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Why do powerful tech billionaires see crypto as a weapon for destroying democracy? Read my book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (a New York Times Bestseller) to find out. Click here to buy it on Bookshop.

“Don’t get too excited about Hunter Biden’s new social media persona,” I wrote on June 5. “Looks like another nepo baby crypto grift is afoot...”

Today, Hunter Biden—son of former President Joe Biden—made it official. In a sign that crypto is entering a new phase of its death spiral, Hunter announced plans to launch his own meme coin. From the Wall Street Journal:

The son of former President Joe Biden is launching a meme coin that takes aim at his family’s nemesis, Donald Trump. And he’s naming it for the most-infamous personal computer in American political history. 

Yes, Hunter Biden’s laptop will live on. At least on the blockchain.

Biden’s token will trade under the ticker, $LAPTOP, and launch Sept. 9 on Base, a digital ledger built by Coinbase Global ... the largest U.S. crypto exchange, people familiar with the matter said. 

That’s right. Hunter Biden—a convicted felon whose criminal record was wiped clean by a pardon from his daddy, the president—is going full crypto bro. It makes sense. A meme coin is generally a method of siphoning money from people by convincing them to buy fake digital joke money.

“Meme coins carry no intrinsic value, and most tumble in price within days or even hours after their launch,” reports the WSJ.

The announcement comes after a brief period during which Biden emerged as a prolific social media poster and podcast guest, wowing liberal audiences with his spicy takes and dramatic antics. There has even been talk about a presidential run.

Biden’s meme coin will undoubtedly fail. But how much money will flow into Biden’s coffers in the meantime, and from where? Foreign interests have funneled billions of dollars into Trump family crypto ventures. So have many Trump supporters, who have lost billions of dollars as a result.

Joe Biden’s presidential failson, 56, has been broke and mired in debt—though he recently won a $1.7 million defamation case against former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. Now, he’s hoping to follow the Trumps by using crypto as a magic money machine to generate loads of wealth out of thin air.

But where does this all lead?

Biden himself has given us the answer. When I speculated that he was heading toward a crypto play back in June, I wasn’t randomly guessing. I was reacting to a post in which Biden spouted—word-for-word—the most extreme crypto bro talking points imaginable.

“Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death,” wrote Biden on X on June 5—in a tweet that sounded more like Peter Thiel or Balaji Srinivasan than the son of a Democratic president.

So, it was immediately clear that Biden was on a crypto cash grab arc, using gullible podcast hosts to build his social media audience and develop the parasocial relationships necessary to eventually sell crypto to suckers (and anyone else wishing to pour money onto a political nepo baby with a large social media following).

Biden’s comments echoed the most extreme version of crypto bro beliefs—the idea that government-issued money (rather than crypto) is actually fake, and that a shift to crypto is “inevitable.” (Biden has also pumped non-fungible tokens (NFTs), another digital “asset” scheme that collapsed after a brief period of hype.)

This is not Biden’s first questionable business venture. During the Obama presidency, he made gobs of money consulting for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Later, he scandalized the art world by selling his painting for unusually high sums of money, a lucrative project that apparently ended with his father’s presidency. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote in the Guardian in March 2025:

Just a few years ago, Joe Biden’s troubled son, who had previously earned megabucks sitting on various boards doing mysterious board things, was enjoying remarkable success as an “emerging” artist. His paintings were being exhibited in a fancy New York gallery and selling for large sums. Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer and friend of Biden, reportedly bought 11 works for a total of $875,000 (£690,000). Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Democratic donor, bought two paintings, for $42,000 and $52,000. All in all, Hunter sold art for about $1.5m between 2021 and 2024. Not too shabby for someone considered an amateur.

But something changed:

Now, however, Biden’s creative career appears to be cratering. In court filings last week, Hunter said he was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit concerning his abandoned laptop hard drive because he doesn’t have the money to continue litigation. “My income has decreased significantly,” read the documents. “In the 2 to 3 years prior to December 2023, I sold 27 pieces of art at an average price of $54,481.48, but since then I have only sold 1 piece of art for $36,000 … I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances, but that has not happened.”

Golly, I wonder why? Has the art market shifted, do you reckon? Or had his dad’s political power started to wane?

Hmm...big mystery.

Now Biden is entering the crypto market—and spouting Network State talking points about crypto replacing government currency—as the crypto market experiences severe turbulence under the Trump regime. Bitcoin has lost zillions in market value as Trump’s open corruption has exposed crypto as little more than a scam for enriching oligarchs and bribing politicians.

So, Biden is late to the game, but the playbook is clear: Crypto, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

What’s next? A Network State? A venture capital firm? A Coinbase-powered presidential run?

