OCTOBER 23, 2026

Inequality In The US Is Getting Worse In Ways You Might Not Expect
The buzzword of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections may be affordability, but growing anger over inequality is behind the sentiment.

A Pew Research survey released in October 2026 found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans — including 4 in 10 Republicans — believe there’s too much inequality in the U.S. And a growing share from both major political parties state that the economy needs to be fundamentally rebuilt to address this. The trend of rising inequality since 1980 has been driven by the wealthiest pulling away not just from the middle class, but also from the “merely wealthy.” Overall, recent research underscores how policy choices — including taxation and public spending — enabled this 40-year rise in inequality. Some policies enacted more recently appear to be accelerating this trend. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research organization, concluded that policy changes since the start of 2025 have imposed higher costs on everyone except the top 1%. Counter Punch.

Metal of the Past, Metal of the Future
Copper, the first metal worked by humans, will be crucial to decarbonization, and could be the path to a Chinese Century. As union turmoil in Chile’s critical copper industry rattles world supplies, our comrade Bill Barclay explores the metal’s past and future.

Copper was the first metal worked by homo sapiens—and was the basis of the Bronze Age, a period that lasted more than a millennium. Bronze metallurgy shifted the balance of power between empires and provided tools to increase agricultural output to those empires with the ability to meld copper and tin.Today, copper is the critical element for decarbonization. Once again, leadership, in this case in copper mining and processing, will reshape the global balance of power and reorganize the global political economy. Dollars and Sense

AI’s Rise is Being Fueled by the Sprawling U.S. Military State
Can an increasingly precarious tech workforce be a site of antiwar resistance?
Hossam Nasr was never under the impression that his employer, Microsoft. is a force for good, but says he ​“did genuinely believe it to be one of the lesser evil big tech companies.” Then he discovered the cloud storage service he worked on, Azure, provided the Israeli military with artificial intelligence tools essential to the post-October 2023 onslaught on Gaza. Silicon Valley sells itself as an engine for human progress, in which technology can conquer problems and improve society. But in subsequently protesting his employer, Nasr joined an increasingly vocal minority of tech workers who are so concerned about their own complicity in war crimes they are risking their jobs to organize against their companies’ war production. ​“Tech workers at the heart of Microsoft are waging one of the most significant and under-covered labor battles in the U.S. right now,” labor journalist Maximillian Alvarez has reported. In These Times

Apocalypse Now and Then
Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination

The auguries are raining down hard. Think or Sink. Comply or Die. Look Up or be Left Out. And so, with these not-so-gentle threats, it has come to pass that the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us. Heck, I’ve already used two dashes in this opening paragraph. That, as they say, is a tell. So, perhaps I haven’t written this essay at all. You’d have to use an AI app to check if it’s actually AI, and whether I’m really, or not really, or only partially me. You can no longer use your instincts. You have to use the App. Now that AI owns the em dash, what will future generations make of Emily Dickinson and her love of them? Has she been fed to the machine, too? Will they love her less? Are we being gradually locked out of language? Does it matter anymore? Arundhati Roy [maybe?] writes in Equator via 5 Leftie Links

Unions Are the Key to America’s Cost of Living Crisis
A promise of a union is that workers will share in the profit they create. As soon as wealthy executives saw their bottom lines under threat, they attacked unions. The research proves what workers have always known: It’s better in a union.

Union contracts raise pay for workers. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that tripling union membership in this country would deliver a 14.5% raise to the median worker—more than $7,700 a year or the equivalent of 7.5 extra weeks of pay annually. This adds up to nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. Unions can also be powerful tools for combating racial pay discrimination; the new report shows tripling union membership would narrow the racial wage gap by more than a third.Tripling union density wouldn’t only benefit union members. Nonunion workers would also see large raises, because strong unions lift standards across the economy. AFL-CIO prez Liz Shuler and EPI economist Heidi Shierholtz share a byline in TIME magazine, via Portside

How ‘You Can See Everything’ Exacts Hollywood’s Revenge on Big Tech
Along with ‘Artificial,’ ‘Musk’ and ‘The Social Reckoning,’ the storytellers are finally getting back at the engineers

AI will generate plenty of memeslop and cost-cutting; anyone who comes out of these movies thinking the great automation battle has been won in Hollywood, let alone the world, is either naive or self-deceiving. But it would be equally misguided to emerge into the daylight and think the films won’t matter at all, that a strong injection of anti-oligarchal humanity won’t course through the collective blood or change social views — that a long-term grudge, really, won’t be settled in some very productive ways. The Hollywood Reporter via Portside