Saturday Report 10/3/26 - Corporations Aren’t Pricing Products Anymore. They’re Pricing You.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

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— Trump’s sending a third aircraft carrier toward Iran, his Pentagon’s drawing up more ways for him to be able to use nuclear weapons, and “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth’s busy thinning out the generals. What could possibly go wrong? Attacking Iran right now or amping up the war would be destructive to Republicans running for election, but a month from now, when the election is over, may be the perfect time for Donald Trump to do what he savors more than any other thing on earth: getting revenge and killing people in ways that are extremely painful for them and their families. To that possible end, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that the USS Theodore Roosevelt quietly left San Diego last Sunday and should arrive around mid-November, weeks after — conveniently — the election. They’ve also just this week started installing new Patriot batteries (that should have gone to Ukraine) to guard Saudi and Qatari oil and gas sites, which sure suggests they’re planning to do something they expect will provoke a retaliatory strike from Iran’s IRGC. Even more alarming, reporter Ken Klippenstein has dug up some shocking previously-secret closed-door Senate testimony from the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby. He told the senators that there’s now a classified review designed explicitly to hand Trump “more nuclear options.” Experts on nuclear war and proliferation are horrified and this story is being almost completely ignored by the corporate media. And Whiskey Pete just doubled his cut of general and admiral slots to 20 percent of the entire force, causing Charlamagne Tha God to worry out loud that Pete’s teaching our military leadership that “loyalty to the Constitution may not be enough anymore.” More ships, more nuclear choices, and a military purged of anybody who may object: panic isn’t a plan, but calling your senators to demand a war powers vote and a public hearing on that nuclear review is.

— Asked whether he’d rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, Donald Trump said he isn’t ruling anything out. That’s from his sit-down with TIME, where his exact words were a Putin-like “I don’t rule anything out or in,” after which Trump himself brought up the Insurrection Act, noting he’s never used it but could. Sending armed, masked ICE thugs to polling places in violation of federal law? He lies that he hasn’t even thought of it. As the Guardian recounts, he also waved off his collapsing numbers as “fake” and the pollsters as “corrupt,” all while a new AP poll finds 69 percent of Americans actively disapprove of him and his psychopathic (my term) behavior. The war he promised would only take weeks is now dragging into its seventh month, but he insists he’s “met my timeline” and simply chose to drag the war out. He also said he’d happily pardon his own staff on the way out the door, too, which probably elicited a huge sigh of relief from Miller, Hegseth, and Blanche, among others. Under our Constitution, the states run the elections, presidents don’t, and no emergency or Insurrection Act declaration changes that unless the rest of us let him get away with it. The solution is an overwhelming repudiation of Trump and the GOP at the polls, and most states are already in or on the verge of early voting. Check your registration this weekend as the registration deadlines for most states hit in the next two weeks, vote early if your state allows it, and sign up to work the polls. Autocrats count on empty rooms and we’ve got to deny that to Trump and his neofascist lickspittles.

— Republicans have a plan to go after abortion pills nationwide, and they’d very much like you not to hear about it until the day after you vote. This is wild. The strategists in the White House have told Todd Blanche’s DOJ to hold off on their promised enforcement of the Comstock Act, which will outlaw the abortion pill nationally, until after the election. Once it’s lame-duck time, one conservative in touch with the administration told The Washington Sun, “the gloves will be off.” The White House now says the story is fake news, but they’re ignoring Trump’s FDA commissioner telling his staff to stall their mifepristone “safety review” until after the November election. The Comstock Act, passed in 1873 when women couldn’t vote, explicitly bans the Post Office or any common carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc.) from shipping anything that can be used for abortion; it just hasn’t been enforced since the 1930s. But if fully enforced, it could even cripple the ability of clinics in Blue states to perform surgical abortions by outlawing the transportation of the devices uniquely used for those procedures. The regime doesn’t want this discussed before November 3rd because it’s so unpopular, which is exactly why you should forward this to every woman you know, and every man who loves one, before they vote.

— Bernie Sanders, AOC and Jeff Merkley want to pull the plug on the cameras tracking your car, and for once a few Republicans are nodding along. The three unveiled the Ban Flock Act on Friday. It would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or the data they collect, cut off federal grants to state and local governments that keep using them, and let you sue when the feds track you anyway. As Common Dreams reports, the target is Flock Safety, a company Sanders says is bankrolled by rightwing tech billionaires Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, which now runs more than 120,000 AI cameras scanning 20 billion American vehicles a month. “Flock is always watching,” Sanders said, and he’s not exaggerating. Its data has been shared with immigration agents, searched in connection with No Kings and anti-ICE protests, and illegally used by cops to stalk wives, girlfriends and exes. Even Josh Hawley has opened a Senate probe, and Thomas Massie has a bill of his own, showing how voters of all stripes are getting concerned about this growing surveillance state the billionaire tech bros want us to live in. The bill doesn’t outlaw the cameras outright, but starving them of federal money is a great start. Meanwhile, at least 56 cities and towns have deactivated, canceled or rejected Flock contracts this year. Check in with your city council or mayor’s office to find out what your local authorities are doing about this Fourth Amendment abomination.

