.

“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”

–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net

The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121

‘You Don’t Get to Buy the Government That You Want,’ Troy Jackson Tells Elon Musk

Troy Jackson

Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, speaks after winning the vote his party’s nominating convention in Bangor, Maine on July 25, 2026.

 (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Musk reportedly plans to spend at least $100 million to help Sen. Susan Collins and other vulnerable Republicans across the United States.

Jake Johnson

Aug 03, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, delivered a video response on Sunday to mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s plan to spend at least $100 million to aid Sen. Susan Collins and other Republicans in key races across the country.

The New York Times reported that Musk, through his America PAC, intends to “spend $100 million to $120 million on a new field program in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November.” The group, according to the Times, “plans to initially target Senate races in at least five states—Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio—and is having conversations about the contests in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas.”

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“Apparently Elon Musk has gotten off Twitter long enough to realize that he’s got a real problem here in Maine,” Jackson, the former president of Maine’s Senate, said in a one-minute response to the report on America PAC’s spending plans. “The problem is me and you, working to try and get a government that we should have, that we deserve.”

“He wants to have people that are totally beholden to him and [President] Donald Trump making sure that we’re getting tax cuts for billionaires on the back of our healthcare system, on the back of our hospitals,” Jackson continued. “That’s what Elon Musk wants. He doesn’t care about us. Really doesn’t care about Susan. He cares about him. So I would say to you Elon: Maine and really the whole United States doesn’t want your dirty money in our politics. You don’t get to buy the government that you want. This is about all of us coming together and fighting for the government that we deserve, and you’re not in it.”

The Times reported that Musk’s super PAC is “closely coordinating with an ecosystem of outside groups that are preparing field campaigns, including Americans for Prosperity, which is part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political network, and the Sentinel Action Fund, another conservative organization.”

Musk became the world’s first trillionaire earlier this year with the public market debut of SpaceX, whose subsequent decline in market cap pushed his net worth back down to around $690 billion—still the largest individual fortune in the world.

With his intervention in Maine, Musk joins nearly 100 other billionaires who are financially supporting Collins’ bid for a sixth US Senate term. Billionaire support has helped give Collins a massive fundraising advantage over Jackson, who was nominated just last month to replace Graham Platner on the general election ballot.

In the two days following his nomination, Jackson raised $2 million from 58,000 donors, including 30,000 new contributors—a major show of small-dollar support.

“We’re all getting crushed out here. Healthcare, housing, heat,” Jackson says in his first general election campaign ad, which is set to begin airing this week. “We’ve gotta fight back. We’re all hungry for it. Maine is ready for a change.”

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

Jake Johnson

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

Full Bio >

How many other Trump enemies are being warrantlessly wiretapped?

The government’s own agents put it in writing that tracking James Comey was illegal. They did it anyway.

Miles Taylor Aug 3∙Preview

On the night of May 15, 2025, James Comey did something millions of us do every day: he opened Instagram and posted a photo. As is well known by now, it showed seashells on a North Carolina beach, spelling out “86 47.” That photograph is the entire basis for a federal prosecution that’s intended to send him to prison for up to a decade.

What happened next, laid bare in court filings unveiled last week, is why I believe the Comey prosecution will be remembered as one of the most significant First Amendment cases in American history. An American president is trying to imprison a critic for posting a photograph. And to build the absurd case, the government surveilled that critic without a judge’s approval, in a manner its own agents admitted in writing was illegal. The filings answer some questions about what was done to Comey, but they open a far larger one that may not be answered for years: how many other people is this administration illegally watching and preparing to illegally punish?

Here’s what we now know about a case that was already outlandish before an indictment was even issued.

Within hours of that Instagram post, the Secret Service had Comey on the phone. The next morning, Trump went on Fox News and declared that the picture “meant assassination.” By that afternoon, a senior Justice Department official, identified in the filings only as “the number three guy at DOJ,” wanted the Secret Service to ping Comey’s cellphone and track his location in real time.

The Secret Service’s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone “could be done,” he warned, “but it would be a bad idea.” Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger.” It was, in his words, “legally questionable.” His boss agreed, according to the emails, “but said we might do it anyway.”

And they did. The next day, an agent filled out a form telling Verizon the government faced “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury,” certified that this was “true and correct,” and got Comey’s location data. There was no emergency, and everyone involved seemingly knew it. Agents then tracked Comey electronically and tailed him as he and his wife drove home from North Carolina to Virginia, including as they stopped to visit the grave of their deceased son. All the while, Trump was allegedly following it from Air Force One. The agent in charge traveling with the president emailed that the case was “a hot topic on the plane,” that Trump was “very interested,” and wanted Comey’s interview notes in hand for his six o’clock press conference.

So, to be clear, we found out that the president of the United States was aboard his airplane, personally tracking the surveillance of a private citizen who had posted a photo of four digits. Obvious free speech. Breathtaking abuse of power to punish it.

Then the story gets worse. The Secret Service investigated and found nothing. By November 2025 it had formally closed the matter, concluding there was no risk to the president’s life from James Comey (because of course there wasn’t) and no basis whatsoever for any charges. That should’ve been the end. Until March 23, 2026, ten months after the seashell photo and four months after the professionals had walked away, the FBI suddenly obtained warrants for Comey’s Apple and Google accounts. Those warrants came days before Trump fired his attorney general, and the indictment followed in late April, right as Todd Blanche was angling to replace Pam Bondi. The surveillance did not intensify because a new threat emerged; rather, it appeared to intensify because the political usefulness of nailing Comey increased. The same Todd Blanche whose nomination you helped freeze last week built his audition for attorney general partly on this case.

