Public power: It’s not just for lefty conspiracy theorists anymore. Could this city use eminent domain to break up with PG&E and municipalize electric service? It may yet try. 

by Joe Eskenazi December 29, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)

PG&E, the utility company that, last week, reintroduced one-third of San Franciscans to the Dickensian joys of wearing coats indoors and tabulating the losses of spoiled food by candlelight, is not popular. 

Last night, in a move that would be on the nose if you could locate your face in the dark, a planned power outage was rudely preceded by an unplanned power outage.

If PG&E executives were visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, it wouldn’t have been a shock: In the last two decades and change, the utility company has blown up a quaint Peninsula town, triggered some of California’s most lethal and destructive wildfires, entered into a pair of bankruptcies, been convicted of multiple felonies and has been accused by a federal judge of engaging in a “crime spree” while acting as a “continuing menace to California.” 

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PG&E was once a City Hall darling: 14 years ago, Mayor Ed Lee blithely described it as a “great company that gets it.” Nobody’s talking like that anymore.

Beating up on the monopolistic utility is now great politics: If the energy generated by local politicians gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists could be harnessed and shunted into the city’s power lines, San Francisco would be well on its way to opening up a municipal utility. 

And you know what? We may yet do that. Whether PG&E likes it or not. 

In 2019, the city offered PG&E $2.5 billion to buy up those parts of the company’s electrical infrastructure serving San Francisco (not the gas infrastructure, though; the city wasn’t interested in that) in a bid to become one of several municipal utilities across the state. The offer was quickly rebuffed. 

But the city’s plan was still afoot.  It followed up in July 2021 by filing a petition with the California Public Utilities Commission “For a valuation of certain Pacific Gas & Electric company property pursuant to Public Utilities Code Section 1401-1421.” 

In September 2025, after four years and more than 130 legal filings, an administrative law judge issued a decision regarding how to even begin “establishing methods and standards” to evaluate the cost of buying out PG&E.

In other words: Nine years after PG&E spurned the city’s offer, and four years after San Francisco’s formal petition, the parties are ready to negotiate about the shape of the negotiating table.   

Electricity moves through the wires at close to the speed of light. The legal process of buying out the monopolistic provider of that electricity is glacial. 

Last week’s multi-day blackout, which was purportedly caused by yet another PG&E substation fire, was a convenient reminder of why elected officials and their constituents alike are fed up with the utility.

Buying it out and municipalizing power, once the raison d’être and white whale of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, is now mainstream city policy, and has been for years. 

“Right now, literally and figuratively,” says Susan Leal, the former general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, “this should be a fire sale.” 

It is unlikely that there will be an immediate purchase of smoke-damaged electric infrastructure in San Francisco’s future. The sclerotic pace of the legal process all but guarantees that. Even once the appraisal process is complete, PG&E could well turn down the city’s much more exhaustively researched and documented offer. 

And here’s where things get interesting. Nobody in city government will comment on the record, but it is also lost on nobody that an environmental impact report and a fair appraisal, both of which the city has been plodding its way through the process of obtaining, are precursors to eminent domain. 

So, yes: We may be witnessing the early stages of a literal power grab. 

If PG&E harbored  hopes of turning back the clock and getting back into the good graces of this city’s mayor and board of supervisors, last week’s blackout didn’t help at all.

The company’s rapport with the city has, in fact, been dimming for quite a while. When former city controller Ed Harrington left the city’s public utilities commission in 1991, he said, the city and PG&E got along just peachy.

By the time he returned to the PUC in 2008 to become its general manager, “it was war.” 

What happened? In 2008, the San Bruno explosion and the worst of the wildfires were yet to come. But things had changed: The deregulation crisis of the early 2000s actually wasn’t PG&E’s fault, but it did drive the utility into bankruptcy.

And, when it emerged from bankruptcy, “to deal with the large amount of debt it incurred, [PG&E] really was intent on reestablishing itself with Wall Street and regaining the goodwill of shareholders,” said Katherine Blunt, the author of “California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas And Electric — And What It Means for America’s Power Grid” in a 2022 radio interview. 

“At that point, you begin to see an effort in which earnings growth is really a priority. To achieve that, it cut expenses. That turned out to be the wrong choice. The cuts were such that safety was compromised.” 

For example, Blunt wrote that the small metal hook on a PG&E power tower that  sparked the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive wildfire in state history, was forged shortly after World War I, cost 59 cents, and had not been replaced for nearly 100 years.  

