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US and Russia ‘actively discussing’ settlement of Ukraine conflict – Moscow

16 Nov, 2025, https://www.rt.com/russia/627862-russia-us-discuss-ukraine-settlement/

The understanding reached at the Alaska summit is still in force, President Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Moscow and Washington are continuing their dialogue on resolving the Ukraine conflict in line with the understanding reached during the Alaska meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump in August, Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Although the summit failed to yield a breakthrough, Moscow has praised what it called Washington’s willingness to mediate and consider the conflict’s underlying causes.

Russian officials also maintain that continued dialogue creates opportunities for trade and economic cooperation despite the US decision to sanction the oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil last month.

Russia is receiving “many signals” from the US, with the Anchorage meeting still acting as a basis for the talks, Ushakov told journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday. “We do believe it is a good way forward,” he said. According to the official, the understandings are still relevant since Washington has never explicitly stated that they are no longer valid.

The presidential aide admitted that the peace process and agreements reached in Alaska do not sit well with Kiev and some of its European backers, adding that it only indicates they want to continue the bloodshed. “The Anchorage [meeting] is only disliked by those who does not want a peaceful resolution [to the Ukraine conflict],” he said.

Bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington sank to an all-time low under former US President Joe Biden, amid the Ukraine conflict, but have shown signs of improvement since Trump’s return to the White House. US and Russian officials have held several rounds of talks this year, including the Alaska summit.

The US and Russia also announced the next planned Trump-Putin summit in Budapest in the fall, but it was then postponed indefinitely. Washington is still determined to continue contacts with Moscow, according to US Vice President J.D. Vance. Earlier in November, he called direct dialogue with Russia part of the “Trump doctrine.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reaffirmed this month that Moscow was ready to resume contacts and rejected media reports claiming otherwise as false.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | politics international, Russia, USA | Leave a comment

The Censored History of Able Archer 83

Archive Publishes “War Scare” Documents Deleted from State Department History

Newly Declassified Documents Focus on Soviet Military’s Fear of U.S. First Strike During Exercise

Washington, D.C., November 14, 2025  https://nsarchive.salsalabs.org/908?wvpId=753e3bf4-ad6a-4702-8e18-2f0d8d5326e6– The State Department quietly deleted important archival records from an official history detailing how a 1983 NATO war game could have led to a catastrophic nuclear exchange, according to new reporting from The Washington Post. This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, according to the report.

Today, the Archive is publishing copies of the records that were censored by the State Department, along with a selection of the most revealing war scare records. Among them are records revealing that the Soviet military leadership genuinely feared that they were vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear strike from the West during the war scare.

The State Department republished the FRUS volume without the records after the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2024 upheld a CIA decision to deny a 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the National Security Archive seeking the declassification of an important retrospective analysis of Able Archer 83 written by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, who warned that the exercise could have led to “a potentially disastrous situation.”

Asked why 15 pages on Able Archer had been removed from the history without explanation, the State Department told the Post that “[t]he Department was not required to provide public notice.”

National Security Archive director Tom Blanton said that the unprecedented deletion of declassified historical records from the State Department volume on the war scare echoed similar efforts in the Soviet Union where, as author David Remnick writes, the “censors went through the libraries with razor blades and slashed from the bound copies of Novy Mir.”

“Today, in America,” Blanton said, “the censors just have to press delete.”

READ THE DOCUMENTS THAT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CENSORED
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.

November 18, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Trump Bets Big on a Nuclear Comeback

critics are not so certain that Westinghouse will be able to deliver on its promises due to the company’s poor track record.

The question now is, just how long will it take to achieve the U.S. nuclear renaissance? ………………………  The projects being funded by tech companies, which focus on the development of SMRs, are not expected to produce power until the next decade, and these are much smaller than conventional reactors.

By Felicity Bradstock , Oil Price- Nov 15, 2025, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Trump-Bets-Big-on-a-Nuclear-Comeback.html

  • The Trump administration plans to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050 and deploy 10 new large reactors by 2030, backed by major public funding and tech-sector investment.
  • Westinghouse, Cameco, and international partners like Japan and the U.K. are central to the expansion push, though Westinghouse’s troubled track record raises concerns.
  • Long development timelines, high costs, regulatory delays, and a diminished skills base make a rapid nuclear renaissance unlikely despite political momentum.

United States President Donald Trump is putting his money where his mouth is as he doubles down on efforts to accelerate the expansion of the country’s nuclear energy sector. The government will spend billions in public funding to reinvigorate U.S. nuclear power, following decades of underinvestment. Unlike renewable energy, Trump views nuclear power as key to expanding the U.S. electricity generation capacity and recently announced the target of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050.

In May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to develop 10 new large nuclear reactors by the end of the decade. In addition, several tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, are providing billions in private funding to restart old nuclear plants, upgrade existing ones, and deploy new reactor technology to meet the growing demands from the data centres powering advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) loan office will dedicate significant funds to the nuclear energy industry to support the development of new reactors. This week, the Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “We have significant lending authority at the loan programme office… By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants — to get those first plants built.”

Wright expects the public support for the sector to encourage private actors to invest more heavily in nuclear power in the coming years. “When we leave office three years and three months from now, I want to see hopefully dozens of nuclear plants under construction,” said Wright.

In October, Trump came to an agreement with the owners of Westinghouse – uranium miner Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management – to invest $80 billion to build nuclear plants across the country. Westinghouse plans to construct large nuclear plants to be fitted with its modern AP1000 reactor design, which can power over 750,000 homes, according to the company. Cameco COO Grant Isaac suggested he would look to the DoE’s loans office to fund the development of the Westinghouse reactors.

However, critics are not so certain that Westinghouse will be able to deliver on its promises due to the company’s poor track record. The firm went bankrupt in 2017 after going over budget on large-scale nuclear projects in Georgia and South Carolina. Westinghouse will have to prove its ability to build the AP1000 on time and on budget to attract the investment it requires.

The Trump administration has developed various international partnerships to help develop its nuclear power sector in recent months. In September, Japan committed to investing in the Westinghouse nuclear project. The Asian country also agreed on an investment deal for Hitachi GE Vernova to build small modular reactors (SMRs). 

Also in September, the U.S. signed a multibillion-dollar deal with the United Kingdom to expand nuclear power across both countries. The new Atlantic Partnership for Advanced Nuclear Energy is aimed at accelerating the construction of new reactors and providing reliable, low-carbon energy for high-demand sectors, such as data centres.

The question now is, just how long will it take to achieve the U.S. nuclear renaissance? It typically takes a decade or longer to develop a new nuclear power plant, and while adding additional reactors to existing plants can be faster, licensing and approval can take several years. In addition, after decades of stagnation in the sector, developing nuclear reactors in the U.S. can be extremely costly and slow, due to the lack of expertise, compared to rapidly growing nuclear powers, such as China.

In China, developing a new nuclear reactor now takes between five and six years on average, much faster than the decade-long timeline in most Western countries. This is supported by China’s strong regulatory system and tried-and-tested development methods. Meanwhile, in the U.S., just powering up a disused reactor, such as that of Three Mile Island, can take several years to achieve. The projects being funded by tech companies, which focus on the development of SMRs, are not expected to produce power until the next decade, and these are much smaller than conventional reactors.