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.

Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402 million to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.

Based on a worldwide farming population of 934 million, this means approximately 46 percent of farmers are being poisoned every year. The greatest estimated number of poisonings was in southern Asia, followed by Southeast Asia and East Africa.

The overall highest national incidence of poisoning was in Burkina Faso in West Africa, where nearly 84 percent of farmers and farm workers were reported to have experienced poisoning.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health this past Wednesday, also found that an estimated 11,000 deaths occur every year due to pesticide poisoning, with nearly 60 percent of these in India.

The director general of Parkinson’s Europe said there was also “overwhelming evidence” to suggest that Parkinson’s was an environmentally driven disease.

Jayakumar Chelaton, the executive director of Pesticide Action Network India, said the research exposed a “crisis that can no longer be ignored.”

The authors of the study are calling for “immediate action,” including the implementation of a UN recommendation to phase out highly hazardous pesticides.

The study states that despite global efforts to highlight the dangers, pesticide use has continued to grow steadily, with 3.8 million metric tons used in 2023, a doubling since 1990.

Dr Sheila Willis, the head of international programmes at Pesticide Action Network UK, said: “Now that the scale of suffering has been revealed, farmers must be supported to access safer alternatives to protect their health and that of their families.”

The study did not consider the impact of pesticide exposure on the estimated 84 million children working in agriculture and did not look at the long-term health impacts, with acute pesticide poisoning defined in the study as any illness or health effect experienced a short time after exposure.

Génon Jensen, the executive director of the Health and Environment Alliance, said: “We are extremely concerned about the devastating health impacts from pesticide poisonings—both the acute impacts mentioned in this study but also chronic exposures that farm workers and communities suffer.”

Hélène Nicora, the director general of Parkinson’s Europe, said there was also “overwhelming evidence” to suggest that Parkinson’s was an environmentally driven disease, with growing evidence linking pesticide exposure to the development of Parkinson’s.

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder in which parts of the brain become damaged over time, affecting movement and balance. The global burden of the disease is rising, with France, Germany and Italy all recognizing it as an occupational disease for farmers.

Farmers and farm workers are mainly exposed to pesticides during preparation and application, as well as when touching treated crops and contaminated equipment or clothing.

Speaking at a webinar organized by Friends of the Earth Europe earlier this year, Rendert Algra said he believed his Parkinson’s disease was linked to the pesticides he had used when working at his family farm in the Netherlands. “Being the eldest son, I did all the spraying of pesticides in our fields for several years in a row,” he said.

Despite being the most robust study to date, the report highlights that available information on pesticide poisoning is inadequate, with the authors calling for standardised surveillance and reporting protocols so that pesticide-related poisonings become reliable and comparable.

It used to be that the president of the United States tried to persuade the public to go to war. Franklin Roosevelt’s speech asking Congress to enter World War II produced one of the most famous phrases in American history: “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.” Lyndon Johnson’s administration lied about the Vietnam War, but Johnson at least asked Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. George W. Bush sent Colin Powell to pitch the Iraq War at the U.N. in 2003. Over the last century, presidents have increasingly waged war without congressional approval, in violation of the Constitution. But even presidents with an appetite for unilateral warmaking have usually felt the need to bring the public along—to provide a justification, however pretextual, for their foreign policy plans.

As with so many other laws and norms, President Donald Trump has shattered that tradition. The war he launched against Iran in February 2026 involved no effort to explain to voters why we were fighting. Even after the fact, Trump showed little belief that there was any need to persuade the public that he was justified or correct. It was a war of pure presidential whim.

Trump’s illegal and unconstrained warmongering stems, in part, from his contempt for democratic decision-making—and a toxic stew of racism and Islamophobia. But his belligerence is also fueled by crony capitalism. After invading Venezuela in January 2026, Trump made his motives stunningly clear, crowing that “Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of oil, and the “money” from it “will be controlled by me.” He repeated that move with Iran, declaring that “if it were up to me, I’d take the oil.” Indeed, Trump’s basic approach to foreign policy is to enrich himself, his family, and his advisers through investment deals and free planes. Trumpian foreign policy is bribery, white supremacy, and authoritarianism all the way down.

There is, of course, a long history of capitalist greed driving U.S. foreign policy. The Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, for example, who led military interventions throughout the Western Hemisphere in the early 1900s, later lamented that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in” and “helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests.” Taking the oil has always been the goal. Trump is, in some ways, a supercharged version of the kleptocracy that came before.