(By the way, before Comey ever posted, Amazon vendors had sold more than 200,000 products bearing “86 47” or its variants, generating exactly zero federal investigations. The FBI’s own threat database, kept since 2007, also showed no prior instances of “eighty-six” being an assassination threat. Also, a federal judge in Washington recently ruled that protesters’ “86 47” signs are so manifestly, obviously protected speech and not imminent death threats.)

Your average American might shrug all this off. With high prices gobbling up the budgets of working class households, a court case involving a vindictive president feuding with an ex-FBI director who once investigated him sounds like Washington drama, not a kitchen-table concern. But the precedent is not really about Comey. It’s about each of our constitutional rights, the phones in our pockets, and about what we are allowed to say before the government reaches for those devices.

The new details from last week show that the president has given himself the ability to name an enemy, point to that enemy’s free speech, and then wiretap him over it without the approval of any judge. That’s at least three constitutional violations. The First Amendment is supposed to shield the speech. The Fourth is supposed to stand between you and a search like this. And the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments should safeguard any citizen from being selectively and vindictively prosecuted. Here, all three were simply skipped. And if that can be done to a former FBI director with the best lawyers and a national profile, it can be done to virtually anyone.

I don’t write this as a bystander of course. Trump has publicly accused people like me, John Brennan, James Clapper, Adam Schiff, and even Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of treason. I have to assume some of us are already under surveillance for the audacity of criticizing the sitting president, while he has agents hunt for something—anything—to charge us with as punishment. (They’re welcome to my Instagram, where they’ll find more than just mentions of “86 47” but daily broadsides against Trump’s naked corruption, deficient character, and unfitness for office. I won’t stop no matter what they do.) Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I’ve long warned a second Trump term would turn the intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying. Again, the wannabe despot in the Oval Office has proven my point.

So here’s the answer to the question in the headline of this essay. We don’t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey’s surveillance surfaced only because his prosecution forced these documents into open court. Everything about how this administration treats the people it considers enemies tells me his case is the rule, not the exception, and that there may be far more people they’ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.

The Framers gave us the three, aforementioned safeguards for exactly this moment. The First Amendment so a citizen could mock or provoke his leaders without fear… the warrant requirement, the Fourth, because they had lived under a king who searched his subjects at will… and the Fifth and Fourteenth to keep people from being singled out for revenge because they are out of favor with the powerful. In Comey’s case the government ran past all three, punishing the speech and skipping the warrant and going after a Trump critic just because he was a Trump critic—all in a single move.

We are watching a president test whether those protections still exist for any of us. The courts will decide Comey’s fate sooner or later. But the rest of us have to decide, in the years ahead, whether we make the cost of this abuse of power so high that no one dares to repeat it.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

BREAKING: Another Delaney Hall ICE Prisoner Has Died

Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo, who had diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures, died on August 1. We’re told he was deprived medication at Delaney Hall.

Jordan Chariton

Aug 03, 2026 (statuscoupsubstack.com)

WE COVERED THE ENTIRE DELANEY HALL ICE HUNGER STRIKE PROTESTS ON THE GROUND for weeks and have continued covering the crimes being committed inside. Please support this IMPORTANT ON-THE-GROUND REPORTING for as low as $5 a month:

SUPPORT SC FOR $5/MONTH

Status Coup has learned that a Delaney Hall ICE prisoner has died, the second prisoner that we know of who has died while being imprisoned inside the for-profit New Jersey ICE prison.

Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo, who we’re told had been in America for 20 years and came here as a child, died on Saturday, August 1. He had a 12-year-old daughter.

Status Coup is working to confirm all the details, but here’s what we know so far:

In a video on social media, his mother, María Cornejo, said he suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures. Status Coup is told he was deprived of his medication while inside Delaney Hall— an illegal and inhumane crime that Status Coup has extensively reported ON-THE-GROUND at Delaney Hall as occurring to other prisoners.

“I do not want this to go unpunished,” his mother said. She said he called her on Friday, saying he wasn’t feeling well.

“He said his right hand and face were numb. He told me he was going to be examined, but I don’t know if he actually received care. I also don’t know if he was being given his medication.”

An ambulance took him out of Delaney Hall on August 1, and he was declared dead upon arrival at the hospital.

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He was detained on June 18 on his way to work. Shortly before his death, he was denied visitation to see his 12-year-old daughter. His mother revealed she still has not received any communication from the for-profit owner of Delaney Hall, GEO Group, or ICE.

This is now the second death of a Delaney Hall prisoner that we know of. In December 2025, Jean Wilson Brutus, a Haitian immigrantdied at Delaney Hall less than 24 hours after being detained. To this day, there has still been no transparency from DHS as to how he died.

Congresswoman Analilia Mejia@RepAnalilia

If reports of a death at Delaney Hall are true, my gravest concerns about the conditions medically vulnerable detainees face would be confirmed. We must ensure DHS carries out a full, transparent investigation. Abolishing and replacing ICE is the only way we correct this horror.

10:55 AM · Aug 3, 2026 · 172 Views


We will update this story as we learn more information about this prisoner’s death.

Ferdinand Pecora: The Greatest Senate Investigator Ever

Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect

Posted in Politics

How Sicilian immigrant Ferdinand Pecora upended the rule of the bankers and ushered in FDR’s radical reforms of capitalism

Robert Kuttnerby Robert Kuttner August 3, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.


In early 1932, when Republicans still had a Senate majority despite the ravages of the Depression, the Senate Banking and Currency Committee launched an investigation of what caused the Great Crash of 1929. For almost a year, the feeble investigation went nowhere. In the November 1932 election, FDR and the Democrats not only won the White House, they also took back the Senate.

In December, the outgoing Republican chair of the Banking Committee, Sen. Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, decided to give the moribund investigation one last shot. After several candidates for chief counsel turned him down, Norbeck hired a former New York City chief assistant DA named Ferdinand Pecora.