The Trump administration hopes to speed up the development process through a range of measures. One executive order calls for the nuclear power industry’s safety regulator to approve applications in no more than 18 months. The recent funding announcement from the DoE’s loan office is expected to help overcome the biggest bottleneck – funding. Congress has also kept its tax breaks in place for nuclear development to attract private funding to the sector.

Thanks to greater political support and public financing, the U.S. nuclear energy sector could rapidly expand its power capacity over the coming decades. However, achieving the level of acceleration in nuclear development expected by the Trump administration is highly unlikely due to a range of challenges hindering development, from expertise to cost and manufacturing capacity. So, while a nuclear renaissance is possible, it is unlikely to be seen within the next decade. 

November 17, 2025 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

‘Gunboat Diplomacy’: U.S. War in Latin America Feared as Hegseth Launches ‘Operation Southern Spear’

SCHEERPOST, November 15, 2025 By DemocracyNow!

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced the launch of Operation Southern Spear to target suspected drug traffickers in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The U.S. now has 15,000 military personnel in the region. Over the past two months the U.S. has blown up at least 20 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. “80 people have been killed in what are extrajudicial executions under international law,” says Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch. The Pentagon claims the boats were carrying drugs but officials have acknowledged they don’t know who has been killed.

“Progressives and people of goodwill — of the U.S. and Puerto Rico — it’s time for those of us here to stand up and say that where we will not support any attempt to bring back the old gunboat diplomacy and to invade another Latin American country, and we need to do it soon, because this stuff is moving very quickly,” says Democracy Now!’s Juan González.

Transcript

………………………..AMY GOODMAN: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced the launch of Operation Southern Spear to target suspected drug traffickers, he says. In a post on X, Hegseth wrote, quote, “Today, I’m announcing Operation Southern Spear led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM. This mission defends our homeland, removes narcoterrorism from our hemisphere, and secures our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” unquote.

The announcement comes as the Pentagon continues to amass warships in the Caribbean. The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier arrived earlier this week. The U.S. now has 15,000 military personnel in the region. It’s the largest buildup in the region in decades, according to the New York Times. Over the past two months, the U.S. has blown up at least 20 boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The latest strike killed four people on Thursday.

The Pentagon claims the boats were carrying drugs, but officials have acknowledged they don’t know who’s been killed. Critics have denounced the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings. We begin today’s show with Juan Pappier, the Americas Deputy Director at Human Rights Watch. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Juan. Begin by talking about Operation Southern Spear and what this means.

JUAN PAPPIER: Amy, thank you for having me. We don’t know what Operation Southern Spear means. The Secretary has not provided details. But we have every reason to be concerned because in the buildup of this announcement, as you mentioned, 80 people have been killed in what are extrajudicial executions under international law…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, well, Amy, I think with the – especially now, not only with these attacks on boats and these killings, but now with the arrival of an unprecedented military force – we’re talking the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald Ford, has just arrived in the Caribbean with another 5,000 troops and several other battleships accompanying it.

We now have 15,000 U.S. troops in the region, thousands of them based in Puerto Rico. The government has reopened Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, which they had closed, and U.S. planes at the old Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla. All of these soldiers are not there to hang out. They’re there to take military action. We have to be clear.

Even though the government hasn’t announced it, it’s clear that this is what’s coming. Our government is embarking on a totally unprovoked military assault and regime change operations in Latin America. The Trump administration has openly accused not one but two Latin-American presidents of drug dealing without any proof, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Gustavo Petro of Colombia and threatened to kill Maduro. This is a bizarre return to the gunboat diplomacy of the early 20th century.

And the big prize being not democracy or not stopping drug trafficking, but grabbing the Venezuelan oil fields, the largest oil reserves in the world. The problem is, this is not the old Latin America that the U.S. could bully at will. The countries at the region are today independent sovereign states………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 Yes, it’s a clear continued policy of the United States to control oil production as much as it can as the Trump administration continues on this crazy, bizarre attempt to corner as much oil supply as they can as it continues to deny the existence of climate change or the climate catastrophe we face, https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/15/gunboat-diplomacy-u-s-war-in-latin-america-feared-as-hegseth-launches-operation-southern-spear/

November 17, 2025 Posted by | SOUTH AMERICA, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Finally Some Accountability for Georgia’s Costly Nuclear Power Mistake

Vogtle stands as the only new nuclear reactor built in the last 30 years, and its fallout offers a bleak prognosis for any supposed “renaissance” and its supporters in statehouses across the country. We can look back to 2017 when the main contractor, Westinghouse, filed for bankruptcy due to the extreme cost overruns at Vogtle. At that critical moment, the Georgia PSC ignored its own staff, energy experts, and public outcry, choosing to burden ratepayers with the project’s continuation.

By Kim Scott.15 Nov 25 https://nuclearcosts.org/finally-some-accountability-for-georgias-costly-nuclear-power-mistake/

The story of Plant Vogtle’s two new nuclear reactors in Georgia is not a triumph of a “nuclear renaissance”; it’s a cautionary tale written in soaring electric bills and a growing political fallout. The people of Georgia are paying the price, literally, as their utility bills have skyrocketed by over 40% – and now, following last Tuesday’s Public Service Commission election in Georgia, it seems those that allowed this to happen in the first place are starting to feel the pinch as well. It’s about damn time! 

Georgia voters delivered a stunning message by unseating two Republican utility commissioners, Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, who rubber stamped and championed the costly mistakes leading to a 41% increase in Georgians’ electric bills. This election, which saw Democrats Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard championing fair rates, affordability and renewable energy, was a clear referendum on Plant Vogtle’s enormous price tag and more importantly, nuclear power as a not so clean future power resource both here in Georgia and elsewhere. 

The stunning defeat of utility backed incumbents sends a powerful signal to utility regulators nationwide that consumers will not tolerate being forced to pay for multi-billion-dollar nuclear boondoggles. If they aren’t paying attention, Wall Street sure is, downgrading Southern Co.’s stock immediately following the election, citing the increased risk and the new difficulty the company will face in pushing through further rate hikes to pay for Plant Vogtle and other projects in their pipeline. Georgia customers will pay an additional $36 billion to $43 billion over the 60-80 year lifespan of the two Vogtle reactors compared to cheaper alternatives. 

Vogtle stands as the only new nuclear reactor built in the last 30 years, and its fallout offers a bleak prognosis for any supposed “renaissance” and its supporters in statehouses across the country. We can look back to 2017 when the main contractor, Westinghouse, filed for bankruptcy due to the extreme cost overruns at Vogtle. At that critical moment, the Georgia PSC ignored its own staff, energy experts, and public outcry, choosing to burden ratepayers with the project’s continuation.

The consequences of those decisions, subsequent rate increases and soaring electric bills are not abstract—they are impacting the most vulnerable among us and the most overlooked i.e. middle class/working class Georgians. Disconnection rates for the inability to pay have soared by 30% in 2024. For retirees on fixed incomes, the rate increases to pay for Plant Vogtle mean the difference between making ends meet and falling into destitution. This summer, when brutal heat waves descended, vulnerable Georgians had their power shut off, creating life-threatening conditions because they could no longer afford to cool their homes.

The ratepayer backlash in Georgia is also being fueled by the projected massive energy demands of AI data centers, which are forcing utilities like Southern Co. to reckon with costly new generation and transmission projects. Instead of aggressively pushing nuclear power—as evidenced by the Trump administration’s recent $80 billion deal to buy reactors from Westinghouse, the same company bankrupted by Vogtle—we must demand that elected politicians focus on fast and affordable energy solutions like solar and battery energy storage systems. 