Two new books helpfully illuminate the sordid business of U.S. foreign policy and show how the system became vulnerable to the unchecked militarism and flagrant corruption of Trump’s presidency. A.J. Murphy’s Pentagon Capitalism tracks how the military “modeled itself on private business” and ultimately privatized national security. Chad Levinson’s The President’s Echo System reveals how the White House secretly manipulates seemingly private outside experts and think tanks to “sell” foreign policy to the public. Both of those trends have increasingly privatized foreign policymaking and placed foreign affairs beyond democratic control. The question is whether we can democratize foreign policy in the future.

Without a large and well-armed military, presidents wouldn’t have the ability (or the temptation) to deploy force at will. And to control that enormous military apparatus, the United States has gravitated toward the model of private enterprise, organizing the national security state on the template of a multidivision, for-profit corporation. These days, military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs to round out their résumés. It’s the accountants scattered throughout the sprawling defense bureaucracy who often set policy for the most powerful military in history.

Military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs. It’s the accountants who often set policy for the most powerful military in history

As Murphy brilliantly narrates in Pentagon Capitalism, the national security state increasingly embraced corporate-style management in the wake of World War II. To compete with the Soviet Union, the United States established a huge standing Army for the first time in its history and maintained hundreds of bases around the world. But the cost of that new defense establishment created tension. During World War II, the United States was willing to spend whatever it took to win. In the quasi-peacetime of the Cold War, the military no longer got a blank check. In the late 1940s, Murphy explains, conservative politicians who were opposed to the “expanded government capacity” of the New Deal state attacked defense spending as “creeping socialism” and “a betrayal of the free enterprise foundations of the American system.” In response, “the architects of the Cold War defense apparatus increasingly invoked business as both a practical resource and a legitimizing model for organizing American military power.” Defense planners rearranged the military like a private enterprise to make it more efficient and to fend off charges that centrally planned defense spending was state socialism.

The heart of that project was a revolution in how the Pentagon managed money. In 1949, a commission appointed by President Harry Truman reported that “the most disturbing aspect” of the national security state was its “enormous cost.” Fixing how the military managed its budget, the commission said, could “make the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.” The technical details of financial accounting methods carried existential, world-historical stakes.

Congress agreed. The National Security Act Amendments of 1949 reorganized how the Pentagon handled funds. In particular, the military shifted to “consumer funding.” Under this new model, instead of unit commanders requisitioning as much materiel as they could get, each unit—say, an Army base—received a set amount of funds. That unit could then use its funds as a “consumer” to buy gear from other military units—say, a supply depot with food or winter coats. Supply units wouldn’t receive any funding directly from the federal budget: Their funds would only come from “selling” supplies to other military units. This system simulated a free market, shaped by supply and demand, and it theoretically increased efficiency by incentivizing bases to “buy” only what they needed and supply depots to stockpile only what they could “sell.”

These new types of budgeting also required financial experts to implement them, in the form of military comptrollers. In the early 1950s, the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended “immediate and aggressive action” to train accountants for “the vital work of comptrollership.” Military comptrollers quickly ballooned. Bases ran weekend and night schools to teach financial management, and management schools took off. Syracuse University created an Army Comptrollership Program and an MBA for the Army. George Washington University ran a comptroller training program for the Navy. And the Army Management School, founded in 1954, borrowed methods from Harvard Business School to teach high-ranking officers “the ins and outs of the military’s new financial system.” By 1957, 100,000 defense employees worked in financial management. Murphy calls the comptrollers spread throughout the defense bureaucracy “the foot soldiers of modernized military finance.” Higher up the org chart, at the Army Management School, colonels and generals “relaxed in executive-type lounge chairs” discussing business school case studies with their professors, fostering “a culture of executive identity” among top brass.

The sudden centrality of accounting turned military officers into corporate managers. Generals who had led combat troops in World War II now found themselves balancing budgets at bases, choosing how to spend limited funds on equipment, housing, or medical care. As a result, officers began trying to maximize the productivity of their workers, using popular new techniques for managing personnel. Starting in the 1940s, business school professors and management consultants developed theories for how to control the increasingly large and decentralized corporate conglomerates that dominated the U.S. economy—multidivision companies like GE. These business intellectuals achieved surprising cultural salience in the 1950s—as Murphy says, “management celebrities disseminated their ideas far and wide.” The military listened.

Military officers studied new management techniques in business schools, then applied them to their personnel. They embraced the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneering theorist of industrial manufacturing, for tracking and controlling workers. In Taylorist fashion, they timed each movement workers made on the job, then added up how long each task should take. For example, the Pentagon’s Defense Work Measurement Standard Time Data Program found that “mopping in a lightly soiled room full of furniture, using a damp mop, and making four strokes forward and back on each spot” took “twelve seconds for every ten square feet.” Officers believed such control boosted efficiency. “Local supervisors” at one base, Murphy reports, “were particularly pleased with the results in the laundry facility, where a change in the method of folding socks and sorting incoming clothing was leading to appreciable speed increases.”

