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In June, 2026, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission awarded $750,000 to the Western Rivers Conservancy (with Kashia Band of Pomo Indians) through the Priority Conservation Area (PCA) Grant Program, to protect 298 acres of river corridor and redwood forest, supporting habitat restoration and Tribal cultural uses.

[Excerpt:]

Western Rivers Conservancy is working to conserve the 298-acre South Fork Gualala property, which lies along 1.2 miles of the South Fork Gualala River. This effort builds on our recent project on the Wheatfield Fork, where WRC conserved 4,440 acres of land spanning 6.6 miles of river and tributary streams in 2022. . . .

WRC’s goal is to purchase the South Fork Gualala property and convey it to the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, whose ancestral lands encompass this area. The Tribe plans to use both current forestry methods and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to restore nearly 300 acres of second growth redwoods to accelerate progress toward a mature forest. This will benefit the river and its fish by reducing sediment loads and water temperature, while improving habitat for a variety of aquatic and terrestrial species.

The acquisition will also provide new opportunities for tribal members to reconnect with their ancestral territory and engage in traditional cultural activities on their own land. Given our shared conservation vision for the Gualala River, this is a partnership that will deliver critically important gains for the river system, its fish and wildlife and the people who call this place home.

To read the complete article, visit the Western Rivers Conservancy.

PFAS Results Raise More Questions Than Answers

Part 1 of a 3-part series. Part 2 will examine U.S.-caused contamination at each of the 36 individual facilities in Greenland. Part 3 will survey the appeals U.S. veterans have filed with the U.S. Veterans Administration, claiming cancers and disease as a result of their exposure to toxins in Greenland.

By Pat Elder
July 4, 2026

‍Pituffik Space Base is likely to be heavily contaminated with PFAS, but the U.S. Department of War refuses to divulge pertinent data.

‍When the Danish newspaper Politiken reported on July 1, 2026, that groundwater at the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in Greenland contained 1,100 parts per trillion (ng/L) of PFOS, the finding immediately attracted international attention. The concentration greatly exceeds current European drinking water standards and adds to growing alarm over PFAS contamination at former and active U.S. military installations worldwide.

1,100 parts per trillion of PFOS? What exactly does the reported number represent? Searching for the answer provides insight into the U.S. military’s sloppy culture of non-disclosure in Greenland and around the world.  

Based on the results, the public cannot determine:

• the exact sampling location,

• whether the sample came from a drinking water well or a monitoring well,

• the depth of the well,

• the screened interval,

• whether the water was collected before or after treatment,

‍ Without this information, we don’t have a clue.

‍This is not only an issue for Greenland. Communities living near active and  former U.S. military installations in England, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere are asking the same questions as they seek to understand how decades of military firefighting activities have poisoned their environment and what can be done to protect their health. They’re not getting much help from the Americans.

The U.S. military uses carcinogenic aqueouos film-forming foam ( AFFF ) in about 1,500 facilities and over 6,800 mobile assets worldwide. Release of AFFF into the environment, either through accidental releases, or for fire training and emergency use, has resulted in PFAS detections in drinking water and groundwater in and around DOD installations, according to the  U.S. General Accounting Office in 2024.  

Public resentment around the world is building because the American public knows a great deal more about the specifics of the contamination in the U.S. than “foreigners” do at any of these places. Individual states are taking actions, based on The PFAS data released by the Department of War, to protect the health of their citizens.  

‍The lack of accountability for U.S. military pollution in Greenland stems from Article XI of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. This clause freed the U.S. from any legal obligation to clean up or restore its military bases. The treaty states:

‍ It is understood that any areas or facilities made available to the  Government of the United States of America under this Agreement need not be left in the condition in which they were at the time they were thus made available.”

‍This sentence is extraordinarily broad. It contains no environmental standard, no restoration requirement, no cleanup obligation, and no obligation to compensate for environmental damage, so the U.S. can tell Denmark to go to hell when it complains of environmental tyranny. The same is largely true under the SOFA agreements (Status of Forces Agreements) that set the tone between the great Goliath of 1945 and its many subjects today.

‍Section 345 of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, (NDAA)

‍When Congress mandated that the Department of Defense test off-base drinking water for PFAS contamination, it effectively left the Pentagon to police itself. By assigning the execution, reporting, and oversight of the PFAS program to the military's own internal PFAS Task Force, Congress created an inherent conflict of interest that complicates independent accountability.

‍The DOD is fundamentally stonewalling its statutory reporting requirements. Despite identifying 723 domestic bases  that utilized PFAS-containing firefighting foams, the Pentagon has only submitted data for 86 installations in response to Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. Even this minimal disclosure is functionally hollow, leaving major gaps where critical concentration metrics are omitted entirely.

‍A close examination of the records associated with Pituffik Space Base in Greenland raises serious questions about how the data have been organized and presented to the public.

What the Pentagon’s Website Says‍ ‍

Marketed as a sophisticated public transparency initiative, the Department of War’s PFAS database ostensibly delivers the final results of off-base drinking water testing mandated by Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. According to the Pentagon, these assessments are designed to determine whether military-related PFAS contamination has migrated beyond base boundaries into local drinking water supplies. However, a closer look at the data reveals that this transparency is largely performative.

The Unexpected Discovery of Pituffik’s PFAS data

The structural flaws of the DOD’s PFAS database are not limited to missing values; the platform’s underlying data architecture displays bizarre anomalies that further obscure transparency. For example, querying the database for Colorado’s Peterson Space Force Base (SFB) mistakenly returns data records for Pituffik Space Base in Greenland.

A broader examination of the eight primary U.S. Space Force installations reveals a stark institutional disparity: while six bases yield "no records found" and one returns just 11 rows, Pituffik SB accounts for a staggering 27,595 rows of data. This erratic indexing and massive data imbalance strongly suggest that the database is functionally compromised, undermining its statutory utility under Section 345 of the 2022 NDAA.

U.S. Dept. of Defense, Off-Base Drinking Water Information: PFAS Testing Database, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment, https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/eer/ecc/pfas/map/pfasmap.html (last visited July 3, 2026) (demonstrating indexing anomaly where a query for "Peterson SFB (CO)" returns records for "Pituffik SB (Greenland)" via the "Advanced Search" interface).

Looking Inside the Exported Spreadsheet

A granular look inside the exported spreadsheet reveals profound structural anomalies that challenge basic data integrity protocols. While the Pituffik dataset resembles a conventional laboratory database on the surface, a deeper audit reveals irreconcilable duplication errors.

A raw snapshot of the DOD’s exported Pituffik spreadsheet sorted by analyte concentration. A single physical water sample (ID: C256053) displays impossible redundancy, containing multiple, varying numeric results for identical compounds (like PFHxS and PFOS) taken on the exact same date.

When sorted by Laboratory Sample ID, individual identifiers contain numerous repeated measurements of identical compounds. For example, a single sample identifier—C256053—contains 252 analytical rows detailing eighteen unique PFAS analytes. Crucially, each analyte appears exactly fourteen distinct times under the same sampling date, analytical method (QSM_B15), and laboratory contract number. Even more perplexing is that these repeated records are simultaneously split across three conflicting treatment categories: No Treatment, Pre-Treatment, and Post-Treatment.

Ask the Artist Blue what he meant by this.

In standard environmental engineering and legal chain-of-custody protocols, a single Laboratory Sample ID isolates one physical sample. It cannot simultaneously represent pre-filtered and post-filtered water. The Pentagon’s platform offers zero documentation or methodology to explain why these contradictory treatment phases are compressed into single identifiers, rendering the data functionally uninterpretable. What were they thinking?

Putting the Pituffik Results into Context

To accurately assess the Pituffik database concentrations, it is critical to distinguish between different regulatory sampling methodologies. The Pentagon states that this portal tracks off-base drinking water under Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. This represents point-of-consumption monitoring, which is fundamentally distinct from the source-zone groundwater investigations that initially brought military PFAS contamination to national attention.

For context, the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) landmark 2019 report analyzed raw groundwater directly beneath or adjacent to 100 military installations.

Figure 2: Top 15 U.S. military installations ranked by maximum historical PFAS concentrations detected in groundwater (measured in parts per trillion / ppt). Data adapted from historic source-zone investigations.

Concentrated near historic fire-training areas where aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) was heavily discharged, those groundwater samples yielded extraordinary concentrations. Because these monitoring wells target undiluted source zones, their metrics are predictably orders of magnitude higher than finished drinking water supplies.

Groundwater monitoring wells located immediately adjacent to historic fire training areas are designed to locate contamination near its source. They examine highly contaminated groundwater before a great deal of dilution occurs. Establishing these historical baselines remains vital to understanding what is to be expected when examining military installations.

To illustrate the scale of these historical source-zone investigations, Figure 2 highlights the peak groundwater concentrations compiled from these landmark military assessments.

As documented above, raw groundwater adjacent to historic fire-training areas reached extraordinary levels. At the most impacted sites—such as England Air Force Base in Louisiana and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California—total PFAS concentrations reached 20.7 million and 8 million parts per trillion (ppt), respectively.

These extreme values represent the raw, undiluted toxic footprint at the source of the discharge. They serve as an important baseline when evaluating the available data from the six U.S. Space Force bases, allowing us to determine if Pituffik's anomalies extend to its actual toxicological profile.

 Domestic Baselines: Space Force Groundwater Concentrations

To evaluate what might be expected within the hidden records of Pituffik Space Base, we can isolate historical source-zone groundwater data from six primary U.S. Space Force installations. Because these metrics target undiluted groundwater near historical fire-training zones, they illustrate the raw scale of baseline contamination prior to environmental migration or dilution.

Figure 3 compiles the peak total PFAS concentrations and specific compound counts reported across these domestic facilities.

Figure 3: Peak historical total PFAS concentrations (measured in parts per trillion / ppt) and corresponding compound distributions across six domestic U.S. Space Force installations.

The mathematical average across these six domestic installations sits at approximately 1,143,000 ppt of total PFAS. To put this into perspective, this historical groundwater baseline is more than a thousand times higher than the 1,100 ppt concentration  recently reported by the Danish newspaper Politiken regarding Pituffik.