The painful lesson learned in Georgia is that new nuclear power is simply too expensive and takes too long. The reality is that for half the cost and in less than a quarter of the time, we could have built more than twice the capacity using solar, wind, or battery storage technologies. But corruption won out and Vogtle is here for the foreseeable future. Georgians will be paying for this mistake for decades to come… I’m just glad there’s finally some accountability headed our way.

Kim Scott is Executive Director of Georgia WAND, is a native Georgian, and has a Chemical Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

November 17, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Non Government Organisations Warn that Recent Executive Orders Would Harm Public Health, Disproportionately Impacting Women and Children

“Young men like the Reference Man are harmed by radiation, but they’re more resistant to harm than are women and children. Radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”

Asheville, North Carolina – November 14, https://www.radiationproject.org/blog/ngos-warn-that-recent-executive-orders-would-harm-public-health-disproportionately-impacting-women-and-children?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6917d62bc4477007efdd4b63&ss_email_id=6917db9d43e3de1cada92627&ss_campaign_name=Welcome+to+GRIP%E2%80%99s+NEW+Blog&ss_campaign_sent_date=2025-11-15T01%3A47%3A30Z

Over forty citizen’s sector organizations including the national nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility have sent a joint letter to federal officials warning of public health consequences of a series of executive orders by President Trump which direct the NRC to dramatically weaken Standards for Protection Against Radiation in the US federal code.  The letter points out sharply disproportionate impacts on women and children from weakening existing radiation exposure standards and calls for strengthening them.

The letter is posted here. It was spearheaded by the nonprofit Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) and sent to US Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Surgeon General Denise Hinton, and other key elected and appointed officials. 

Recent Trump executive orders direct the NRC to “reconsider” the linear no-threshold (LNT) model. The joint letter argues that this “would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus.” The widely accepted LNT model has no limit “below regulatory concern,” i.e. no level below which radiation exposure can be treated as negligible or zero-risk.  Where applied, LNT takes account of proportional cancer and health risks of all tiny exposures no matter how small.

Trump executive orders direct the NRC to undertake new rulemaking and “wholesale revision” of existing radiation regulations, which would likely lead to the NRC abandoning LNT and raising allowable exposure limits.

But past NRC opposition to such changes stands to be reversed by the Trump executive orders. If federal radiation regulations were weakened to permit  exposures of 10 Rems a year, scientists estimate that over a 70-year lifetime, four out of five people would develop cancer they would not otherwise get.

Today’s joint letter stresses that health damage would not be evenly distributed across the population, but would disproportionately affect women and children, who are biologically more susceptible to ionizing radiation than men.  And an article published today in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cites several lines of evidence “that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference” and that “infants are especially vulnerable to radiation harm.”

A July 2025 Idaho National Laboratory report commissioned by the Department of Energy recommended loosening the public radiation standard fivefold to 500 millirems. In 2021 the NRC roundly rejected a petition to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year, 100 times the current limit. 

“[NRC] bases its risk assessments on Reference Man, a model that represents a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impacts to infants, children, and women—pregnant or not,” the joint letter states. “Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies. Research on internal exposures…has not yet been sufficiently analyzed to discover if there are broad age-based or male/female differences in impact…. Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities…not weakened.  Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease and ongoing new findings.”

In cases where cancer, heart disease, and vascular degradation including stroke are caused by radiation, they are documented at higher rates in women than in men, according to 2024 UNIDIR report Gender and Ionizing Radiation. 

 The joint letter urges the NRC to “to stand up to the Executive Order’s marching orders to ‘promote’ nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate,” and adopt “stronger, science-based radiation protections….Contemporary research shows that radiation’s impact is far greater on females, children, and fetuses—the most at-risk postnatal group being girls from birth to age five. A truly protective framework would replace Reference Man with a lifecycle model.”

“All US radiation regulations and most radiation risk assessments are based on outcomes for the Reference Man,” said Mary Olson, CEO of GRIP, the organization which spearheaded the joint letter, and co-author of Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “Young men like the Reference Man are harmed by radiation, but they’re more resistant to harm than are women and children. Radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”

“We know that exposure to radiation causes disproportionate harm from both cancer and non-cancer related disease outcomes over the course of the lifetime to women and especially to little girls, but radiation is dangerous for everyone,”  said Amanda M. Nichols, Ph.D., lead author of  Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[President Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate.  This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. “

“Living near nuclear power facilities doubles the risk of leukemia in children; and radiation is also associated with numerous reproductive harms including infertility, stillbirths and birth defects.,” said Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist with the NGO Beyond Nuclear, a signatory to the joint letter. “Exposing people to more radiation, as this order would do if implemented, would be tantamount to legitimizing their suffering as the price of nuclear expansion.”

November 17, 2025 Posted by | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Trump stupidly brags about committing war crimes against Iran 

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, Nov 15, 2025, https://theaimn.net/trump-stupidly-brags-about-committing-war-crimes-against-iran/

Rule 1 for leaders committing war crimes is to refrain from bragging about them. President Trump jettisoned that wise rule regarding his criminal involvement in Israel’s 12 day war on Iran last June. 

When Israel attacked, Trump trotted his obedient Secretary of State Marco Rubio who issued this lie to America and world. “Israel had taken unilateral action to defend itself. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Let me be clear: Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”

Of course Iran had every right to target US interests and personnel since the US knew about and aided Israel’s crazed war that backfired on Israel. How so? Iran was wise to ignore US perfidy to launch a massive rocket attack on Israel that could not be defended against. After 12 days Israel threw in the towel. Israel now knows Iran will never be a genocidal punching bag like the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

US involvement was overt and covert. The former included refueling Israeli bombers during the entire 12 day war. The covert consisted of holding fake negotiations with Iran about their nuclear program to lull them into false security that no attack, which the US knew about, was imminent. Just 2 days beforehand Trump scheduled another negotiation and proclaimed “I am committed to a “diplomatic solution” with Iran.”

The US maintained the ‘not involved’ charade for nearly 5 months. Alas, Trump, an inveterate braggart on everything he maliciously touches from business partners, women wishing to be left alone, political enemies among others, just couldn’t contain his glee in assisting Israel’s unprovoked, murderous attack. ”Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that. When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel because that attack did more damage than the rest of them put together.”

Iran took note of Trump’s confession of international criminality. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi fired off a letter to UN officials demanding the US be held to account for enabling Israel’s attacks on Iran that killed more than 1,000 people. In the letter Araghchi cited Trump’s recent comments about how he was “in charge” of the Israeli attacks. “The Islamic Republic of Iran reserves its full and unimpeachable right to pursue, through all available legal means, the establishment of accountability for the responsible States and individuals and to secure compensation for the damages sustained.”

Araghchi can Faggedaboudit. If the UN and the International Criminal Court can do nothing Trump’s complicity in Israel’s monstrous genocide in Gaza, there is zero chance they will even glance at his war crimes in Iran.

November 17, 2025 Posted by | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Empire Only De-Escalates In One Area So It Can Escalate In Another, And Other Notes

Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 15, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-empire-only-de-escalates-in-one?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=178942591&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Just as things cool down a bit in the middle east, the US has relocated the USS Gerald Ford from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean while the Trump administration discusses plans to bomb Venezuela.

The violence of the empire remains constant. Peace is never the goal. You get happy they’re pulling the world’s largest aircraft carrier away from Iran, then it turns out they’re only doing it so they can move it to Venezuela. You get happy they’re pulling out of Afghanistan, then suddenly they’re waging a proxy war in Ukraine.