Workers didn’t like this intrusive control. In fact, laborers at the Watertown Arsenal had gone on strike in 1911 when the Army tried to introduce Taylorist production controls, leading Congress to temporarily ban such management techniques in federal workplaces. But as the post–World War II military expanded, it hired more female workers, and as the United States built hundreds of bases abroad, it hired local workers for jobs like cooking and cleaning. The white male officers overseeing this increasingly female and nonwhite workforce sought to extract maximum productivity from the people under their control. Murphy concludes that both “racialized views” and gender politics “structured the military’s Cold War transformations” into a businesslike bureaucracy. Racialized and gendered systems of workplace power built the infrastructure for U.S. military hegemony.

All this focus on businesslike efficiency changed how the United States went to war. In 1961, Robert McNamara, an executive at Ford who had both studied and taught at Harvard Business School, became secretary of defense and accelerated the adoption of management thinking. Under his leadership, for example, economists from the Pentagon-linked think tank Rand moved into official comptroller positions at the Defense Department and, as Murphy puts it, “set out to measure, quantify, and price more military functions than ever before.” Statistics would shape defense policy.

That process reached its infamous apotheosis during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon used a “body count” metric of enemy deaths to track progress. Critics have argued that the body count metric both encouraged “indiscriminate violence” and “blinkered American military leadership to the realities of the war” by treating statistics on total deaths as a proxy for strategic gains. Similarly, Gen. William Westmoreland, who studied at Harvard Business School and commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, launched a program in 1967 to bring down the “high cost per individual casualty” (at the time, it took six tons of munitions to kill one enemy combatant). Westmoreland called this economizing project “a matter of highest priority.” It produced such tangible results as “changes to the process of sweater procurement.” President Johnson praised the program for employing “innovative management improvements” amid the “most trying conditions conceivable in a combat zone.” At least LBJ had his priorities straight.

After Vietnam, the officer corps turned against some forms of technocratic managerialism. In one survey, Army generals called the body count metric a “great crime.” But in the 1970s and 1980s, economistic logic became even more embedded in national security. The libertarian economist Martin Anderson, who later shaped Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, pushed Richard Nixon to end the draft, and some reformers saw the end of the draft as a chance for the Pentagon to privatize more military functions by hiring outside contractors. When Nixon did end the draft in 1973, he said the military would now “compete in the job market” for employees. As the military became an all-volunteer force, human relations became more important. Officers were urged to “enrich” each service member’s job to help productivity. One military theorist, Col. John Boyd, blended management with a countercultural spirit when he advocated “The Art of Success,” a mindset meant to “shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.” The Marine Corps’s “Warfighting” doctrine still draws on Boyd’s ideas, and both military leaders like Jim Mattis and corporate titans like Jamie Dimon cite Boyd.

Indeed, contemporary business practices have been influenced by the history of managerialism in the military. Management consulting firms used defense work during World War II to build their cachet, while Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, which still trains executives today, grew out of a program for defense management in World War II. In the 1960s, budgeting techniques that were developed in the military to control costs spread to other parts of the federal government, bringing what Murphy calls “military-incubated economic analysis” to bear on public “health, education, welfare, and housing.” At a more pervasive, ideological level, key elements of neoliberal economics, including an infatuation with rational choice theory and cost-benefit analysis, trace their lineage partly to Rand and the experiences academic economists had with the military. The Defense Department, Murphy writes, “served as a breeding ground” for the ideas that shaped neoliberal capitalism and its radical free-market beliefs.

At the same time, Murphy argues, the neoliberal free-market economy in the United States, far from eliminating any role for the government, “has in fact relied on an active and massive state, including a massive military.” Military power secures “overseas markets and resources,” while the Pentagon pumps capital into large corporations, which contract with the military to provide services, including weapons production, that the military itself often used to carry out. Military spending, Murphy concludes, is “part of the essence of American neoliberalism.” We live in a market-fundamentalist system that strips benefits from the public at large while channeling immense sums into the state-run Department of Defense and its cozy corporate contractors.

The use of military contractors to fight the war on terrorism is another product of the trend toward privatization that Pentagon Capitalism narrates. The drive to cut costs that inspired new methods of “sweater procurement” in Vietnam also led to the deployment of mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Murphy emphasizes, this “outsourcing changed the nature of war,” because private contractors are less accountable for causing civilian harm, and they enable the public to ignore the wars being fought in our name. Privatizing the infrastructure of war incentivizes more war.