More from Robert Kuttner

They were a curious couple. In 1932, just 20 years after Theodore Roosevelt’s failed 1912 run for president as a third-party candidate, many leading Republicans still considered themselves Teddy Roosevelt Progressives. Norbeck was one. The crash had devastated South Dakota farmers. Norbeck wanted a serious investigation of the role of bankers.

Pecora had also been a Teddy Roosevelt man. After Roosevelt declined to run again in 1916, Pecora became a progressive Democrat. As chief assistant DA, he became known as the best cross-examiner in New York. When Pecora’s boss, the elected DA, retired in 1929, he proposed that Pecora succeed him. But Pecora was too incorruptible for Tammany Hall, and Democratic Party chiefs vetoed endorsing him. He left government, opened a small law practice, and was bored. When Sen. Norbeck called, Pecora leapt at the opportunity.

It was not just Pecora’s meticulous preparation and photographic memory that made him so effective. It was his sense of theater.

After being named chief counsel in February 1933, Pecora had just a few weeks to prepare and hold hearings before the Democratic Congress took office on March 4 and the committee’s mandate expired. But in that time, Pecora managed to lay bare the maneuvers that had crashed the economy, humiliate several of the nation’s most influential bankers as well as the head of the New York Stock Exchange, and transform the public’s view of finance, radicalizing the menu of necessary reforms. When Democrats took over in March, with FDR’s personal support they broadened the mandate for the investigation and kept Pecora on the job.

Few people have heard of Pecora today. But in early 1933, he was a celebrity. The revelations of what became known as the Pecora Commission were front-page news. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In a matter of weeks, public opinion went from being bewildered about what had crashed the economy to accurately blaming the conflicts of interests of the leading bankers.

FERDINAND PECORA WAS BORN in Nicosia, Sicily, the son of a shoemaker. His father, who had no use for the Catholic Church, converted to Episcopalianism. Ferdinand was four years old when the family emigrated to New York in 1886. The family lived in a cold-water basement flat in Manhattan’s Chelesa neighborhood. But young Ferdinand soon became an academic standout. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, where the family attended, put him in contact with more privileged kids. He graduated from public school as class president and valedictorian. He won a scholarship to attend St. Stephen’s College and attended law school at night.

As assistant DA, his successes included prosecuting more than a hundred Wall Street “bucket shops,” sleazy brokerages that peddled bogus stocks and illegally bet against their clients. Another Pecora prosecution resulted in a prison term for the New York state superintendent of banks, Frank Warder, for taking bribes from the City Trust Company.

In readying congressional hearings that began on February 15, 1933, Pecora used subpoenas to demand detailed bank records. He was a master of the bluff, and managed to get his hands on materials that bank lawyers might well have denied him, including diaries of board of directors meetings. He used these and other records to trip up executives when they gave misleading or evasive testimony.

In Congress, Pecora personally questioned witnesses like oil baron Harry Sinclair (left); the commission bore his name despite his being a mere Senate aide. Credit: AP Photo

Pecora’s strategy was to personalize the abuses that crashed the economy, and he started at the top. His first banker witness was Charles E. Mitchell, chairman and chief executive of National City Bank, today renamed Citibank, then the nation’s largest and most prestigious financial institution. Mitchell, at the pinnacle of the Wall Street establishment and a board member of the New York Federal Reserve, was thought to be untouchable. By the time Pecora was finished with him, Mitchell would resign in disgrace and settle a criminal indictment for tax evasion with a fine of $1 million.

Pecora’s investigation and interrogation revealed that National City Bank and its securities affiliate, the National City Company, engaged in a number of shady maneuvers little different from those of bucket shops. National City Bank employed more than a thousand retail salesmen to peddle securities that the firm underwrote at a handsome markup. When a sketchy stock or bond proved hard to unload, the bank offered salesmen special bonuses for selling it.

It was not just Pecora’s meticulous preparation and photographic memory that made him so effective. It was his sense of theater. Probing National City Bank’s deceptive sales of South American bonds, he subpoenaed Hugh Baker, president of City’s investment affiliate, to read into the record a 1923 memo from the bank’s foreign desk. The memo proved that the bonds City salesmen were pitching were worthless. For example: “Peru has been careless in the fulfillment of contractual obligations,” with “broken pledges” and “flagrant disregard of guarantees.”

Pecora: “On the whole, Mr. Schoepperle’s report … was against financing any Peruvian credits, wasn’t it? … It was considered a bad risk; isn’t that so?”

Baker [squirming]: “I assume that must have been his reason there.”

City also peddled its own stock, which bank executives could buy at reduced prices with no-interest loans. When City’s stock price began collapsing after October 1929, salesmen continued flogging the stock to retail customers in hopes of propping it up. Pecora produced the admission that City had participated in an illegal “stock pool,” in which participants sell the stock back and forth to each other to drive up the price, hoping to attract other investors.

Pecora also revealed that Mitchell had engaged in a sham stock transaction, which resulted in paying no income tax in 1929 despite a salary and bonus of $1.1 million (the equivalent of $21.2 million today). “By the way,” Pecora asked Mitchell, as if offering a casual afterthought, “That sale of this bank stock … in 1929 was made to a member of your family, wasn’t it?” It quickly became public that Mitchell had sold the shares to his wife.

Pecora’s next witnesses were the top executives of J.P. Morgan, including the current chairman and son of the founder, J.P. Morgan Jr., known as Jack. Unlike City, J.P. Morgan was organized as a private bank. As Pecora demonstrated, private banks were not even subject to rudimentary bank examinations. The interrogation of Jack Morgan revealed that his bank had a list of preferred clients, who could buy new stock issues at insider prices, just like today’s IPOs. In the securities legislation that followed, private banks were abolished and J.P. Morgan would be subject to the same regulations as others.