This, for San Francisco’s modern-day proponents of public power, is an argument for a public utility, instead of a regulated monopoly like PG&E. A municipal utility doesn’t need to curry favor with Wall Street or placate shareholders. Maintenance, at least in theory, would be a virtue, instead of a drain on earnings growth. 

PG&E’s overt disasters have strengthened the city’s argument. But, in recent decades, the city and PG&E have had a series of more under-the-radar disagreements.

The Public Utilities Commission has, since 2018, documented and sent to the Board of Supervisors instances of what it describes as “PG&E obstruction of local projects.” Lengthy waits for electricity hook-ups, the city claims, have added more than $20 million to costs on city projects, which were already slow and costly. 

This is not just a San Francisco grievance. In the wake of the blackout, Sen. Scott Wiener announced that he would once again introduce legislation to create “a clear, statutory pathway” for local governments to decouple from PG&E and form municipal utilities.

Colleagues as far off as Kern County, Wiener said, have told him that lethargic PG&E electric hookup timetables have led businesses to leave the state.

More than one observer has compared the city’s overtures regarding PG&E to a divorce. Fittingly, the estranged parties are fighting over everything.

In 2023, the San Francisco-born utility and San Francisco even did battle before the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee and at the Washington, D.C. circuit court regarding city efforts to provide more power to San Franciscans using PG&E’s power grid. 

Every move, no matter how minor, will be contested, and PG&E won’t give up its monopoly without a fight.

It’s far more efficient for PG&E to provide power to city dwellers like those in San Francisco — who are literally stacked atop one another — than in more spread-out parts of the state. Any steps from this or any city to secede will be challenged with great vengeance and furious anger.

All of which is to say: This will not be pretty. This will not be easy. This will not be quick. 

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In November 2008, the voters of San Francisco were given the opportunity to approve a ballot measure that would municipalize city electric service. 

The political message from PG&E and its allies to voters then was a simple one. Do you want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars so the people in charge of keeping San Francisco functional can now run your electricity company? More than 61 percent said, “hell no.”

That tack probably won’t fly now. San Francisco voters may not be aware of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between this city’s powers-that-be and its power provider.

But they have heard of San Bruno and those wildfires, as their electrical bills, for the most part, inched steadily higher. One-third of us did sit in the dark last week with perhaps even more missing out on Christmas shopping at the worst possible time. 

The choice between PG&E and the city isn’t so lopsided anymore, and the coming years could be interesting. Perhaps San Francisco’s future relationship with PG&E will be incendiary in more ways than one. 

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Joe Eskenazi

getbackjoejoe@gmail.com

Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi

Trump is following Stalin’s playbook

Dean Obeidallah

Dec 28, 2025 (deanobeidallah.substack.com)

The Trump regime has a message for all musicians and artists who dare to stand up to Donald Trump: They will destroy you!

I’m not exaggerating. That is the threat by the Trump appointed head of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell to a musician who refused to play at the venue after Trump’s minions illegally renamed it the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

Chuck Redd is a well-respected musician who has hosted the annual “Jazz Jams” Christmas Eve concert since 2006 at the Kennedy Center. But after Trump’s stooges on the Kennedy Center board recently voted to rename the venue after Trump, Redd chose to boycott instead of being a part of a center that celebrates Trump. As Redd told the AP, “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert.”

Who can blame Redd? It’s one thing to perform at a venue being run by Trump’s lackeys, it’s quite another to perform in a venue named to honor Trump. After all, Trump was declared a rapist by a federal judge, convicted of 34 felonies for cheating in the 2016 election, attempted a coup after losing the 2020 election, incited the Jan. 6 terrorist attack and then celebrated/pardoned the terrorists.

And to be clear, boycotting a business as a form of political protest has long been protected by the First Amendment. In 1982, a unanimous Supreme Court made that very clear in the case of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., where they ruled Black Mississippians had a constitutionally protected right to boycott local businesses in protest of segregation and racial inequality. As a result, white business owners who had sued the NAACP for organizing and participating in the boycott were not liable for damages.

But freedom of speech and constitutional rights doesn’t matter to Team Trump—as we have seen with their efforts to silence media outlets and even comedians like Jimmy Kimmel. In that fascist tradition, in stepped Grenell who posted on social media about Redd’s boycott: “The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts. But we will not let them cancel shows without consequences.”