Even as the expanding national security state made it easier for presidents to wage war, they still needed to sell their hawkish foreign policy to the public. That’s where Levinson’s book The President’s Echo System comes in. Levinson traces how the White House surreptitiously orchestrates nonprofit groups outside the government to run public relations campaigns. Those ostensibly private mouthpieces make it look as if independent experts support the president’s foreign policy plans, when they are really just echoing the president’s line.

This “echo system” arose because federal law bans domestic propaganda. The U.S. government ran propaganda campaigns in both world wars—the poet Archibald MacLeish famously worked in the Office of War Information in World War II. But Americans have been wary of state propaganda. Since 1919, an anti-lobbying statute has barred the executive branch from using federal funds to pay for any “advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress … to favor, adopt, or oppose” any “law” or “policy.” As a result, the White House can’t run publicity campaigns to pressure Congress. To get around that, Levinson shows, presidents have built an entire ecosystem of private groups that “launder” the president’s foreign policy proposals as their own.

The modern version of that “laundering” started in the late 1930s, as President Roosevelt tried to mobilize the public for war. After World War I, many Americans came to believe that big banks and arms manufacturers had duped the United States into war to line their pockets. That led to a wave of isolationism, epitomized by books like Merchants of Death and the Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry. Congress therefore passed a series of Neutrality Acts. Roosevelt himself signed the Neutrality Act of 1935. But by 1937, he favored intervention—his “Quarantine Speech” urged the United States to act more vigorously abroad.

Facing an isolationist Congress, Roosevelt used outside groups to promote his plans like “cash-and-carry” and “lend-lease.” In particular, the Committee to Defend America, or CDA, placed articles and ads in newspapers across the country. The White House helped manage that campaign. At one point, one of FDR’s aides asked the CDA to delay a petition, and the CDA said it was “very glad to comply” and would take “no action on it until such time as mutually agreed.” FDR himself thanked the CDA’s chair for a “grand job” on cash-and-carry. After Pearl Harbor, the CDA shut down. But the CDA’s director, Clark Eichelberger, in close consultation with the White House, ran the American Association for the United Nations, or AAUN, to generate public pressure on Congress to ratify the U.N. Charter. One of the last things Roosevelt did before he died was to release a statement, written by Eichelberger, backing the AAUN’s work.

Later presidents made similar moves. When the Truman administration proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, Eichelberger recommended creating an outside lobbying group, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, or CMP. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state who helped design the Marshall Plan, resigned from the government and founded the CMP to lobby for his own proposal. The CMP printed 1.25 million texts, including petitions and postcards for citizens to fill in and send to Congress. Then, when Truman sought to boost defense spending after 1950 to implement a more confrontational Cold War strategy, the CMP reformed as the Committee on the Present Danger, or CPD. The State Department and the Defense Department both coordinated with the CPD, even sharing confidential military information. The CPD called for more military aid to Europe, and it ran a weekly, nationwide radio show to circulate its views.

The foreign policy echo system intensified during Vietnam. In 1967, as the antiwar movement took off, White House aides organized the Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, or CPF. The CPF was co-chaired by former presidents Truman and Eisenhower and endorsed Johnson’s conduct of the war. The White House aide who steered the project told LBJ that ­Eisenhower’s involvement helped because it “automatically takes suspicion off the White House.” That same aide wrote that “for obvious reasons,” it would be “wise” to keep the CPF files “locked up.”

Nixon doubled down on the secrecy and manipulation. Charles Colson, Nixon’s special assistant for public liaison, organized Americans for Winning the Peace, which ran a marketing campaign to defeat a congressional attempt to end the war. Colson also helped raise $25 million for the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, then a relatively minor think tank, which backed Nixon on the war. Those funds helped make AEI a major player, but the White House masked its ties to AEI—one White House aide warned of risks “should evidence of any of our activities surface.” Colson himself went to jail for Watergate. But President Gerald Ford created the Office of Public Liaison to formalize the job Colson had done. Jimmy Carter used the Office of Public Liaison to coordinate with outside groups on the Panama Canal and arms control. Ronald Reagan’s Office of Public Liaison worked with think tanks like AEI and the Heritage Foundation to try to get Congress to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. When Congress refused, Iran-Contra was the result.

The war on terrorism followed a similar script. In 1992, the CIA provided startup funds for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi. Then, in 2003, Chalabi helped justify invading Iraq. George W. Bush promoted the invasion in a speech at AEI a month before U.S. bombs started to fall. Dick Cheney praised the Iraq War two months later at the Heritage Foundation. Private organizations that owed their power, prestige, and sometimes their very existence to government backing proceeded to support the White House’s plans for war.