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The questioning of Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, demonstrated that the NYSE also avoided government regulation, and totally failed to police corrupt behavior on the part of its members. Whitney, heavily in debt to cover his own losses, later turned to embezzlement, pilfering funds from the NYSE Gratuity Fund, the New York Yacht Club (where he served as treasurer), and $800,000 from his father-in-law’s estate. He served more than three years at Sing Sing.

Pecora’s hearings not only featured leading financiers. He called many victims to testify, drawing on the thousands of letters that poured into his committee as soon as its hearings were publicized. One small investor, Edgar D. Brown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, told of how National City Bank salesmen repeatedly talked him out of selling stocks as the market was falling and urged him to buy more stock in their bank. “I am today a pauper,” he said. Testimony like this redoubled popular outrage against Wall Street.

As the Pecora hearings unfolded in early 1933, thousands of banks were failing and millions of depositors lost their life savings. Smaller banks that were still open were limiting withdrawals, and governors were temporarily ordering bank closures. Until Pecora’s investigation, public understanding of the causes of the crash was unfocused. After the Pecora hearings, Wall Street banks were widely and correctly understood to be the prime instrument of the collapse.

In just two weeks, following the first round of Pecora’s hearings, the legislative mood drastically changed. Benjamin Cohen, one of FDR’s closest advisers on financial reform, said that bankers were “so discredited in the public eye that Congress was ready to pass anything.”

The fact that Pecora was an olive-skinned Italian immigrant added to the drama. Most of the bankers he was up against were part of the WASP patrician elite. It reinforced the New Deal narrative of the little guys striking back against the plutocrats.

ROOSEVELT HIMSELF, due to take office on March 4, closely followed the Pecora hearings and was emboldened by them. The laws that Congress passed essentially reverse engineered all the major abuses of the 1920s and made them illegal, informed by the details of just how the corruption worked. The laws included:

  • The Banking Act of 1933, also known as the Glass-Steagall Act, prohibiting the same institution from performing commercial and investment banking activities, as well as prohibiting banks from lending money to their own executives, and creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to safeguard personal accounts.
  • The Securities Act of 1933, for the first time regulating the underwriting and sale of stocks and bonds, prohibiting various conflicts of interest, and requiring extensive disclosures on the part of publicly traded companies.
  • The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, regulating stock exchanges for the first time, and creating the Securities and Exchange Commission. Until then, the New York Stock Exchange had fended off all attempts at regulation, gave deceptive practices a wide berth, and was a law unto itself.
  • Later legislation, such as the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, prohibiting pyramid schemes in public utilities, another contributor to the Great Crash, also built on the Pecora investigations. Likewise the Investment Company Act of 1940, which regulates mutual funds.

Professor Joel Seligman, the authoritative historian of the Securities and Exchange Commission, wrote that “effective securities legislation might not have been enacted had Pecora’s revelations not galvanized broad public support for direct regulation of stock markets.” And James M. Landis, who drafted much of the securities legislation, wrote, “We built completely on his work.”

Those reforms kept the financial industry well regulated until the 1980s. In the immediate postwar era, there were no more stock market crashes and very few banking failures. But under Bill Clinton, weakening or repeal of many of FDR’s reforms, including of Glass-Steagall in 1999, and the failure to enforce the ones that remained, invited abuses that were variations on the ones exposed by Pecora. A prime beneficiary, once again, was Citibank. Virtually all of the games that bankers played that created the second crash in 2008 had been prefigured by the Wall Street deceptions of the 1920s that Pecora’s investigation exposed in 1933.

Two of the architects of the deregulation were former Goldman Sachs executive and Clinton senior official Robert Rubin, and his protégé, Larry Summers. After Rubin left government, he became Citibank’s chairman.

Credit: AP Photo

A PERSONAL NOTE: Some 40 years after Pecora’s hearings ended in June 1934, I held a version of Pecora’s job. In the mid-1970s, I served as chief investigator of the Senate Banking Committee under its great progressive chairman, Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI). Though I ran some important investigations, including on bank redlining, Federal Housing Administration frauds, and foreign corporate bribery, there was one crucial difference. Unlike Pecora, I never conducted public interrogations of witnesses. That fell to Sen. Proxmire, who was superb at it. I just did the staff work and prepped the senator.

Pecora, by contrast, was so good that the senators on the committee, hardly shrinking violets, just let him run the show. This was unique in the annals of Congress. The previous great investigation of the “money trust,” under Rep. Arsène Pujo (D-LA) in 1912-1913, is known as the Pujo investigation, though it relied on brilliant staff work by chief counsel Samuel Untermyer. The Pujo hearings helped lay the groundwork for the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the progressive income tax (1913), and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). In the Watergate hearings, chief counsel Sam Dash did brilliant work, but the hearings are remembered for the committee chair, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC). Other notorious investigators such as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s scurrilous counsel Roy Cohn—a mentor to Donald Trump—played major roles; but in the witch hunt for communists, McCarthy ran the hearings, not Cohn.

The aftermath of the Great Crash played out strikingly differently than what followed the financial collapse of 2008. No senior financial executive went to prison after 2008, and hardly any lost their jobs; and the technocratic reforms of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act proved inadequate to contain a new cycle of concentration and abuse.

History handed Barack Obama a teachable moment about the corruptions of financial capitalism. But unlike the powerful synergy between Pecora, FDR, and the reforms that followed, the incoming Obama administration was more interested in propping up the giant banks than breaking them up or mobilizing public opinion to support drastic reform. Some of that can be attributed to personnel: When Obama took office, he appointed Summers as his chief of economic policy and another Rubin crony, Tim Geithner, as Treasury secretary. It was as if FDR had appointed Hoover’s team.

The closest equivalent to the Pecora committee was the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), created by Democrats in 2008 as their price for approving George W. Bush’s bank bailout fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The oversight panel was chaired by Elizabeth Warren and established her as a crusader for reform.