Yep, Grenell made it clear that if any performer refuses to play the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” there will be “consequences.” Before you dismiss this as an empty threat, Grenell announced in a letter that was released to the public that the Kennedy Center would be suing Redd for $1 million for what he dubbed a “political stunt.”

The letter continues with Grennell again making the case that the lawsuit is in response to a political boycott, writing, “Your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances.” Finally, Grennell takes a personal dig at Redd writing that his Christmas concert “had been lagging considerably behind our other Christmas and holiday offerings, which have drawn strong crowds and enthusiastic response.”

As a lawyer myself, I can only assume Grennell didn’t speak to any lawyers before releasing this letter because dubbing Redd’s boycott “political” speech just made it just about impossible for them to win given the US Supreme Court decision cited above. And Grennell just undermined a breach of contract claim by saying in essence that no one was buying tickets to the show. That begs the question: What are the damages to the Kennedy Center if no one was buying tickets?!

But let’s put aside if the lawsuit will be successful or not. Trump’s lawsuits are not about winning or losing: They are about sending a message designed to intimidate others into submission and silence. Same goes for his Executive Orders targeting everything from Act Blue to universities.

This potential lawsuit is intended to scare other artists into not boycotting the Kennedy Center out of fear Trump will sue them—or use the power of the government to target them from IRS audits (like Richard Nixon did) to trumped up BS investigations.

Controlling the arts and artists is right from the far-right playbook. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made control of the arts one of his priorities–utilizing the arts to further Stalin’s “cult of personality” as well as by creating an idealized version of the Soviet Union. And those artists who refused to submit to Stalin were dubbed an “enemy of the people” and then punished —including interrogation, torture, humiliating public trials, and execution. Trump now threatening to destroy this musician for defying him is right from the Stalin playbook.

And like so much of Trump’s actions this second term, Trump’s control of arts institutions like the Kennedy Center follows the lead of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban—a close ally of Trump. As a 2022 report noted, “Orbán’s government implemented a new cultural policy in order to advance a single nationalist narrative and define alternative viewpoints as anti-Hungarian.” This included appointing Orban loyalists to the board of arts organizations just as Trump has with the Kennedy Center. The impact in Hungary has been “limiting creative expression and diminishing plurality in the arts.”

We must stand with Chuck Redd—just like we did with Jimmy Kimmel.

How? Well for starters, you can express your support for him on social media. You can also send him a message directly as I did via his Instagram account offering your support for his courageous stand. (Redd has a website but the “Contact” information is missing—not sure if that was because Trumpers were attacking him or if this predates this issue.)

If Trump sues Redd, the hope is the ACLU or other lawyers will volunteer to represent him. But if not, we should collectively crowdfund for his legal fees.

Trump is weakened politically. He is at his lowest point in approval ratings plus his mental and physical decline is undeniable. But he is still very dangerous.

That is why we must stand united when he seeks to silence anyone who has the courage to stand up to him. We need to send a message to all contemplating taking such a stand that we will have your back. That will hopefully incentivize others to do the same.

History tells us that when confronted with a fascist threat: Alone we will be crushed. But together, we can win. That is why we must stand up for Chuck Redd!

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) speaks during a news conference outside the US Capitol on November 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

“We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where… healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable,” the San Francisco lawmaker said.

Stephen Prager

Dec 28, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

US Rep. Ro Khanna defended California’s proposed tax on extreme wealth Saturday after a pair of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists threatened to launch a primary bid for his California House seat.

The proposal, which advocates are gathering signatures to place on the ballot in 2026, would impose a one-time 5% tax on those with net worths over $1 billion to recoup about $90 billion in Medicaid funds stripped from the state by this year’s Republican budget law. The roughly 200 billionaires affected would have five years to pay the tax.

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While higher taxes on the superrich are overwhelmingly popular with Americans, the proposal has rankled many of California’s wealthiest residents, as well as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said earlier this month that he’s “adamantly” against the measure.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that two of the valley’s biggest powerbrokers—venture capitalist and top Trump administration ally Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page—were threatening to reduce their ties to California in response to the tax proposal.

This has been a common refrain from elites faced with proposed tax increases, though data suggests they rarely follow through on their threats to bail on cities and states, even when those hikes are implemented. Meanwhile, the American Prospect has pointed out that the one-time tax would still apply to those who moved out of the Golden State.