Levinson convincingly argues that this echo system naturally tends toward hawkish policies. The White House turns to outside groups when it needs to manufacture support for ambitious plans, which means that presidents tend to ally with groups that favor robust interventionism. Those groups then get privileged access to policymakers and information, which gives them insider advantages in subsequent foreign policy debates. The intellectual ecosystem for foreign policy ideas therefore becomes systematically biased toward interventionism. Levinson’s book can be a bit dry—it often reads more like a political science lecture on scope conditions and independent variables than like the sharp story of political intrigue it should be. But Levinson reveals a critical history of presidents constructing clandestine, privatized propaganda networks that keep dragging the United States into war. Maybe, after his book, we’ll learn our lesson.

The national security state modeled itself on private enterprise, ultimately outsourcing war, while the presidency came to rely on private organizations to launder interventionist plans to the public.

Since at least Eisenhower’s farewell address, critics have worried about the military-industrial complex capturing government policymaking and funneling ever-increasing funds to private defense contractors. Between them, Murphy’s and Levinson’s books highlight new and different facets of the public-private partnership that fuels America’s addiction to war: The national security state modeled itself on private enterprise, ultimately outsourcing war, while the presidency came to rely on private organizations to launder interventionist plans to the public.

The Trump administration has radically embraced that privatization. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using private companies to build and run mass immigrant detention centers. Trump proposed removing Palestinians from Gaza so that the United States could “own” it and construct a “Riviera” on “a beautiful piece of land.” Trump-aligned companies like Palantir have won huge contracts with the Defense Department and ICE. Trump donor—and defense contractor—Elon Musk headed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, potentially contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. After the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” demanded a “review” of “all general and flag officer promotions” to weed out “critical race theory” and concern for “climate change” in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun purging women and nonwhite officers from the upper ranks.

What to do? Levinson’s somewhat thin solution to the foreign policy echo chamber is better elites. Because “citizens take cues from elites,” he argues, we need to clean up our “marketplace of ideas” to make sure foreign policy experts aren’t just White House puppets. It’s crucial, of course, to halt government manipulation or censorship of the media. But beyond focusing on elite discourse, perhaps grassroots antiwar movement–building and a more active role for Congress—the people’s representatives—might improve foreign policy legitimacy and results.

More broadly, it will be necessary to combat the ideology of privatization that has swallowed foreign affairs. Democracy is not a private enterprise. If we want to rein in the excesses of the national security state, we will need to reawaken the sense that foreign policy is a public good.

On Labor Day 2026, the outlook for workers can seem grim. The Trump administration is rolling back workplace protections, and corporations act as though they have a free pass to do whatever they want.

But viewed through another lens, this is an optimistic moment. The federal government isn’t the only game in town. Union approval sits near a half-century high—roughly seven in ten Americans—worker organizing is climbing, and state and local governments are moving on workers’ rights with real dynamism.

Labor Day is the perfect time to take stock of that forward motion—and to raise our expectations of government closer to home. We need more than honeyed words once a year about the dignity of work. States and localities possess immense power to improve workers’ lives, and we should demand that they use it.

The most encouraging story of 2026 isn’t only that states passed good laws (though they did plenty of that, as we outline in a new issue brief). It’s that a growing number are building the muscle to enforce them—putting money, prosecutors, and real teeth behind labor standards just as federal enforcement collapses.

Workplace laws aren’t self-executing. Recognizing this, some states are funding the work. Virginia put $10 million into its labor department and stood up a new worker protection unit in the state attorney general’s office; Illinois expanded its attorney general’s workplace rights bureau to inspect payrolls and interview workers on-site; and New York’s budget seeded grants for district attorneys to pursue wage theft and workers’ compensation fraud, modeled on similar programs in California.

The sharpest edge is criminal prosecution. If an employee steals from an employer, no one questions whether criminal prosecution is appropriate. But historically, when an employer has stolen workers’ wages, even repeatedly, intentionally, and egregiously, that has been treated as a civil matter. This is changing, as a growing number of district attorneys have added labor to the docket. One day before his office convicted Donald Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced guilty pleas in a wage theft case against the owners of famed pizzeria Grimaldi’s. And prosecutors are bringing workplace fatality cases that once went largely unpunished: In Travis County, Texas, District Attorney José Garza secured a guilty plea from a construction company over the trench-collapse death of 24-year-old Juan José Galvan Batalla, with the plea agreement requiring worker trainings and an independent safety monitor.