These days whenever you see the imperial war machinery getting pulled from one area, you know it’s just going to be sent someplace else.

Peace is never pursued for its own sake, because there’s nothing in it for the empire. There’s too much power and money in nonstop warmongering for peace to be allowed to become the norm.

Which is just insane if you think about it. Every normal person wants peace in their own lives. None of us want our time on this planet to be disturbed by violence, chaos and bloodshed.

The western world has created a machine whose behavior goes against every healthy human impulse. The US-led world order has given birth to an out of control monster with an insatiable appetite for human flesh.

❖

Reuters reports that in 2024 the Biden administration had intelligence showing that the IDF was using Palestinians as human shields in Gaza. But Biden continued shipping genocide weapons to the Israelis the entire time he was in office.

You’ll still periodically see online liberals trying to shame leftists for not voting for Kamala, but the more information comes out about what the Biden administration was up to during that time the more genocidal they look. Biden-Harris are looking worse with time, not better.

When you see what a large-scale power broker Jeffrey Epstein was for Israeli intelligence, you understand why it’s entirely reasonable to suspect that extensive state resources would be put toward an elaborate plot to murder him in his prison cell and make it look like a suicide.

Generative AI stuff only looks impressive to mediocre people for the same reason a chess novice couldn’t tell you whether they were playing against a Grandmaster or just someone who’s pretty good at chess. We can only appreciate something up to the level of our own adeptness.

To someone who’s not very bright, an AI’s imitation of reasoning looks sharp. Someone with no aptitude for writing or appreciation for great literature will think its prose reads brilliantly. Its poetry looks good to those who don’t understand poetry. Its “art” looks great to those with no artistic sensibility. It’s music sounds awesome to those with no musical depth. Only those who are emotionally stunted and incapable of meaningful human connection will find them to be stimulating conversationalists and companions.

Like so much else capitalism produces, it’s a product that’s designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For everyone else it looks vapid and gross, just like daytime talk shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and trashy tabloids always have.

That’s just how it works in a society which only elevates that which can generate profits. The food is designed to induce craving rather than facilitate health. The entertainment is designed to distract and sedate rather than to edify. The social media is designed to be addictive rather than to help people connect with each other. It’s all geared to appeal to our baser instincts rather than to improve and inform us.

Anyone who is interested in actually growing as a person will have less and less use for anything GenAI has to offer. Past a certain point of personal development, it simply cannot satisfy.

November 17, 2025 Posted by | spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

Lab Chromium Contamination Confirmed on San Ildefonso Pueblo Land.

Since chromium contamination was first reported in 2004, the Lab’s nuclear weapons budget has more than doubled to $5 billion (now 84% of LANL’s ~$6 billion annual budget). Cleanup is being cut to $278 million (less than 5% of the Lab’s total budget), as are virtually all non-nuclear weapons programs (research into renewable energies is being eliminated).[6]

Comprehensive Cleanup Needed Instead of More Nuclear Weapons

November 14, 2025, nuclear watch , New Mexico, nukewatch.org

Santa Fe, NM – The New Mexico Environment Department has announced:
“A toxic chromium plume from Los Alamos National Laboratory has spread beyond Lab boundaries onto Pueblo de San Ildefonso land for the first time, with contamination exceeding state groundwater standards… These new results are conclusive evidence that the U.S. Department of Energy’s efforts to contain the chromium plume have been inadequate.” In reality, chromium groundwater contamination probably migrated beyond the LANL/San Ildefonso Pueblo boundary long ago, with Lab maps of the plume “magically’ stopping at the border. In the past, tribal leadership has commented that it was fortunate that the contamination stopped there, but that any future indications of groundwater contamination on Pueblo land could have serious consequences. The San Ildefonso Pueblo is a sovereign Native American tribal government.
As late as the late 1990s the Lab was falsely claiming that groundwater contamination was impossible because underlying volcanic tuff is “impermeable.” [1] This ignored the obvious fact that the Parajito Plateau is heavily seismically fractured, providing ready pathways for contaminant migration to deep groundwater.
By 2005 even LANL acknowledged that continuing increasing contamination of the regional aquifer is inevitable.[2] Some 300,000 northern New Mexicans rely upon the aquifer for safe drinking water. The potential serious human health effects (including cancer) caused by chromium contamination was the subject of the popular movie Erin Brockovich.


LANL’s chromium contamination plume is at least one mile long, a half mile wide and 100 feet thick.[3] It is commonly regarded as the Lab’s most serious environmental threat. One drinking water supply well for Los Alamos County has already been shut down because of the plume. But even two decades after it was first reported, the Lab still doesn’t know how big the chromium plume is.


On December 30, 2024, in the middle of the holiday season, the Lab posted the report Independent Review of the Chromium Interim Measures Remediation System to its largely unknown Legacy Cleanup Electronic Public Reading Room. The Report’s bottom line was:
“…at this time the plume is not sufficiently characterized to design a final remedy… data gaps and uncertainties need to be addressed before committing to an alternative or final remedy.”


From 1956 to 1972, water containing potassium dichromate was used to prevent corrosion in cooling towers, releasing as much as 160,000 pounds of potassium dichromate into the headwaters of Sandia Canyon.[4] Over a 3-year period ending in November 2022, the Department of Energy extracted, treated and reinjected more than 400 million gallons of groundwater. But the December 2024 chromium report stated that only ~680 pounds of chromium was actually removed.[5] At this rate it will take more than a century to treat and remediate the chromium plume.

While failing to recommend a final remedy, the new chromium report did argue that extraction and treatment of groundwater should be continued. However, in order to speed up cleanup as part of any final remedy, Nuclear Watch New Mexico argues for pumping or trucking the treated groundwater uphill to flush out the chromium contamination at its source. In addition, more monitoring wells should be installed to finally determine the true depth and breadth of the chromium contamination that threatens northern New Mexico’s largest supply of drinking water.

Since chromium contamination was first reported in 2004, the Lab’s nuclear weapons budget has more than doubled to $5 billion (now 84% of LANL’s ~$6 billion annual budget). Cleanup is being cut to $278 million (less than 5% of the Lab’s total budget), as are virtually all non-nuclear weapons programs (research into renewable energies is being eliminated).[6]

According to the independent Government Accountability Office, expected completion of Lab cleanup has been repeatedly pushed back, most recently to 2043 with an estimated cost of $7 billion.[7] But even this is a false cleanup with the Lab planning to “cap and cover” some 800,000 cubic yards of radioactive and toxic wastes, leaving them permanently buried in unlined pits and shafts as a perpetual threat to groundwater. As the Lab becomes more and more a nuclear weapons production site for plutonium “pit” bomb cores, it remains woefully ignorant over the extent and depth of the contamination it has caused to the regional groundwater aquifer. At the same time, LANL continues to downplay widespread plutonium contamination in soil, water and plants.[8]

Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented: “LANL’s expanding nuclear weapons programs are a two-fold threat. First, they fuel the new nuclear arms race that threatens all of humanity. At the same time, they rob funding from vitally needed cleanup that would permanently protect our irreplaceable groundwater. As is commonly said in northern New Mexico, “Aqua es Vida!” Nuclear weapons can destroy both.”

