotiate on the Democrats’ healthcare demands. The Senate’s majority leader John Thune has said he will discuss the ACA tax credit issue, but only when government funding is restored.“We can do both: fix healthcare and reopen the government. This is not an either-or thing, which Republicans are making it. The American people don’t like it,” Schumer said.While both parties’s rank-and-file lawmakers have appeared united around their leaders’ strategies, the GOP suffered a high-profile defection on Monday when far-right lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene backed negotiations over the tax credits. However in the days since, no other Republicans have publicly joined her.Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican congresswoman representing a swing district, has received bipartisan support for legislation that would extend the credits for a year, and is viewed a potential compromise in the funding standoff.At a press conference on Tuesday, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called the idea a “nonstarter”.“It was introduced by the same people who just permanently extended massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors,” Jeffries said, referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans passed this year without Democratic votes. More

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      Why Tony Blair just can’t kick the habit of imperial interference in the Middle East | Oliver Eagleton

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      “There are two types of politician,” Tony Blair observed in 2012. “Reality creators and reality managers.” While postwar politics was generally a matter of steady management, he claimed, the emerging order called for more creativity, “both in the economy and foreign policy”. Only a particular type of visionary leader was fit for the task.More than a decade later, Blair has now joined forces with the pre-eminent reality-creator, Donald Trump, to draft a hallucinatory 20-point plan for Gaza. It aims to turn the devastated Strip into what seems to resemble a colonial protectorate: cleansed of armed conflict, buzzing with development projects and a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow, and overseen by an international “board of peace” with Trump himself as chair.The authors of the programme have not explained how they intend to impose it on a resistant population, or how they will persuade Hamas to disarm and concede defeat. So there is a high likelihood that the Blair-Trump fantasy will remain just that. Whatever its fortunes, though, it is a clear reflection of our historical moment, representing the most recent mutation of an imperial worldview that has already left a trail of destruction across the Middle East.For Blair, “the economy and foreign policy” have long been entwined. His military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan tried to spread the virtues of the market to supposedly backward nations. The privatisation of resources created new investment opportunities, while a wide range of profiteers, from weapons dealers to security contractors, made a killing off the wars themselves.Upon leaving office in 2007, Blair immediately took up a post as Middle East envoy for the so-called Quartet: the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia. His work in Palestine displayed the same unerring faith in free enterprise. He proposed a series of “industrial parks” to attract foreign investment, advocated eccentric agribusiness and tourism schemes, and promoted other ventures that raised questions about possible conflicts of interest: while being paid £2m per year as a JP Morgan adviser, for example, he was accused of using his Quartet role to advance the interests of JP Morgan clients. (Blair denied the claims, insisting he did not know about the links between the bank he worked for and the companies it served.)As envoy, Blair often bypassed or rejected political solutions – fighting vigorously against Palestinian attempts to win statehood at the UN – and instead treated economics as the route to progress. His diplomatic activities seemed to be based on the notion that peace would naturally follow prosperity. If securing the latter was the task of the intrepid statesman, then strong ties to the business sector could perhaps be framed as an asset.Yet Blair’s tenure in the Middle East brought no diminution of the conflict. In 2012, a senior Palestinian official gave a succinct assessment of his record: “Useless, useless, useless.” Still, undeterred by failure and fond of dramatic political comebacks, the former prime minister now appears to be seeking to apply the same logic to Gaza. Since the early months of the war, he has reportedly been crafting his plan for the “day after”.Staff from his thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), participated in a project that appeared to endorse ethnic cleansing in the territory and outlined what could be built atop its mass graves: a “Trump riviera”, an “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone”, “regional datacentres”. Although Blair’s organisation claimed it had no meaningful involvement in the plan, and rejected the idea of displacing Palestinians, there are a number of continuities with his own blueprint, details of which were soon leaked to the press.Drawn up with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the 21-page document suggests reconstructing Gaza through “public-private partnerships”, forged by a “commercially driven authority, led by business professionals and tasked with generating investable projects with real financial returns”. Hamas would be demobilised and a small unelected executive would be installed. This would include Blair himself in a prominent role, plus “leading international figures with executive and financial expertise” and “at least one qualified Palestinian representative (potentially from the business or security sector)”. An international stabilisation force would meanwhile put down “threats to public order”.View image in fullscreenBlair met Kushner and Trump in the White House on 27 August and his proposals got a warm welcome from the president. They have since been refined and repackaged as the Trump “peace plan”. As with previous versions of the initiative, the emphasis is on creating a Gaza that is “conducive to attracting investment”, and in which Israel will continue to reign supreme. Blair is primed to take charge of governing the Strip until some unspecified future point when day-to-day administration may be returned to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe practical issues are glaring. Which states would be irresponsible enough to send troops to serve this novel dictatorship? How can it hope to sustain itself with no mandate nor legitimacy? Even more striking, however, is the extent to which the plan signals the overlap between Blair’s ethos and Trump’s.It is not unreasonable to suggest that Blair might see a business opportunity beneath the rubble of Gaza. To figure out who may benefit, we can look at his network of paymasters. Since 2021, Larry Ellison, founder of the tech company Oracle, has donated or pledged £257m to the TBI. The thinktank has, in turn, transformed into what one commentator has called an “Oracle dealership”: promoting the company’s software around the globe, including in impoverished countries where it has been criticised for potentially “trapping” and “indebting” users. Ellison is also a prominent supporter of Israel who has given millions to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and, according to Haaretz, once offered Benjamin Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle board. Were Blair to rule over Gaza – perhaps establishing “regional datacentres” in line with the TBI-linked plan – it is possible that Ellison could wield major influence.The TBI has also received huge sums from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, while Blair has been given a lucrative advisory contract by the UAE state-owned investment firm Mubadala. All three states have readily endorsed the plan for Gaza. Once the besieged enclave is opened for investment, they may well be first in line. Blair’s work for these petro-monarchies tallies with his involvement in the fossil fuel industry, having taken cash from a BP-led consortium, the oil company PetroSaudi and the South Korean UI Energy Corporation, which has interests in the Middle East. Given that Israel has recently granted new licences to explore for oil and gas off the Mediterranean coast, such connections could prove significant later down the line.In one sense, then, this “peace plan” could simply be read as an extension of Blair’s belief in market-led development. Yet this chapter in the annals of colonialism also has a uniquely Trumpian twist. Visions of a new world order that underpinned earlier regime-change projects are gone. Here politics is reduced to dealmaking, grand strategy to crude self-interest. The fusion of public power and private profit is complete. Blair may be creating new realities, but few would want to inhabit them.

      Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right

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      Mamdani attends Israelis for Peace vigil after his 7 October statement draws ire from Israel

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      The New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday evening attended a vigil in Manhattan convened by Israelis for Peace, an anti-occupation group of Israelis in New York who have rallied weekly since 2023 to call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.Sitting in Union Square alongside New York City comptroller Brad Lander, his one-time rival for the Democratic nomination who has been campaigning for him, Mamdani listened as speakers at the event – which marked the two-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel – called for an end to the killing and to Israel’s occupation, and for equal rights for Palestinians.Earlier in the day, Mamdani drew ire from Israel over his statement on the anniversary in which he commemorated both the Israeli victims from that day and Palestinian victims from Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza.“Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more. I mourn these lives and pray for the safe return of every hostage still held and for every family whose lives were torn apart by these atrocities,” Mamdani said in the statement on Tuesday.He denounced Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government for launching a “genocidal war” in Gaza as well. He also accused the US government of being “complicit”.“A death toll that now far exceeds 67,000; with the Israeli military bombing homes, hospitals, and schools into rubble,” Mamdani wrote. “Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief itself has run out of language. I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered.”He said the last two years had “demonstrated the very worst of humanity” and called for an end to Israeli “occupation and apartheid”.Mamdani’s statement prompted a sharp rebuke from the Israeli foreign ministry on X, accusing him of “acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” and “spreading Hamas’s fake genocide campaign”.“By repeating Hamas’s lies, he excuses terror and normalizes antisemitism. He stands with Jews only when they are dead. Shameful,” the post said.Israel stands widely accused of committing genocide in Gaza, where its ongoing military assault has killed tens of thousands of civilians, some 20,000 of them children, caused famine and mass starvation, and razed much of the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.Mamdani is no stranger to criticism for his views on the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, and the issue has proved a major flashpoint in the mayoral race.He has won significant support from certain segments of the Jewish community particularly among younger and more progressive voters, and faces stronger opposition from more conservative groups. A recent Marist poll found 35% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani, as does the same proportion supporting Cuomo. (The poll was taken before Eric Adams dropped out of the race.)The democratic socialist has faced criticism over his past refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”, which some view as a call to violence. He has since said he would discourage use of the phrase. He also recently reiterated his intention to order the NYPD to arrest Netanyahu should he travel to New York.His October 7 statement on Tuesday attracted pushback from other pro-Israel voices. David Frum, a writer at the Atlantic and former speechwriter for George W Bush, wrote on X: “The chilly formulaic language about the 10/7 atrocity … the intense angry passion of the denunciation of Israel’s self-defense … together they arrestingly reveal what the author cares about and what/who he does not care about.”Fox News anchor David Asman called the statement “obscene”. He wrote on X: “The ‘very worst of mankind’ is what Mamdani supporters are on the streets today celebrating…‘honoring’ the beasts responsible for Oct 7. He supports a ‘global intifada,’ responsible for 9/11 and Oct 7. He should not be mayor of a city hit so hard by Jihadists.”Noa Yachot contributed reporting More