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Khanna (D-Calif.), who is both a member of the House’s progressive faction and a longtime darling of the tech sector, has increasingly sparred with industry leaders in recent years over their reactionary stances on labor rights, regulation, and taxation.

In a post on X, the congressman reacted with derision at the threats of billionaire flight: “Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt] said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much.’”

https://x.com/krystalball/status/2005293420827590946?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2005293420827590946%7Ctwgr%5E0cc654cf4fd4bfc4f78d92df1caf8755c9cd4a19%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fkhanna-tech-oligarchs

Casado, who donated to Khanna’s 2024 reelection campaign according to OpenSecrets, complained that “Ro has done a speed run, alienating every moderate I know who has supported him, including myself.”

“Beyond being totally out of touch with [the moderate] faction of his base, he’s devolved into an obnoxious jerk,” Casado continued. “At least that makes voting him the fuck out all the more gratifying.”

Casado’s post received a reply from another former Khanna donor, Garry Tan, the CEO of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator.

“Time to primary him,” Tan said of Khanna.

Tan, a self-described centrist Democrat, has never run for office before. But he is notorious for his social media tirades against local progressives in San Francisco and was one of the top financial backers of the corporate-led push to oust the city’s liberal former district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022.

Casado replied: “Count me in. Happy to be involved at any level.”

Progressive commentator Krystal Ball marveled that “Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against Ro Khanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax.”

So far, neither Casado nor Tan has hinted at any concrete plans to challenge Khanna in 2026. If they did, defeating him would likely be a tall order—since his sophomore election in 2018, a primary challenger has never come within 30 points of unseating him.

But Khanna still felt the need to respond to the brooding tech royals. He noted that he has “supported a modest wealth tax since the day I ran in 2016,” which prompted another angry retort from Casado, who accused the congressman of “antagonizing the people who made your district the amazing place it is” with a tax on billionaires.

Khanna hit back at his critics with a lengthy defense of not just the wealth tax, but his conception of what he calls “pro-innovation progressivism.”

“My district is $18 trillion, nearly one-third of the US stock market in a 50-mile radius. We have five companies with a market cap over $1 trillion,” Khanna said. “If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other [House] members or 100 senators.”

“The seminal innovation in tech is done by thousands, often with public funds,” Khanna continued. “Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation… But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2% tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory.”

“We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where 70% of Americans believe the American dream is dead and healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable,” he concluded. “What will stifle American innovation, what will make us fall behind China, is if we see further political dysfunction and social unrest, if we fail to cultivate the talent in every American and in every city and town… So, yes, a billionaire tax is good for American innovation, which depends on a strong and thriving American democracy.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Stephen Prager

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on March 5, 2025 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

“Obviously, they have issues with what is in that video, and that’s why they don’t want everybody to see it,” Sen. Mark Kelly said of administration officials after the meeting.

Brett Wilkins

Dec 16, 2025

https://trinitymedia.ai/player/trinity-player.php?pageURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fhegseth-briefing-boats&contentHash=420c66fa0bcf61f1f1c8fd58c9b02b5cc182f72457e72fdd3e0f2714da9c9c60&unitId=2900021701&userId=5752cafe-a61d-4177-b146-0c8454dc0ef8&isLegacyBrowser=false&version=20251224_4ea8e4f416f9ec053edc1ab8fdde99cf11b51ae5&useBunnyCDN=0&themeId=478&isMobile=0&unitType=tts-player&integrationType=web

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that the Pentagon will not release unedited video footage of a September airstrike that killed two men who survived an initial strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea, a move that followed a briefing with congressional lawmakers described by one Democrat as an “exercise in futility” and by another as “a joke.”

Hegseth said that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees would be given a chance to view video of the September 2 “double-tap” strike, which experts said was illegal like all the other boat bombings. The secretary did not say whether all congressional lawmakers would be provided access to the footage.

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“Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters following a closed-door briefing during which he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio fielded questions from lawmakers.

As with a similar briefing earlier this month, Tuesday’s meeting left some Democrat attendees with more questions than answers.

“The administration came to this briefing empty-handed,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters. “If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean?”