Critically, this comparison represents a distinct methodological asymmetry. We are comparing apples to oranges. While the domestic Space Force data captures raw, undiluted source groundwater, the Pentagon’s Section 345 testing theoretically targets off-base drinking water supplies used by neighboring communities. These two testing frameworks evaluate entirely different phases of the human exposure pathway—moving from the heavily contaminated source zone to the finished public tap.

However, tracking this migration remains a profound regulatory challenge. By routinely omitting critical metadata—such as exact GPS coordinates and sample well depths—the Department of Defense leaves independent scientists, lawyers, and the public to guess how these toxic source zones physically connect to public drinking water supplies. and how the contamination impacts multiple environmental media.

Welcome to the U.S. Military’s International PFAS Testing Dog and Pony Show!

‍ ‍Playing a shell game with the depth of testing

Sometimes we will see results in a PFAS Site Inspection from a surficial aquifer near the surface at a fire training area and the levels may be surprisingly low because the carcinogens may have seeped deeper into the ground. We may also see data at the same location taken from 200 feet below the surface, showing low, or even non-existent levels. To get the real picture we would need to examine results from every ten feet down or so. This way, we might find concentrations of total PFAS exceeding hundreds of thousands of parts per trillion somewhere in between.

By withholding both geographic coordinates and depth metadata, the Pentagon leaves the world’s public with a spatial blackout.

The Politiken Disclosure: Unmasking a Fabricated Baseline

The recent investigation by the Danish newspaper Politiken drew vital international attention to a reported PFOS concentration of 1,100 nanograms per liter (ng/L or ppt) associated with Pituffik Space Base. While this reporting represents a critical contribution to public awareness—offering a stark glimpse into a broader legacy of environmental degradation left by decades of U.S. military operations in Greenland—the metric itself originates from a deeply flawed source.

While the Pentagon's exported spreadsheet does contain raw PFOS entries that match this1,100 ppt figure, the underlying architecture of the dataset severely undermines its credibility. Because individual Laboratory Sample IDs are structurally compromised, confounding the data with unexplained duplicate rows and overlapping treatment categories, the entire database lacks the baseline integrity required for scientific or legal validation.

Ultimately, these pervasive structural errors create an information vacuum. Because the data lacks fundamental reliability and the Department of War provides no public transparency channels, independent investigators are left with a chaotic dataset that raises far more questions than it answers, completely obscuring the true scale of the toxic footprint at Pituffik.

Regulatory Miscalculations: Disentangling Water Concentrations from Dietary Limits

The Politikenreport quotes an expert claiming that the 1,100 ppt PFOS finding at Pituffik represents “about 250 times the EU limit.” This assertion conflates two distinct toxicological metrics.

The European Union’s statutory framework handles these limits through separate mechanisms:

• EU Drinking Water Directive: Establishes a maximum contaminant level of 100 ng/L for the sum of 20 individual PFAS compounds (including PFOS).

• European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) : Sets a Tolerable Weekly Intake (TWI) of 4.4 nanograms per kilogram (ng/kg) of body weight per week for the combined mass of PFOS, PFOA, PFNA, and PFHxS.

Dividing the reported 1,100 ng/L by the media's stated factor of 250 yields exactly 4.4 - confirming that the source material mistakenly swapped an ambient drinking water threshold with a physiological dietary intake ceiling.

Let’s make this real

Data from the Forever Pollution Project illustrates the staggering discrepancy between regulatory limits and dietary reality. Fish from the Damhussøen reservoir in Copenhagen have been recorded containing 311,000 ng/kg (311 ng/g) of PFOS. ‍ ‍

• A minuscule 0.08-gram fleck of this fish (portrayed here) contains 24.88 ng of PFOS. (.08 × 311 ng/g) This single crumb accounts for nearly 23% of the total weekly allowance (110 ng) for a 25-kilogram child under EFSA’s guidelines.

•  A typical 200-gram meal of this same catch delivers a massive 62,200 nanograms of PFOS. For that same child, this single meal represents 565 times the recommended weekly toxicological limit—and over 190 times the weekly ceiling for an average adult.

=========================

An expanding consensus among international toxicologists on both sides of the Atlantic maintains that no level of exposure to these bioaccumulative carcinogens is safe.

There’s so much more!

There are actually 40,000 types of PFAS. The Pentagon is providing compromised results for 40 compounds at Pituffik. That’s .1% of all the compounds potentially out there.  

40 PFAS compounds reported by the U.S. Military

Ask British, German, and Japanese scientists and environmentalists if they are frustrated by the lack of U.S. transparency. The dutiful corporate media is doing a lousy job reporting on the lack of data, the sobering science, and the world’s frustration.

Polar Bears and the Arctic Marine Food Web

PFAS contamination in the Arctic is not confined to military bases. Scientific reviews show that PFAS also reach the Arctic through long-range atmospheric and oceanic transport, also contaminating seawater, sediments, aquatic organisms, seabirds, marine mammals, and polar bears. In Arctic marine food webs, PFOS and related compounds can biomagnify, with the highest burdens often found in top predators such as polar bears and seabird eggs. Beyond accumulating in polar bears and other Arctic predators, PFAS have been linked to altered gene expression, immune suppression, reproductive impairment, and epigenetic changes that may affect future generations. 

Biologists, toxicologists, and geneticists are actively investigating whether the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) can survive the dual threat of climate change and genetic modification or if we are watching the final generations of the species as it has historically existed. The people who run this world just don’t give a damn. For them, if there’s no market-based solution or lucrative capitalist incentive for carrying it out, well then, there’s no solution.

And just one more parting shot, in U.S. military parlance.

In addition to PFAS, petroleum-related contaminants are commonly associated with military installations in Greenland. Releases from fuel storage areas, pipelines, refueling operations, vehicle maintenance facilities, and spills often result in contamination by benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX), along with a wide range of petroleum hydrocarbons. We know that certain American bases in Greenland have been severely and permanently contaminated with nuclear radiation.

Other compounds that may be present include vinyl chloride, which can form as chlorinated solvents degrade in the environment, as well as metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, and combustion byproducts associated with historical military activities. At Arctic bases such contaminants can become trapped in frozen soils and permafrost for decades, only to be mobilized as permafrost thaws, potentially creating long-term sources of contamination to groundwater, streams, wetlands, and the broader ecosystem.

Bummer.

How do we talk sense into these knuckleheads?

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective, an ongoing series this year.

The post CELDF’s What is America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Read CCEJN's 2025 Annual Report — celebrating 25 years of environmental justice work across the San Joaquin Valley.

Following years of drought, the wells in Estancia, New Mexico, are running dry. 

After declaring a water emergency last week, the small town in Torrance County is hauling in water to fill its pipes. Estancia has also reduced water sales to the Torrance County Detention Facility, or TCDF, a federal immigration detention center run by the private contractor CoreCivic. The detention facility, Estancia’s largest commercial water customer, has resorted to trucking in water. 

In the midst of the crisis, Estancia Mayor Runnel Riley has taken a leave of absence. During a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday evening, Estancia’s elected leaders passed a vote of “no confidence” in the mayor. The state has provided funding to drill a new well, and Estancia will be opening the 30-day bidding process this month.

Dozens of residents attended Tuesday’s meeting in person or virtually to voice their frustration about the water problems and delays in drilling a new well. When asked by a reporter for the Mountainair Dispatch, board trustees said they did not have data available on what proportion of the city’s water goes to the detention facility. Estancia is home to 1,400 people, and up to 800 people can be detained at the facility.

Read Next The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird Jake Bittle

Ryan Gustin, senior public affairs director at CoreCivic, said the company implemented contingency plans once it learned of the water emergency. He said that the Torrance County Detention Facility has brought in additional water supplies, and the water emergency has not impacted its operations.

“Drinking water is always available within our housing units and bottled water has been provided in addition to the readily available drinking water containers,” Gustin said.

Roy Hubbard, Estancia’s deputy clerk, told Inside Climate News that the town is meeting with CoreCivic on Wednesday to discuss next steps. The detention facility has been the subject of complaints about sewer and water problems in the past.

A detention center, a drought, and years of delay

The current water shortage is not Estancia’s first. 

Last year, Estancia asked residents to conserve water because its wells were not producing adequately. In 2024, the town issued a similar call.

Overpumping has caused significant declines to the groundwater level in the Estancia Basin aquifer, which the town relies on, according to the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance. The Office of the State Engineer, which regulates water rights in New Mexico, closed the Estancia Basin to new water rights. However, the office predicted that if existing water rights remain in use, the groundwater level will continue to decline.

New Mexico, including Torrance County, is experiencing severe drought. State officials expect groundwater supplies to further diminish because of higher temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change.

Read Next This simple metal tube helps scientists predict drought before it happens Jesse Nichols

Estancia elected Runnel Riley to replace the incumbent mayor in November 2025 by a mere five votes. However, Riley stopped attending trustee meetings as the town’s water problems became more severe.

State Representative Stefani Lord, a Republican who represents Torrance and Bernalillo counties, said at Tuesday’s meeting: “I called the mayor in January. He has never returned my phone calls.

“Just get the well finished. That is the short-term problem,” she said. “There are all kinds of things we can do in the future. But for this moment, we just have to focus on getting this done.”

During the meeting, the trustees also voted to prohibit fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend. The town still plans to hold a fireworks display, but private citizens will not be allowed to set off fireworks because of the ongoing drought and the risk of fires during the water emergency.

Hubbard, the deputy clerk, said that as of Saturday, trucks had delivered 116,700 gallons of water to the town. He said that water supply to CoreCivic will “gradually be turned back on” when there is more water available. According to reporting in the Mountainair Dispatch, more than 80 percent of the town’s water goes to commercial customers. However, town officials have not clarified how much of that share goes to CoreCivic.

Read Next How New Mexico is ‘building a forest’ by solving a seedling shortage Kylie Mohr

During Tuesday’s meeting, in response to questions from a Mountainair Dispatch reporter, Mayor Pro Tem Albert Lovato said that providing up-to-date information on the town’s water supply is difficult because of the fluctuating population at the detention center. “Our population goes up and it goes down because of CoreCivic,” he said.