November 17, 2025 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s Ploy at the UN Is American Imperialism Masquerading as a Peace Process

Jeffrey D. SachsSybil Fares, Nov 13, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-s-ploy-at-the-un-is-american-imperialism-masquerading-as-a-peace-process

Palestine remains the endless victim of US and Israeli maneuvers. The results are not just devastating for Palestine, which has suffered an outright genocide, but for the Arab world and beyond.

The Trump administration is pushing an Israeli-crafted resolution at the UN Security Council (UNSC) this week aimed at eliminating the possibility of a State of Palestine. The resolution does three things. It establishes US political control over Gaza. It separates Gaza from the rest of Palestine. And it allows the US, and therefore Israel, to determine the timeline for Israel’s supposed withdrawal from Gaza–which would mean: never.

This is imperialism masquerading as a peace process. In and of itself it’s no surprise. Israel runs US foreign policy in the Middle East. What is a surprise is that the US and Israel might just get away with this travesty unless the world speaks up with urgency and indignation.

The draft UNSC resolution would establish a US-UK-dominated Board of Peace, chaired by none other than Donald Trump himself, and endowed with sweeping powers over Gaza’s governance, borders, reconstruction, and security. This resolution would sideline the State of Palestine and condition any transfer of authority to the Palestinians on the indulgence of the Board of Peace.

This would be an overt return to the British Mandate of 100 years ago, with the only change being that the US would hold the mandate rather than Britain. If it weren’t so utterly tragic, it would be laughable. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Yes, the proposal is farce, yet Israel’s genocide is not. It is tragedy of the first order.

Incredibly, according to the draft resolution, the Board of Peace would be granted sovereign powers in Gaza. Palestinian sovereignty is left to the discretion of the Board, which alone would decide when Palestinians are “ready” to govern themselves – perhaps in another 100 years? Even military security is subordinated to the Board, and the envisioned forces would answer not to the UN Security Council or to the Palestinian people, but to the Board’s “strategic guidance.”

The US-Israel resolution is being put forward precisely because the rest of the world—other than Israel and the US—has woken up to two facts. First, Israel is committing genocide, a reality witnessed every day in Gaza and the West Bank, where innocent Palestinians are murdered to the satisfaction of the Israel Defense Forces and the illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Second, Palestine is a state, albeit one whose sovereignty remains obstructed by the US, which uses its veto in the UNSC to block Palestine’s permanent UN membership. At the UN this past July and then again in September, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Palestine’s statehood, a fact that put the Israel-US Zionist lobby into overdrive, resulting in the current draft resolution.

For Israel to accomplish its goal of Greater Israel, the US is pursuing a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, squeezing Arab and Islamic states with threats and inducements. When other countries resist the US-Israel demands, they are cut off from critical technologies, lose access to World Bank and IMF financing, and suffer Israeli bombing, even in countries with US military bases present. The US offers no real protection; rather, it orchestrates a protection racket, extracting concessions from countries wherever US leverage exists. This extortion will continue until the global community stands up to such tactics and insists upon genuine Palestinian sovereignty and US and Israeli adherence to international law.

Palestine remains the endless victim of US and Israeli maneuvers. The results are not just devastating for Palestine, which has suffered an outright genocide, but for the Arab world and beyond. Israel and the US are currently at war, overtly or covertly, across the Horn of Africa (Libya, Sudan, Somalia), the Eastern Mediterranean (Lebanon, Syria), the Gulf region (Yemen), and Western Asia (Iraq, Iran).


If the UN Security Council is to provide true security in accordance with the UN Charter, it must not yield to US pressures and instead act decisively in line with international law. A resolution truly for peace should include four vital points. First, it should welcome the State of Palestine as a sovereign UN member state, with the US lifting its veto. Second, it should safeguard the territorial integrity of the State of Palestine and Israel, according to the 1967 borders. Third, it should establish a UNSC-mandated protection force drawn up from Muslim-majority states. Fourth, it should include the defunding and disarmament of all belligerent non-state entities, and it should ensure the mutual security of Israel and Palestine.

The two-state solution is about true peace—not about the politicide and genocide of Palestine, or the continued attacks by militants on Israel. It’s time for both Palestinians and Israelis to be safe, and for the US and Israel to give up the cruel delusion of permanently ruling over the Palestinian people.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Bechtel Chief Says U.S. Must Subsidize Trump’s Nuclear Revival.

By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles – Nov 153, 2025 https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Bechtel-Chief-Says-US-Must-Subsidize-Trumps-Nuclear-Revival.html5,

  • Bechtel CEO Craig Albert said the U.S. government should help cover the costs of new nuclear plants under Trump’s proposed expansion.
  • Nuclear power relies on layers of government subsidies for insurance, fuel, and waste disposal.
  • If more reactors are truly needed, the government—not private firms—should build and operate them to lower capital costs

Well, someone important finally said it. Craig Albert, head of construction firm Bechtel, credited by the Financial Times for “rescuing” the Vogtle nuclear project in Georgia (we think “finishing“ it would be a better description), told that august paper that if the government wanted to get Donald Trump’s nuclear construction expansion going, it should be willing to pick up part of the costs. That is, subsidize the seemingly inevitable cost overruns? All the stories that followed talked about encouraging the “early movers” as if nobody had been building nuclear plants for the past seventy years, with cost overruns a common feature of construction in the US and Europe for at least 40 years.

We’ve said, and written in blogs and books, that building nuclear power plants in the USA (and a lot of other places) is not and has never been a commercial business venture. And maybe not a rational one, either. (The list of government subsidies for the industry like insurance, fuel procurement, nuclear waste disposal etc. go on and on.) 

And Mr. Albert’s comments seem to bear that out. Just about every other electricity source is cheaper. If you don’t believe in climate change, then why not build more coal and gas? The USA has large domestic supplies of both. They run around the clock, too. If you believe in climate change, wind and solar assisted by batteries and better transmission can do the same job as a base load plant at about the same price points. And the wind and sun don’t have to be imported. But the Chinese control the rare earths that go into those facilities. Yes, but there are plenty of rare earths to be found elsewhere (“rare” being a misnomer). The problem is that the Chinese control the processing. So, would it take more time to build a nuclear plant or to build rare earth processing facilities in friendly places?

Or, if we really were worried about national security or the climate and were looking for an economical way out, we might want to do something about our outsize consumption of electricity, roughly 50-100% higher than in similarly developed countries in similar climates. For years, energy economists have argued that saving energy is a lot cheaper than producing it. A nonstarter nowadays. (Ever since 1977 when Jimmy Carter caused a controversy by turning down the thermostats and putting on a sweater in the White House to encourage energy conservation this has been a political nonstarter. Sad.)

Here’s the point. We need lots of electricity, but we don’t need nuclear power. So why should we subsidize the risk? This is not a new technology. Our first commercial reactor entered service in 1957. It’s an old, extremely complicated technology that never met its promised potential. A workable fusion reactor might change the world, but not more fission nukes. However, if the powers that be really want more nukes, we suggest that the government build and run them. It couldn’t do worse than the private generating companies. It would open the nuclear subsidy to public scrutiny and it would save a bundle on capital costs. (The government can always finance things much more cheaply than the private sector.) Our conclusion is that nuclear power is not a place for the private sector because it is not, and has never been, a commercially viable business.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Beyond Nuclear brings interim storage case back to Supreme Court.