Cities and counties are in the mix too. San Diego County created an Office of Labor Standards five years ago and has been a bulldog against wage theft; this summer it sued several national sushi companies for allegedly underpaying sushi chefs in supermarkets. And if restaurants fail to pay final state orders of unpaid wages? After trying to extract payment, the county will suspend the restaurant’s permit to operate.

Well over two dozen localities now run offices dedicated to workers—the newest in Cleveland, and the original in San Francisco, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. Enforcement by Denver Labor and the San Francisco City Attorney has reclassified thousands of gig workers at staffing businesses as employees with wage and other rights. Boston passed a construction and demolition ordinance requiring extensive safety measures as a precondition for getting a large-scale building permit in the first place.

Far-reaching city involvement seems standard now, but in fact we should appreciate that it’s remarkable: A mere decade ago, this was not a thing that cities did.

States and localities also shape the economy as purchasers and regulators. When a business wants a license, permit, tax incentive, or government contract, that’s leverage to demand legal compliance and, ideally, good working conditions. Some cities and counties block repeat wage thieves from bidding on government contracts, and many jurisdictions set prevailing- or living-wage standards for government contractors, so bad apple bidders can’t win by offering bargain-basement working conditions.

Others write new standards outright: This year, Connecticut and Rhode Island joined nearly a half-dozen other states in reining in the punishing warehouse quotas that churn through workers’ bodies. Virginia joined states like Oregon and Maryland in passing a law to set simple but specific heat rules for employers as temperatures rise, rules that have been proven to keep people healthier and save lives. Washington enacted one of the nation’s strongest noncompete bans. And as more states look to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce, Connecticut became the first state to make employers disclose whether layoffs are AI-driven.

On the most fundamental right—to organize and join unions—states have less leeway, because federal law constrains their powers. But there’s still tremendous untapped opportunity for action, including granting organizing rights to state and local public employees, but also going far beyond that. Illinois this year gave rideshare drivers a path to unionize, joining California (by statute in 2025) and Massachusetts (by ballot initiative in 2024). Washington and Oregon last year followed New York and New Jersey in allowing striking workers to receive unemployment benefits. Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board lets workers, employers, and the labor commissioner negotiate binding standards for an entire industry—the “sectoral bargaining” that labor experts have long lauded, and that should be replicated many times over.

For all this motion, a new ingredient should also be stirred in: cross-state coordination. Conservatives have long understood that states acting together, through the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and its allies, can move markets and set national agendas. Progressives should be just as ambitious: sharing rosters of labor violators so a scofflaw barred in one state can’t win contracts in the next, coordinating multi-state cases, and even synchronizing the “drop dates” on which state labor bills are introduced.

The dynamism on worker issues isn’t evenly spread. You’ll have noticed perhaps that every state mentioned above is a blue one. In red America, some leaders remain indifferent or even hostile to their own constituents. One illustrative recent example: Nebraska’s attorney general just filed a lawsuit to keep wages lower, hot on the heels of state lawmakers moving to weaken voter-approved ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage.

Even so, state legislators have made some minor inroads even in more challenging terrain: Utah and New Hampshire both curbed non-competes for certain health care workers this year. And there are still more glimmers of hope: Many city and state leaders in worker-hostile states keep fighting mightily for working people. Consider recent action in deep-red Texas: Just last month, Houston’s mayor signed an executive order raising the minimum wage at the city’s airports to $20 per hour, from its prior rate of $15. And Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, last year passed a worksite safety policy for its construction contractors, with inspections and real consequences for violations.

The constellation of pro-worker state and local action isn’t just a scatter of separate dots. There’s a trendline, and a lesson.

Right-wing culture and economic warriors laid considerable groundwork at the state level for their current national takeover. Downballot elections and governance have never been the cool kids for national advocates, but people with humane, economic justice values ignore state and local government at our peril. This is where the rebuilding happens—and where government can prove, tangibly, that it can make people’s lives better.

Strategists are drafting national blueprints for 2028; but for workers, the real blueprint is already an iterative work in progress closer to home.

So this Labor Day, the charge runs both ways: To leaders at every level, examine the full powers of your office and use them for working people—even if your office isn’t nominally about labor; even if your predecessor did nothing for workers. And to the rest of us: Expect and demand more from state and local leaders than annual Labor Day platitudes. The best way to gain and exert power—for workers, and for cities and states—has always been to use it.