The detention center has been a source of controversy for years. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General documented unsanitary conditions at TCDF in 2022, including “clogged toilets, broken sinks, inoperable toilets, water leaks, and mold.” The Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant and refugee rights organization, has also documented complaints from detainees at TCDF about sewage overflows and restricted access to water.

“There have been no sewage issues at TCDF because of this situation, nor were there any sewage issues in 2025 related to any water supply issues,” said Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson. “At no point have those in our care been without drinking water.”

The New Mexico Environment Department, or NMED, enforces health and safety regulations at TCDF. Agency spokesperson Drew Goretzka said that following a 2025 inspection, TCDF has addressed potential deficiencies with the sewer system.

“NMED is supporting the town of Estancia through emergency response coordination, including requesting assistance from other state agencies to provide alternate water sources,” Goretzka said. “The department is in communication with the town and its contractors to resolve the immediate water shortage issues.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deferred questions about the facility to CoreCivic. 

The federal agency has expanded its detention capacity under the Trump administration. ICE purchased numerous warehouses around the country to open new detention facilities this year for immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. ICE has been detaining an increasing number of people with active immigration cases seeking to stay in the country. Many residents in these communities, from Texas to Pennsylvania, have raised concerns whether local infrastructure could support the increased water demand from detention centers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A New Mexico town is running dry. An immigration detention center is its biggest water customer. on Jul 4, 2026.

Boots Riley’s new film, I Love Boosters, is a Robin Hood story about a crew of “boosters”—people who steal high-end clothing and resell it at affordable prices to working-class people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. The result is a beautiful, playful, funny, didactic, Afro-surrealist film with an earworm score by Tune-Yards. It’s a satirical comedy packed with practical special effects. It is also an unapologetically socialist film from an openly Marxist director.

The movie takes on the cost-of-living crisis, alienation, sweatshop labor, corporate control of the media, labor exploitation at home and abroad, and the predatory self-help industry. More importantly, it is crystal clear about its proposed solution: collective action by class-conscious workers.

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the film follows Corvette (Keke Taylor), an aspiring fashion designer struggling to survive while living in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Along with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), they make up the Velvet Gang. Their primary target for boosting is Metro Designers, a fast-fashion chain specializing in monochromatic clothing. The chain is owned by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a workaholic designer who seems to live in an especially angry TED talk.

Once Christie becomes aware that Metro Designers is being targeted, the feud turns increasingly personal. To gather intelligence, members of the gang take jobs at Metro Designers, where they witness firsthand the unfair and often illegal tactics used to exploit workers. They also meet Violeta (Eiza González), who is attempting to organize a union at the company. Soon the Velvet Gang joins forces with Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker at one of Christie’s Chinese garment factories with her own reasons to bring down the fashion mogul. Armed with a convenient teleportation device, the group launches an escalating campaign to empty every Metro Designers store in the Bay Area.

This is a long-overdue movie. You may have heard of Nana Duffour’s excellent 2025 short film Rainbow Girls, which also follows a group of young femme shoplifters in the Bay Area. These two films were conceived and produced entirely independently. As Duffour wrote, “What I’ve come to understand is that when two filmmakers independently look at the hyper-gentrification of the Bay Area, the crushing weight of late-stage capitalism, and the rebellious art of boosting luxury goods, and decide to make a movie about it—that’s not a case of copycats. That is a cultural distress signal. It means a story is begging to be told.”

One of I Love Boosters‘s most striking qualities is its overwhelmingly woman-led cast. While several men play memorable supporting roles—LaKeith Stanfield is particularly entertaining as Pinky Ring Guy, a literal sex demon—they are all in supporting roles. In fact, I Love Boosters joins a very small club that passes the reverse Bechdel Test: in the handful of scenes in which two men speak to each other, they only talk about women—or the women’s revenge scheme. This represents a notable and welcome shift from Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, which only has two named female characters, who do not speak to each other at all.

Spoiler alert

I Love Boosters is a surreal film with a flamboyant visual style and an abundance of wild ideas, though it is not unique in that regard. Films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once similarly combine absurdity with a flamboyant fashion sense (they both share the same costume designer, Shirley Kurata).

What makes I Love Boosters distinctive is the clarity of its class politics.Throughout the film, Christie Smith is revealed to be the real thief. She steals design ideas from aspiring artists, as well as  wages and dignity from her retail employees through exploitative labor practices, and profits from starvation wages paid to workers in her overseas factories. When she is informed that the chemicals used to sandblast her designer jeans are causing lung cancer among factory workers—including Jianhu’s family—her response is indignant rage at being bothered.

The film’s final act offers a direct answer to these injustices: unionization, mass strikes, and the overthrow of capitalism. It turns out that the teleportation device that allows Jianhu to travel between China and Oakland has two additional settings. One, “Deconstruction,” can reduce concrete walls to piles of stone. The other, “Situation Acceleration,” intensifies contradictions in a distinctly dialectical manner. When amplified and combined with the teleportation function, the device triggers a worldwide surge in class consciousness. As the film ends we learn that revolutionary movements are spreading around the world.

This film is not perfect. There is a lot going on in this movie, which can make the plot feel overstuffed and rushed, especially the second act. Most of the practical effects feel fresh and vibrant in a way that CGI cannot replicate (see Mad Max: Fury Road for other examples of this). But the extended claymation sequence is a bit jarring and does not match the visual style of the rest of the movie, much as I enjoyed it.

Make sure to watch through the end credits for an explanation of dialectics from a stoner union organizer set in a hair salon. And if you haven’t seen Sorry to Bother You or Riley’s Hulu series I’m a Virgo, then add them to your list. They should be required watching for any political activist.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Señor Codo; modified by Tempest.

The post Afro-surrealism with a banging soundtrack appeared first on Tempest.

The stakes of a state theoretical category

Over the past decade, the American Left has often used the term “fascism” to describe the emerging regime in the United States, and this has been quite understandable. All around us there has been visible disdain for legal procedures, cultivation of a leadership cult, the use of paramilitary symbols in security forces, the escalation of the machinery of deportation, and a culture-war mentality. Still, equating these developments with fascism can do more harm than good by muddying understanding. In the Marxist-historical tradition—from Trotsky to Poulantzas to Paxton—fascism refers to a specific type of movement: a mass-mobilizing force of the petty bourgeoisie, organized outside of parliamentary politics, fused with parts of capital to suppress a working class facing a revolutionary or near-revolutionary crisis (Trotsky 1934; Poulantzas 1970; Paxton 2004).

The current American situation doesn’t meet those conditions. The working class isn’t organized for revolution; the petty bourgeoisie doesn’t have the necessary extra-parliamentary units; and capital is not suffering the profitability crisis that led German and Italian industries toward fascism in the interwar period.

Calling the current regime as fascist might be a misstep, and labeling it as populist authoritarianism might miss some important nuances. What we’re really looking at is a more specific category—one that reflects how the executive power has become more independent from different class factions within an exhausted hegemonic bloc while also becoming more personal and patrimonial in its approach to state administration. I refer to this as “patrimonial Bonapartism,” which combines insights from two major theories: the Marxist view of Bonapartism as a unique form of capitalist state rule and Weber’s analysis of patrimonialism as a special mode of governance. I believe that bringing these two ideas together helps us better understand what’s happening in the United States, compare it with other cases, and start thinking strategically about what the future might hold.

The origins of Bonapartism as a Marxist category

The category of Bonapartism comes into Marxist analysis through Marx’s influential pamphlets covering France from 1848 to 1851: “The Class Struggles in France,” “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and later, “The Civil War in France” (Marx 1850; Marx 1852; Marx 1871). These writings primarily explore the idea of state autonomy. By the time Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte orchestrated his coup in December 1851 and was proclaimed emperor just a year later, the French bourgeoisie had largely overcome the proletarian uprising of June 1848. Instead of governing directly, the bourgeoisie ceded political power to a regime that suspended parliament, weakened the party system, and concentrated administrative control in an executive supported by a “society of December 10”—a group of displaced adventurers, financial speculators, and noble remnants that Marx vividly describes (Marx 1852, Ch. 5).

Marx’s analysis turns on a paradox. The Bonapartist state is, in its political form, autonomous from the bourgeoisie: it disciplines them, taxes them, and deals with them through the prefectural apparatus. However, in its social content, it is a state that serves the general interest of capital. Bonaparte protects property; he crushes the workers’ movement; he opens the way for the second industrial revolution under Haussmann and the Crédit Mobilier. The autonomy is real but conditional. It rests on a peculiar conjuncture: a working class strong enough to threaten the bourgeoisie but not strong enough to take power, and a bourgeoisie too divided to rule directly. Into that vacuum steps the executive, claiming to stand above class to represent the nation—most especially the parcelized peasantry, which Marx famously likens to a “sack of potatoes,” incapable of self-representation and therefore requiring a representative who lords over them (Marx 1852, Ch. 7).

This is the original sense of Bonapartism: a particular form of capitalist state in which the executive, surrounded by a personal apparatus, achieves real autonomy from the dominant class while serving its general interest. Hal Draper’s reconstruction of Marx’s state theory establishes that Marx and Engels treated this phenomenon not as an anomaly but as a recurring form of the bourgeois state under conditions of class equilibrium (Draper 1977). Engels generalized the category in his analysis of Bismarck’s Germany, where he saw a similar structural logic at work in a different historical setting (Engels 1884). The category was thus, from its first elaboration, intended as a portable analytical tool rather than a description of a single regime.