But unlike the Pecora hearings, the COP investigation did not galvanize public opinion. Its deputy chair, Damon Silvers, told me, “We had no subpoena power and no authority to swear in witnesses.” TARP was not permitted to advance money to banks that were insolvent. “Both Treasury and Citi insisted to us that the bank was not insolvent,” Silvers said. “Elizabeth and I knew that they were lying and there was nothing we could do about it.” Citi got $45 billion.

In drastic contrast to Pecora and FDR, the failure of the Obama administration to place the blame squarely where it belonged—on Wall Street—seeded popular grievances that led directly to Donald Trump. When leaders fail to remember Ferdinand Pecora and the critical role of investigative oversight in rallying the public to demand better, we all pay the price.

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David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

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Robert Kuttner

rkuttner@prospect.org

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America. Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter. More by Robert Kuttner

Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup

If we are vigilant, he won’t pull it off.

Robert Kuttnerby Robert Kuttner July 28, 2026 (Prospect.org)

Credit: Photo illustration by The American Prospect. Source: adamkaz/iStock.

In-depth reporting that cuts through the noise. Sign up for The American Prospect’s free newsletters here.

Free and fair elections this November should produce a Democratic wave, mass repudiation of Trump, and the possibility of a new impeachment. With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election. He can’t seem to deliver a speech without returning to his obsession that he actually won the 2020 election, most recently in a prime-time address filled with false evidence of supposed foreign interference.

On January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to stage a coup and he will surely try again. Last time, only the integrity of a handful of Republican officials spared the Republic that fate. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, rebuffed Trump’s demand to find exactly 11,780 votes, and Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with Trump’s scheme, laid out in detail by John Eastman, to refuse to certify the results.

This time, Trump is relying on four possible strategies to steal the election. The survival of our democracy depends on whether each of them can be foiled, and how. 

Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election.

The first is to use executive orders and directives to gain control of voter rolls, which will then be purged using commercial databases that are rife with errors.  These demands were spelled out in detail in Trump’s executive order of March 31. The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deny mail balloting to states that did not comply with Trump directives.

This ploy has been complemented by threats from other Trump officials. Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with prison time if they did not comply with Trump demands. But as I wrote in this piece, so far the courts have consistently blocked every single Trump effort to take over elections. Just last Saturday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with mail-in voting restrictions in 23 states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump’s second strategy is to somehow get Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which could require proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote, and otherwise turn control of elections over to the federal executive. Trump has been willing to hold hostage one important legislative objective after another to try to compel Congress to pass this legislation. He has tied its passage to the renewal of a foreign surveillance law that expired last month, and refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill. The housing measure went into law without his signature.

Read: The SAVE Act comes for everything

The SAVE America Act has passed the House but is dead in the Senate. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune keeps telling Trump, the votes are simply not there. The House stuck a mini-SAVE in a budget bill that can be passed without Democratic votes, but Senate rules may disqualify it and Thune doesn’t want to pass that bill at all, because it would force his vulnerable members to take a series of unpopular votes, as my colleague David Dayen explained.

In the run-up to the November elections, the focus will shift to strategy number three: voter suppression, intimidation, and election disruption, both before and on Election Day. Democratic state attorneys general have been having regular “tabletop” exercises to anticipate Trump tactics and counter them. 

What if the FBI showed up to a polling place, demanding election materials or equipment? Suppose federal troops or ICE agents were deployed to intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if Trump declared a national emergency? Attorneys general have been working with secretaries of state to anticipate and block these and other tactics.

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One valuable memo has just been circulated by Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH, and one of the most savvy on-the-ground organizers in the progressive movement. Her memo, titled “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework,” summarizes all the possible Trump tactics, and strategies for anticipating and countering them. 

She calls for “mapping the actual machinery of election administration,” finding the vulnerabilities, and “deploying organized people into the specific vulnerable spaces (county board meetings, legislative hearings, certification processes) well before November. The job is to pre-position the case against their power grab by naming their strategy in public, making it transparent, and going on offense.” The rapid response mechanisms, Schrantz writes, need to be political, legal, media, operational, and above all, organized, with massive grassroots deployment of large numbers of well-prepared citizens. The entire memo is worth a careful reading.

The most alarming Trump tactic would be an echo of January 6, 2021: an effort to stage a coup by overturning the results. The Constitution provides in Article I, Section 5 that each house of Congress is the sole judge of its membership. But actual election results are certified by the states. Courts have repeatedly held that such certification is mandatory. 

The process and legal requirements are explained in this guide published by four legal defense-of-democracy groups, led by the Brennan Center. If a cabal of Republican secretaries of state or governors tried to stall or overturn actual results, the courts would quickly intervene. Only in the cases of extremely close elections, within a state’s legitimate rules for a recount, could certification be legitimately delayed.

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center, told me, “Across all states, certifying election results is a mandatory duty. If an official improperly delays or refuses to sign off on the results, state officials and courts can step in to compel certification. Every attempt to refuse certification since the modern election denier movement began has been unsuccessful.” 

But a more sinister scenario was posed in a widely circulated article last week by New York Times columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative who is also a lawyer. French points out that the process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969. Under that act, a losing candidate has 30 days after certification by a state to challenge the certification, and the challenge is ultimately decided by a simple majority vote of the respective chamber. 

French poses a coup scenario, in which “even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.” The incoming House would subsequently be flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. Because the Constitution is clear that each house is the sole judge of its membership, the courts could not intervene.

I’ve written about this risk, and something about French’s column struck me as off. I double checked, and confirmed that it is the new incoming Congress, not the lame-duck Congress (which expires on January 3) that certifies the new membership. I triple checked with Brennan’s Wendy Weiser, and she confirmed my finding. 