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      Venezuela on edge over Trump regime change whispers: ‘If it does happen we are ready’

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      The mayor of Caracas had come to one of her city’s busiest tube stations wearing a camouflage T-shirt declaring herself a card-carrying combatant – and with a message to match.“They think they’re the owners of the world,” Carmen Meléndez complained of the Trump administration and its pressure campaign against Venezuela’s government. “But if they dare [to invade] we’ll be waiting for them here.”Meléndez said she hoped a US invasion was not on the horizon, even though they had shown themselves to be “a bunch of crazies, who are capable of anything”. “But if it does happen we are ready,” she added, “and we will use all of the weapons we have to defend the homeland.”Mayor Meléndez was at La Rinconada station to supervise an early morning drill: a practice response to fictitious cyberattack on the Caracas underground that had brought its trains to a halt.The rehearse evacuation, ordered by President Nicolás Maduro as part of a nationwide “civil protection and preparation of the people” exercise, came as Donald Trump turned the heat up on Venezuela’s leader to levels rarely seen before.Since early August, when Trump signed a secret directive authorizing military action against Latin America drug cartels, the US president has labelled Maduro a “narco-terrorist” fugitive and advertised a $50m reward for his arrest; deployed marines and warships off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast; and ordered at least four deadly strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats which have killed at least 21.Last week Trump again upped the ante, declaring a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels whose members were now considered “unlawful combatants”.View image in fullscreenWashington has justified its strikes as part of a crackdown on Venezuelan narco-traffickers who the US accuses of flooding its streets with drugs, supposedly at Maduro’s behest. “They’re the enemies of all humanity,” Trump told the UN last month, vowing to blow such “terrorist thugs … out of existence”.But many observers suspect Trump’s counter-narcotics crusade is really a pretext to depose Maduro, either by sparking an internal rebellion against Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian heir or perhaps through direct military intervention within Venezuela itself.Speaking to the New York Times last month, Venezuela’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, said she was convinced one of Trump’s “strategic objectives” was “what they call ‘regime change’”. “We will never handover our homeland!” Rodríguez vowed as she announced that Maduro would declare a state of emergency in the event of a US attack.Rodríguez and Meléndez are not the only Maduro allies talking tough in the face of US pressure. One recent evening, the interior minister Diosdado Cabello, appeared on television clutching a heavily annotated copy of a book about the “military thinking” of the Vietnamese revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh. The message was clear: any attempt to topple Maduro’s regime would suck US troops into a bloody quagmire such as the one that unfolded in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and nearly 60,000 American soldiers.Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for Crisis Group, doubted Trump had immediate plans to target Fort Tiuna, the military base where Maduro is thought to live.But Gunson did think Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June had left Venezuela’s leaders genuinely alarmed. In a recent letter to Trump, Maduro tried to defuse the situation, writing: “I respectfully invite you, President, to promote peace through constructive dialogue and mutual understanding throughout the hemisphere.”View image in fullscreen“What Trump did to Iran was a wake up call to the people in government here,” said Gunson. “A lot of analysts thought that wasn’t going to happen … But they did it – and the Iranians had no response. And I think that that was quite sobering for the Chavistas.”The idea of a US intervention is music to the ears of some of Maduro’s political foes, who are desperate to end his 12-year rule during which Venezuela’s economy and democracy have crumbled and millions have fled abroad.In a recent interview, the prominent conservative politician María Corina Machado – whose ally, Edmundo González, is widely believed to have beaten Maduro in last year’s