Leon Trotsky decisively extended the category in the 1930s. Confronting the rise of fascism, Trotsky was concerned to distinguish Bonapartism, a form of normal bourgeois rule under crisis, from fascism proper, which involved the destruction of working-class organization by an extra-parliamentary mass movement (Trotsky 1934). For Trotsky, the regimes of Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher in late Weimar were Bonapartist preludes; Hitler’s regime, once consolidated, was something qualitatively different. The Bonapartist regime, Trotsky argued, was an emergency form of rule, inherently transitional, pointing either back toward parliamentary normality or forward into fascism. Trotsky also, controversially, stretched the category to characterize Stalin’s bureaucratic regime in The Revolution Betrayed, arguing that Stalinism represented a Bonapartism sui generis, the autonomization of a bureaucratic stratum from both classes in a workers’ state (Trotsky 1937). Whatever one makes of the Soviet application, the methodological move is important: Bonapartism became, for Trotsky and his successors, a tool for contemplating state autonomy in moments of class equilibrium and crisis.

The next major theoretical extension comes from Nicos Poulantzas. Across Political power and Social Classes, Fascism and Dictatorship, and State Power and Socialism, Poulantzas systematized Marxist state theory and gave Bonapartism a structural rather than purely conjunctural meaning (Poulantzas 1968; Poulantzas 1970; Poulantzas 1978). For Poulantzas, the bourgeois state always exhibits a relative autonomy from the dominant class, because it must organize the class as a whole against the centrifugal tendencies of its competing fractions. Bonapartism, then, refers to a period in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. During this time, the executive concentrates power, parliamentary mediation breaks down, and the state apparatus becomes the primary site of conflict among class fractions. In his late work, Poulantzas proposed that this had become the normal form of the developed capitalist state under late capitalism, a regime he called “authoritarian statism,” characterized by the decline of parliamentary institutions, the concentration of power in the executive, the fusion of party and state, and the decline of formal legal procedure (Poulantzas 1978). In this account, authoritarian statism is described as Bonapartism that has become permanent and pervasive, serving as the underlying tone of advanced capitalist rule rather than merely as an expression of a crisis episode.

Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational reconstruction of Poulantzas’s framework has advanced this analysis, insisting that the state must be understood not as a thing but as a social relation, more precisely, as the institutional materialization of a balance of class forces (Jessop 1990; Jessop 2016). On this account, Bonapartism, whether episodic or structural, is the institutional crystallization of a particular conjuncture of forces, and it has its contradictions, its conditions of reproduction, and its forms of crisis. This is the Marxist inheritance on which the present analysis builds.

The Weberian Inheritance and the Patrimonial Moment

To this Marxist tradition, I want to graft a category drawn from Max Weber, one that the Marxist literature has been slow to integrate: patrimonialism. In Economy and Society, Weber distinguishes three pure types of legitimate domination: legal-rational, traditional, and charismatic, and within traditional domination, he develops patrimonialism as the dominant form of pre-modern rule (Weber 1922). Patrimonial domination rests on the personal loyalty of officials to the ruler; the apparatus of administration is treated as the ruler’s personal household; offices are dispensed as favors and held at the ruler’s pleasure; there is no clear distinction between the private wealth of the ruler and the public revenue of the polity; and rule-bound, predictable, legal-rational procedure is subordinated to the personal will of the patron.

Weber developed the category to analyze pre-modern empires, sultanates, and feudal kingships. However, Weberian scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly that of Shmuel Eisenstadt, extended the concept to analyze post-colonial regimes in which a formally modern, legal-rational state apparatus operated alongside or beneath a system of personal rule, clientelism, and rent extraction (Eisenstadt 1973). Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997) specifically developed the category of neopatrimonialism in the comparative politics literature on Africa. It was refined methodologically by Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel (2007). This literature establishes that patrimonialism is not confined to pre-modern formations: It can be the dominant administrative principle within ostensibly modern states, hollowing out the formal apparatus from within while preserving its outer forms.

It is worth distinguishing patrimonialism in this sense from Weber’s other category of personal rule, charismatic domination, since contemporary analyses of Trumpism frequently conflate the two. Charismatic domination, in Weber’s account, rests on the personal devotion of followers to a leader whose authority derives from his perceived extraordinary qualities; it is inherently unstable, episodic, and prone to be “routinized” into one of the other forms over time (Weber 1922). The American regime exhibits charismatic elements in its legitimation: the cult of personality, the rally form, and the perceived extraordinary qualities of the leader. But its administrative substance is patrimonial. The two layers must be kept analytically distinct: Charisma is the legitimating idiom by which a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime addresses its mass base, while patrimonialism is the actual principle on which the administrative apparatus is being remade. The conflation matters strategically. If one mistakes the regime for a purely charismatic phenomenon, one expects its collapse to follow the personal political fortunes of the leader. If one understands the patrimonial substance, one recognizes that an architecture of personal-loyalty administration is being built that may survive, in altered form, even through significant changes in personnel at the top.

To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.

Patrimonialism, in this synthesis, names a mode of administration: the principle on which the personnel, budgets, rule-following, and loyalty relations of the state apparatus are organized. Bonapartism, by contrast, names a political form: the relationship between the executive and the contending class fractions of the dominant bloc. The two operate at different levels of abstraction, and that is precisely why they can be fused. To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.

Historical examples and the comparative register

Before turning to the American case, it is worth running through several historical and contemporary examples that fall within the synthetic category, since the comparative register is what makes the framework analytically productive.

The original case, Louis Bonaparte’s France from 1851 to 1870, already exhibits both moments. Marx’s society of December 10, Bonaparte’s personal retinue, is patrimonial in its essence: a household of personal clients, financiers, military adventurers, and political opportunists who depend on the ruler for their position and whose function is to staff the state apparatus on principles of personal loyalty rather than meritocratic competence (Marx 1852). The Second Empire’s economic policy, concessions to favored financiers, contracts dispensed through personal channels, and the rebuilding of Paris organized through Bonapartist patronage are patrimonial in their concrete operation, even as the political form is Bonapartist in Marx’s strict sense. The Second Empire, then, is not merely Bonapartism; it is already patrimonial Bonapartism, though the Marxist tradition has tended to read only the Bonapartist moment.

The Latin American caudillo tradition supplies a register but a distinct one. From Rosas in Argentina to Vargas in Brazil to Perón again in his second turn, Latin American politics has known many regimes in which executive concentration, personal rule, and patrimonial administration coexisted with formally republican institutions. These cases differ from European Bonapartism in their relation to the world economy. They were, for the most part, semi-peripheral or peripheral states, often dependent on commodity exports, and the autonomy of their executives was conditioned by that dependency in ways with no direct American analog.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia exemplifies the cleanest contemporary case of developed-capitalist patrimonial Bonapartism, but we must handle the comparison with care. Putin’s regime exhibits, with textbook clarity, the autonomization of the executive from the contending oligarchic fractions of the 1990s; the personalization of administration around a network of siloviki and personal clients; the fusion of family wealth with state office; the use of state resources as personal levers; and the relative subordination of capital to political access. The Russian case differs from any prospective American case in its semi-peripheral position in the world system and in its specific path of regime formation out of the Soviet collapse, but the structural logic is recognizably similar.

Silvio Berlusconi’s three turns as Italian prime minister between 1994 and 2011 constitute a more telling rehearsal of the form within a Western liberal democracy. Berlusconi entered politics from the private media-industrial complex he had built; his governments used state office to defend his personal business interests; he packed the administration with personal clients; and his legal-political combat against the magistracy prefigured many of the conflicts that have since recurred in the United States. The Italian case is instructive because it shows the form arising not from regime breakdown but from the exhaustion of an established party system: the collapse of the Christian Democrats and Socialists in the Mani Pulite crisis created the vacuum into which Berlusconi stepped, just as the exhaustion of the post-1980 American party-political order has created the vacuum into which Trumpism has expanded.

Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey supplies an intermediate case between the personalistic but episodically institutional Italian variant and the more deeply institutionalized Hungarian variant. Since his initial accession through the AKP in 2003, through the constitutional referendum of 2017, through the consolidation of presidential rule, and through the wholesale remaking of the judicial and educational apparatus, Erdoğan has built a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime in a NATO member state that retains formal elections and a residual opposition (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). The Turkish case is instructive because it exemplifies a state that, like the United States, is an important regional power with significant military assets, is entangled in international institutional architectures, and has a politically active capital fraction (the so-called Anatolian tigers) that has developed as a political-economically of the ruling party, serving as a clear analogue to certain American capital fractions whose growth has been politically mediated.

Narendra Modi’s India, similarly, has entailed the patrimonial reorganization of a major capitalist democracy whose institutional architecture is far more complex than that of the small post-communist states most often studied in the comparative literature. Modi’s regime has bound itself to specific capital fractions, the Adani and Ambani groups of family-dynastic conglomerates, in a way that recalls Bonaparte’s society of December 10 in its essentials: the use of state office to favor a personal-political coalition of capital, with the public revenue and regulatory apparatus serving as instruments of personal-political accumulation (Crabtree 2018). The Indian case, similar to the Turkish case, is enlightening for Americans because it demonstrates how the form arises not from regime breakdown but from the patrimonial transformation of a large, complex capitalist democracy during an organic crisis.

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary represented the most institutionalized variant. Orbán’s regime did not merely concentrate executive power; it rebuilt the administrative state, the judiciary, the universities, and the media on principles of personal and partisan loyalty (Scheppele 2018). Where Berlusconi remained primarily a personal-dynastic political entrepreneur whose regime did not survive his political eclipse, Orbán built an institutional architecture intended to outlast him. The Hungarian case is the model toward which American patrimonial Bonapartism may evolve if its early phase consolidates, and it is the case most closely studied by the American right intelligentsia associated with the current administration.

The American conjuncture

What conjunctural conditions have produced the American variant of this form?

The first is the exhaustion of the neoliberal order that has organized American politics since roughly 1980. The bipartisan coalition that produced NAFTA, financial deregulation, the welfare reforms of the 1990s, and the long wars of the post-2001 period began coming apart in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has not been reconstituted. Neither party has been able to assemble a stable governing program responsive to the conditions of low growth, declining real wages for the working majority, capital’s drift toward rentierism and political access, and the secular decline of American hegemony abroad. This is what Gramsci called an “organic crisis,” a crisis of the relationship between rulers and ruled in which the inherited political forms can no longer organize consent. However, no new form has yet stabilized (Gramsci 1971, 275–6). Trumpism is best understood as the political form that has arisen within this organic crisis: not its resolution but its prolongation under new auspices.