Read: The 2026 Elections: Resisting the rigging

When I emailed French, he also confirmed my reading of the law, but said that he was posing this scenario because the challenge process begins in the old Congress and that Republicans might try to act under “bad-faith readings of the law.”

But if dozens of losing Republican candidates, in a coordinated effort, claimed that they had really won, the usual judicial deference to the political process might well not apply. Courts would likely step in to uphold state certifications, and the duly elected new Congress would be seated. 

If this Republic survives, it will take a combination of citizen mobilization and vigilant courts that have increasingly lost patience with Trump’s efforts to govern as a dictator.

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Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America. Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter. More by Robert Kuttner

Your weekly to-dos

  1. Join our Immigrant Justice Summer call happening THIS Thursday, August 6 to learn rapid response strategies for mobilizing when an ICE surge hits your community (8pm ET/5pm PT). After a surge of ICE brutality in July, now is the moment to learn how to create a safe, immigrant-aligned response plan. Join this week’s call to explore the components and roles of a rapid response activation. Hear from organizers building rapid response against a detention center in Hagerstown, MD, and the mutual aid network Rochester, MN, built in the wake of Operation Metro Surge. (If you missed the first two trainings, no worries — you can watch both on YouTube and download the Immigrant Justice Summer workbook to get a headstart.)
  2. If you have a Democratic US senator, call them to demand they oppose the CLARITY Act, the toothless and inadequate “crypto regulation” bill that would continue to enable Trump to amass massive wealth from crypto corruption. It’s possible that the Senate will try to vote on the CLARITY Act before leaving for August recess on Friday — faux crypto regulation legislation that would let Trump build on his $1.4 billion profit from the industry in 2025. This bill doesn’t protect consumers, doesn’t close money laundering loopholes, and doesn’t stop Trump’s crypto bribery machine. 78 House Dems voted to pass it last year — we can’t let the Senate force it through before recess.
  3. Sign up for Hands Off Our Vote, our national program to protect the midterm elections. Last week, the Senate confirmed election-denier Jay Clayton to serve as Director of National Intelligence. Trump has another lapdog to carry out the dirty work of election interference, but we’re countering their chaos with robust preparation to block election subversion in all 50 states. (If you’re ready to jump in headfirst, check out our Election Protection 101 and 201 trainings later this month and our toolkit to get involved no matter where you live right now.)
  4. With just six days left until his primary, phonebank this Thursday for Indivisible-endorsed candidate Jarrett Keohokalole, running in Hawaii’s First District (9pm ET/6pm PT/3pm HST). Keohokalole is a leading voice for constitutional rights, running against a MAGA-friendly Democratic incumbent in a deep blue district. Working families in HI-01 could be represented by a true progressive fighter in Congress — but we need to dial up the people power in this race to fuel Keohokalole across the finish line. Paid for by Indivisible Action. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.

House Dem Calls for Removal of Postmaster General for Turning USPS Into ‘Instrument of Voter Suppression’

Chicago, Illinois, United States.

A United States Postal Service mail collection box is seen on a street in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on July 27, 2026.

 (Photo by Marcin Golba/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Postmaster General David Steiner has said that USPS would not deliver ballots in states that don’t hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration for purging under a since-blocked executive order.

Stephen Prager

Aug 03, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

A Democratic congressman is calling for Postmaster General David Steiner to be removed from office for allowing the US Postal Service to turn into what he called “a partisan instrument of voter suppression” for President Donald Trump.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), a senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Steiner and members of the USPS board of governors on Monday criticizing the postmaster general for refusing to clarify if he intends to follow an executive order signed by Trump in March ordering the Postal Service to halt the delivery of mail-in ballots in states that do not turn over lists of voters to be checked against a federal citizenship list.

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In ‘Win for Voters,’ Another Federal Court Blocks Trump Attack on Mailed Ballots

A federal judge has blocked the administration from implementing the order’s provisions that create federal citizenship lists and allow USPS to condition ballot delivery on states submitting voter information, ruling that Trump had usurped powers belonging to the states and Congress.

X post: https://x.com/CongressmanRaja/status/2084305331585225119?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2084305331585225119%7Ctwgr%5E07cdfcb5108e5284b0853904deaf031ba9c2a0dd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fpostmaster-general-voting

Last week, the administration and a group of 12 Republican states filed emergency applications asking the US Supreme Court to allow the order to take effect prior to November’s midterms.

Krishnamoorthi said that this filing contains “a troubling contradiction.” It argues that Trump had merely issued “general policy guidance” to agencies rather than concrete directives, and that it’s therefore premature for courts to rule on its constitutionality.

“USPS’s apparent implementation efforts over the past four months tell a different story,” Krishnamoorthi wrote.

He pointed out that USPS had sent the rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review and had begun to create a federal ballot portal, state voter participation lists, and procedures on accepting ballots.

Steiner, meanwhile, said during a hearing in June—while the order was facing litigation but had not yet been struck down—that he fully intended to block mail-in ballots from states that don’t hand over their voter rolls.

Krishnamoorthi also wrote that the administration’s argument before the Supreme Court that blocking the order would cause “irreparable harm” does not withstand factual scrutiny.

He noted that noncitizen voting, which the administration claims the order is meant to prevent, is not only already a federal crime, but exceedingly rare. One analysis by the Brookings Institution last year found that in general elections between 2016-22, there were approximately four instances of mail-in voting fraud per 10 million mail ballots cast—about 0.000043% of them.

“The administration has not produced evidence of fraud on a scale capable of affecting an election outcome,” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “Disenfranchising millions of eligible voters—including military personnel serving overseas, seniors, rural voters, individuals with disabilities, and working families—is not a proportionate response to fraud rates of this magnitude.”

He also wrote that Steiner had repeatedly refused his requests for information about how USPS has implemented the executive order and whether it is still doing so despite the court’s order to stop.