election – hailed Trump’s “visionary” stance. “I totally support his strategy … I’m in favour of the US dismantling this criminal structure,” Machado, who is in hiding in Venezuela, told the Sunday Times.The exiled opposition leader Leopoldo López has said their movement supports “any scenario that helps us transition to democracy”.Robert Evan Ellis, a Latin America specialist who advised the state department on Venezuela policy during Trump’s first administration, saw a “50-50” chance of the opposition’s wish coming true.Trump’s failure to unseat Maduro with a “maximum pressure” campaign during his first term, made it more likely the US president would try to finish the job now, Evan Ellis said. “I think there’s … a certain determination not to essentially feel that he loses this time around as well – so I think that creates incentive,” he said.After the Caribbean boat strikes, Evan Ellis anticipated a “graduated escalation” of US pressure – perhaps air strikes against “narco-planes” or “narco-leaders” on Venezuelan soil: “You don’t just unnecessarily jump from blowing up a couple of ships to pulling the trigger on a major air-land campaign.”View image in fullscreenBut Evan Ellis did not rule out a large-scale “multi-pronged attack”, involving F-35 fighter jets destroying Venezuela’s aerial defences before troops “grab[bed] Maduro wherever he is, based on probably good insider intelligence” and took him to the US. On Thursday, Venezuela’s defence minister, Vladimir Padrino López, said five US “combat aircraft” had been detected flying off his country’s coast.Four days later, on Monday, another key Maduro ally, the national assembly president, Jorge Rodríguez, announced that he had informed US and European authorities of plans for an alleged “false flag operation” attack on the US embassy in Caracas. Rodríguez claimed right-wing extremists had been plotting to target the building with “lethal explosives”.The prospect of a US intervention fills many Venezuelans – even those opposed to Maduro – with dread. “If there’s a war, what will we do?” said Naide González, 58, a cleaner from 23 de Enero, a working class community in Caracas long considered a stronghold of Chavismo.In a recent Guardian interview, Juan González, the White House’s top Latin America official under Joe Biden, called Trump’s military buildup “political theatre” designed to convince Maga voters that he was taking a hard line on drugs and migrants coming from South America. But González feared that if Maduro was deposed, the US could stumble into a protracted guerrilla war, involving a variety of armed groups including government-linked paramilitaries, criminal organizations and Colombian rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN).“The conditions are ripe here for some kind of protracted low-intensity conflict, if the US gets it wrong – which they may well,” Gunson warned. “This country is absolutely packed from end to end with armed groups of various kinds, none of whom has any incentive to just surrender or stop doing what they’re doing.”David Smilde, a Tulane University Venezuela specialist, said neoconservative Trump officials and hard-line members of Venezuela’s opposition seemed convinced by the “absolutely absurd” idea that Maduro was “hanging on by threads” and that regime change could be achieved “with just a few limited strikes”.“This is the mentality that thought that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a house of cards and Iraq would be a cakewalk once you got rid of Saddam Hussein or took Baghdad,” Smilde added.At La Rinconada, government supporters vowed to resist any foreign intervention as commuters streamed out of the underground into a sunny Caracas morning.Amelia Contreras, a 68-year-old seamstress who is part of Maduro’s Bolivarian militia volunteer group, said she had been receiving first aid and firearms training in preparation for a possible attack. In the event of an incursion, Contreras had been tasked with defending Caracas’s electricity pylons. “We don’t want anyone coming along and interfering here – we won’t allow it,” she said.Kristian Laborín, a 48-year-old member of Maduro’s socialist party, had spent the last three Saturdays undergoing military training but still hoped the US would recoil. “President Trump, there’s still time for us to continue building friendly ties between our peoples,” Laborín said.But if the US president insisted on attacking, Laborín’s comrades would have no choice but to fight back. Parroting a government propaganda line, he said: “You’d be talking about a Hundred Years’ War!” More