The second is the long-run hollowing of American state capacity. Wolfgang Streeck’s work on the consolidation state describes the secular transformation of advanced-capitalist states under the discipline of bond markets. However, the underlying logic has also been at work in the American case, converting states from “tax states” that respond to citizen-democratic demands into “debt states” that respond to creditor demands (Streeck 2014; Streeck 2016). The American administrative state in 2026 is the product of forty years of cumulative privatization, contracting out, hiring freezes, the politicization of senior career positions, and the substitution of consultancy networks for permanent civil service capacity. This environment is the soil into which patrimonial principles have penetrated. The civil-service density that could resist personal-loyalty administration is significantly lower than it was even in the 1970s, not to mention the New Deal apparatus established by Roosevelt and the long Cold War security state that consolidated around it.

The third condition is the transformation of the Republican Party from an organized party of capital, with its own internal discipline and class-fractional coalitions, into something closer to a personal vehicle for the leader. The conservative legal movement, the corporate donor network, the evangelical organizational infrastructure, and the talk-radio and cable-news complex have not disappeared. However, the party’s relationship with these constituencies has been reversed. Where the party’s leadership once disciplined these constituencies into a coalition, the leader now disciplines the party against them, retaining their support by delivering on selected priorities while subordinating their organizational autonomy to his personal political vehicle. This is the patrimonialization of a major bourgeois party, a development with no real precedent in modern American political history.

The fourth condition is the specific accumulation regime within which all of this is occurring. I have argued elsewhere that this is best called “political capitalism”: an accumulation regime in which appropriation through political access, tariffs, sanctions, regulatory favor, subsidized contracts, and public-private deals becomes a primary route for the rentier fractions of capital, displacing competitive accumulation as the dominant mode. (Riley and Brenner 2022 develop a closely related argument under a slightly different label.) Patrimonial rule is functional for this regime in a way it could not be for a competitive-industrial accumulation regime. When access to the executive becomes a prime means of appropriation, the executive’s autonomy and personalization become valuable to the fractions of capital that benefit. This is the class content of the American form.

The fifth condition is strategic-imperial. The American imperial state is undergoing a transition from rules-based multilateral hegemony—the form constructed after 1945 and renovated after 1991—to a hub-and-spoke bilateralism in which the United States maintains its power through personal deals with subordinate strongmen—transactional rather than rules-based, with the leader himself as the central interlocutor. This shift is consistent with the domestic state form: patrimonial rule at home and patrimonial empire abroad are the same political logic operating at different scales. Whether this is the political form of a hegemon managing its own decline—a cheaper, more transactional imperial economy of force—or a contingent political form that happens to fit a moment is, in my view, the central question of Marxist analysis of American empire. Arrighi’s framework of hegemonic transition supplies the materialist version of the first reading (Arrighi 1994; Arrighi 2007). In this interpretation, the patrimonial-Bonapartist form serves as the political-administrative framework for the United States’ transition from a hegemonic to a multipolar world economy.

The patrimonial-Bonapartist form serves as the political-administrative framework for the United States’ transition from a hegemonic to a multipolar world economy.

What does the American case look like in its concrete operation? It is worth being specific. We see the appointment of senior administrators based on personal loyalty rather than expertise; the use of pardons as commodities for personal allies; the dissolution of the conventional boundary between family business and state office; the assault on the civil service via the elimination of career protections and the reclassification of senior positions as political appointments; the use of tariffs not as instruments of industrial strategy but as personal levers for extracting concessions from foreign governments and domestic firms; the cultivation of personal loyalty within the security apparatus and the displacement of professional military and intelligence leadership; and the open use of the Department of Justice as an instrument of personal vendetta. These are not isolated abuses, but the systematic features of a regime being remade on patrimonial principles.

The assault on the federal civil service is the most consequential institutional dimension of this transformation. The Schedule F executive order, originally promulgated in 2020 and revived in 2025, reclassifies tens of thousands of senior career positions as political appointments removable at the president’s discretion. This is an administrative measure that converts an ostensibly merit-based bureaucracy into a patrimonial household in a single stroke. Combined with the reorganization of agencies along loyalty-political lines, the systematic dismissal of inspectors general, the politicization of military and intelligence commands, and the use of executive orders to bypass legislative authorization on questions of staffing and policy, the cumulative effect has been the most rapid transformation of the federal administrative apparatus since the New Deal, but in the opposite direction. Where the New Deal built a permanent administrative state on legal-rational principles, the present transformation dissolves that state into a network of personal-political appointments responsive to executive will. This represents the literal patrimonialization of the administrative apparatus.

The class beneficiaries are not the bourgeoisie as a whole but a determinate fraction: the politically connected rentiers; the family-capitalist and dynastic-firm fractions; and the new-tech and crypto fractions whose accumulation has been most dependent on political-regulatory favor; and the energy and military-industrial fractions whose interests align with the imperial reorientation. By contrast, the regime’s principal capitalist opponents have been the fractions of capital most disciplined by the bond markets and most exposed to global supply chains. However, their opposition has been sporadic and limited, as they lack a political vehicle to defect to.

The tensions of the form

Patrimonial Bonapartism is not a stable equilibrium. It carries within it real tensions that bear on its future.

The first is theoretical and points to a possible misreading. Classical Bonapartism presupposes a modernizing, rationalizing state apparatus—the prefectoral system in France and the imperial bureaucracy in Germany. The autonomy of the executive was, in classical Bonapartism, made possible by the existence of a developed legal-rational administration. Patrimonialism is, by contrast, the dissolution of that administration into personal-loyalty networks. So, when we describe a single regime as both Bonapartist and patrimonial, we are either describing a stable hybrid in which the autonomous executive captures and patrimonializes a still-functioning apparatus or a transitional form in which the political moment of Bonapartist concentration is the prelude to a deeper hollowing of the rational-legal state. The second reading is, I believe, closer to the truth of the American case, and it implies that we are not yet at the equilibrium point of the form but in its phase of active state destruction.

The second is the class-content tension. Bonapartism is supposed to be relatively autonomous yet ultimately functional for capital in general. Patrimonial rule, by contrast, is functional for a specific fraction. There are moments at which significant fractions of capital have opposed the regime’s policies, with the bond market’s intermittent disciplining of tariff policy as the clearest example. The repeated testing of limits and the regime’s retreat from its most extreme positions during bond market revolts indicate that capital generally retains a structural veto power. However, the fact that the limits keep being tested indicates that the regime is willing to push the relationship further than any postwar American regime has. Whether this represents capital reorganizing itself, building a state form adequate to the new political-capitalist accumulation regime, or a fractional capture of the state at the longer-term expense of total social capital is the central question of class analysis.

The third is the succession problem. Patrimonial regimes are notoriously brittle at the death or political eclipse of the patrimon. The personal-loyalty structure of the apparatus, the absence of institutionalized rules for succession, the family-dynastic ambitions of the ruler’s circle, and the rivalry of subordinate lieutenants all conspire to produce succession crises. The literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa documents this with grim clarity (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American case will face this problem within a determinate political horizon: the constitutional limit on presidential terms, however contested; the leader’s age and health; and the absence of an obvious successor who commands the same personal authority. How the regime will manage this transition, whether through a designated dynastic successor, a partial restoration of party-political mediation, or a deeper authoritarian institutionalization on the Hungarian model, is among the most important open questions of American politics.

The fourth is the comparative-conjunctural question. The Hungarian model of institutionalization through judicial and constitutional reconstruction has been studied by American conservative intellectuals associated with the regime, and elements of it have been imported into the United States. However, the American context is different in important respects: the federal structure, the relative independence of state-level political systems, the continuing institutional weight of capital fractions opposed to the regime, the residual organizational density of the labor movement and the social movements, and the simple fact that the United States is a hegemonic state with imperial responsibilities and not a small open economy. These factors may make full Hungarian-style consolidation more difficult, or they may produce a distinctively American variant of the form whose features are not yet fully visible.

The fifth is legitimation. Postwar American politics has rested on a specific form of legal-rational legitimation: the claim that authority is exercised through rule-bound, constitutionally constrained, professionally administered procedures. Patrimonial Bonapartism cannot continue to claim that form of legitimation, since its administrative substance contradicts it. The regime has been visibly groping for alternative legitimizing idioms: the charismatic-populist register addressed to its mass base, the civilizational-nationalist register addressed to elements of the right intelligentsia, the transactional-deal-making register addressed to the business class, and the providential-religious register addressed to evangelical constituencies. None of these has the unifying capacity of the legal-rational legitimacy it is displacing. This deficiency is a structural weakness of the form, and it is one of the conditions on which a counter-hegemonic project might be built.

Futures

What, then, are the plausible trajectories?

The first is intensification toward institutionalized authoritarianism on the Hungarian model: a consolidated patrimonial Bonapartism. This requires that the regime succeed in remaking the federal judiciary, universities, civil service, and federal apparatus to a degree that endures political transition. The regime must successfully delegitimate the opposition party or politically constrain it from full alternation. Moreover, it requires that the major factions of capital that have not endorsed the regime nevertheless accommodate themselves to it. This trajectory is possible but not guaranteed; the federal structure and the residual political density of the opposition both work against it.

The second is a succession crisis and regime instability: patrimonial Bonapartism in collapse. This trajectory follows if the regime fails to manage its succession, if the personal-loyalty networks fragment in factional conflict, or if the leader’s eclipse produces a vacuum that no designated successor can fill. The historical record of this trajectory is well documented in the neopatrimonialism literature: Eegimes built on personal rule tend to undergo turbulent transitions (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American outcome of such a transition is impossible to predict in detail. However, it is likely to involve a partial restoration of party-political mediation under conditions of significantly weakened administrative capacity and democratic legitimacy.