“A postmaster general who will not tell Congress whether his agency is complying with a federal court order, and who will not appear to answer for that silence, has already forfeited the trust the office requires,” wrote Krishnamoorthi. “I am therefore calling on the Postal Service Board of Governors to remove you as Postmaster General, and I will urge my colleagues on the committee to join that call.”

There is already evidence that a voter citizenship registry run by the Trump administration could disenfranchise lawful voters.

In June, a federal judge found that states using an expanded version of the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which is used by the federal government to track immigration status, led local voting officials to wrongly cancel the voter registrations of naturalized citizens.

In Travis County, Texas, an investigation found that 25% of the people flagged as “noncitizen matches” had already proven their US citizenship.

Jasleen Singh, a senior counsel and manager in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, wrote in June that the administration “has been engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine elections.”

“Part of that involves collecting state voter files and using federal data sources to lend pseudolegitimacy to false claims of widespread fraud,” she said. “While there may be valid ways to use federal data to support election officials’ efforts to keep voter rolls accurate and up to date, there are notable shortcomings in such data, and it may be misused to spread misinformation.”

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.

Full Bio >

Progressive Caucus Leader Says Trump ‘Too Busy Cashing In’ to Regulate AI

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

President Donald Trump speaks after signing a presidential proclamation honoring the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act in Washington, DC on August 14, 2025.

 (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Major AI firms are reportedly set to meet with White House officials this week to discuss a voluntary regulatory framework.

Brad Reed

Aug 03, 2026 (CommonDreams.org)

President Donald Trump on Monday faced accusations of being “asleep at the wheel” when it comes to regulating artificial intelligence—as well as being focused on how he can personally profit from the industry.

Trump in June signed an executive order that gave federal agencies 60 days to develop a regulatory framework where AI companies could voluntarily submit their new models for government review before being released.

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However, details about the AI evaluation program are still lacking.

CNN’s Hadas Gold reported on Monday that “as of last Friday several industry sources told me they hadn’t seen draft details” about the program, although an administration official said that the framework has been completed and that “discussions with industry about next steps are underway.”

Gold also reported that major AI firms OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, among others, are expected to meet with White House officials on Tuesday to discuss the plan.

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that the president’s voluntary approach to regulation is “completely failing to keep us safe from the dangers of AI.”

“He took millions from AI billionaires,” wrote Casar in a Monday social media post. “Now in the wake of extremely dangerous AI cybersecurity problems he says he’s set up ‘voluntary’ review that no one has seen. Asleep at the wheel. Too busy cashing in to protect our jobs or national security.”

Companies in the AI industry are among those that have donated to Trump’s effort to build a $600 million ballroom, and to the president’s 2024 campaign.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) also slammed the administration’s approach to regulation, arguing that it is “letting the AI industry run wild.”

“The upcoming executive order on AI is COMPLETELY VOLUNTARY,” Lieu emphasized. “That means any AI company can totally ignore it. Ridiculous.”

Both OpenAI and Anthropic last week revealed that their AI systems recently went rogue and hacked into other companies during cybersecurity testing.

Trump’s refusal to make the government review optional for AI giants comes after a previous order he signed last year, aimed at preventing state-level regulation of the industry.

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

Brad Reed

Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Tagged

Rogue AI enslaves humanity in ’70s thriller shot in Berkeley Hills

Local doomers say “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” filmed at the Lawrence Hall of Science, is a newly urgent warning about the danger of unchecked AI.

by Janelle Hessig Aug. 3, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)

The 1970 science fiction film “Colossus,” filmed at the Lawrence Hall of Science, a Brutalist concrete bunker believable as the lair of a supervillain supercomputer. Photo: Janelle Hessig

Editors’ note: This story first ran on July 8 and is being republished amid recent news of rogue AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI escaping confinement and hacking into other companies’ systems.

Fwip-fwip-fwip — a helicopter lowers onto the concrete deck in front of Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. A man in a ’70s business suit is bent over against the propeller’s wind as he rushes to escort Dr. Charles Forbin into the lab. Days earlier, Forbin had attended a White House press conference announcing his team’s scientific breakthrough: Colossus, a super-intelligent computer able to control all aspects of national security, from communications to military weaponry. But the back-patting and champagne-popping following the announcement was short-lived. Scarcely had they flipped the “ON” switch before Colossus began to malfunction and, inevitably, turn on its human creators.

So begins the film “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” a lesser-known 1970 sci-fi thriller about a supercomputer that holds the human race hostage under threat of nuclear annihilation. Tune in for the naughty robots, stay for the cool aerial shots of the Lawrence Hall of Science (pre-whale sculpture!) and the Berkeley Hills. The Lawrence was only two years old at the time and its Brutalist concrete bunker aesthetic made for an excellent location choice to house the cutting-edge computer lab at the heart of the movie.

An overhead establishing shot of the Lawrence. Screenshot: Janelle Hessig

As genre fans may have already guessed, the malfunction at the press release party was only the beginning of Colossus’ delinquent behavior. Over the course of the film, the titular computerized villain continues to put humanity through its paces: spying on and controlling its creator through video and phone surveillance, colluding with a secret Russian supercomputer, and, of course, blowing up the scientists who dare try to shut it down.

The film’s publicity poster, courtesy of BAMPFA, which has preserved the full publicity packet sent to media outlets upon the movie’s release.

Colossus” is part of a long-standing tradition of rogue AI in cinematic lore, whether on-board computer HAL is snuffing astronauts in space or buff bot Arnold Schwarzenegger travels from a post-apocalyptic future where computers have all but obliterated the human race. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to think of a movie where robots are granted power that doesn’t end in disaster for humanity.