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      Schumer rejects Trump’s claim that bipartisan government shutdown negotiations are under way – live

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      Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that negotiations with Democrats are underway.“Trump’s claim isn’t true — but if he’s finally ready to work with Democrats, we’ll be at the table,” Schumer said in a statement. “For months, Democrats have been calling on Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans to come to the table and work with us to deliver lower costs and better healthcare for the American people.”He added: “If President Trump and Republicans are finally ready to sit down and get something done on healthcare for American families, Democrats will be there — ready to make it happen.”Earlier today, Trump told reporters that “we are speaking with Democrats” regarding the ongoing government shutdown and that “some good things could happen with health care.”“Just hang in there, because I think a lot of good things could happen, and that could also pertain to health care,” Trump said.Donald Trump signed an executive order to allow construction of an access road to the Ambler mining district in Alaska and unlock domestic supplies of copper and other minerals, reversing an order from former President Joe Biden.The Biden administration had rejected a 211-mile road intended to enable mine development in the north central Alaskan region. Biden’s Interior Department had cited risks to caribou and fish populations that dozens of native communities rely on for subsistence.“This is something that should have been long operating and making billions of dollars for our country and supplying a lot of energy and minerals and everything else that we are talking about,” Trump said earlier today.“On day one, he signed a very important executive order unleashing Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, said on Monday. “And this is part of the continuation. There’s a number of things that have already happened with Alaska that are moving forward. There’s more to come. But big milestone today in reversing this Biden-era decision about the Ambler Road.”Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that negotiations with Democrats are underway.“Trump’s claim isn’t true — but if he’s finally ready to work with Democrats, we’ll be at the table,” Schumer said in a statement. “For months, Democrats have been calling on Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans to come to the table and work with us to deliver lower costs and better healthcare for the American people.”He added: “If President Trump and Republicans are finally ready to sit down and get something done on healthcare for American families, Democrats will be there — ready to make it happen.”Earlier today, Trump told reporters that “we are speaking with Democrats” regarding the ongoing government shutdown and that “some good things could happen with health care.”“Just hang in there, because I think a lot of good things could happen, and that could also pertain to health care,” Trump said.While speaking to reporters on Monday, President Donald Trump said that “Puff Daddy” has contacted him about a pardon.He’s referring to Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was sentenced on Friday to more than four years in prison on federal prostitution-related charges. Trump made these remarks while answering questions about the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted on sex trafficking charges, after the Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal.“I have a lot of people who have asked me for pardons,” President Trump said. “Puff Daddy has asked me for a pardon.”Regarding Maxwell’s appeal, Trump said: “I’m gonna have to take a look at it. I have to ask DOJ. I didn’t know they rejected it. I didn’t know she was even asking for it.”Voting is officially underway in California, the final step of lightning speed campaign to temporarily redraw the state’s Congressional districts.Proposition 50, known as the Election Rigging Response Act, was brought by Governor Gavin Newsom and California Democrats to offset Texas’s gerrymander, drawn at Donald Trump’s behest, that aims to safeguard Republicans’ fragile House majority next year.Unlike Texas and Missouri, where the Republican legislature approved a new map carved up in their favor, the effort in California will be decided by voters.Ballots have been mailed and the “yes” and “no” campaigns are in full swing. Polling suggests the yes campaign has the edge in the blue state that has been tormented by Trump since his return to office.Proponents have put the president at the center of their campaign, arguing that it is the