The third, and to my mind, the most probable, medium-term scenario is a prolonged organic crisis without resolution. Neither the consolidation of the regime into a stable authoritarian institutional architecture nor the restoration of the antecedent neoliberal-democratic order is fully achievable in the medium term, given the underlying conditions of secular American decline, capital’s fractured strategic orientation, and the weakness of organized political alternatives to the regime’s right. We will likely see, in this scenario, a continuing oscillation between phases of intensified patrimonial rule and phases of partial institutional restoration, with the underlying state apparatus becoming progressively less capacitated and the political form becoming progressively less recognizable as the postwar American republic.

The strategic terrain on which the socialist Left must operate is the possibility of an organized political alternative built out of the working class, the social movements, and the residual democratic-republican forces.

The fourth, which is the strategic terrain on which the socialist left must operate, is the possibility of an organized political alternative built out of the working class, the social movements, and the residual democratic-republican forces. This alternative takes the regime’s patrimonial-Bonapartist character seriously. It frames its political project as a defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program. This is not the same as a popular front of “democracy against authoritarianism,” which dissolves class content into a constitutional defense. It is also different from a third-camp abstentionism that treats the conflict between patrimonial Bonapartism and the residual democratic order as a quarrel of bourgeois fractions in which the workers’ movement has no stake. It is, rather, a political project that recognizes the regime as a determinate enemy of the working class, since its assault on the civil service, on labor enforcement, and on the public goods that working-class life depends on is not collateral but central, while refusing to subordinate the workers’ movement to the political vehicles of the displaced neoliberal order.

A serious socialist political project in this conjuncture must operate on several fronts simultaneously. It must defend the legal-rational institutions of the residual American republic—the civil service, the courts, the universities, and the regulatory state—not because these institutions, in their existing form, fully serve working-class interests, but because their destruction strengthens patrimonial rule and weakens the working class’s capacity to compel reform. The destruction of the National Labor Relations Board’s enforcement capacity, the gutting of OSHA, and the politicization of immigration enforcement against workers and their families: these are not collateral consequences of a regime focused elsewhere. They are central elements of a regime whose class character, in its everyday operation, is anti-working class.

It must, at the same time, refuse the political subordination that the “defense of democracy” framing demands. The neoliberal-democratic order that the regime has displaced was itself in deep crisis, and its restoration on its old terms is neither possible nor desirable. The political project of subordinating the workers’ movement to the Democratic Party’s restorationist agenda, one that has organized much of the institutional Left over the past decade, is a strategic dead end. It can neither defeat the regime decisively nor offer the working class a political instrument adequate to the conditions of organic crisis.

The third front is the slow, difficult work of building, within and against the existing parties, an independent political vehicle of the working class, a vehicle that takes seriously the patrimonial-Bonapartist character of the regime, that organizes for the defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program, and that begins, gradually, to compete for political authority based on a different resolution of the organic crisis. The conditions for such a project are unfavorable; they were unfavorable for most of the great party-building efforts of the past two centuries. The category of patrimonial Bonapartism does not, by itself, deliver such a project. However, it specifies the regime we are confronting, and a clear specification of the enemy is the first condition of strategic clarity. The category is, in the end, a Marxist contribution to that clarity, and the use we put it to will determine whether the next phase of American politics is one in which the working class is a strategic subject or merely a spectator at its own defeat.

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Weber, Max. 1922. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

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Featured Image credit: Government of the Republic of India, Ministry of the Presidency. Government of Spain, Alexandre Cabanel, US Department of State, European Union,The White House, and shadowgirls-stock; modified by Tempest.

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A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

Last week, the United States Senate Agriculture Committee released its draft version of the next Farm Bill, the cornerstone framework of U.S. agriculture policy that’s now more than three years overdue. The House of Representatives passed its own version earlier this year, which means the current Congress is on track to determine the country’s broad-scale food policy for the next five-plus years.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman called the legislation a “discussion draft of Farm Bill 2.0 that is built for the people who feed America.”

So what’s actually in this Farm Bill draft—and what did not make the cut?

The draft Bill will reauthorize a number of popular initiatives, including the Rural Energy for America Program and more than 60 research programs. American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall praised the Bill as a “good first step” with benefits that include “improved access to credit, expanded investments in specialty crops, increased transparency in fertilizer markets, and enhanced research and conservation programs.”

But the Bill earned criticism from the National Family Farm Coalition for failing to tackle anti-competitive practices, and the organization Friends of the Earth worries that it cuts nearly US$2 billion from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and pushes subsidies toward the largest agribusiness operations.

In short, the Senate version appears to have some positive qualities but overall fails to take the level of ambitious action we need in this moment.

“The Senate is right to listen to the American people and abandon the politically toxic Cancer Gag provisions and the Save Our Bacon Act, but a Farm Bill that fails to protect farmers from corporate consolidation, invest in real climate solutions and ensure healthy, affordable food for all is not a solution—it’s just more of the same,” says Rebecca Wolf, Food & Water Watch Food Policy Director, in a statement.

What could a better version of the 2026 Farm Bill look like?

“This Senate Farm Bill draft falls far short of what the farmers and rural communities we work alongside need. We believe the Farm Bill must do more to address the farm crisis, support independent farmers, and protect nutrition programs. It must challenge policies that prioritize corporate agribusiness over farmers,” per a statement from RAFI-USA.

After the House passed its version, I talked to one of my favorite food systems experts, Kathleen Merrigan, who is Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University. A bad Farm Bill, she told me, “is not worth it.” One of the things we need to see in a good Farm Bill, she said, is protections and expansion for food relief programs like SNAP.

Right now, SNAP access is getting more difficult. According to recent analysis from the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), there are now more than 5.5 million fewer people receiving SNAP than there were when President Trump took office in January 2025. And for Kathleen, in her home state of Arizona, food pantries are seeing longer and longer lines as the safety net becomes weaker.

“I want people to think big,” she told me on the Food Talk podcast. “Be creative and be ready to roll up your sleeves and do what it takes…We have enough power to say no if it doesn’t address the SNAP inequities. We have the power to say no if we all stand together, and that’s what I want people to realize: Even in this very different (political) climate, they do have the ways to act to make a difference.”

The Bill is set to be debated and potentially amended in the Ag Committee sometime after the July 4 holiday and before Congress’ August recess, Boozman says. And there’s plenty of discussion remaining, since the Senate and House will both need to agree on a version of the Farm Bill text for it to be sent to the President and signed into law.

Especially if your elected officials in Congress sit on Agriculture Committees—but even if they don’t—let’s make sure we’re being clear about our priorities, empowering them to fight for an equitable Farm Bill, and holding them accountable to represent the health of people and the planet.Farm Bill, food and farming policy, SNAP, subsidies

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Roger Starnes Sr., Unsplash

The post Here’s What’s Included in—and Missing from—the Senate Farm Bill Draft appeared first on Food Tank.

CCEJN’s Vision & Mission The Central California Environmental Justice Network’s (CCEJN) mission is to empower our communities and secure our children’s future by eliminating negative environmental impacts in low-income communities […]

CCEJN’s Vision & Mission The Central California Environmental Justice Network’s (CCEJN) mission is to empower our communities and secure our children’s future by eliminating negative environmental impacts in low-income communities […]

The Thematic Social Forum on Mining and Extractive Economy —TSF-Mining Latin America— invites you to take part in the webinar “Minerals and technologies for death and resistance for life: a geopolitics of peoples,” a space for reflection and dialogue on the geopolitics of critical minerals, false climate solutions, and the links between extractivism, digitalization, and militarization.

This gathering continues and deepens, at the Latin American level, the debates and proposals of the TSF-Mining Declaration, presented during the Peoples’ Summit at COP30 in Belém do Pará, Brazil. It is also part of a broader process of coordination, reflection, and mobilization on the way to COP31.

The webinar will deepen the debate on the geopolitics of critical minerals, false climate solutions, and the links between extractivism, digitalization, and militarization, while also sharing experiences of resistance and alternatives led by peoples and communities.

The activity will take place on July 9 at:

11:00 a.m. Central America
12:00 p.m. Colombia
1:00 p.m. Chile / New York
2:00 p.m. Brazil / Argentina
7:00 p.m. Madrid

Register here: https://forms.gle/RmdEmyLYzNCKAMcv5

Spanish-English interpretation will be provided.

ESPAÑOL – Webinar: Minerales y tecnologías para la muerte y resistencias por la vida: una geopolítica de los pueblos

El Foro Social Temático sobre Minería y Economía Extractivista —TSF-Mining América Latina— invita a participar en el webinar “Minerales y tecnologías para la muerte y resistencias por la vida: una geopolítica de los pueblos”, un espacio de reflexión y diálogo sobre la geopolítica de los minerales críticos, las falsas soluciones climáticas y los vínculos entre extractivismo, digitalización y militarización.

Este encuentro da continuidad y profundiza, a nivel latinoamericano, los debates y propuestas de la Declaración del TSF-Mining, presentada durante la Cumbre de los Pueblos en la COP30, en Belém do Pará, Brasil. Además, forma parte de un proceso de articulación, reflexión y movilización rumbo a la COP31.

El webinar buscará profundizar el debate sobre la geopolítica de los minerales críticos, las falsas soluciones climáticas y los vínculos entre extractivismo, digitalización y militarización, compartiendo también experiencias de resistencia y alternativas impulsadas por los pueblos.

La actividad se realizará el 9 de julio en los siguientes horarios:

11 h Centroamérica
12 h Colombia
13 h Chile / Nueva York
14 h Brasil / Argentina
19 h Madrid

Inscripción: https://forms.gle/RmdEmyLYzNCKAMcv5

One week after 40+ communities mobilized to call on the federal government to make a deal with the people, the Prime Minister made a clear choice.

He decided to double down on protecting Big Oil’s profits instead of prioritizing our communities, our climate, and our future.

Let’s break down what happened over the last 24 hours:

• Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith teamed up to unveil their plans for their West Coast Pipeline. They proposed dragging the one-million-barrel-a-day tar sands pipeline from Alberta all the way to the Delta port right outside of Vancouver.
• They confirmed the pipeline would be another publicly-owned project, with an extremely unclear private-sector partnership. In other words, we can get ready to expect $35-100 billion of our tax payer dollars wasted on building this dangerous pipe dream.
• Earlier that same day, Carney went to BC, striking a New Cooperative Prosperity partnership with BC Premier Eby and pledging to gut environmental protections to accelerate the expansion of LNG facilities.4

Canada is headed in a dangerous direction. Expanding tar sands and the fracked-gas industry is like pouring fuel on the flames of the climate emergency. Let’s make sure our Members of Parliament know that they need to stand up to oppose this agenda. Call on your MP to sign the People’s MOU and say no to new pipelines.