Nov 14, 2025, https://www.ans.org/news/article-7537/beyond-nuclear-brings-interim-storage-case-back-to-supreme-court/

The U.S. Supreme Court may once again scrutinize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license consolidated interim storage facilities for commercial spent nuclear fuel. The antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear has filed a petition with the court for a writ of certiorari review of an August 2024 appeals court decision rejecting the group’s lawsuit against the licensing of Holtec International’s New Mexico storage facility, the HI-STORE CISF.

Beyond Nuclear is arguing that the NRC’s decision to license the HI-STORE CISF and deny the group’s hearing request violated the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) and the Administrative Procedure Act, as well as the constitutional separation of powers doctrine. The group also contends that the NRC manipulated the hearing process to deny the group its right to a “day in court.”

The petition was filed on October 31 and docketed on November 4, with docket No. 25–540.

Litigating the merits: The U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled against Texas in its case regarding the licensing of Interim Storage Partners’ proposed CISF in Andrews County, Texas. The court found that plaintiffs Texas and Fasken Land and Minerals did not have standing as “parties aggrieved” to challenge the NRC license, sending the case back to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to be dismissed. As directed by the Supreme Court, the 5th Circuit dismissed the petitions against both the ISP and Holtec CISFs on October 20.

In NRC v. Texas, however, the Supreme Court did not weigh in on the NRC’s authority under the Atomic Energy Act and the NWPA to license private companies to store spent nuclear fuel at away-from-reactor sites.

In its petition to the Supreme Court, Beyond Nuclear claims that Holtec’s NRC license violates the NWPA, as the law prohibits the Department of Energy from taking any ownership of spent fuel until a deep geologic repository is licensed and operating.

Beyond Nuclear, together with Fasken, made similar arguments in their 2024 petition to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court, however, rejected that argument, finding that because Holtec “sought a license for the lawful storage of privately owned spent fuel, and only the conditional storage of DOE-titled fuel if such storage became lawful, the Commission concluded that Beyond Nuclear had failed to raise a genuine dispute of law or fact.”

New Mexico pause: In October, Holtec canceled its agreement with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, its partner in building the HI-STORE CISF. The company cited ongoing state resistance to the facility for the decision. In addition, Holtec said the canceled agreement would allow the company to work with other states that may be interested in interim storage projects.

Beyond Nuclear, however, has denigrated Holtec’s announcement as a “ruse,” claiming the company could be waiting until the political environment is more favorable to the project, or that Holtec may sell its license to another company for development in New Mexico.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | Legal, USA | Leave a comment

Atom is prematurely split in the ‘golden age’ transatlantic partnership

Nils Pratley, 14 Nov 25 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/13/atom-split-us-uk-golden-age-partnership-wylfe-smr

Britain was always going to prefer homegrown technology for the SMR reactors at Wylfe. The US would have done the same.

It had all been so harmonious two months ago. “Together with the US, we’re building a golden age of nuclear that puts both countries at the forefront of global innovation and investment,” purred the prime minister about the new “landmark” UK-US nuclear partnership.

Now there’s an atomic split over the first significant decision. The UK has allocated Wylfa on the island of Anglesey, or Ynys Môn, to host three small modular reactors (SMRs) to be built by the British developer Rolls-Royce SMR. The US ambassador, Warren Stephens, says his country is “extremely disappointed”: he wanted Westinghouse, a US company, to get the gig for a large-scale reactor.

This quarrel is easy to adjudicate. The US ambassador is living in dreamland if he seriously thought the UK wouldn’t show home bias at Wylfa. This is the coveted site for new nuclear power in the UK because the land is owned by the government, which ought to make the planning process easier and quicker, and the site hosted a Magnox reactor until 2015, so the locals are used to nuclear plants. Since Rolls-Royce’s kit is the best national hope of reviving the UK’s industry with homegrown technology, of course there was going to be preferential treatment.

None of which is to say the SMR experiment will definitely succeed in the sense of demonstrating cheapness (a relative measure in nuclear-land) versus mega-plants, such as Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C or the Westinghouse design. Rolls-Royce oozes confidence about the cost-saving advantages of prefabrication in factories, but these have yet to be demonstrated on the ground. The point, though, is that the only way to find out is to get on and build. Rolls-Royce SMR’s only other order currently is from the Czech Republic for six units.

Indeed, the criticism from some quarters is that the UK government has been too timid in ordering only three. If the batch-production is supposed to be the gamechanger on costs, goes the argument, then commit to a decent-sized batch at the outset.

The choice of Wylfa may help on that score in time, though. The site is reckoned to be big enough to hold an additional five SMR units eventually, on the top of the first three. Since each SMR is 470 megawatts, a full build-out would equate to more megawatts in total than the 3,200 from each of Hinkley and Sizewell.

The sop to the US is that Westinghouse gets to compete for future large-scale reactor projects in the UK. It would probably have been a good idea to tell the ambassador in advance before he blew a fuse. Reserving Wylfa for Rolls-Royce SMRs was the only sensible decision here.

Hopes that SMR technology will become a major export-earner for the UK eventually are best treated with extreme caution at this stage. The first electricity from Wylfa won’t be generated until the mid-2030s, and the demonstration of falling costs with each additional unit can only come after that. There is a long way to go. But a good way to maximise your chance of success is to give the top site to your pet project. The US would have done exactly the same.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | politics international, UK, USA | Leave a comment

Toxic plume from Los Alamos National Laboratory spreads to nearby pueblo

by: Nicole Sanders, Nov 14, 2025 https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/toxic-plume-from-los-alamos-national-laboratory-spreads-to-nearby-pueblo/

NEW MEXICO (KRQE) — A toxic chromium plume from Los Alamos National Laboratory has spread onto Pueblo de San Ildefonso land, with contamination levels exceeding state groundwater standards. The New Mexico Environment Department says there is no imminent threat to drinking water on pueblo land or Los Alamos County because the plume is not near any known drinking well yet.

NMED says that the US Department of Energy’s chromium mitigation efforts failed, and because of that they are planning to file a lawsuit. Health officials say that long-term chromium ingestion can lead to cancer.

November 16, 2025 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

AI Warlord”+: Eric Schmidt – Money, Media and Maim

rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.

In an era where technology is advancing at breakneck speed, the implications of AI on warfare are profound and troubling. Byrne’s latest article, “AI Warlord: Eric Schmidt,” part of the ongoing Military AI Watch series from Project Censored, sheds light on the intersection of power, profit, and peril in the realm of military AI. From the shadowy alliances of tech billionaires to the ethical dilemmas posed by autonomous weaponry, we’ll explore how the hype surrounding AI is not just about innovation but also about control, surveillance, and an unsettling future.

October 30, 2025, By Peter Byrne, https://www.projectcensored.org/ai-warlord-eric-schmidt-money-media-maim/

In August, Foreign Affairs published Alphabet-Google billionaire Eric Schmidt’s essay “The Dawn of Automated Warfare”—co-authored with Greg Grant of the Center for New American Security, a nonprofit funded by Schmidt and the military industry.

Best characterized as an advertorial, the AI weapons piece promotes Schmidt’s investments in military AI, including Ukrainian drone manufacturer White Stork, and Relativity Space, a military rocket contractor.

The authors frame Ukraine’s battlefields as laboratories for testing AI weapons in “the new reality of war.” From their profit-seeking perspective, mass death and suffering are collateral effects justified by “racing to create … an automated drone swarm—the holy grail of drone operations.”