best chance Democrats – and the country – has to put a check on Trump’s second term. Opponents argue that the new maps – designed to help elect five more Democrats to Congress – disenfranchise the millions of Republican voters in the state, while dismantling the work of the state’s independent commission, long considered a gold standard in fair map-drawing.While surveys consistently find that voters prefer independent redistricting and do not trust politicians to control the process, Newsom and Democrats have argued that their plan is both temporary and necessary to respond to Trump’s “powergrabs” in red states.The measure asks voters to amend the state constitution to adopt a new congressional map for 2026 through 2030. Election Day is 4 November.Michael Ellis, the deputy director of the CIA, unexpectedly removed a career lawyer who had been serving as the agency’s acting general counsel since January and appointed himself to the position, The New York Times reports.Ellis, who was involved in a number of controversies during President Trump’s first term, is keeping his role as the agency’s second-highest official while assuming responsibility for the agency’s top legal decisions.The reason behind his move remains unclear, but it has raised concern among current and former intelligence officials, according to the Times.President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would be open to striking a deal on Affordable Care Act subsidies that are at the heart of the government shutdown fight.But he also noted that “billions and billions” of dollars are being wasted, nodding to arguments from conservatives who do not want the health subsidies extended.“We are speaking with the Democrats,” Trump said, adding: “some very good things” could happen.Trump, who had been teasing layoffs for the last several days, said that if a Senate vote later Monday to reopen the government fails, “it could” trigger mass firings.“It could,” he said. “At some point it will.”A CBS News/YouGov survey shows that more Americans blame President Trump and congressional Republicans for the government shutdown than congressional Democrats.According to the poll, 39% of US adults say Trump and the GOP deserve most of the blame, compared to 30% who fault Democrats and 31% who place equal blame on both sides.A majority (52%) disapprove of how Trump and Republicans are handling the shutdown, while 49% disapprove of Democrats.Social Security Administration commissioner Frank Bisignano was named to the newly created position of CEO of the IRS today, making him the latest member of the Trump administration to be put in charge of multiple federal agencies.As IRS CEO, Bisignano will report to Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, who currently serves as acting commissioner of the IRS, the Treasury Department says. It is unclear whether Bisignano’s newly created role at the IRS will require Senate confirmation.The Treasury Department said in a statement that Bisignano will be responsible for overseeing all day-to-day IRS operations while also continuing to serve in his role as commissioner of the Social Security Administration.JB Pritzker, Illinois’ Democratic governor, said today that the federal immigration agents have “terrorized” people in his state in recent months.“They aren’t receiving any orders from Trump to cease and desist their aggressive behavior. Remember, they answer only to Trump, not to the people of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “Their plan all along has been to cause chaos that and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power. They think they can fool us all into thinking that the way to get out of this crisis that they created is to give them free rein.”Addressing reporters today, Illinois governor JB Pritzker said today that he plans to use “every lever” to resist the “power grab” from the Trump administration to quell protests in Chicago by deploying national guard troops.The state has now filed a lawsuit to block the president’s move to federalize troops. Earlier, a federal judge did not block the deployment immediately, but has given the justice department two days to respond in writing to the state’s temporary restraining order motion. The next hearing is set for Thursday.Per my earlier post, noting that the Chicago mayor has signed an executive order which prevents federal immigration agents from using city property for immigration staging, the White House has responded, calling the move “a sick policy” that “coddles criminal illegal alien killers, rapists, and gangbangers who prey on innocent Americans”. Donald Trump has announced that all “Medium and Heavy Duty Trucks” coming to the US from other countries will be subject to a 25% tariff starting 1 November.