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That includes preparations for a possible attack on oil-rich Venezuela, which include the deployment of US warships and thousands of troops to the region and the authorization of covert action aimed at toppling the government of longtime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Tuesday’s briefing came as House lawmakers prepare to vote this week on a pair of war powers resolutions aimed at preventing President Donald Trump from waging war on Venezuela. A similar bipartisan resolution recently failed in the Senate.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and co-author of one of the new war powers resolution, said in a statement: “Today’s briefing from Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth was an exercise in futility. It did nothing to address the serious legal, strategic, and moral concerns surrounding the administration’s unprecedented use of US military force in the Caribbean and Pacific.”

“As of today, the administration has already carried out 25 such strikes over three months, extrajudicially killing 95 people,” Meeks noted. “That this briefing to members of Congress only occurred more than three months since the strikes began—despite numerous requests for classified and public briefings—further proves these operations are unable to withstand scrutiny and lack a defensible legal rationale.”

.@PabloReports: Were you satisfied with the answers you’ve gotten so far in this classified briefing on Venezuela?

AOC: Oh, hell no. It was a joke. This was not a serious intelligence briefing. This was the communication of an opinion. pic.twitter.com/5rQpLMSv6F

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2025

Briefing attendee Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.)—who is in the administration’s crosshairs for reminding US troops that military rules and international law require them to disobey illegal orders—said of Trump officials, “Obviously, they have issues with what is in that video, and that’s why they don’t want everybody to see it.”

Defending Hegseth’s decision to not make the boat strike video public, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) argued that “there’s a lot of members that’s gonna walk out there and that’s gonna leak classified information and there’s gonna be certain ones that you hold accountable.”

Mullin singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who, along with the Somalian American community at large, has been the target of mounting Islamophobic and racist abuse by Trump and his supporters.

“Not everybody can go through the same background checks that need to be cleared on this,” he said. “Do you think Omar needs all this information? I will say no.”

Rejecting GOP arguments against releasing the video, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said after attending Tuesday’s briefing: “I found the legal explanations and the strategic explanations incoherent, but I think the American people should see this video. And all members of Congress should have that opportunity. I certainly want it for myself.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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The British Empire, in steep decline on the eve of World War I, is a cautionary tale for a decayed U.S. Empire a century later.

Chris Hedges Dec 27, 2025 (chrishedges@substack.com)

At the start of the 20^th century, the British Empire was, like our own, in terminal decline. Sixty percent of Englishmen were physically unfit for military service, as are 77 percent of American youth. The ruling Liberal Party, like the Democratic Party, while it acknowledged the need for reform, did little to address the economic and social inequalities that saw the working class condemned to live in substandard housing, breathe polluted air, be denied basic sanitation and health care and forced to work in punishing and poorly paid jobs.

The Tory government, in response, formed an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration to examine the “deterioration of certain classes of the population,” meaning, of course, the urban poor. It became known as the report on “the degeneracy of our race.” Analogies were swiftly drawn, with much accuracy, with the decadence and degeneracy of the late Roman Empire.

Rudyard Kipling, who romanticized and mythologized the British Empire and its military, in his 1902 poem “The Islanders,” warned the British that they had grown complacent and flaccid from hubris, indolence and privilege. They were unprepared to sustain the Empire. He despaired of the loss of martial spirit by the “sons of the sheltered city — unmade, unhandled, unmeet,” and called for mandatory conscription. He excoriated the British military for its increasing reliance on mercenaries and colonial troops, “the men who could shoot and ride,” just as mercenaries and militias increasingly augment American forces overseas.

Kipling damned the British public for its preoccupation with “trinkets” and spectator sports, including “the flannel fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals,” athletes whom he believed should have been fighting in the war in South Africa. He foresaw in the succession of British military disasters during the South African Boer War, which had recently ended, the impending loss of British global dominance, much as the two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East have eroded U.S. hegemony.

The preoccupation with physical decline, also interpreted as moral decline, is what led Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to decry “fat generals,” and order women in the military to meet the “highest male standards” for physical fitness. It is what is behind his “Warrior Ethos Tasking,” plans to enhance physical fitness, grooming standards and military readiness.

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia. Almost 800 generals, admirals and their senior enlisted leaders were ordered into one location from around the world on short notice. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

We live in an eerily similar historical moment. Britain, within 12 years of Kipling’s lament, was plunged into the collective suicide of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of over a million British and Commonwealth troops and doomed the British Empire.

H.G. Wells, who anticipated trench warfare, tanks and machine guns, was one of the very few to see where Britain was headed. In 1908, he wrote “The War in the Air.” He warned that future wars would not be limited to antagonistic nation-states but would become global. These wars, as was true in the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, would carry out the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians. He also foresaw in “The World Set Free,” the dropping of atomic bombs.