The sane response to such callous marketing disguised as objective analysis by a stakeholding multibillionaire is revulsion and disbelief. But, such is the halo of entrepreneurial genius and progressive philanthropy crowning the 70-year-old Democrat Party sugar daddy, that Schmidt’s pronouncements are treated as oracular in corridors of government where he exercises undue influence alongside fellow billionaire AI militarists Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Thiel, Hoffman, Bloomberg, Andreessen, Altman, Huang, Son, the Trumps, and Kushners.

Since 2016, investigative reports in major media have documented serious conflicts of interest between Schmidt’s governmental positions and his $30 billion in private investments and the multibillion-dollar stock portfolios managed by his nonprofit foundations. But Schmidt and his similarly conflicted tech mogul demographic remain politically immunized against punishment—or paying taxes—by the violence-energized system that created and enriches them.

Schmidt’s conflicts of interest

In 2016, when Schmidt served as CEO of Alphabet-Google, The Intercept and the Tech Transparency Project published The Android Administration, illuminating the incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and 152 Google executives: “Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations.”

Obama’s doors were always open to executives from Schmidt’s investment firm, Tomorrow Ventures, and Civis Analytics, an AI data firm controlled by Schmidt that is a federal contractor.

In 2019, Politico published “How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon,” highlighting Schmidt’s activities as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, a quasi-governmental body composed of militaristic capitalists such as Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman, who is also a board member of the genocide-abetting Microsoft Corporation. The Defense Innovation Board develops military contracting policies that impact companies controlled by Schmidt and other board members.

In 2021, American Prospect exposed that Rebellion Defense, a military and security tech company that Schmidt owns, was vacuuming up military AI contracts while he chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

As Schmidt’s reputation was spoiling, New York Times tech reporters tried to refresh it, “updating” a previously published hagiography. Brushing past Schmidt’s well-documented conflicts, Kate Conger and Cade Metz explained that the philanthropic venture capitalist had simply “reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex.”

In May 2022, the Tech Transparency Project published a blockbuster series detailing the scope of Schmidt’s influence over military AI contracting and his many conflicts of interest.

In December 2022, referencing CNBC reporting on Schmidt’s conflicts, Senator Elizabeth Warren formally requested that the Secretary of Defense investigate Schmidt; there is no available record of a reply.

In May 2023, Le Monde highlighted the synergies between Schmidt’s business interests and his calls to prepare for warring with China. Fox News reported on an investigation by the MAGA-friendly Bull Moose Project, which charted the intersections of Schmidt’s interlocking business and governmental networks. Jack Poulson’s All Source Intelligence published additional evidence of conflicts of interest between Google and Schmidt, including collaborating with US and Australian intelligence agencies.

These are but a few examples of the flood of exposés, amplified by hundreds of news outlets, that could have prompted federal agencies to bar Schmidt from military contracting for influence peddling. But Schmidt’s military businesses thrived during the Trump I and Biden years, and continue to do so under Trump II. In June 2025, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, a military AI venture capitalist associated with the Trump–Kushner family’s Thrive Capital, was tasked with delivering the keynote address at a June 2025 conference called AI+ Expo, sponsored by Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was dissolved in 2021 after concluding that the US must buy more military AI products to face off against China. Schmidt then transmuted the federal commission into the SCSP, a partially tax-exempt private foundation he funded and governs, which opposes AI regulation.

Most of SCSP’s fifty-member staff have worked for either the Commission, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or Wall Street firms. SCSP leadership includes the Center for a New American Security’s Robert O. Work and Michèle Flournoy. Both are Pentagon careerists turned lobbyists for military AI. To direct his military AI lobby, Schmidt hired the commission’s director, Ylli Bajraktari, the former chief of staff to Trump’s national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, also a prominent military AI promoter.

Tax-avoidant, Schmidt hires former national security officials to operate his interlocking network of businesses and tax-exempt organizations. He also places his employees and grantees in influential governmental positions, paying their salaries via his for-profit organization, Schmidt Futures.

Unholy AI alliances

Schmidt credits the late, and credibly accused war criminal, Henry Kissinger, with having inspired him to create SCSP. Schmidt modeled SCSP after Kissinger’s Special Studies Project (1956–1960), which oil and railroad billionaire John D. Rockefeller bankrolled through his Rockefeller Brothers Fund. History records that the Rockefeller study rationalized minimizing social spending to free up larger portions of the gross national product for the nuclear arms race.

Media amplification of the study influenced public opinion to support the Cold War by demonizing Russia and China as existential threats to American values, by which the Rockefellers meant plutocracy, not democracy.

Kissinger opposed arms control efforts. He advocated fighting “limited” nuclear wars with intercontinental ballistic missiles. He falsely claimed the US was militarily disadvantaged because Russia fielded more nuclear missiles, while the opposite was known to be the case. The Rockefeller study he crafted helped institutionalize what outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower called a danger to democracy when he left office in 1960. The former Army general presciently predicted “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” operating a perpetually war-seeking “military-industrial complex.”

In 2021, Kissinger, Schmidt, and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher published the bestselling book, The Age of AI. They advocated spending vast amounts of public wealth developing AI weapons of mass destruction for use against China.

Their arguments are framed in terms of seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy. They hail the solipsistic Cartesian worldview as the epitome of Reason, acting as if the wisdom of all previous ages culminated in the anti-democratic musings of Immanuel Kant, who avidly supported aristocratic rule. “The AI age needs its own Descartes, its own Kant, to explain what is being created and what it will mean for humanity. … Existing principles [of human reasoning] will not apply.” For Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher, artificial intelligence is the New Enlightenment.

The Age of AI echoes the factual dishonesty and omnicidal sociopathy of Herman Kahn’s 1960 treatise On Thermonuclear War. RAND Corporation theorist Kahn had argued that obedience to Reason requires accepting millions of deaths in a nuclear war waged to preserve American values.

According to Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, it is worth taking existential risks in order to achieve the supremacy of artificial intelligence:

Machines will enlighten humans, expanding our reality in ways we did not expect or necessarily intend to provoke. In daily life, AI is our partner, helping us make decisions about what to eat, what to wear, what to believe, where to go, and how to get there. … [AI] weapons are targetable with relative precision, [obeying] moral and legal imperatives.

Counseling going to war with China, Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher claim that failing to militarize artificial general intelligence (AGI) will wreck American society: “The dilemma posed by AI-related weapons technology is that keeping up research and development is essential for national survival.”

But, they caution, advanced AI must serve only certain corporations:

Developing AGI will require immense computing power … created by only a few well-funded organizations. … Its applications will need to be restricted. Limitations could be imposed by only allowing approved organizations to operate it.

Kissinger joined his ancestors in 2023, and in 2025, after Trump retook office, Schmidt teamed up with Alexandr Wang (founder of the military AI company Scale AI, now charged with developing “superintelligence” for Meta) and Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit largely funded by Open Philanthropy.

In March, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang co-published a Strangelovian policy paper on national security, “Superintelligence Strategy.” The authors compare their version of deterring attacks from unfriendly AI-armed nations—which they call “Mutual Assured AI Malfunction” or MAIM—to the classical Cold War deterrence theory of “mutual assured destruction” or MAD.

But, rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.

Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang compare MAIM favorably to Kahn’s “thinking the unthinkable” about the positive aspects of launching a preventative nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, while preplanning to robustly rebuild American capitalism from the radioactive ashes after the hypothetically enfeebled Soviet retaliation.