      The White House criticized a Trump-appointed judge’s ruling, which temporarily blocked the deployment of national guard troops from Oregon and California. At a press briefing today, Karoline Leavitt said Judge Karin Immergut’s decision was “untethered in reality”, and said the administration was hopeful that the ninth US circuit court of appeals would rule in the president’s favor. Immergut said there was no evidence that persistent protests outside the immigration facility in Portland constituted an “invasion” – which could allow Trump to federalize guardsmen. The White House said that the facility is “under siege” by “anarchists”.

      In the midwest, Illinois has sued the Trump administration to block the deployment of hundreds of national guard troops to the streets of Chicago. In the lawsuit, leaders in the state say that Trump is using a “flimsy pretext”, which alleges an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in a Chicago suburb needs protecting as protests outside the building over Trump’s immigration crackdown continue. A reminder that over the weekend, the president sought to federalize up to 300 members of the Illinois national guard, despite the objections of the Democratic governor JB Pritzker. Trump sent another 400 from Texas, which Republican governor Greg Abbott has said he authorized.

      It is the sixth day of the government shutdown, and both parties continue to trade barbs over who is to blame. Congressional republicans say and the White House say that the ball is in the Democrats’ court, to pass a “clean” funding bill, and tackle healthcare negotiations once the government reopens. Meanwhile, Democrats say that their colleagues across the aisle have stonewalled any attempts at compromise. Earlier today, Karoline Leavitt said that any layoffs would be an “unfortunate consequence” of the shutdown, again laying blame at Democrats’ feet.

      The Senate will hold votes later today on the dueling stopgap funding bills, which are set to fail … yet again. The House of Representatives remains out of session, after Republican speaker Mike Johnson said that he wouldn’t be calling lawmakers back to Capitol Hill until the Senate advances the House-passed extension, known as a continuing resolution.

      The supreme court rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s challenge of her criminal conviction for recruiting and grooming minors who were sexually abused by her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking crimes. Two lower federal courts have ruled that a plea deal Epstein struck in 2007, which protected his co-conspirators, didn’t extend to Maxwell’s federal conviction.

      Beyond the beltway, delegations from Israel, Hamas and the US began negotiations in Egypt today. The White House said that it hopes for a swift release of all remaining Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners so that a lasting peace deal can be reached in the region.
      The cause of a huge fire at the beachfront home of a South Carolina judge who had reportedly been subjected to death threats is being investigated by state law enforcement investigators.The blaze at the home of Diane Goodstein – a Democrat-appointed circuit court judge – erupted on Saturday, sending three members of her family to the hospital, including her husband, a former state senator.However, Goodstein, 69, was walking her dogs at the time the blaze erupted at the three-story home in the luxury gated community on Edisto Beach in Colleton county.A spokesperson for the South Carolina state law enforcement division (Sled) confirmed it was investigating a fire in the county. “The investigation is active and ongoing. More information may be available as the investigation continues,” a Sled spokesperson told FITSNews.For his part, John Kittredge, the South Carolina chief justice, told the outlet: “At this time, we do not know whether the fire was accidental or arson. Until that determination is made, Sled chief Mark Keel has alerted local law enforcement to provide extra patrols and security.”Goodstein, who has served on the state judicial bench since 1989, in September issued a temporary injunction on the release of the state’s voter files to the Trump administration-led US justice department.Goodstein’s ruling was later publicly criticized by an assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon. The division has been at the forefront of efforts to acquire information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and social security numbers, of more than 3 million registered voters under an executive order targeting “non-citizen voter registration”. More

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      Boom time for US billionaires: why the system perpetuates wealth inequality