— Trump is paying local cops up to $2 million each to help them arrest immigrants, criminals or not. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that once a local department hands over a single deportable immigrant under Trump’s revived 287(g) program, it can bill Washington fully $60,000 a year for every deputized officer involved in the arrest, whether or not those officers ever arrest anyone again. Miami-Dade’s sheriff signed up an eye-popping 970 officers and thus qualified for nearly $14.5 million over the three months in which they turned seven immigration arrests over to ICE. The police in Venice, Florida, have asked for $895,000 on the strength of one single arrest. And in Doddridge County, West Virginia, population 7,600, Sheriff Clinton Boring collected more than $137,000 for two arrests after telling the Journal, “Honestly don’t think there are any Hispanics that live in Doddridge.” DHS has shoveled out more than $200 million this way that the Journal was able to document, but there’s another billion from Congress in the pipeline, and, as Voz summarizes, the program still produced fewer than one in ten of the country’s immigration arrests. Ken Klippenstein called these departments “ICE’s bounty hunters” earlier this year, and the Journal describes video of an officer cracking wise about a $30,000 bonus moments after he used a taser to torment a brown-skinned person. And Republicans insist that there’s no money for Medicaid or school lunches. Ask your sheriff and your county commissioners whether they’ve signed on, and what they’ve been paid, then call your local paper or radio/TV news outlet to let them know.

— Corporations have stopped pricing products and started pricing you. Groundwork Collaborative’s Lindsay Owens argues that algorithms, surveillance and electronic shelf tags are letting companies reinvent a whole series of 21st century rip-offs right under our noses. For example, a California class action lawsuit alleges that an AI pricing tool called Kalibrate helped more than 1,700 gas stations push prices up as much as 30 cents a gallon, which Owens calculates took about $4 billion out of drivers’ pockets and put it into the money bins of the fossil fuel kings. Landlords using RealPage’s software raised some rents as much as 33 percent in a single year. Walmart’s putting digital price tags in every store, so they can instantly and remotely manipulate prices in ways customers will never see. And retailers are buying your location and personal data from brokers to figure out how badly they can overcharge you without your screaming or walking away. “Now, they are pricing people, too,” Owens writes. This is where 45 years of Reaganomics and Republican “greed is good” philosophy was always headed. Gut antitrust enforcement, let the giants swallow their competitors, and eventually the so-called “free market” reinvents itself as a machine for picking your pocket. Her answer is a Shoppers’ Bill of Rights that would guarantee the price you see is the price you pay, ban surveillance pricing, and require AI shopping assistants to work for you instead of the seller. And people are listening: Seattle just became the first city to outlaw surveillance pricing, and roughly 90 bills have been introduced in various states. Ask your legislators whose side they’re on in this new tech innovation.

— Geeky Science Alert! Picking up the pace may actually reverse frailty in older people, not just slow it down. Researchers from Northwestern and the University of Chicago report in PLOS One on a trial of 105 residents of Chicago-area retirement communities, average age 79, with about two-thirds of them already using a cane or walker. Everybody walked the hallways and stairwells alongside a research assistant for 45 minutes, three times a week, for 16 weeks. One group strolled comfortably while the other kicked it up, pushing their speed-walking to hit roughly 70 percent of their normal maximum heart rate. At the end of this study, about 70 percent of the brisk walkers had moved into a “milder frailty” category versus only 46 percent of the strollers, and — most astonishingly — half the fast group no longer could be diagnosed as frail or pre-frail at all. And this is safe: across more than 3,300 sessions the only mishap definitely tied to the walking was one fall with no injury. The National Institute on Aging paid for this: apparently neither Vought or Musk have discovered its existence yet. So, go take a walk and make it a brisk one.

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Did Trump’s Iran War Just Blow a Hole in Big Oil’s Future?

I’ve never understood why Big Oil never read basic Bschool models about expanding their brand. Being an Energy company instead of just Oil. Providing multiple forms of energy. Developing alternatives. Like China has been doing.
~ Leslie Kain

We were just finishing up a lease on a Jeep Hybrid. I was sick & tired of dealing with all the warranty issues, so we decided to turn it in when the lease was completed. We ended up buying a Honda Prologue, an electric car.

So happy we did it! Haven’t bought gas for 6 months. I feel better that I am helping (a little bit) at keeping our Earth safe.
~ Barbara Wissler

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy Kindle edition.

”Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich”.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.