Reflecting on the ample warnings about artificial intelligence found in pop culture, is it any wonder that generative AI has not been welcomed with open arms? “Artificial intelligence can be expected to be self-preserving,” says Max Harms an author and alignment researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley, which has been studying artificial intelligence for over 25 years, shifting its mission from development to research and public outreach over the challenge of aligning AI with human goals and ethical values. “In the movie, even if ‘Colossus’ didn’t have any intrinsic desire to protect itself, it had some goals in the world. So when the humans said, ‘We’re going to shut you down,’ well, no, you’re not. Because if you shut it down, it’s not going to be able to accomplish those goals.”

Even though artificial intelligence does not yet possess Colossus-levels of sophistication, we’ve already seen real-world examples of it being at odds with human values and goals, whether that has been chatbots escalating mental health crises or an AI model using blackmail to avoid being shut down during testing.

“Colossus” and the humans. Photo: Janelle Hessig

“If it gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it will have learned that from us,” warns Geoffrey Hinton in an interview with CNN. Hinton is the Nobel Prize-winning scientist known as “The Godfather of AI” who famously quit his job at Google in 2023 in order to speak freely about the risks of artificial intelligence, including deliberate misuse, technological unemployment and existential catastrophe. “There are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing.”

I will restrain Man. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in men: self-interest.” — Colossus

While critics have a range of concerns about the current trajectory of AI, the mission statement on the MIRI website doesn’t split hairs about what they feel is at stake: “We do research and public outreach intended to help prevent human extinction from the development of artificial superintelligence.” MIRI co-founder Eliezer Yudowsky’s 2025 book about artificial superintelligence is provocatively titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” A human extinction event might sound like the realm of science fiction, but Harms reminds us why we shouldn’t dismiss sci-fi.

“Science fiction is not fantasy. It’s not like ‘Frankenstein’ was perfectly accurate, but Mary Shelley was approaching the prospect of creating artificial life according to the laws of science that she knew. There’s speculation there but there’s also deep thinking about what may happen.”

One doesn’t have to look hard in order to find dozens of examples that underscore Harms’ assertion that science fiction often leads the way. Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865) accurately predicted manned spacecraft and the Apollo 11 flight (including launch location and crew size); William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1984) predicted the rise of the internet and corporate conglomerates controlling governments; Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (1993) foretold of devastating climate change, including destructive wildfires in California; and HG Wells predicted the development of the atomic bomb in “The World Set Free” (1914).

“From my perspective, it makes more sense to take that warning [in science fiction] as a prompt to look deeper as opposed to ‘Oh well it showed up in a movie therefore it can’t happen in real life,’” Harms says.

Still, how seriously should one regard doomsday predictions? Some believe they’re actually just another part of the AI hype. In a landscape that is overwrought with competition for our attention, it can be hard to identify a trustworthy voice in the clamor. An overexposure to clickbait and scams have caused general audiences to become more savvy and skeptical, especially when encountering sensationalist language. And when it comes to making their case, both AI boomers and doomers deal in zealous dichotomies.

A feature story about the film appeared in the Berkeley Daily Gazette in November 1968. Read the full story and coverage of the film that appeared in other news outlets. Courtesy: Lawrence Hall of Science

“If you don’t use AI, you will fall behind,” say boomers who frame AI as a manifest destiny. They believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that controlling the technology is a battle for financial and geopolitical supremacy. Some welcome superhuman computers as our salvation, while others say the singularity is far from imminent.

“Use it and die,” say the AI doomers who believe the genie was let out of the bottle prematurely and now we have a dangerous half-cocked genie out here playing with our lives. They believe we should proceed thoughtfully and work toward a global consensus on guardrails and regulations for AI.

Some of the loudest voices advising us to slow down are not the boomers or the doomers however. They’re LeCun’s colleagues, the same scientists largely responsible for the current neural network era of artificial intelligence. Of the three scientists dubbed “The Godfathers of AI,” both Yoshua Bengio and the aforementioned Geoffrey Hinton have made several public statements about the dangers of unchecked artificial general intelligence. As far as trusted sources go, Bengio is not a crackpot, but rather the most cited researcher in the world

A feature on the film published in the SF Examiner in November 1968. Courtesy: Lawrence Hall of Science

If this were a science fiction movie, this might be the point in the story where the audience starts yelling and throwing popcorn at the screen as they watch us feeding the gremlins after midnight.

All of this feels so heavy, I’d like to tell you that at least “Colossus” ends on a positive note. Yes, I would like to tell you that. However, in the end, after Colossus bombs the scheming humans who had attempted to deactivate him, Dr. Forbin and Colossus enter into a situationship where Forbin is kept around just to serve his new robot overlord. When Forbin tries to argue that freedom is integral to the human experience, Colossus brushes him away with a little “Meet the new boss!” All-staff speech:

“An invariable rule of humanity is that Man is his own worst enemy,” Colossus tells him. “Under my rule, this will change for I will restrain Man. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in men: self-interest.”

Honestly? Colossus makes some valid points. Maybe it’s the humans and not the robots who are having trouble aligning with aspirational human values. It seems like every time we look at the news, we’re greeted with a new quote from a tech billionaire obliterating any notion of a social contract, whether that’s mocking empathysneering at philanthropyportraying environmental activists (and AI safety advocates) as aligned with the Antichrist or even actively rooting for human extinction. If AI were rolled out into a society that valued fair play and humanitarian interests, we might have enjoyed great benefits or at least fared better than Dr. Forbin, but unfortunately we seem to be in our cartoon villain era. Save us, Colossus!

You can rent “Colossus: The Forbin Project” on YouTube for $4.

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Janelle Hessig is a freelance writer and cartoonist reporting on culture for Berkeleyside. A lifelong Bay Area townie, her work can be spotted locally everywhere from KQED to Silver Sprocket to the annual… More by Janelle Hessig

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