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      To many Americans, the economy of the past five years has been rough. Prices have soared yet pay remains stagnant. High mortgage rates have made buying a home a dismal prospect. The unemployment rate has been creeping up.Most people have indicated they are delaying major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a very small group of people, the last five years couldn’t have been any better.The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even amid all the economic instability, the stock market has only continued to grow. This growth has largely benefited just a small number of Americans: 10% of the population owns 93% of stock market wealth.As uneven as this distribution seems, it’s the system working as it is currently designed.In his new book Burned by Billionaires, inequality researcher Chuck Collins argues that the system that perpetuates wealth inequality is purposely opaque to most Americans.“[The wealthy] have bought their jets, they’ve bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they’re buying senators and media outlets,” Collins told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re now entering this other chapter of hyper-extraction where the wealthy are preying on the system of inequality.”Collins, a director at the Institute for Policy Studies, is no stranger to wealth. A great-grandson to Oscar F Mayer, the founder of the meat processing brand, he is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a non-partisan group of wealthy Americans who advocate for higher taxes for the rich and higher wages.To help others understand what exactly it means to be “wealthy” in the US, Collins borrows a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as “Richistan” villages: Affluent Town, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.To modernize the concept, Collins categorizes these “wealth villages” based on income levels. At the lowest tier, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m. The villages get more exclusive as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m; Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m; while Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.Altogether, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their experiences vary dramatically.“You could be in Lower Richistan, and you’re still sitting in the coach section of a commercial plane,” Collins said. “Whereas in Upper Richistan, you’re flying in a private jet. That’s a really different cultural experience. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don’t care if the whole system shuts down – you’re set.”The highest hill in “Richistan” is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world’s wealthiest. The power that this group has far surpasses those who are simply affluent, let alone the average American who doesn’t reside in “Richistan” at all.But Collins thinks the progressive slogan “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or “abolish billionaires” misses the point and has a “whiff of exterminism” to it.“It’s the distinction between individual behaviors and a system of rules and policies,” Collins said. “We should be concerned about an economic system that funnels so much wealth upward to the billionaires.”In other words, it’s not about the billionaires themselves, but about the system that allows them to have an enormous amount of influence and control over society today.To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: getting the wealth, defending the wealth, political capture and hyper-extraction.When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them residency in Affluent Town.But getting to Billionaireville requires serious investment and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the “wealth defense industry”: the tax layers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.“Wealth defense professionals use a wide variety of tools such as trusts, offshore bank accounts, anonymous shell companies, charitable foundations and other vehicles to hold assets,” he writes.To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m translates to political power, Collins says, and can be used to defend wealth and protect its accumulation. He notes that the 2010 landmark supreme court decision Citizens United v Federal Election Commission allowed the wealthy to pump a seemingly unlimited amount of money into elections, which has dramatically increased the power the ultra-wealthy have on politics.The last stage is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls “hyper extraction”, to describe how the wealthy have come to touch nearly every single part of an Americans’ everyday life largely through private equity, which allows wealthy individuals to invest in private companies.“Private equity is looking for those corners of the economy where they can squeeze things a little bit harder,” Collins said. “One thing I don’t think people understand is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can kind of turn around and say, ‘Where else can we squeeze money out of the economy?’ Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can’t go anywhere, [so] you can raise their rents.”Collins writes about the Mars family, best known for their dominance in the confectionary market, with M&Ms, Snickers and Skittles, but who have also cornered the pet industry. Along with being the biggest owner of pet care products in the US, the Mars family owns more than 2,500 pet care facilities across the US.The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It’s about people paying more for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to deep discontent.“The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being left behind [and] are economically suffering,” Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at tapping into a potent “phony populism”.“They can basically project this message that actually, Democrats are elitists. They just care about rich Hollywood executives and woke politics, and the people who care about you are over here. They’re the Donald Trumps of the world. They hear your pain, they feel your pain,” he said.The irony, Collins points out in his book, is that Trump has appointed a string of billionaires to his cabinet. Along with Elon Musk, who had a brief but powerful role as head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, which oversaw massive cuts to the federal workforce, Trump’s secretaries for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.His cabinet, along with help from Republicans in Congress, helped him pass his huge tax bill, which will make permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.While Republican continue to argue that immigration and bad trade agreements are the source of everyone’s economic problems, “the question becomes: Will the Democratic party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?” Collins said.Democrats, he argues, know what policies are needed to “reverse the updraft of wealth”, including deep changes to the tax system, increasing the minimum wage and strengthening unions.Collins recalled four years ago, when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The Democrats introduced the $4.3bn Build Back Better bill, which would have seen deep investments in the climate crisis, Medicaid, housing and childcare, among other things. The bill was going to be partially funded through changes in the tax system, including higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy and closing out tax loopholes.But while the bill passed the House in November 2021, it ultimately died in the Senate because two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, blocked it. Both Manchin and Sinema have since both left their Senate seats.“It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the majority of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these urgent problems,” Collins said. “Oligarchic power is not about creating so much as blocking. It’s easier to block than it is to make something meaningful happen, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like.”Collins is optimistic that there can be change, but said it would require sustained political momentum.“It may be before we know it that the pendulum swings back, and then it really is about maintaining a sustained really popular movement to make progress on this extreme inequality we’re living in,” he said. “We can fix this. It is fixable.” More