Who is your favorite female villain? “Poison Ivy for sure. I like that she uses plants as a toxic defense to poison Batman. Harley Quinn too, because in the comics they team up at some point, but Poison Ivy is definitely number one.” Kitty Vincents, 35, artistic horticulture by Forest Creeper “So many are misunderstood. […]

Quick Take

• In episode four of Lanterns, we heard the name Hector Hammond.
• Hammond is one of Hal Jordan’s oldest adversaries in the pages of Green Lantern comics.
• We look at the DC Comics history of Hector Hammond.
• Nerdist take: While we don’t see him on screen, Lanterns mentioning Hector Hammond points to decades of comic history.

In episode four of HBO Max’s Lanterns, Hal Jordan’s investigation into the Manhunters leads him to a name that he in the show doesn’t seem to know. Hal visits Atlas Inc. looking for its CEO, a little someone named Hector Hammond. This is a name comic book fans know very well, and you’d expect Hal Jordan would too. And while we don’t see Mr. Hammond in the episode, his name alone points to some of the Green Lanterns’ earliest stories.

Who Is Hector Hammond in Green Lantern Comics? DC Comics

Hector Hammond is one of the Silver Age Green Lantern’s earliest foes. First appearing in Green Lantern Vol. 2 #5, Hammond is a petty thief who discovers fragments of the meteor which landed in what became Gorilla City and hyper-evolved the intellect of Gorillas like Grodd. He then kidnaps four scientists, exposes them to the radiation from the meteor to make them ultra-intelligent. Why does he do this? So that they’ll invent amazing devices that Hammond can sell on the black market. Dream big, dude.

Hal then does a very silly thing and creates a duplicate Green Lantern ring for his friend and mechanic to use to disguise himself as GL, for Hal to then get closer to Hammond without him knowing it (?). Unfortunately, Hammond overpowers the mechanic and steals the right, leading Hal to have a battle of rings with Hammond, which the Green Lantern eventually wins.

Hammond Gains Super Intelligence

The next appearance of the character came in Justice League of America #14. Hammond escapes from prison and deliberately exposes himself to the meteorite. He gains not just mega intelligence, but his brain grows to an abnormally large size. Hammond develops psionic powers and immortality, though loses the use of his limbs and speech. You’ve probably seen Hammond as a giant-headed guy sitting in a floating chair, which is his normal mode.

Hector Hammond Post-Green Lantern: Rebirth DC Comics

Following Geoff Johns taking over the Green Lantern title, Hal Jordan returns to his previous GL status after over a decade as both the villain Parallax and the host for the spirit of vengeance, the Spectre. It’s during this run of Green Lantern that Hector Hammond emerges as a regular adversary for Hal. In the Secret Origins miniseries, which retells Hal Jordan’s origins for the modern age, we learn Hammond is a private consultant for Ferris Airlines who has romantic designs on Carol Ferris. She does not reciprocate.

After Green Lantern Abin Sur’s ship crashes, which leads to Hal taking over as Green Lantern of Sector 2814, Hammond investigates the crash site and inadvertently exposes himself to a meteorite which powers the ship. This gives him his psionic powers and enormous head.

Hammond has a prominent role in the Brightest Day event, in which he becomes the host for the entity Ophidian, the cosmic being inside the Orange Lantern Battery. (It’s a whole thing.) Eventually, Hammond overpowers Ophidian and escapes to search for Carol Ferris, who at this point is missing. She’s also the Violent Lantern, aka Star Sapphire. Again, it’s a whole thing.

Hector Hammond in The New 52 DC Comics

Bucking all tradition, beginning with the rebooted timeline of DC’s New 52, Hector Hammond appears not as a Green Lantern villain, but a Superman one. He already has his psionic powers, but is comatose inside S.T.A.R. Labs. The villain group H.I.V.E. kidnaps him to utilize his powers to enslave the human race, to ready the world for Brainiac’s arrival. Hammond eventually overpowers the Queen of H.I.V.E. and takes over the organization.

Hector Hammond in the Green Lantern Movie Warner Bros.

If you happened to have seen the ill-fated Green Lantern feature film starring Ryan Reynolds, you have seen Hector Hammond. Serving much the same function as he does in the Geoff Johns/Rebirth era, Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), obtains psionic powers after performing an autopsy on Abin Sur and coming into contact with the Parallax entity. In that movie, Parallax is a giant CGI fart cloud from space, so Hammond acts as the personified villain for Hal Jordan to fight against. It’s not a good movie.

Hector Hammond in Lanterns

While we don’t see Hammond in the episode, and we don’t know if he’ll show up again, Hammond is involved in shady extraterrestrial dealings through his company Atlas Inc. And frankly, regardless of universe, Hector Hammond is a pain in Hal Jordan’s butt.

Lanterns airs Sundays on HBO Max.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post Who Is LANTERNS’ Name-Checked Villain Hector Hammond? appeared first on Nerdist.