There’s power in raising our voices together. The People’s MOU was delivered to 40+ MPs across the country last week and, since then, thousands of others have e-mailed it to their Members of Parliament. We know that many Liberal MPs also have their doubts about Prime Minister Carney backsliding on climate. That’s why it’s so important to ensure as many of them as possible are confronted by their constituents and pushed to use their leverage in this fragile majority government to champion a different direction.

This week, heatwaves gripped communities across the country as we marked the 5 year anniversary of the 2021 Heat Dome where 619 people died from extreme heat. And yet, Prime Minister Carney kicked off the week with a special video speaking directly to Canadians and sharing that climate action isn’t “sustainable in the long run.”

But you and I both know, what’s truly unsustainable is expanding fossil fuels and cooking our planet. And to top it all off, the world is rapidly transitioning towards affordable, renewable energy, meaning that building a new oil pipeline locks us into a volatile, dead-end economy.

It’s time to stop fuelling climate destruction and funding our future. Tell your MP to back this vision.

The good news is that the odds are in our favour. Even pipeline companies aren’t ready to fully back the project because they know it’s a bad idea.

We also know that Indigenous-led resistance and people power can bring dangerous proposals like this to a halt. We did it before and we can do it again.

Blog by Atiya Jaffar, 350 Canada Country Manager

The post Carney wants to gamble away our future appeared first on 350.

The post How One State Can Impact the Nation appeared first on ANHE.

Across every region, member organizations mobilized to defend land, agroecology, rural communities, and social justice while resisting corporate control, violence, and environmental destruction.

The post 2026 | June News Wrap: Updates from LVC Members Worldwide appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The World Bank has abandoned a target for 45% of the funding it gives developing countries to be “climate finance”, following months of pressure from the Trump administration in the US.

However, a concerted effort by developed- and developing-country shareholders has seen the bank hold onto its “action plan” for tackling climate change.

The multilateral development bank (MDB) – which is headquartered in Washington DC – is the single largest provider of climate finance globally, distributing $39.2bn in 2025 alone, primarily as loans.

Amid widespread aid cuts by developed countries, the World Bank and other MDBs have previously pledged to significantly scale up their climate finance over the next decade.

Despite scrapping its central target, the bank says it will continue to support the demands of its “clients”, many of which have explicitly stated their need for climate-related investment.

Here, Carbon Brief looks at the likely impact of the World Bank’s policy shift and whether it is – as one expert puts it – “mostly a symbolic victory” for the US.

• How does the World Bank support climate action?
• Why has the World Bank abandoned its climate-finance target?
• Why is the World Bank important for international climate finance?
• How will these changes affect global climate action?

How does the World Bank support climate action?

The World Bank is the oldest and largest MDB. It is tasked by its 189 member governments – the bank’s shareholders – with supporting development projects around the world. 

The US is the bank’s largest shareholder, followed, in order, by Japan, China, Germany, France and the UK. 

Every year, the bank provides billions of dollars – predominantly as loans – to developing countries. 

(One part of the World Bank, the International Development Association – IDA – specifically distributes grants to lower-income nations, as well as lower-interest loans.)

Through its financing, the World Bank also has an important role in “mobilising” private investments in developing countries.

In recent years, the bank has increasingly focused on helping developing countries to cut emissions and adapt their economies for climate change.

The World Bank provided $164bn in what it calls financing with climate “co-benefits” between 2020 and 2025.

The largest share of this funding – roughly one-fifth – went to clean energy and electricity access projects. Smaller shares went to areas such as public transport, water supply and sustainable farming.

As the map below shows, the largest recipients of the bank’s climate funds since 2020 have been emerging economies, such as Turkey ($10.3bn), India ($9bn) and Nigeria ($6.3bn). 

Map showing total climate-related finance received,$bn, between 2020-2025. Source: World Bank and Carbon Brief analysis.

Among the largest World Bank projects in recent years are two extensive programmes in India, totalling nearly $3bn, supporting renewables and green hydrogen. 

Others include $1.7bn for a Pakistan hydropower project, $926m for Iraq’s railways and $803m to boost “green development” in Colombia.

Despite the bank’s major role in providing climate finance to developing countries, it has faced heavy scrutiny from climate advocates.

In particular, they have noted the dominance of loans that push developing countries further into debt. The World Bank has also been criticised for a lack of transparency around how it classifies projects as “climate-related”, as well as “over-reporting” of climate finance.

Why has the World Bank abandoned its climate-finance target?

When World Bank president Ajay Banga – nominated by former US president Joe Biden – took over the institution in 2023, there were widespread calls for MDB reform.

Many of the bank’s shareholders wanted to see billions more dollars being channelled to support climate action. Later that year, Banga announced that the bank would ensure that 45% of the bank’s funding was climate finance by 2025.

This replaced an existing target of 35% for climate finance between 2021 and 2025, which had been set out in the bank’s second climate change action plan (CCAP). 

The CCAP is intended to “mainstream” climate action in the bank’s work. With it in place, the World Bank’s climate finance more than doubled from $17.2bn in 2020 to $39.2bn in 2025.

As the chart below shows, this meant the World Bank exceeded its 2025 goal, with climate-related projects making up a 48% share of total funding that year.

Share of World Bank finance with climate “co-benefits”, 2020-2025. Source: World Bank.

When Biden was replaced by Donald Trump as president in 2025, the US administration turned against international cooperation, including climate finance.

However, the US did not walk away from the World Bank, where it exerts considerable power as the largest shareholder. 

With the CCAP due to expire in July 2026, the US has spent months pressuring the bank and its shareholders to weaken or abandon the plan altogether.

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent issued a statement during the 2026 World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) spring meetings in April 2026, in which he called for “jettisoning” the 45% climate-finance target. More broadly, he said:

“We welcome the coming expiration of the CCAP and…expect the bank to immediately shift its myopic focus on climate and financing volumes to one that emphasises high-quality, durable projects.”

This vision involves a push for the World Bank to finance more fossil-fuel projects, including drilling for new gas. (The bank has committed since 2019 to stop funding upstream oil and gas projects.)

The decision on whether to continue with the CCAP was negotiated behind closed doors by the board of directors – representing national shareholders. There were reports of “deep divides”.

A joint statement from 19 of the 25 directors last year affirmed the need for both a plan and a target. The US, Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all declined to sign up, while Japan and India abstained, according to Reuters.

There were reports of European nations championing a climate plan, bolstered by support from the developing countries that would stand to receive climate finance. The US call to drop the 45% target entirely was reportedly backed by Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Ultimately, the day before the CCAP was due to lapse, the World Bank announced what appeared to be a middle ground. It would drop both the 45% target and the 35% goal it had replaced, while also “extend[ing]” the CCAP.

UK development minister Jenny Chapman told a committee hearing in the House of Commons the next day that this marked a “compromise”. She said:

“It wasn’t clear we were going to get a CCAP at all and a bank without an action plan on climate is a problem for us – so that’s a good outcome.” 

Supportive shareholders had been pushing for a one-year extension of the plan. While the World Bank did not initially define the length, Chapman confirmed on LinkedIn that the plan had, in fact, been extended “indefinitely”. 

The bank said it would also engage an “independent evaluation group” to assess the CCAP, in line with a board request.

Gaia Larsen, director of climate finance at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Carbon Brief  that this evaluation will likely be “relatively free from political ideology” and could be “focused on how to make the CCAP more effective”.

Why is the World Bank important for international climate finance?

Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries – including major World Bank shareholders in Europe and elsewhere – are obliged to provide climate finance for developing countries.

This includes a target of $300bn a year by 2035, which is expected to largely come from developed countries. One significant way these nations can contribute to this goal is via their support for MDBs, particularly the World Bank.

The World Bank has described itself as “by far the largest provider of climate finance to developing countries”. Each year, it oversees half of all climate finance from MDBs and far more than any single donor country.

Many developed countries have, therefore, enthusiastically backed the World Bank’s climate efforts, as well as a “bigger” role for MDBs in development more broadly. The bank can lend sums that far exceed the amount of new public finance that individual nations are willing to commit.

This is particularly significant, given many of these nations, including the UK, Germany and France, have announced large cuts to their aid budgets in recent years.

Carbon Brief analysis suggests that roughly a fifth of the international climate finance provided and “mobilised” by developed countries in recent years can be attributed to their World Bank contributions, as the chart below shows. 

(This only accounts for the World Bank financing that can be linked to developed-country shares in the bank. Developing countries, such as China, also have significant shares, which are not included in the chart below.)

Developed-country climate finance provided and mobilised for developing countries. The share of World Bank finance that can be attributed to developed countries (blue), is calculated based on the collective shares in the bank held by developed countries. Source: World Bank, OECD, Carbon brief analysis.

MDBs – including the World Bank – have committed to providing $120bn in climate finance to developing countries by 2030. 

This was set to come from greater shareholder contributions, combined with a programme of reforms to free up capital.

If the World Bank continued to provide half of the MDB total, it would need to increase its climate finance by around 50%, from $39.2bn today to $60bn in 2030.

Therefore, experts see a “key” role for the World Bank in achieving not only the $300bn target, but also the more aspirational $1.3n target that countries agreed as part of the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) on climate finance at COP29 in 2024. This includes the private capital it could “unlock” through its lending.

Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), tells Carbon Brief that these “NCQG politics” are “quite important”. He says:

“The maths of the $300bn does not work if the MDBs pull back and so I think that’s why you’re seeing developed countries taking a stand.”

How will these changes affect global climate action?

To date, the World Bank has only released minimal details about its new climate plans. As such, experts say the impact on future climate finance remains uncertain.