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Nearly one third of the population in Edwardian England endured abject poverty. The cause, as Seebohm Rowntree noted in his study of the slums, was not, as conservatives claimed, alcoholism, laziness, a lack of initiative or responsibility by the poor, but because “the wages paid for unskilled labour in York are insufficient to provide food, shelter, and clothing adequate to maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency.”

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty among Western industrialized nations, estimated by many economists at far above the official figure of 10.6 percent. In real terms, some 41 percent of Americans are poor or low-income, with 67 percent living paycheck to paycheck.

British eugenicists from the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics — which was funded by Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” — advocated “positive eugenics,” the “improvement” of the race by encouraging those deemed superior — always white members of the middle and upper classes — to have large families. “Negative eugenics” was advocated to limit the number of children born to those deemed “unfit.” This would be achieved through sterilization and the separation of genders.

Winston Churchill, who was home secretary in the liberal government of H.H. Asquith in 1910-11, backed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded,” calling them a “national and race danger” and “the source from which the stream of madness is fed.”

The Trump White House, led by Stephen Miller, is intent on carrying out a similar culling of American society. Those endowed with “negative” hereditary traits — based usually on race — are condemned as human contaminants that an army of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are terrorizing, incarcerating and purging from society.

Miller, in emails leaked in 2019, lauds the 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints,” written by Jean Raspail. It chronicles a flotilla of South Asian people who invade France and destroy Western civilization. The immigrants, who the Trump administration are now hunting down, are described as “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms” and “teeming ants toiling for the white man’s comfort.” The South Asian mobs are “grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta,” led by a feces-eating “gigantic Hindu” known as “the turd eater.”

This, in its most scurrilous form, is the thesis of the “Great Replacement” theory, the belief that the white races in Europe and North America are being “replaced” by “lesser breeds of the earth.”

Donald Trump boasts that he will be the “fertilization president.” American couples — meaning white couples — will be given incentives by his administration to have more children to counter declining birth rates. In the vernacular of the right wing, those who promote this updated version of “positive eugenics” are known as “pronatalists.” The Trump administration will also reduce refugees admitted to the United States next year to the token level of 7,500, with most of these spots filled by white South Africans.

Trump’s allies in Big Tech are busy creating the fertility infrastructure to conceive children with “positive” hereditary traits. Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, which is facilitating the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, has backed an embryo screening company called Orchid Health. Orchid promises to help parents design “healthy” children through embryo testing and selection technology. Elon Musk, a fervent pronatalist and believer in the Great Replacement theory, is reportedly a client of the startup. The goal is to empower parents to screen embryos for IQ and select “their children’s intelligence before birth,” as the Wall Street Journal notes.

We are making the same self-defeating mistakes made by the British political class that oversaw the decline of the British Empire and orchestrated the suicidal folly of World War I. We blame the poor for their own impoverishment. We believe in the superiority of the white race over other races, crushing the plethora of voices, cultures and experiences that create a dynamic society. We seek to counter injustices, along with economic and social inequality, with hypermasculinity, militarism and force, which accelerates the internal decay and propels us toward a disastrous global war, perhaps, in our case, with China.

Wells scoffed at the idiocy of an entitled ruling class that was unable to analyze or address the social problems it had created. He excoriated the British political elite for its ignorance and ineptitude. They had vulgarized democracy, he wrote, with their racism, hypernationalism and simplistic cliché-ridden public discourse, stoked by a sensationalist tabloid press.

When a crisis came, Wells warned, these mandarins, like our own, would set the funeral pyre of empire alight.

Media conglomerates want the president’s permission for mergers—and control of news outlets is at stake.

By Franklin Foer

DECEMBER 22, 2025 (TheAtlantic.com)

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The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

More at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/trump-paramount-netflix-cnn-cbs/685349/

11 December 2025 (BBC.com)

Paul KirbyEurope digital editor

The government of Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov has resigned after protesters took to the streets in cities across the country and filled the centre of the capital Sofia on Wednesday night.

Zhelyazkov’s dramatic move came ahead of a vote of no confidence in parliament, and 20 days before Bulgaria joins the euro.

Protesters had accused his minority centre-right government, in power since January, of widespread corruption. The government had already scrapped a controversial budget plan for next year in response to the demonstrations last week.