Echoing extreme “AI doomer” worldviews, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang encourage the US military to undertake preemptive cyber and “kinetic” sabotage campaigns to ruin the AI infrastructure of US competitors, including bombing data centers to prevent the emergence of non-US-aligned superintelligences.

Afraid of US market competitors launching expensive Manhattan Project-style superintelligence efforts, they advocate for “nonproliferation.” By which they mean using military means to ensure that only the US, its allies, and certain corporate behemoths can create and use advanced AI technologies.

In a major obfuscation, the trio’s pro-AI acceleration paper does not acknowledge ongoing attempts to create international agencies capable of monitoring, regulating, and sanctioning the development and use of military AI, such as the Netherlands’ Responsible AI in the Military Domain, or international resolutions by governments to regulate or ban lethal AI weapons.

Schmidt’s SCSP vehemently opposes significant governmental regulation of AI products and weapons. Schmidt prefers that the AI industry self-regulate, and his policy aligns with the vaguely stated regulatory aims of Hendrycks’s Center for AI Safety.

In late October, leading computer scientists, world celebrities, and thousands of concerned professionals signed the Future of Life Institute’s call for prohibiting the further development of superintelligence until there is “strong public buy-in” and “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.” Hendrycks signed the call; Wang and Schmidt did not.

An April 2025 analysis by AI Now concludes that, given the propensity of large language models to hallucinate and the impossibility of humans monitoring neural network decision-making processes, it is a national security error to allow commercial interests to dictate the reliability and safety of military AI. The failure to establish strong laws regulating artificial intelligence violates long-established legal and social norms governing the safety of nuclear power, nuclear arsenals, and chemical weapons. Loosely regulated AI systems are obviously more susceptible to hacking, sabotage, and operational disaster than regulated systems, AI Now emphasizes.

In 2025, SCSP released a series of Defense Papers and Memos to the President, urging, “The United States should organize ‘moonshot’ programs, modeled on past successful efforts like the Manhattan Project, to drive AGI [artificial general intelligence] innovation.” Schmidt’s clarion call is for the US to harm China.

Schmidt’s stance on military AI aligns closely with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the policy blueprint followed by the Trump administration. Heritage paints a similarly paranoid view of China, while urging that government research and development of AI weaponry ought to be “transferred swiftly to American interests in the private sector,” which includes, of course, Schmidt’s ventures.

Last year, the Tech Transparency Project uncovered Schmidt’s stakes in Chinese AI firms, “Eric Schmidt Cozies up to China’s AI Industry While Warning U.S. of its Dangers.” It appears that Schmidt lacks a coherent international relations strategy beyond enriching his globalized enterprises.

Media conflicts of interest

In June 2025, SCSP’s AI+ Expo conference in Washington, DC, was sponsored by military firms and “media partners” focused on ramping up military AI spending by the “Department of War.” Talks by Schmidt and panels featuring a Who’s Who in governmental and corporate AI war planning were obsequiously “moderated” by national security beat reporters from the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, Washington Post, and C4ISRNET.

Code Pink energetically disrupted Schmidt’s presentation, which was hosted by former New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, who is now employed by RAND Corporation. The activists unfurled Palestinian flags, demanding that Google cease providing technology enabling genocide in Gaza. They were forcibly removed.

David E. Sanger of the New York Times supervised a panel discussion featuring former Rep. Mac Thornberry, a board member of military AI corporations, including CAE and Booz Allen, where he sits alongside Michèle Flournoy, his colleague at Beltway lobby firm West Exec Advisors and SCSP. Sanger also ran a panel featuring a Google vice president, Royal Hansen, and SCSP’s Anne Neuberger, who had served on Biden’s National Security Council, before joining SCSP and anti-AI regulation leader, Andreessen Horowitz.

SCSP videos record Sanger making statements disguised as questions about the threat of China to US global hegemony, and, therefore, the necessity for the US to quicken AI weapons contracting. Sanger did not ask the panelists about the validity of accepting those core elements of SCSP’s lobbying agenda as factual or desirable.

Hansen, however, made a newsworthy statement:

We have been using AI to defend Gmail long before people were using chatbots, and … it’s only gotten better [with large language models]. … We use little agents, little classifiers, to look at all the content and metadata about a message to look for bad actors.

To reiterate: Hansen stated that Google uses Gemini to parse all the content of Gmail looking for (undefined) “bad actors,” and the “reporter” ignored it. (Google’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The New York Times’s Ethical Handbook cautions reporters that

those assigned to beats, must be sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. … [S]ources are eager to win our good will for reasons of their own. … Staff members may not collaborate in ventures involving individuals or organizations that figure or are likely to figure in coverage they provide … While many professional and trade groups are organized as nonprofits, most of them do lobbying or advocacy work on policy issues [so] avoid situations that create an appearance of coziness or favoritism.

Sanger is professionally affiliated with military-industry-focused organizations, including the Center for New American Security, Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Aspen Institute. In an email exchange with Military AI Watch, Sanger said his only recompense for hosting the SCSP panels was “a somewhat soggy sandwich.” He did not respond to our query about his possible conflicts of interest, including writing a Times story last year praising Google’s much-criticized Project Maven, while pumping Schmidt’s White Stork drone business in Ukraine.

Mick Sussman, a New York Times editor charged with investigating staff conflicts of interest, did not respond to Military AI Watch’s email query on Sanger’s conflicts. Reached then on his cellphone, Sussman demanded to know how we got his phone number and abruptly hung up. Doggedly, we called back, and he picked up. Sussman said he had received the email and would get back to us. He didn’t.

Influence peddling and tax dodging

Banking a net worth of $30 billion—more than doubled since 2020—Schmidt uses a network of private nonprofits to reduce taxes and to social engineer his popular image. Advertising himself as “working to restore a balanced relationship between people and the planet,” Schmidt has disbursed billions of his tax-deductible dollars to hundreds of socially and environmentally progressive nonprofits, including media organizations.

To be clear: Schmidt’s foundations earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year investing in environmentally and socially disastrous multinational corporations, venture capital partnerships, and private equity firms, some operating out of secretive tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Schmidt’s nonprofits pay multimillion-dollar fees to Schmidt’s personal investment firm, Hillspire LLC, to manage portfolios of decidedly non-progressive investments.

According to IRS filings in 2023, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation held $1.4 billion in assets and logged (largely untaxed) capital gains of $302 million. It distributed $301 million, mostly to scientific and university projects, including $15 million to SCSP. Its largest tax-free grant, $41 million, went to an AI software accelerator, Convergent Research, which works on barcoding brains.

The Schmidt Family Foundation held $1.8 billion in stocks and real estate, netting $198 million in profits. Its charitable contributions were $137 million, targeting Indigenous and alternative energy organizations—causes antithetical to the sources of the money. The foundation holds $814 million in shares of climate- and information-destroying Alphabet (Google), and extensive holdings of Chinese AI companies.

The family foundation invests heavily in environmentally destructive corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Oracle, Dow, Barrick Gold, and Rio Tinto. It profits from companies that fuel wars and genocides, such as Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, and Rheinmetall. It owns stock in Las Vegas casinos, greenhouse gas-generating chemical manufacturers, and oil-guzzling automakers. The nonprofit owns a piece of Murdoch’s anti-environmentalist News Corp. And its 2018–2023 tax returns reveal cash donations of $9.75 million to Grist, an “independent” environmental magazine that regularly climate-washes Google and Schmidt. Grist’s media department did not respond to a request for comment.

November 15, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

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