Jon Sward, environment project manager at the Bretton Woods Project, tells Carbon Brief:

“They have said they are going to retain all the same processes about climate-finance reporting. So, of course, there is a world in which, actually, climate finance continues to increase like it has been.”

Some of the World Bank’s internal organisations will, in fact, keep their climate-finance goals for the time being. For example, the IDA’s largely grant-based funding retains a 45% target for its current round, which will last until 2028 – the year of the next US presidential election.

However, WRI’s Larsen tells Carbon Brief that the changes, from a bank that was previously a “champion for climate action”, remain significant:

“This reality, reinforced by the elimination of the 45% goal, means that it would not be surprising to see a reduction in climate investments.”

In a statement, the World Bank said its “work on climate is and will remain firmly client driven”, noting that it supports nations undertaking their Paris Agreement climate plans.

Therefore, its climate focus may come down to whether there is demand for climate action from “client” countries receiving finance.

At an April event in discussion with the climate sceptic Bjørn Lomborg, Bessent said that global financial institutions should focus on growth, characterising climate action as an “elite belief”. 

The implication from the US Treasury secretary was that recipient countries are not interested in climate action. However, as reported by Devex, a group of World Bank shareholders representing nearly 100 developing countries, wrote a letter that appeared to push back against this framing. 

This “G11+” group, led by Brazil and China, said the bank “must remain firmly client-driven”, noting that countries are “following nationally determined pathways toward climate action”. NRDC’s Thwaites tells Carbon Brief:

“It’s one thing for the Europeans to talk about climate…This was the client countries [100 developing countries] saying: ‘No, we want this.’”

Recent research by the ODI thinktank found that 79% of developing-country officials polled wanted to see MDB investment in solar projects, 54% wanted hydropower and 47% wanted wind power. Only 13% wanted investment in gas-power plants.

Rishikesh Ram Bhandary, a senior development researcher at Boston University, has stressed the need for an “enhanced CCAP”, which could be supported by the bank’s new independent evaluation. Among other things, he tells Carbon Brief:

“The bank needs to make a more convincing case about how climate change is being integrated into development priorities rather than competing with them.”

Thwaites says he is hopeful that the outcome is “mostly a symbolic victory for the US”. 

However, he says major shareholders from Europe and elsewhere should make it clear to the bank that it is not “the only game in town” when it comes to climate finance. He says:

“If [the World Bank] are going to cave into one shareholder, when the vast majority of the other shareholders are supportive of continuing climate action, they can take their money elsewhere.”

The post Q&A: How will the World Bank’s abandoned finance goal affect climate action? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Registered nurses at HCA HealthONE Swedish (a.k.a., Swedish Medical Center) in Englewood, Colo., voted to join National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses union, in an election held on July 1 and 2, 2026.

Nurses at two Ascension hospitals in Wichita, Kan., are moving forward with their one-day strike on July 6 to protest hospital management’s refusal to address RNs’ deep concerns about safety at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis and Ascension Via Christi St. Joseph hospitals.

Within the soil, a group of unique microbes are working overtime to shield wild plants from salt stress. Now researchers have shown that those naturally-occurring microbes can be successfully transferred to a range of crops and, crucially, can boost their growth.

The obliging microbe, a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas, was identified lurking around the roots of plants exposed to high salt levels, a situation expected to grow worse as climate change causes rising sea levels that push salty water further inland from the coast. 

Researchers on a new Science Advances paper observed that while other bacterial colonies died off under salty conditions, Pseudomonas microbes continued to thrive around the roots of wild soybean plants. They think this is because the bacteria contain specialized genes, and it suggests that the microbes hold a competitive advantage under salty conditions. 

On a hunch, they isolated samples of these resilient specimens and set about testing how well they did in other crops. 

They found that when they inoculated the roots of several crops with these bacteria, the microbes thrived almost universally. Particularly around salt-stressed sorghum, maize, tomato and rapeseed, Pseudomonas populations grew significantly, increasing from 22% to 41%, compared to just 1% to 21% in the control experiments. They weren’t a good match for every crop: populations of Pseudomonas did not flourish around rice and wheat plants, for example.

 

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Recalling the abundance of this microbe around wild soybean plants, the researchers then focused on what it could do for the economically-important and widespread domesticated soybean.

They found that not only did the bacteria swiftly colonize soybean roots—their numbers rising twofold under salt stress—but compared to controls the inoculated soybeans also experienced a significant growth boost under salty conditions, developing considerably longer roots and also forming more lateral ones. The soybeans showed increased salt tolerance in greenhouse experiments, and in open field experiments too. 

The question is how the microscopic soil residents seemed to be facilitating this remarkable resilience in plants, something the researchers still don’t have a full answer to. But further investigation gave them some clues—particularly as they noticed that lignin levels in the cell walls of inoculated soybeans increased by between 30 and 35% under salt stress, compared to non-inoculated plants. 

Lignin is an ingredient that increases stability and support in plant tissues, and the researchers theorize that something about the Pseudomonas microbes triggers enhanced lignin synthesis in plants, which shields them against rising salt. 

Next steps are to uncover precisely how the microbes do this. With that information in place, these bacteria may become a tiny but crucial key to future crop survival, the researchers say. “If scientists can harness this natural process, it could mark the beginning of a new era in climate-resilient agriculture.”

Zheng et. al. “Pseudomonads associated to salt-stressed plantsfacilitate stress adaption of soybean through enhancedlignin biosynthesis.” Science Advances. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Maxwin merupakan singkatan dari Maximum Win, yaitu batas kemenangan tertinggi yang dapat diperoleh dalam satu permainan atau satu putaran sesuai ketentuan yang telah ditetapkan oleh pengembang game. Nilai kemenangan maksimal ini berbeda-beda pada setiap judul permainan dan biasanya dinyatakan dalam kelipatan nilai taruhan.

Memahami Cara Kerja Permainan Slot

Permainan slot modern menggunakan teknologi Random Number Generator (RNG), yaitu sistem yang menghasilkan kombinasi simbol secara acak. Dengan sistem tersebut, setiap putaran bersifat independen dan tidak dipengaruhi oleh hasil putaran sebelumnya. Artinya, tidak ada pola atau waktu tertentu yang dapat menjamin kemenangan.

Apa yang Dimaksud dengan RTP dan Volatilitas?

Selain Maxwin, terdapat dua istilah yang sering dijumpai, yaitu RTP (Return to Player) dan volatilitas.

RTP merupakan persentase teoritis dari total taruhan yang dikembalikan kepada pemain dalam jangka panjang. Misalnya, RTP sebesar 96% bukan berarti setiap pemain akan menerima kembali 96% dari uang yang dipertaruhkan, melainkan merupakan nilai statistik berdasarkan jutaan putaran.

Pentingnya Bermain Secara Bertanggung Jawab

Para ahli mengingatkan bahwa permainan slot pada dasarnya dirancang sebagai bentuk hiburan dan tetap mengandung unsur risiko finansial. Oleh karena itu, pemain disarankan untuk:

• Menentukan batas anggaran sebelum bermain.
• Tidak mengejar kerugian dengan terus meningkatkan taruhan.

Kesalahan yang Sering Dilakukan Pemula

Pengamat industri hiburan online menyebutkan bahwa banyak pemain baru masih memiliki beberapa kesalahpahaman mengenai permainan slot, di antaranya:

1. Menganggap terdapat pola pasti untuk memperoleh Maxwin.
2. Percaya bahwa kemenangan dapat diprediksi berdasarkan jam bermain.
3. Tidak memahami aturan permainan sebelum memulai.
4. Bermain tanpa menetapkan batas anggaran maupun waktu.

Padahal, karena menggunakan sistem RNG, hasil setiap putaran tetap bersifat acak dan tidak dapat dipastikan sebelumnya.

Kesimpulan

Istilah Maxwin merupakan bagian dari mekanisme permainan slot yang mengacu pada batas kemenangan maksimum yang tersedia dalam suatu permainan. Namun, keberadaan Maxwin tidak berarti kemenangan tersebut mudah diperoleh. Setiap hasil permainan tetap ditentukan oleh sistem RNG yang bekerja secara acak.

Bagi pemula, memahami konsep dasar seperti RTP, volatilitas, paylines, serta fitur bonus akan membantu mengenali cara kerja permainan secara lebih objektif. Yang tidak kalah penting, selalu mengutamakan permainan yang bertanggung jawab dengan menetapkan batas waktu dan anggaran agar aktivitas bermain tetap berada dalam koridor hiburan.

Headline News:

• “Denmark, Portugal, And Lithuania Lead The Way As The EU Share Of Electricity From Renewables Hits 46%” • The EU’s share of electricity generated from renewables continues to grow, new Eurostat data reveals. In the first quarter of 2026, it reached 45.5% of the total electricity generated. This is up from 42.7% in the same period in 2025. [Euronews]

Wind turbines in Portugal (Afonso Coutinho, Unsplash)

• “New “Air” Battery Makes Larger Electric Aircraft Possible” • The idea behind lithium-air batteries is to use oxygen from the air as a key ingredient, thereby saving considerable weight while potentially boosting energy density far beyond the capacity of ordinary lithium-ion technology. US startup Air Energy may have found a way to do that. [CleanTechnica]
• “Brussels Pivots From Climate Mitigation To Adaptation As Heatwaves Expose Vulnerabilities” • The European Commission, seeing that European policies fail to match the quickening pace and impacts of climate change, pledged to “double down” on efforts to mitigate climate change following last week’s extreme and deadly heatwave in Western Europe. [Euronews]
• “Nova Scotia Green Light For 1.2-GW Onshore Giant” • Nova Scotia has granted environmental assessment approval for the 1.2-GW Ocean Lake wind project. The project will include up to 158 turbines and is being developed by EverWind NS Holdings Ltd and Membertou Development Corp. It will generate enough electricity for about 404,000 homes. [reNews]
• “One Year Since One Big Beautiful Bill: Fewer Jobs, Higher Bills, More Pollution” • In the year since Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law the Trump administration reduced over $7.5 billion in clean energy investments. And Americans are facing soaring energy bills, more toxic emissions, and continued economic instability. [CleanTechnica]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.