“We hear the voice of citizens protesting against the government,” Zhelyazkov said in a TV address.

“Both young and old have raised their voices for [our resignation],” he added. “This civic energy must be supported and encouraged.” A statement on the government website said ministers would continue in their roles until a new cabinet was elected.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 people turned out in Sofia’s central Triangle of Power and Independence Square on Wednesday evening calling for the government to go. The words “Resignation” and “Mafia Out” were projected onto the parliament building.

They were backed last week by President Rumen Radev who had also called on the government to stand down.

Zhelyazkov’s government had already survived five votes of no confidence and was expected to get through a sixth on Thursday.

Many of the protesters have been angered by the roles of two figures, oligarch Delyan Peevski and ex-prime minister Boyko Borissov, and Wednesday’s rally was organised under the slogan “Resignation! Peevski and Borissov Out of Power”, Bulgaria’s BTA news agency reported.

Peevski has been sanctioned by the US and UK for alleged corruption and his party has helped prop up the government.

Borissov is part of Zhelyazkov’s Gerb party, which came first in October 2024 elections, and he was reported to have said on Wednesday that the coalition parties had agreed to remain in power until Bulgaria joined the eurozone on 1 January.

Borissov was prime minister when anti-corruption protests brought down his government in 2020 and there have been seven elections since.

Despite the political drama in Sofia, Bulgaria’s move to join the euro is not seen as under threat.

In his resignation statement, the outgoing prime minister said Bulgaria faced a major challenge and its citizens would need to produce “authentic proposals” on what the next government should look like.

Bulgaria ranks among the highest in Europe in terms of the public’s perception of official corruption, according to Transparency International.

Bulgaria ditches budget plan after tens of thousands join protests

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel Dec 23, 2025 The Chris Hedges Report Anand Giridharadas explains how the elite continuously find ways to screw you, with either good or cynical intentions.

Nurses rally with lawmakers to show their support for Medicare for All on April 29, 2025 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images”

The Washington Post editorial predictably ignores research showing that a single-payer system would save hundreds of billions of dollars—and tens of thousands of lives—each year.

Jake Johnson

Dec 26, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

An editorial published on Christmas by the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post inveighed against supporters of Medicare for All in the United States, pointing to the struggles of Britain’s chronically underfunded National Health Service as a “cautionary tale” while ignoring research showing that a single-payer system would save the US hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives each year.

The editorial, headlined “Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter,” laments the “religious-like devotion to the NHS” in the United Kingdom even as “hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as ‘winter.’”

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The Post editorial board, led by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, waves away expert analyses showing that the UK government is underinvesting in its healthcare system relative to other countries in Europe, resulting in the kinds of problems the Thursday editorial attributed to the supposedly inherent flaws of single-payer systems.

“This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare for All is a good idea,” the editorial declared ominously.

The editorial understates Medicare for All’s popularity among US voters. A recent Data for Progress survey found that even after hearing common opposing arguments, 58% of voters strongly or somewhat support improving Medicare and expanding it to cover everyone in the US.

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A separate poll conducted by GQR Research found that 54% of voters nationally, and 56% in battleground districts, support Medicare for All. US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the co-leader of the Medicare for All Act in the House, is reportedly planning to present those findings to colleagues next month as she pushes Democrats to rally behind her legislation ahead of the critical midterm elections.

https://x.com/RepJayapal/status/2004018509660238144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2004018509660238144%7Ctwgr%5E09c7d27de61a4d2a056f58444a2fce7840233482%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fwashington-post-medicare-for-all

The renewed push for Medicare for All comes as the corporate-dominated healthcare status quo hits Americans with massive premium hikes stemming from congressional Republicans’ refusal to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits.

Predictably, the Post‘s editorial board—which Bezos has instructed to write “every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”—neglected to mention the myriad horrors of the United States’ for-profit system in its diatribe against Medicare for All.

The editorial also ignores research showing potentially massive benefits from a transition to Medicare for All, which would virtually eliminate private insurance while providing comprehensive coverage to everyone in the US for free at the point of service.

One study published in The Lancet estimated that a Medicare for All system would save more than 68,000 lives and over $450 billion in healthcare expenditures annually.

An analysis by Yale researchers calculated that “if the US had had a single-payer universal healthcare system in 2020”—which marked the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic—“nearly 212,000 American lives would have been saved that year” and “the country would have saved $105 billion in Covid-19 hospitalization expenses alone.”

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Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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